★★★☆☆
by Yoko Tawada
An interesting complement to The Candy House with dovetailing characters introduced in each chapter adding to the main party of protagonists. In this thinly-described pseudo-dystopia the idea of nationality is almost foreign. Language is a gloopy tool for expression and nothing and nobody are quite as they appear.
This short novel was dreamlike, lyrical and captivating.
★★★☆☆
by Jennifer Egan
I enjoyed this although it didn’t have the same impact as Goon Squad. The core conceit of wildly overlapping characters was satisfying and the email thread chapter was a gleeful highlight. I found a few of the individual character chapters reminded me of Douglas Coupland short stories where things fizzle out with either mild unease or surprising resolution.
by Michael Palin
A bit of comfort audio whilst recovering from the dreaded Coronavirus. Michael Palin is eternally affable, unflappable and overwhelmingly amiable. It’s strange reading a travelogue from over 20 years ago, a strange snapshot from a distant place and time.
by Christopher Alexander
★★★★☆
by David Sedaris
A heady mix of egotistical self-promotion, gimmicky wins and dated sales strategies.
by Alison Green
by C. Thi Nguyen
★★★☆☆
by Jia Tolentino
★★★★☆
by John Darnielle
Really enjoyed this. Better than Universal Harvester and on par with Wolf in White Van.
by Kate Crawford
★★★☆☆
by Kim Stanley Robinson
★★★☆☆
by Guy Vanderhaeghe
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
★★★★☆
by Rekka Bellum and Devine Lu Linvega
by Derek Sivers
★★★★☆
by Bo Burlingham
★★★★★
by Howard White
Fantastic tales of whalers, loggers, hoax real estate and a cast of coastal characters.
by David Berman
★★★★☆
by Haruki Murakami
★★★★★
by Jer Thorp
★★☆☆☆
by Tamara Shopsin
I expected to love this but the “cast of characters in a quirky company” vibe never quite landed for me.
★★★★★
by Oliver Burkeman
Okay, okay this is the first and last time management/productivity book I’ll read this year. But it’s pretty good! An antidote to the others, Burkeman describes the sheer finite nature of our time on this planet and makes recommendations to overcome the fatigue of overflowing todo lists.
Make it a conscious decision to “tolerate the discomfort” of less important tasks building up while you focus on the most important things.
The measure of any time management technique is: “Does it help you neglect the right things?” To take a phrase from financial planning you should pay yourself first and prioritise the things you want to do over the less important things you feel you should be doing.
We have a dependence on technology that makes it convenient to eat, travel and live. Silicon Valley builds products to remove pain points but it’s the brokenness of everyday processes that make us human. By relying on technology to make every process smooth we remove the delicate social threads binding a network together, binding a neighbourhood together.
I happen to be alive, and there’s no cosmic law entitling me to that status. Being alive is just happenstance, and not one more day of it is guaranteed.
Make a list of the top twenty-five things that are most important to you. Top five are the crucial use of your time, discard the rest as they are just a distraction.
“Core ingredient of the modern soul.”
Value is derived from how many others have access to it too. Same for phones and social media networks.
We look after ourselves to give the best chances of staying alive. This is in contrast to our sheer insignificance.
★★★★☆
by Carol Tavris, Elliot Aronson
This book was fantastic. A deep dive into how people self-justify their actions and the cognitive dissonance they are comfortable living with.
The guiding metaphor of this book has been the pyramid of choice: As soon as people make a decision, whether reasoned or impulsive, they will change their attitudes to conform to that choice and start minimizing or dismissing any information suggesting they chose the wrong option.
more you imagine something, the more confident you become that it really happened—and the more likely you are to inflate it into an actual memory, adding details as you go
A fun shorthand example for confirmation bias.
There are stories of dolphins helping nudge shipwrecked humans to safety. To accept this as evidence they like humans we would need to know about cases where dolphins have caused harm and, ultimately, have killed humans. But
We don’t know about those cases because the swimmers don’t live to tell us about their evil-dolphin experiences.
At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control.
