Welcome to the weekend,
I’ve been feasting on bell pepper and cucumber sandwiches and sparkling water this first week of summer, while planning summer trips and (finally) ordering furniture for this house. I’m writing to you from my new(ish) home office, which is very much still in the unpacking phase, as there are new rugs and old boxes stacked behind me and notebooks and writing supplies surrounding my laptop. The books are all out and organized on their respective shelves, though! Here’s to getting things done as they come to you.
The best from around the Internet this week:
Paul Graham with a lesson to unlearn. Imagine if the people who wanted to learn, did so without having to “hack the test” for a good grade? What if they learned and built and their progress was determined by feedback? In what ways are you “studying for the test,” rather than deepening and growing your knowledge?
How to incorporate temptation bundling into your working routine, which proved très useful this week, as it combines “hedonistic pleasure with a chore, to offer short-term gratification while producing long-term gain.” (Sometimes I listen to ridiculous old pop hits while editing, and it’s just the energetic boost I need to tackle those paragraphs.)
An excerpt from the Index of Prohibited Books. Born out of the Council of Trent, which was the Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation, the Church aimed to protect itself from challenges to its authority and identify those writers and books whose teachings it considered heretical. It’s always worth considering what purpose an entity might have for banning books. What ideas do they consider so dangerous as to be forbidden? It’s also worth asking, if people and organizations have been banning books literally since they were first compiled (this was hardly the first attempt in history) and without much success, why are we still attempting the exact same thing in the modern era? At what point do we realize banning books does not make ideas disappear? The most effective way to refute an idea was and is demonstrating its ineffectiveness, showing why the ideas in it fail at their intended purpose. Ideas must be examined, not papered over.
Kevin Kelly on “how to future“. The present is difficult to make out because we are all swimming in it. The future will look a lot like the present – incorporating mostly old technology with new innovations. Those who would predict the future, need to offer scenarios different enough to be surprising, but not so implausible they are dismissed out of hand.
A new book argues the shopping mall is doing fine, thankyouverymuch.
Currently reading: The Witches by Stacy Schiff
Have a lovely weekend.
Photo by Denis Lesak on Unsplash
