Can birds think about flying while they’re flying?

I was reading The Sand Wolf by Åsa Lind to the kids tonight, and we reached a section called “Thinking Exercise”. In it, Zackarina asks the Sandwolf whether birds can think about flying while they’re flying. The …

He was born to look at the world in awe

I am reading Lüzumsuz Adam and in this story called İp Meselesi, Sait Faik Abasıyanık is describing a man—who, I believe, is himself—who is unfit for any job, doesn’t even know where to begin. O, dünyaya hayretle …

Soul-learning

I’ve underlined this part while reading Kaveh Akbar’s book Martyr! where he wrote about how we can pass down information throughout generations but can’t do that for what he calls “soul-learning”; we’ve always …

Printing articles as A5 booklets

I find it difficult to read long articles on a screen. One alternative I’ve grown to enjoy is printing them as small A5 booklets and carrying them in my backpack. This is super easy on iOS, but with the right …

First principles thinking

I was reading this article, Mental Models In Product Design by Teresa Man and she wrote this about first principles thinking: One way to avoid functional fixedness is to abstract a problem and think in First …

Heidegger was an early product thinker

I am watching Hubert Dreyfus’s lecture on Heidegger and Being and Time, where he describes two modes of being for objects. 1. Readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit): When tools are ready-to-hand, they smoothly integrate …

Hockney’s wandering eye photos

I started reading Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing. I bought this book a while ago. I was browsing the book at Dussmann, opened a random page which happened to be page 96 and Odell was talking about David …

Anchoring information to knowledge

Back in 2004, I designed an app called Musicmap. It helped with finding new albums based on the ones you already liked. As you explored the network of albums, they would neatly arrange themselves on the screen …

Years of searching for meaning revealed in a minute

I’m reading Natalie Goldberg’s book Three Simple Lines, in which she describes her visit to Japan as she traces the footsteps of haiku master Basho. Along with her travel companions, she meets Harada and his son, …

This is how thinking is done

I am playing Disco Elysium, where certain topics that arise in the story become available as “thoughts” in what the game calls the Thought Cabinet. The main character can hold several thoughts at once. To …

Questions open up space for answers

The episode from Hurry Slowly, titled Nothing Important Comes With Instructions, starts with a quote from Clay Christensen: Questions are what opens up space in your mind for answers. If you don’t ask the question …

Octavia Butler’s reading style is similar to mine

I found out about this in Arena Annual 2020 from the article Learning Trails by Leo Shaw. I generally have four or five books open around the house-I live alone; I can do this-and they are not books on the same …

From one piece to the next

I am watching a video of Isamu Noguchi explaining his work on YouTube, and the part where he explains the progression of his work felt inspiring to me. I once concerned myself with working with space. I used to …

Life and art are entangled

I am listening to Alva Noë talk about his book The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are on UC Berkeley’s YouTube channel. He started his talk setting by the background by describing the …

To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works

I am reading the introduction of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders and he writes: To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it …

Communication is not what sets humans apart

This is a passage from Ray Nayler’s book The Mountain in the Sea. I keep coming across this idea that language enables us to talk about what is not immediately present, and that we are the only species capable of …

Contests of civilization

I am reading The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, and I was fascinated by the stories that describe how, during the time of European settlement in the Americas, white settlers who had …

My having-oriented understanding of wisdom

I am reading Alone with Others by Stephen Batchelor. The first chapter of the book is about having and being, and this paragraph stood out to me: It is symptomatic of our having-oriented culture that the most …

Combustion is the hidden principle behind every artefact we create

I am reading Rings of Saturn, and in chapter VII, W. G. Sebald writes that the entire British Isles were covered with dense forests after the last ice age. This phase of evolution was halted when the first …

Going back to stone

I am watching a short video on Isamu Noguchi by SFMoMA and I particularly found his remarks on the limitations of the industry relevant. If you want to live and work in an industrialized situation, you have to use …