We can all understand why victims would want to retaliate. But retaliation often makes the original perpetrators minimize the severity and harm of their side’s actions and claim the mantle of victim themselves, thereby setting in motion a cycle of oppression and revenge. “Every successful revolution,” observed the historian Barbara Tuchman, “puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.” Why not? The victors, former victims, feel justified.
by Steph Wright
★★★★☆
by Rob Fitzpatrick
Short and sweet, the core few concepts in this book resonated with me and have clear applications in sales. The title and main conceit is a touch misogynistic, sure, but the author isn’t the first to recommend speaking to someone unfamiliar with a topic to gauge quality.
A recent New York Magazine article about the late “anarchic anthropologist” David Graeber, notes the use of his mother Ruth as an influence on his work:
Ruth herself never went to college. She was a constant reader, however, and years later, she was the audience her son kept in mind when he wrote. Graeber, Leve recalls, used to say that “if he understood something, he should be able to write it in a way that would be accessible and interesting to her.”
My main takeaway is that it’s easy to lead people to say the things they think you want to hear.
Rules of The Mom Test:
It’s easy to get someone emotional about a problem if you lead them there.
Good questions about them:
“Venture capitalists are described as professional judges of the future” – I like that.
Sometimes people will discuss a problem that irritates them but they would have no intent of buying a solution to that problem.
that person is a complainer, not a customer. They’re stuck in the la-la-land of imagining they’re the sort of person who finds clever ways to solve the petty annoyances of their day.
It’s recommended to cut off pitches as early as possible:
Being pitchy is the dark side of the “seeking approval” coin. Instead of inviting compliments by being vulnerable, you’re demanding them by being annoying. It’s when you hold someone hostage and won’t let them leave until they’ve said they like your idea. Normally, compliments are well-intentioned. In this case, they’re just trying to get you out of their office. “Won’t-take-no-for-an-answer” is generally a good quality for a founder to have. But when it creeps into a conversation that’s meant to be about learning, it works against you.
Avoid prematurely zooming – that is getting into the weeds hearing what you want to hear.
When you fall into a premature zoom, you can waste a ton of time figuring out the minutia of a trivial problem. Even if you learn everything there is to know about that particular problem, you still haven’t got a business
If you ask When he talked to farmers, he asked questions like, “Would you switch trackers if something cheaper and more effective was available?” That’s the same as asking someone whether they would like more money.
It’s on you to get a commitment. This can take many forms:
Time commitments
Reputation risk commitments:
Financial commitments:
Good rule of thumb:
It’s not a real lead until you’ve given them a concrete chance to reject you.
The author discusses some strategies to talk to potential customers about your idea.
Be persistent:
Unless your plan is to sell your app via cold calls, the rejection rate is irrelevant.
Strategy for conversations is summarised as Vision / Framing / Weakness / Pedestal / Ask
Don’t mention your product, just your vision:
You’re an entrepreneur trying to solve horrible problem X, usher in wonderful vision Y, or fix stagnant industry Z.
Frame expectations:
mention what stage you’re at and, if it’s true, that you don’t have anything to sell.
Show weakness:
give them a chance to help by mentioning the specific problem that you’re looking for answers on. This will also clarify that you’re not a time waster.
Put them on a pedestal:
show how much they, in particular, can help. Explicitly ask for help.
In terms of mindset, don’t go into these discussions looking for customers. It creates a needy vibe and forfeits the position of power. Instead, go in search of industry and customer advisors. You are just trying to find helpful, knowledgable people who are excited about your idea.
When all the customer learning is stuck in someone’s head instead of being disseminated to the rest of the team, you’ve got a learning bottleneck. Avoid creating (or being) the bottleneck. To do that, the learning must be shared with the entire founding team promptly and faithfully, which depends on good notes plus a bit of pre- and post-meeting work.
You’re never going to be perfect, but it always helps to be better.
by Jake Knapp
A few good insights to start but quickly devolved into listicle-worthy life hacks.
★★★★★
by Raymond Carver
A wonderful collection of short stories. Carver’s spare, tight sentences draw a much more emotive picture than they have any right to.
Particular highlights for me were “Chef’s House,” “A Small, Good Thing” and “Fever”.
★★★☆☆
by China Miéville
Odd little book, quite unsettling.
★★★★★
by Various, Jay Rubin
I’ve been picking this up every other week since I was gifted it last Christmas and I finally finished it with a burst of completionism. It’s a beautiful curation of Japanese short stories from between 1898 and 2014 translated to English. I enjoyed all of them with the exception of the gory “Patriotism” by Mishima Yukio.
