HeyJaredSven Birkerts
Son of Latvian immigrants, Virgo, slightly hard of hearing, photo-taker, essayist, buoyant pessimist, susceptible to onslaughts of memory…
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 24
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Sep 2, 2026
Latest issues
September 30. Regarding… (opens the original)
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I see the word ‘empath’ being thrown around a lot these days. “He’s a real empath…” He, not me—though I believe I have the normal human capacity. I just don’t like the word. It sounds precious, calls up the opposite word, ‘psychopath.’Everything cries for empathy—there is so much real suffering, and ‘sympathy’ won’t quite do. But it’s not easy, there are grades and distinctions to parse. I can only say how it is for me.Empathy: the ability to understand what another person might be feeling, usua
September 29. Je est un autre (opens the original)
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I’m always finding quotes from the masters of alterity—a fancy term for what is usually called ‘otherness.’ Cortazar, Borges and Pessoa are just a few of the writers who play with it. Pessoa does so most directly with his ‘heteronyms’—the distinct identities that live together in the vicinity of his name. It was something by Pessoa that set me to thinking. Or, rather, daydreaming: turns taken and not taken, what would my life have been if…When I was living out my insistent youth, I vowed I would
September 28. Things have changed… (opens the original)
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Everything is in the news at once now, and so I find myself paying attention to repetitions, the things that keep surfacing. I don’t mean the news that our networks bring us, but think-pieces, opinion pieces having to do with cultural developments—and, less charitably, trends.One such emerging theme—setting aside the feeding frenzy around AI—is the decline of the ‘literary.’ Having lived a life devoted to that adjective, I pay attention—too much attention. The gist, and I’m not being hyperbolic,
September 27. “Get it—??” (opens the original)
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I don’t know if anyone else has this experience. I’ll be driving, listening to a book, focused on the road in front of me. Later, at home, rewinding to find my place, I’ll hear a passage and I’ll get a picture where I was when I heard it. I’m sure it can be explained neurologically, and I only bring it up here because I know exactly where I was when the narrator of Javier Maria’s’ Thus Bad Begins made the observation.As I was not reading the physical book, I couldn’t reach for a pencil to mark t
September 26. So fill to me the parting glass… (opens the original)
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I wrote about friendships and relationships the other day. My one-shot meditation stopped at the bottom of the page, but the preoccupation stayed. I started thinking that there is finally little in common between friendship understood in younger years and friendship now. The former doesn’t interest me that much anymore. Those friendships, though a few have survived, were often situational, anchored in happenstance and daily proximity. They were, if I can generalize, allowing the obvious exceptio
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