Quote

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

Blogging is great, and I read blogs all day long. However, my goal is really to have a deep, meaningful discussion with people. For some reason, I'm able to accomplish this best via email.

Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays.

I've taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it's a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.

It sounds so nerdy and pathetic, but what I always do on Sunday afternoon is bring my inbox down to zero, which is so sad. But e-mail has become like homework for adults. I'll have 141 messages from people who will be offended if I don't write back.

For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.

Since I'm not a journalist, I talk about issues that encourage an interchange of ideas through conversation while also being entertaining.

I don't think any of us are careful enough about emails. When you are writing an email, you should imagine yourself in an auditorium speaking to 5,000 people, with your mother and grandmother in the audience, and it is being broadcast on CNN.

People live too much of their lives on email or the Internet or text messages these days. We're losing all of our communication skills.