It was so rewarding to read each short story before flipping back to the commentary from Murakami. I now have a much deeper appreciation for Japanese literature and will definitely seek out some of the further reading.
Here are my favourite short stories in this collection:
This is a story of a petty grudge and sheer irrational behaviour. I loved it for the lack of explanation and the domestic yet unpredictable setting.
A strangely nostalgic tale of transition to a big city.
The book starts with this novella of sorts: a mildly unbelievable but alluring mystery that slowly unravels.
I enjoyed just how mundane this story was. A tale of work politics and salarymen.
An allegory with a plausible backbone. Written in 1973 but could have been published in the last decade.
This short story was from the section entitled “Dread” and describes a Kafka-esque world of transfiguration and misunderstanding. Haunting.
An unsettling depiction of the decline of a relative to a fantastical disease. Pay close attention!
A heartbreaking account of the fallout from atomic warfare, wonderfully crafted and deeply evocative.
by Bob Joseph
★★★☆☆
by Cathy O'Neil
I was pretty cynical about this at first as I thought I’d heard it all before. I think this should be required reading for anyone working with data. I can’t shake that the injustices created by the use of data as described in this book are just the tip of the iceberg.
Just like with Humankind’s homo puppy I winced at the use of the WMD acronym, a purposefully overloaded term.
Three factors to systems deemed “Weapons of Math Destruction”
Clopening is when a worker is scheduled to both close a location at night and then re-open it in the morning. This can be stressful and result in an erratic schedule for workers balancing a number of responsibilities.
A large amount of Facebook users believe the algorithm behind the scenes is just presenting factual information and isn’t tailored to them.
In 2013, when a University of Illinois researcher named Karrie Karahalios carried out a survey on Facebook’s algorithm, she found that 62 percent of the people were unaware that the company tinkered with the news feed. They believed that the system instantly shared everything they posted with all of their friends.
I wonder if this is still the case eight years later?
O’Neill uses the phrase “birds of a feather” a few times to discuss how members of the same social network will often behave in similar ways. One example is that they may click on the same ads on Facebook.
Some recidivism analyses use this concept and inadvertently encode bias by taking acquaintances, jobs and credit rating to predict behavior. This sort of data would be inadmissible in court.
Interesting dataset alert:
A few years ago, MIT researchers analyzed the behavior of call center employees for Bank of America to find out why some teams were more productive than others. They hung a so-called sociometric badge around each employee’s neck. The electronics in these badges tracked the employees’ location and also measured, every sixteen milliseconds, their tone of voice and gestures. It recorded when people were looking at each other and how much each person talked, listened, and interrupted. Four teams of call center employees—eighty people in total—wore these badges for six weeks.
★★★☆☆
by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Enjoyed these stories on their own but all together they felt a little heavy-handed.
★★★★☆
by Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga
The dialogue is a little clunky and I need to do some reading around Adlerism but there were quite a few “aha” moments for me in this book. It was a library loan but I picked up a copy to give myself more time with it.
Etiology is the study of causation while teleology is the story of the purpose of a given phenomenon, rather than it’s cause. In Adlerism we don’t think about past “causes” but instead about present “goals.”
Lifestyle is the tendencies of thought and action in life.
No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.
A life-lie is the state of coming up with all manner of pretexts in order to avoid life tasks. e.g. “I’m busy at work so I don’t have enough time to think about my family.”
All problems are interpersonal relationship problems.
Adlerism denies the need to be recognized by others, one must not seek recognition. You are not living to satisfy other people’s expectations. Do not behave without regard for others – separation of tasks. All interpersional relationship troubles are caused by intruding on other people’s tasks, or having one’s own taks intruded on.
The life tasks of interpersonal relationships are:
We need to think with the perspective of “Whose task is this?” and continually separate one’s own tasks from other people’s tasks.
Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?
Intervening in other people’s tasks and taking on other people’s tasks turns one’s life into something heavy and full of hardship.
All you can do with regard to your own life is choose the best path that you believe in. On the other hand, what kind of judgment do other people pass on that choice? That is the task of other people, and is not a matter you can do anything about.
