For me, problem-solving is a bit like the defragmentation process you had to do with mechanical hard drives back in the day. It’s work that takes place in the background, while doing other things. So I will take long walks with my dog and while I try to avoid his nemesis, the hare, and keep him from barking at the neighbors’ robot lawn mower, most of my brain’s background work somehow gets done.
When I’m sitting at my desk and the prose isn’t flowing, say I’m struggling to describe a peach, I will put on a recording of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata (I’m currently obsessed with pianist Beth Levin’s live performance of it), music that was long deemed unplayable—until [Hungarian composer and musician Franz] Liszt proved it was not—that is meant to be played so fast people have theorized that Beethoven had a faulty metronome. I have listened to it for over twenty-five years, and it never ceases to floor me: the adagio’s emotional devastation, the technical mastery required to play the fugue in the fourth movement. Humans did this! Surely, I think, if someone can write or play the “Hammerklavier,” I should be able to describe a peach.
—Agri Ismaïl, author of Hyper (Coffee House Press, 2026)
Photo credit: Märta Thisner