Every Friday, I publish five links I have found helpful or fascinating. This list is a selection of the best ideas from those posts. Each post also includes the book I am currently reading. Each month I publish a newsletter entirely about books, mostly non-fiction, old titles and new, which I consider worth my time and yours. You can get on that list here. These are the most novel and interesting ideas I’ve come across this year so far, between January and the end of June.
Restrictions can create magic.
The restrictions of the haiku are its magic: three lines, fifteen syllables, and an image from the natural world – or some variation thereof – are frighteningly little to work with.
The Japanese renga was a form of poetry. The opening stanza was comprised of 17 syllables, unrhymed, to set the stage for the rest of the poem. Eventually, these poems became quite popular in their own right, being given the name haiku.
Quality follows quantity.
“The real shocker in Beeple’s Everyday series is comparing his early work to his late work. Within the same interval of time, he went from one-session doodles to one-session masterpieces. The act of repetition within a consistent interval led to a breathe-taking phase change. Beeple’s story is proof that quality comes from quantity.”
“A publishing routine should aim to have an unshakeable foundation. Like the reliability of the sun, the tide, or a new Bitcoin block, you don’t question if it’s going to happen. You assume it as a given. Beeple hasn’t missed a day since he started almost 14 years ago.
If your publishing routine is like a fail-proof cadence of the universe, you will become a force of nature.”
What is the essence of humanity we are passing along in education, or is there even one? Leaning into the human side of work, leisure, life is the only thing which will survive in this age of Information and Machines. Two thoughts from different writers on the art of being human.
If we are only demanding superficial skills, easily replaced by a machine, what is the point of demanding them in the first place? What are we trying to impart to, or better yet, bring out of these students? Seth Godin weighs in on the AI – writing conversation.
While Justin Murphy explains why cultivating human interests remains a competitive advantage.
“First, I use my irreducibly human powers to decide what is worth studying, thinking about, etc. As I’ll discuss below, the stakes here are increasingly high.”
What are the most future-proof elements of the human writer or creator?
The accumulated human perception of a creator’s cognitive, aesthetic, ethical, and sociological character, placement, meaning, and value. If that sounds pretentiously grandiose, notice that the word “brand” is, on the contrary, vulgar and reductionist. Both perceptions are correct, and together they help us understand why brand will become more valuable as AI becomes commoditized.”
Simply going for a walk is one of the best things you can do for your mental and physical health.
Luigi Ferrucci, the scientific director at the National Institute on Aging, suggests for achieving longevity:
“Just walking outside,” makes an enormous difference, Ferrucci said.
“If I had a jewel to give to people who want to live long and well, I would tell them to get up early in the morning and go out,” Ferrucci said. “That is really the best gift that you can give yourself if you want to achieve longevity.”
via Austin Kleon.
What exactly do we hope to take away from learning and why do we give it so much attention?
“And that’s when I decided I had a choice. I could spend my life learning or I could spend it being bored. If I chose learning I would get to think, do, see, go wherever I wanted – hopefully in all of life, but even if I failed at that, at least I could go anywhere in my own head. But if instead I chose not learning, if like so many other people I chose boredom, then an egg …would only ever be …an egg, and that seemed like a truly terrible waste of a really quite amazing world.”
Mozart’s response to being called a ‘natural genius’.
“It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.” – Mozart to a conductor in Prague during rehearsals for Don Giovanni (1787).
Simplicity is elegance.
Penmanship was a real problem in government offices around the world for centuries; a scribe’s writing being too cramped or using the wrong ink could result in illegible official documents.
Isn’t it amazing that handwriting and cursive had no standard form until relatively recently, the 1800s! Then, Thomas Edison created a more effective style by fitting letters closer to together, allowing them to fit onto the smaller paper slips used for telegraph notes. The customary flowing script of the time was too ornate to fit on the sheets.
Perspective matters.
“I’ve found [photography] has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”
A key factor missing in the discussion around reading and writing is the understanding that writing not only captures ideas, but prompts them. Writing your thoughts out creates more thoughts. So, what is at stake in the reading, writing debate is not just cataloging ideas, but the very existence of new ideas.
“Writing is not just a way to convey ideas, but also a way to have them.” In the wake of ChatGPT’s arrival, Paul Graham shares one reason reading and writing matter for the human mind.
Part of managing your attention well is choosing what to ignore.
The World Economic Forum identifies “critical ignoring” as a key skill both now and in the future. There are always dozens of sources and conversations vying for our attention, making the discipline of choosing where to focus paramount. Thinking deeply is impossible until one chooses where they want to direct their attention, therefore, eliminating and ignoring other attention-grabbing conversations, ideas, images, etc., must happen first.
What is the difference between a push button and a scroll?
Images of ‘the future’ promised us all a push-button society, but instead we live in a scroll and swipe one. The always insightful Ted Gioia illustrates how Skinner Boxes have taken over our “social” lives, and why today’s scrolls are entirely different from the scrolls where written language originated.
When it comes to motivation, using energy creates more energy.
Most people think about energy the wrong way. They think they have a set supply of energy and need to choose how and where to spend it. Instead, we have energy and choose to do things which add to or subtract from our energy. “Not feeling like” doing anything turns into not doing anything which depletes energy, whereas spending energy on a short walk or few minutes of writing creates energy. If you’re really needing an energy boost, move your body! Go for a walk, do some light stretching, or even move your workout up and reap the rewards of energy-boosting movement.
The main thing is knowing how to see.
“Sight. Not a slight thing to teach, this: perhaps, on the whole, the most important important thing to be taught in the whole range of teaching. To be taught to read – what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is true or false? To be taught to write or speak – but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think – nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true.”
– John Ruskin, inaugural speech at the Cambridge School of Art in 1858.
It turns out flashcards may be superior to mnemonics for studying material you want to learn for the long-term.
What do we lose when even university libraries are purging thousands of books to make room for discussion areas, laptop desks, and communal study space?
University libraries are purging their shelves of millions of books to make way for communal study space, coffeeshops, and nap pods. Although I am curious what is being studied if not books?
Western decline is in part due to our conception of happiness as ‘having” things rather than being something.
“[T]he postindustrial West’s ‘kind of “pursuit of happiness” does not produce well-being,’ because it is dominated by an attitude of ‘having’ rather than ‘being‘.”
Perhaps movement is a key to helping kids improve their reading comprehension.
Annie Murphy Paul outlines a novel potential shakeup in teaching reading. Perhaps the full-body movements of VR can be helpful in boosting kids’ reading comprehension. Acting out the story, or a response to it, seems to be beneficial to understanding it.
The purpose of learning is improvement, personal and eventually, social.
“The more extensive your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled, the more extensive will be your powers of invention.”
-Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch, On the Art of Writing Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914.
“If you don’t understand what is happening on a good day, you surely won’t understand what is happening on a bad day.”
– Formula One leader Toto Wolff on how attention to detail, both for himself throughout his organization, clarifies the path to winning.
This is an old idea, unfortunately relevant again: censoring language does not one thing to address or improve the actual issues those words describe.
George Packer on the modern tendency to reject reality in favor of a sanitized, “inclusive” vocabulary. This sort of prescriptive language stands between the object or person being described and the reader. It makes a farce of plain speech, while claiming to be the same. Rather than illuminate, it obfuscates; rather focusing on improving the issue described, it aims to make the issue disappear in language.
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