Horizontal relationships are relationships where members have equal standing whereas vertical relationships are those where one member has greater power, authority, knowledge or wisdom over the other.
Don’t praise or rebuke: praise is passing judgement from someone with ability to someone with no ability. By praising we are making vertical relationships, not horizontal ones. All healthy relationships should be horizontal.
The more one is praised by another person, the more one believes they have no ability.
Go from praise to gratitude.
When Adler refers to community, he goes beyond the household, school, workplace, and local society, and treats it as all inclusive, covering not only nations and all of humanity but also the entire axis of time from the past to the future.
The scope of community is infinite! People are never truly alone or separated from community and cannot be.
You must consider yourself part of the community rather than the centre of the world. The goal of personal interpersonal relationships is a feeling of community. Use separation of tasks to “unravel the threads of the complex entanglement of one’s interpersonal relations.”
When running into difficulties in interpersonal relationships, one should zoom out and “listen to the voice of the larger community.”
Life is a series of moments called now, not a linear map from birth to the top of the mountain.
Think of this as a line drawn with pencil, if you magnify enough it’s made up of tiny dots. These are the now.
★★★★★
by Rutger Bregman
A very readable, refreshing look at human nature. I didn’t expect to enjoy this quite so much. The author covers a fascinating array of studies and historical examples to show that, contrary to popular belief, people tend towards being good.
I cringe a little at the repeated reference to homo puppy – the moniker given to the empathetic humans we evolved to be.
★★★★★
by Andy Weir
Reading them in quick succession it’s hard not to blend the worlds of Project Hail Mary, Three-Body Problem and Ministry for the Future into one. Speculative near-future fiction with climate overtones, spaceships and a hope for cooperation between the entire human race.
The main character in this jarred on me at first but reading around I appreciate that Weir’s “gee-whiz” schoolteacher is a tongue-in-cheek inversion of the sweary protagonists of his previous books.
Really enjoyed this, appreciated the thorough science, twists and dedication to an idea.
★★★★☆
by Cixin Liu
The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of other people’s gestures and movements.
★★★☆☆
by Cal Newport
A book of two halves. I loved the first part as Newport described how email overtook as the dominant communication method for businesses, despite being inferior to traditional methods.
A misjudged reference to The Tragedy of the Commons marked the beginning of the book’s decline. The author describes common Kanban tools, provides some introspection on writing the book and finishes by rattles off a few productivity life hacks.
The bits I liked the most echoed Newport’s advice in Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.
Technological Determinism happens when we allow technology to control how we act and behave
★★★★☆
by Chris Voss, Tahl Raz
I wasn’t sure at first but this turned out to be a good listen. Lots of helpful considerations for successful transactional conversations. One undercurrent in the book was that a strong negotiation strategy is simply to buy time and extract information from your “counterpart” to aid the process of reaching an agreement.
Labelling is an interesting idea. Effectively calling out something for what it is without ascribing blame.
It seems that …
rather than
I think you …
Harks back to non-violent communication with the aim of being as non-judgemental as possible.
Similarly I liked the example Voss gave of showing contrition early if you’ve done something wrong. Getting ahead of the situation and keeping in control.
Mirroring is a remarkable active listening device with a clear benefit.
Voss recommends leaning into the conflict that’s at the core of any negotiation and to see it as a collaborative process to reach agreement.
Calibrated questions should be used early and often in negotiations. Voss’s favorite is the oft-repeated
How am I supposed to do that?
but any open question that draws information out of your counterpart is worth using. Questions starting with “how” or “what” will spark a cooperation for both sides to agree.
★★★☆☆
by Robin Sloan
I had high hopes for this book at the start but my enthusiasm waned towards the end. The optimism of the spunky, tech-savvy protagonist and ease in which he could achieve his goals soon grew weary as the mystery slotted into place.
I was surprised how much the book aligned with my interests, in particular data visualization, typography and cryptography. It reminds me there are many people interested in the intersection of these topics.
The fawning Google-worship proved too much. The undeserved, magic code-breaking scene betrayed what is otherwise a reasonable “hard” science fiction fantasy book. The fantasy-novel-in-a-novel failed to escape it’s use as a plot device and a vehicle for some cringe-worthy geekery. Oblique references to Harry Potter were apt considering the author’s fondness for Dumbledore-adjacent names.
