Notes on Bakhtin
La Grande Plage à Biarritz, Jacqueline Marval, 1923
LifeCulture
Henrik Karlsson.
Escaping Flatland — essays on creativity, agency, relationships, and the writing life from a Baltic island.
Recent essays
30 of 31Love is about being invested in someone’s continual expansion
This is one of the joys and challenges of love: the more skillfully you love someone, the more held, encouraged, and accepted they feel, the more they change.
The world reveals itself to those who travel by foot
Nothing was as scary as we thought, and everything was weirder and more friendly.
Thoughts about making a career as a writer
How you can finance your creative work and how you can find an audience and peers and mentors who help you develop.
How to walk through walls
On hacker mindset
Days are enormous
+ personal update and reading recommendations
Differently free
Me getting interviewed by Jackson Dahl
Some relationships deepen when you tell the truth and some end
I asked people to send me stories about situations where they had done what felt right to them, even though they feared social pushback.
Getting a better sense for when you’re thinking well and when you’re faking it
Notebook. On mental proprioception
The need to make art
The work was what connected him to himself.
Things that connect us to ourselves, and things that don't
Notebook + recommendations
On political power
Reflections on Robert Caro’s LBJ biography
On the preparations before writing an essay
Shooting raw footage
Being creative requires taking risks
When children learn to draw, they tend to make more and more interesting images for several years until around age five, when they learn to be boring.
Reflections on my first year writing full time
The best essays Johanna and I wrote in 2025, and some reflections on what it was like to write them.
Just and loving seeing
Notes on Iris Murdoch
When I accept myself just as I am, I change
Looking for Alice, part 4
A list of books and essays that I love
I’m purposefully not looking at my bookshelf to make sure I only pick books that I’ve thought about so much that they immediately occur to me.
When is it better to think without words?
Non-verbal, blurry thinking is faster and can search in a broader way, but it is more error-prone than verbal thought.
Agentic fragments
This capacity to see through objects and notice how they can be reconfigured is closely related to agency. Having learned how to pick things apart and build them back together, my grandparents had a more granular view of the world. They could tinker with and a…
How I read
Reading well is an endurance sport. I sometimes talk to people who want to become serious readers and so pick up Kafka’s The Trial or something like that—it is about as pleasant as running a marathon untrained.
The moments
Life is not a story that builds to a climax. It is a story that meanders. In the first half, we accumulate resources—skills, friends, status—and, in the second half, we lose them, bit by bit.
Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.
When facing a complicated problem, don't try to solve it, try to understand it
On problem solving and form-context-fit
A constellation of lookers
Fragments, vol. 5
I went looking for friends, see what I found
Of all the ways this blog have changed my life, the most exciting was in December 2021 when I wrote a post about Ivan Illich that ended up, to my utter astonishment, to get read by almost a hundred people.
On agency
Or, how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and handle it effectively, and authentically, and responsibly
On the pleasure of reading private notebooks
One reason I like this genre is that people censor themselves less when they are writing in private.
Caring for others
At Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen, I see a passport fall out of the back pocket of a man and immediately (at least) three strangers call out.
When writing, look at what you are trying to describe more than at your words
9 reflections