Stephen King set himself a target of about 2,000 words a day and argued that a first draft should usually be finished within three months — because if it drags on too long, the writer starts to lose their hold on the story

Posted 25 May 2026, by

Mal James

King's argument, when you strip away the prolific-novelist mystique, is uncomfortable. He is not saying you should write quickly because you'll get more done that way. He is essentially saying that if you don't write quickly, the thing you started will not be the same thing by the ...Read More

The toughness most adults raised in the 1960s and 70s carry into late life wasn’t chosen — it was what assembled itself in the silence left behind by the softness that was never offered, and they have been calling it character ever since, partly because they earned it, and partly because nobody ever gave them better language for what it really was

Posted 25 May 2026, by

Daniel Moran

There is a particular kind of toughness that the adults I have been watching across the last decade, the ones who were raised in the 1960s and 1970s, have been carrying into late life. The toughness is real. The toughness has, by every visible measure, served them across ...Read More

Intellectual humility — the willingness to consider you might be wrong — turns out to be a better predictor of being right than raw intelligence is, and the people who score highest on it aren’t the ones who know the most, they’re the ones who hold their beliefs most loosely.

Posted 21 May 2026, by

Daniel Moran

There is a particular cognitive style that turns out, on the available empirical research, to be one of the more reliable predictors of accurate judgment across a wide range of tasks. The style is not, on close examination, the one the wider culture has been calibrated to admire. ...Read More