All that being said I did enjoy this and I’m not sure why I’m being so harsh. The book just seemed to go off-the-rails a third of the way through and never recovered.
by William Strunk
There were a few humorously archaic references in this book, but for the most part it holds up 100 years later!
Here are the main rules that stood out to me, most likely because I flout them all.
Oxford comma, I don’t do this but perhaps I should?
I do a lot of parentheticals. Good core rule to remember.
So before the and or but. I need to do this.
If two or more clauses, grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction, are to form a single compound sentence, the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon.
Or a period.
Do not break sentences in two.
A participial phrase at the beginning of a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject
e.g. about the subject of the sentence:
Walking slowly down the road, he saw a woman accompanied by two children
vs. referring to the woman
He saw a woman accompanied by two children, walking slowly down the road.
A common fault is to use as the subject of a passive construction a noun which expresses the entire action, leaving to the verb no function beyond that or completing the sentence.
e.g. A survey of this region was made in 1900 vs. This region was surveyed in 1900.
The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning.
Certainly, can (instead of may), factor, feature, interesting, so, sort of, kind of, system, very, while
★★★★★
by Kiley Reid
My recent reading list tracks Tom Macwright’s closely, mainly because I see he’s rated something with five stars so I go to the library website to add it to my holds. But I forget to pause the hold until some reasonable date in the future, the book arrives at the library and – bam – I start it in earnest.
This book hooked me. The sharp character observations along with the grey areas of intent and purpose made it a magnetic read. I respect the ending but it felt a little unresolved.
★★★★★
by Stephen King
This was really good. A very clear, cogent take on the craft of writing. It almost made me want to start writing a novel.
… I’m sure all writers feel pretty much the same, no matter what their skill and success level: God, if only I were in the right writing environment, with the right understanding people, I just KNOW I could be penning my masterpiece
In truth, I’ve found that any day’s routine interruptions and distractions don’t much hurt a work in progress and may actually help it in some ways. It is, after all, the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster’s shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters. And the larger the work looms in my day—the more it seems like an I hafta instead of just an I wanna—the more problematic it can become.
★★★★☆
by Guy Vanderhaeghe
by John E. Sarno
★★★★☆
by Mohsin Hamid
We are all migrants through time
★★★★★
by Michelle Zauner
To have a “thin ear” is to be too easily swayed by the advice of others.
★★★★☆
by Dean Nelson
I don’t have any plans to interview anyone but this was a good read on the things to consider if I ever do. The tone was a touch smug at times but it was a breezy read with plenty of anecdotes to help it flow.
Nelson suggests finding something unusual that proves you have done your research and shows the interviewee that they are in safe hands. One example digs into the craft – Nelson asked about a particularly long sentence in something Gay Talese had written. Looks like it’s reproduced in this article.
Heat for heat’s sake or heat for light’s sake
This is referenced a few times, the first time as quoted from Chris Wallace. I really like it. “Heat for heat’s sake” is something that’s pleases an audience. I liken it to virality online and pushing for controversy. “Heat for light’s sake,” however, is the process of “making things a little bit difficult for the object of your scrutiny in order to really try to help the audience understand.”
In my comparison to online discourse this would be drawing attention to something in a non-confrontational way for the purposes of greater awareness.
Unsurprisingly open questions are lauded as important devices for getting good answers from interviewers.
What kind of father were you?
What do you think?
There are also lots of examples of asking questions that you already know the answer to in order to keep in control of the interview. This is a powerful technique when combined with the knowledge you’ve learned “on backround.” But if you don’t know then stick to open questions:
Did it change you in some way? How so?
This is a surprising question to most and even if someone has a “conventional” name confirming regardless will ensure that the printed result won’t upset them in some way. At the least you will prove that you’re thorough.
Give your source a chance to tell you something that they were hesitating to bring up.
I love this because it’s all about referrals and loops. “There’s always someone who knows more, someone behind the scenes, someone who isn’t quoted or sought out very often.”
Leaving the door open with a source is likely to pay off in the future.
As per Anne Lamott,
each of us has a hundred dollars of creativity to spend each day. How will we spend that hundred dollars? If we just have two hours available to write today, we could spend some of that time on the internet […] Then we can focus on getting our work done—wisely spending the remaining dollars.
