The trouble with Twitter isn’t that it’s full of inanity and self-promoting jerks. The trouble is that it’s a solution to a problem that shouldn’t be solved. Eighty percent of the battle of writing involves keeping yourself in that cave: waiting out the loneliness and opacity and emptiness and frustration and bad sentences and dead ends and despair until the damn thing resolves into words. That kind of patience, a steady turning away from everything but the mind and the topic at hand, can only be accomplished by cultivating the habit of attention and a tolerance for solitude.

How Twitter Hijacked My Mind – fantastic meditation by New York Magazinebook critic Kathryn Schulz; bonus points for the Bukowski reference. 

“You don’t measure love in time. You measure love in transformation. Sometimes the longest connections yield very little growth, while the briefest of encounters change everything. The heart doesn’t wear a watch - it’s timeless. It doesn’t care how long you know someone. It doesn’t care if you had a 40 year anniversary if there is no juice in the connection. What the heart cares about is resonance. Resonance that opens it, resonance that enlivens it, resonance that calls it home. And when it finds it, the transformation begins…” 

Jeff Brown (via cosmofilius)

Via Utne Reader

From a letter in 1863, Mark Twain on New Year's resolutions: pic.twitter.com/WrBvAKUpHf

— Letters of Note (@LettersOfNote) December 31, 2013

Awarding the number 3 spot on its best restaurant list to Komi, Washingtonian wrote

We say this is the restaurant that has taught Washingtonians that a meal is a chance to stash the phone and slow down. A night at this rowhouse is a leisurely affair, moving from a series of small plates that consumes a good hour and all but encourages conversation.

It's a good trick if the restaurant can persuade Washintonians to set their devices aside. Too bad that leisure comes with a price tag: Komi gets a very expensive rating, too. Still...

Conversely, there was talk this year about the benefits of an activity that’s in some ways the antithesis of texting and tweeting with their rat-tat-tat rhythm. That activity is the reading of fiction. According to some researchers, people who settle into it are more empathetic — more attuned to what those around them think and feel — than people who don’t...

But I’d bet big on real reading, fiction or nonfiction, as a prompt for empathy and a whole lot more: coolheadedness, maybe even open-mindedness, definitely deliberation. It doesn’t just yank you outside of yourself, making you consider other viewpoints without allowing for the incessant interjection and exaltation of your own. It slackens the pace. Forces a pause.