HeyJaredThe Useful and the Beautiful
Writing, editing, and life in Madrid, Spain - often all at the same time. The Useful and the Beautiful takes its name from an editing principle: remove anything from the page that is neither useful nor beautiful.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Aug 28, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 10, 2026
Latest issues
The Summer Without Fun (opens the original)
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One summer, long ago now - not so much in time but definitely in quantum space - I left Madrid for two months and decamped to my parent's house in the south-east of Spain, hoping to escape the aftermath of a painful breakup. My parents read a lot, but neither of them is really into fiction, so I was surprised to find Siri Hustvedt's The Summer Without Men hanging out in the bookcase. Mum said a visiting friend had left it behind. With a title like that, it had to of been cosmically intended for
Boy Friends (opens the original)
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It wasn’t until I’d reached the tender age of 37 that I made my first male friend.I grew up in a very matriarchal family and I attended an all-girls’ secondary school, so I barely even came in contact with a boy until I was already into my teens. And it didn’t take long for me to decide that boys were for romance and girls were for friendship.Which was basically how things stood for the next 23 years.Let’s call my first male friend “M”, because it is the first letter of his name. He moved around
The Poetry and Prose of Substack (opens the original)
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When I joined Substack, around two years ago, I assumed it would be like the other times I'd dipped a toe into similar platforms, like the WordPress blog I had in the 2010s or the very brief flirtation with Medium. Which is to say: I would click publish, shut the laptop down and think no more of it. But Substack - for better or for worse - is so much more social. I was genuinely (and delightedly) astounded by the level of people’s support on here when my book, A Line Drawn or Printed: Six Routes
Through the Side Door (opens the original)
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I say "the second thing I ever wrote", but it wasn’t the second time in my life that I’d put pen to paper. Rather, it was the second time I’d written with a purpose in mind: to get the thing published.It’s funny that, isn’t it? At what point does the shift from writing for the sake of writing, to writing in order to share happen? And why? I have no idea. I only know that, for me, moving to Madrid was a catalyst. By making myself a legitimate foreigner, far from home on strange soil, I found my w
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