You can’t bank this money, “You get a hundred dollars today”
Above all a good interviewer leaves their ego at the door. An interview is not about the interviewer. In the same vein one should learn to be comfortable with silence if it helps draw out interesting details from a source.
When interviewing and unsure about your source you should consider your audience and try and focus on one person in particular. Consider what they would want to know from this source and take away from the interview. This holds for all writing.
★★★★★
by Brian Christian
An engrossing, cogent look at Machine Learning safety
Imitation and aping, it’s more of a human thing than an ape thing
Possibilism - the view that one should do the best possible thing in every situation
Actualism - the view that one should do the best thing at the moment, given what will actually happen later
Laxism
Equiprobabilism
Pure probablists
Bunch of Guys Sitting Around a Table
★★★★★
by Kim Stanley Robinson
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It opened my eyes to the new realities of climate change but matched those realities with some thought-provoking, optimistic steps we could take in the future.
I found myself marking lots of pages with interesting ideas and collated them below.
The Gini coefficient is a measure of income or wealth disparity in a population, typically given as a fraction between 0 and 1.
0 is the coefficient if everyone owned an equal amount, 1 is for if one person owned everything and everyone else nothing.
The Gini coefficient for the whole world’s population is higher than for any individual countries as there are so many more poor people in the world. It’s roughly 0.7 for the world.
Monocausotaxophilia is the love of single ideas that explain everything – “one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors.” The Gini coefficient is a good example of this, some countries have the same coefficient despite a large difference in the average annual income. We should consider the spread between the richest and the poor.
Foreshortening is a common perceptual distortion.
When standing under a cliff in the mountains and looking up at it, the cliff always appears to be about the same height—say a thousand feet or so. … Only when you get miles away […] can you actually see the immense height …
Other cognitive errors include “anchor bias (you want to stick to your first estimate or what you have been told) and ease of representation (you think an explanation you can understand is more likely to be true than one you can’t).”
The book mentions an “excellent circular graphic display of cognitive errors” – it could be this graphic but it doesn’t quite match the description.
Another one from later in the book is the “availability heuristic,” in which you feel that what is real is what you know.
Hebrew tradition speaks of those hidden good people who keep the world from falling apart, the Tzadikim Nistarium, the hidden righteous ones. In some versions they are thirty-six in number, and thus are called the Lamed-Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six righteous ones.
They emerge and act when needed to save their people before sinking back into anonymity. They are exemplars of humility, if someone were to proclaim himself to be one of the Lamed-Vav, this would be proof that actually he was not. The Lamed-Vav are generally too modest to believe they could be one of these special actors.
The stories of secret actors are the secret action
The Jevons paradox is that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease. Originally written in reference to the history of the use of coal.
At this point it is naïve to expect that technological improvements alone will slow the impacts of growth and reduce the burden on the biosphere.
The 2000-watt society is an environmental vision, first introduced in 1998 by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (ETH Zurich), which pictures the average First World citizen reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) by the year 2050, without lowering their standard of living.
The book posits a carbon coin, or carboni, a cryptocurrency backed by central banks to reward and promote ecological actions. I’d like to learn more about this potential for cryptocurrencies, it sounds fascinating.
Some of us talked about the bathtub graph. People doing dangerous things make mistakes when they’re first learning it, and then when they’ve known it forever. Theses were the two periods with higher rates of accidents, while the in-between was a stretch of low accidents.
One pathologicial reaction, a form of avoidance, has been called The Masque of the Red Death Syndrome, after the story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the story, a group of privileged aristocrats, isolated in a castle on a peak above a countryside devastated by a plague, stage a masquerade to distract themselves, or to display indifference or defiance to their eventual fate.
A silent masked stranger then appears and stalks through the party, and few readers are surprised when this stranger turns out to be death itself.
Even more extreme pathological responses to biosphere collapse are possible and have been observed. Some who feel the end is near work to hasten it, or worsen it.
Götterdämmerung Syndrome ~ the Goddamning of the world or “twilight of the gods.”
Yes. You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay you if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long.
You could literally fill a medium-sized encylopedia with the good new projects already invented and waiting to scale.
