What is your worst intellectual habit?

Rushing to judgment. Looking for the bad in someone else before anything else.

Overthinking. I tend to conflate the amount of time spent on something with how good it is. Sometimes intuition is better than proof, and gut instinct better than hours of “work.”

I’m prone to overexplaining things –- when my own understanding of them is shaky. The better I know something, the shorter my prose.

I question everything. This is also my greatest intellectual habit.

Reading too many books at the same time.

I’m too quick to jump to a negative conclusion. For example, if I’ve had a book come out recently and I’m with a friend who doesn’t mention it, instead of thinking, “This person hasn’t mentioned my book because they’re busy and haven’t had time to purchase it, much less read it, and that doesn’t mean that they don’t like me,” I will go to, “This person doesn’t care about me,” which is such a terrible, self-centered way to think. People really are busy and their world doesn’t stop just because I’ve published a novel.

I don’t believe anything is black and white, so I’m always searching for nuance. On the whole I think this is a positive thing, but it also means I almost never give an unqualified answer.

I’ve a deplorable tendency to become entrenched in my own prejudices: If I dislike an artist, an art form, or an idea (jazz, ballet, certain kinds of fiction) it is extremely difficult to get me to change my mind, and all evidence presented to the contrary will be discarded and very likely mocked. Of course, nobody suffers but me.

My very wise and politically savvy 17-year-old daughter says I get too emotional about political issues. I think she’s right. She knows that if she sees me race across a room, I have just read something about Trump. Turning ideas into feelings is the thing an essayist is supposed to do, but political punditry should probably be more detached.

if you have never suffered from self-loathing, lucky you.