HeyJaredRegister of Aliens
“Keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.”—Walter Benjamin
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 8
- Latest publication
- Sep 20, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 22, 2026
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Sex, Marxism, and Art (opens the original)
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When I sat down to read Tom Overton’s new biography of John Berger a few weeks ago, I was shocked. I expected to update and deepen familiar ideas about an old favorite. He’s a writer whose life and work I thought I knew inside and out. But this book surprised me: it surprised me by showing a new and deeply unpleasant side of someone I admire. And it surprised me by revealing something I’d missed about Berger’s writing—because this biography attempts to imitate it, with abysmal results. Both surp
The Gesture of the Text (opens the original)
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The Slump (August Reading Diary) (opens the original)
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I spent so much of August traveling, preparing for my new baby, and hosting friends that I read appallingly few books. Just five. This was not only because of busy-ness: I also experienced two weeks of the worst reading slump I’ve had in years.It wasn’t that I couldn’t read, it was that I kept finding books boring or irritating and setting them aside to try other books—a kind of readerly anhedonia. Under the influence of this foul mood, I set aside a biography of Hannah Arendt, a monograph about
How to Live an Intellectual Life (part 2) (opens the original)
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Good books about thinking are scarce. That’s what I argued in the first installment of this series (which you might want to read before this essay, if you haven’t already). There, I discussed one of the best such books I’ve ever read, On the Intellectual Life by Antonin Sertillanges. The essay received such an enthusiastic response that I’ve decided to follow it up and share another good book about thinking.But actually, the text I want to tell you about today is not a book. It’s a 33-page ap
Anti-facile (opens the original)
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I am approaching, as I pen these words in a hardback notebook, my first full week as a writer who does not type. Typing would be a relief. At a keyboard I can almost keep up with the speed of my thoughts, but, since I’m left-handed, my pen is slow and painful. Typing’s easy; writing by hand is hard.That’s why I’m writing by hand.After years trying to make writing easier for myself, now I’m trying to make it harder. It’s not just an AI thing, although it’s also an AI thing. In an age of fraudulen
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