Data mining tells us things we wouldn’t have known unless we did it. That could be called artificial intelligence but it’s what we used to call science. What we have really is computer-assisted science. Best to call it that. It’s getting stronger. But we have to figure out what to do with it.
Charles Fourier was a French utopian with followers in France and America. There were communes based on his ideas. For him the animals were very important—they were going to join us and become a big part of civilization.
So at one point he says, The mail will be delivered by lions.
After a cursory look online I can’t find anything about this but it’s a nice idea.
★★★★☆
by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
★★★★☆
by Anne Lamott
I listened to this on audiobook and loved the thinly-veiled contempt throughout. Lamott had a world-weary, bitter outlook on many aspects of writing so it was remarkable how inspiring I found the book in it’s totality.
Writing is labour, any other idea is romantic
I need to bring up radio station KFKD, or K-Fucked, here….If you are not careful, station KFKD will play in your head twenty-four hours a day, nonstop, in stereo.
Out of the right speaker in your inner ear will come the endless stream of self-aggrandizement, the recitation of one’s specialness, of how much more open, and gifted and brilliant and knowing and misunderstood and humble one is.
Out of the left speaker will be the rap songs of self-loathing, the lists of all the things one doesn’t do well, of all the mistakes one has made today and over an entire lifetime, the doubt, the assertion that everything one touches turns to shit, that one doesn’t do relationships well, that one is in every way a fraud, incapable of selfless love, that one has no talent or insight, and on and on and on.
My friend Carpenter talks about the unconscious as the cellar where the little boy sits who creates the characters, and he hands them up to you through the cellar door. He might as well be cutting out paper dolls. He’s peaceful; he’s just playing.
★★★☆☆
by Richard McGuire
★★★★☆
by E. Lily Yu
by Greg McKeown
★★★★☆
by Camila Russo
by Zadie Smith
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by Patricia Lockwood
★★★★★
by Jennifer Egan
★★★☆☆
by Joshua Whitehead
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by David Karashima
★★★★☆
by Kat Holmes
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by Edward Tufte
complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision and efficiency.
that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the shortest space
graphical excellence is nearly always multivariate
And graphical excellence requires telling the truth about the data
Using the data itself to plot data “increases the quantitative detail and dimensionality of a graphic”
If we are going to make a mark it may as well be a meaningful one. The simplest—and most useful—meaningful mark is a digit. (Tukey)
Color often generates graphical puzzles. Despite our experiences… the mind’s eye does not readily give a visual ordering to colors.
Greyscale shades show varying quantities better than color.
Consider the viewing architecture of a graphic.
Data-ink is the non-erasable core of a graphic, the non-redundant ink arranged in response to variation in the numbers represented.
Even part of the data measures can be erased, making a white grid
range-framethe frame of a graphic can become an effective data-communicating element simply by erasing part of it.
should extend only to the measured limits of the data
Taking into account the size of the graphic in relation to the amount of data displayed yields the data density:
by Josh Bernoff
by Stanley Donwood
★★★★★
by C Pam Zhang
by Nir Eyal
by Xiaowei Wang
by Cal Newport
by Daniel Kehlmann
by Edward Tufte
by Jordan Ellenberg
by Edward Tufte
by Adrian Tomine
by David Graeber
by César Aira
by Michael DeForge
by Yoshiharu Tsuge
by Tian Veasna
by Tony Angell
by Brian Christian
by Hamid Sulaiman
by Scott MacGregor
by Samanta Schweblin
by Anna Wiener
by Adrian Tomine
by Jean Barman
by Dorothy Mindenhall
by Douglas W. Hubbard
by Philip Pullman
by Shigeru Mizuki
by Eliot Peper
by China Miéville
by Marshall B. Rosenberg
by Philip Pullman
by Cory Doctorow
by Andy Greenberg
by Douglas Coupland
by Donald A. Norman
by Gidigaa Migizi (Doug Williams)
by James Clear
by Blake Crouch
by Haruki Murakami
by Haruki Murakami
by Jay Hoskin
by J. D. Salinger
by Greg Egan
by Ariane Dénommé
by L. David Marquet
by Adrian Tomine
by Sylvia Nickerson
by Craig Thompson
by Lewis Trondheim and Oiry
by Nick Drnaso
by James Sturm
by David Chariandy
by Cal Newport
by Brian Christian