Coffee Shop Conversations

Come on in, take a seat, and let's talk about ideas

Latest free essays: Spiders in Space and the Meaning of Life and The Begging Creator Economy.

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Hey, you made it. Sit, sit. It’s so good to see you. I hope you don’t mind I already ordered. Crazy frappucino concoction for you, cold brew for me — dark and cold, you know me. That was a magnificent eye roll, by the way.

Anyway, just wanted to tell you that I’m going to do these coffee shop conversations for my paid subscribers. Share a muffin? Yeah, sure, we can do that. As I was saying, I think I figured it out: the paid subs will get two things extra, jungle writing essays and coffee shop conversations. The first one are personal essays, the second will be more like friends sharing what’s been on their minds lately. Let’s call it a collection of micro-essays. Sounds fancier.

Here are a few miscellanea that linger in my notebooks. Let me know what you think.

… Seriously, you ate the whole muffin?

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A whisper is fundamentally different from speech. As you whisper, your vocal cords don’t vibrate. Technically, a whisper is not a voice; it’s ‘an unvoiced mode of phonation‘, a turbulent exhalation that is pushed through a specific part of your larynx. Whispering is - literally - sharing your breath with someone. A whisper gives narrative power to voiceless air.

For some reason, the human nervous system produces an autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) when we hear someone whisper — it’s one of the strongest ASMR triggers, producing a mildly euphoric, tingling feeling that dances from the top of your head down your spine.

Maybe that’s why we whisper sweet nothings to each other when we’re in love.

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Travelers in the late 18th century sometimes used Claude glasses to look at landscapes. Claude glasses were small, usually round mirrors with a tinted, convex reflective surface. As a result, observing a scene in a Claude glass alters the colors and tone to make it look more like a painting by Claude Lorrain (hence the name).

A Claude glass is a social media filter that existed before social media did.

Much like present-day influencers who turn their backs to cultural and natural beauty for the sake of the perfect picture for Instagram, people using Claude glasses would turn their backs to the object of their awe.

I wonder what this says about the human condition.

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A hypothesis: