What is your worst intellectual habit?

Originally asked

Vox, to writers and thinkers, 9 Questions, 2017

Vox's fixed 9 Questions format asks this verbatim across respondents.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Ja’Tovia Gary said elsewhere, not written here
So I’m listening, I’m watching, and I’m also reading while I’m making.

Beandrea July, Current, The Criterion Collection, 22 April 2026 source ↗

Others on this question

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Ursula K. Le Guin Novelist, poet and essayist
But I will be horrified by the way I say kind of and like, and I keep qualifying everything. That’s very feminine. I would like to say it plain, but it always comes out with all these silly qualifiers.
Recorded Choire Sicha, Interview Magazine, 4 September 2015 source ↗
Jacqueline Novogratz Founder and chief executive of Acumen
I don’t. Need a better system. Feel too owned by it right now.
Recorded Thrive Global, The Thrive Questionnaire, Thrive Global, 27 June 2017 source ↗
Henry R. Kravis Financier; co-founder of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
I also developed an unhelpful aversion to asking for favors. Frankly, if I had sought help from others, I would have made far fewer mistakes.
Recorded KKR, 2024 source ↗
Alain de Botton Writer and philosopher; founder of The School of Life
I’m prone to overexplaining things –- when my own understanding of them is shaky. The better I know something, the shorter my prose.
Recorded Sean Illing, Vox, “9 questions” series, 29 April 2017 source ↗

More from Ja’Tovia Gary

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Question What would you like to leave your children? Death & what remains
I’m leaving these things behind so that in 2076 someone can say, “Oh, wow. OK, so this is what they were dealing with,” and maybe they can draw some sort of parallel to whatever is happening in their reality right now, the conditions that they face right now, as much as I can draw a parallel from what Fred Hampton was talking about to what I’m experiencing now.
Recorded Ja'Tovia Gary, BlackStar Projects, Seen, 16 October 2024 source ↗
Question In the last five years, what have you become better at saying no to? Daily life
Certain people really aren’t getting their emails answered. Certain people are getting their emails answered at a very deliberate and delayed rate. There are certain things that I’m passing up that people think that I should be taking, jumping at and clapping over. There’s a certain amount of refusal happening right now because I’ve got to prioritize my health and my ancestral mandates.
Recorded Keisha N. Knight, Filmmaker Magazine, 8 April 2021 source ↗

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