Blai Avià

one of the most insane things is that Reid Miles, Blue Note’s graphic designer and creator of basically a whole visual vocabulary for music, didn’t like jazz and never listened to any of the records he worked on. just asked what the vibe was, flew blind and nailed it every time.

Absolute funniest and most thematically perfect end to Don DeLillo’s career would be his hockey sex novel becoming a TikTok sensation and outselling all his other books nytimes.com/2026/03/20/boo…

Against the Day and Vineland on light and electricity:

ordinary life is beautiful, gorgeous, and that it will one day be a memory makes it more so

There are millions or even billions of people in this world who fundamentally do not understand that children everywhere are the same. This precious child, the tens of thousands dead in Gaza—people don’t connect them to the idea of their own child being violently killed.

I think one of the worst of things to come out of modernity is a lack of regard for children when it comes to art. Not just profanity, but artistry. Children deserve and need good art.

Un nen s’encén un cigarro amb el puraco d’un avi. Camp Nou, Barcelona 1977.

Liminality doesn’t quite describe these sections of the London Underground. It’s more aggressively purgatorial than that, you fell more like some cog in a subterranean industrial catastrophe

so ahead of its time it may still be ahead of our own

My weekend essay in @unherd on why central bank independence is a distraction. The real danger lies not with unelected technocrats but in the aggrandisement of power by authoritarians and the global financial sector—that’s true even for the Fed. unherd.com/2026/01/the-bi…

always loved this cheever christmas story: newyorker.com/magazine/1949/…

is this what cameron winter meant when he said love will make you fit it all in the car

Here’s the things about YIMBY. I support the notion that a key cause of the housing crisis is constrained supply. Thus, l support building housing en masse, which I think would be transformative, economically and politically. But that’s not what YIMBY is. It is specifically the dual-notion that what supply is the only or the main thing that drives the housing crisis, and, crucially, what principally constrains housing supply is the government. The insidious part is that this sounds plausible because the government would indeed play a large role in remedying this problem. But that’s is emphatically not the same. YIMBY like the more general abundance frame is therefore very cynical narrative- and policy space capture: to address the problem in a suboptimal way—insufficient emphasis on capital coercion and curbing demand for positional assets— but in a way which preserves the ‘Deutungshoheit’ of the very political framework and coalition which is ultimately responsible for much of this mess in the first place. It produces, quite deliberately, the perverse effect of progressives dismissing all-together the relevance of the housing supply and the regulatory dimensions of the problem.

One reason Don Draper is such a spectacular fictional character is that he accurately depicts what a true outsider’s idea of “social climbing” is (just class mobility) and when he’s presented with opportunities to do the real version he fucks it up massively or is like “ew, what”

Central banking done right

Writing as a professor of macroeconomics: Never in the history of world economic growth have countries intentionally designed their macroeconomic growth regimes to ensure that they have positive feedback effects on the rest of the world.

people often post this stuff to imply that moral panics about the technologies of the past were quaint. But the past is full of reminders that we are on a long, slow march away from embodied experience, and that we’ve lost more of it than we can even remember

The post-WWII world is dead. The Pax Americana, growth liberalism, the rules based international order, the humanitarian limitation of state violence, the outlawing of ethnic and race-based group annihilation: Gaza is its graveyard. The arc of history bent back toward genocide.

Pet Sounds is the story of the desire to experience the world like how you think other people do and the crushing feeling that it’s leaving you behind