Featured post
Why merely useful glasses get forgotten
I see well enough to leave my glasses behind. That sounds better than poor eyesight, but it isn't.
Writing in public
Uncompressed public thinking
Short, plain, unhedged essays on thinking and cognition, civilization, and identity, with story and the small crafts of attention: coffee, calendars, kitchens, and code.
Featured post
When every voice is Cassandra
Cassandra saw truly and no one believed her. Now everyone claims her gift in the same vocabulary of emergency, and I can't tell the prophet from the propagandist by sound alone.
Recent
All postsWhy snobbery toward good ideas only works amid abundance
"Turn up your nose at good ideas," Alan Kay told an audience in 1982. It's thrilling advice from someone who could afford it. Who else can?
How the Design Thinking definition decayed into a platitude
A definition of Design Thinking once pointed at a real practice. The wording hasn't changed since. Everything around it has.
Why scientific evidence changes institutions slowly
A field can be shown to rest on weak foundations and carry on much as before. Why does decisive evidence have so little immediate effect?
Problem-as-opportunity framing is a conditional advantage
The person who approaches a problem like an opportunity, the maxim goes, has an advantage the person who sees an obstacle "will never understand." Now try it on a genuine dead end.
Start here
Essays that say what the rest is trying to do.
Why the say-nothing rule fails thinking out loud
If you do not know what to say, say nothing. The line circulates without an owner, and its usual witness is Socrates, who talked continuously, to strangers, at length.
Why Feynman and Watts lectures still resonate
Feynman and Watts gave lectures decades ago that still sound better to me than any talk I'll hear next year. It can't be calmer times: Feynman helped build the bomb.
The wheel turns: an old man and his son by the river
An old man sits with his thirty-six-year-old son beside the river he has fished for forty years. He once counted every fish he took from it. He no longer remembers the number.
The republic as something each generation must keep
A 250th birthday invites the grandest reflex: we have arrived, the founding is secure. Set that beside the Civil War and Jim Crow, and it gets harder to say what exactly has lasted.
COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·FARE
QUIESCE