Building knowledge around central themes

I am reading Julie Bogart’s book, The Brave Learner. The central theme of the book is to make learning a magical, enchanted experience. To find the joy in learning. She suggests to start with putting the interest …

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 …

Bir hayal yakalayabilmek için bakmaktaydım

Sait Faik Abasıyanık’ın Semaver adlı kitabını okuyorum. Şehri Unutan Adam adlı hikayesinde şöyle bir paragraf dikkatimi çekti. Akşam oluyordu. Köşe başındaki tütüncüye uğradım. Güneş, satılmamış edebiyat …

Advice from Buson

I am reading Three Simple Lines from Natalie Goldberg and she quotes Buson to the group of travelers that are in this Japan trip together: “What you want to acquire, you should dare to acquire by any means. What …

The “we-ness” of being an octopus

I’m reading The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, and there’s a section where he writes about Tibetan Maintenance Drones, the degree of independence built into them, and what it feels like to command them. You …

Pleasure in looking

I am watching a YouTube video about how Monet chased an "envelope". I haven’t heard this word used in this context before. Brian T. Martin, the creator of the video, describes it as the air, the light, or the …

Writing is the act of saying I

I am reading Joan Didion’s book Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and in the essay I particularly bought the book for, titled Why I Write, Didion writes: In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing …

A way of looking but not joining

I am reading Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion and in this essay titled Last Words, she has written about Hemingway: The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of …

I, you, and we

I have been noticing for a long time now that using “I” or “you” while writing about ideas makes a big difference. If I use “you” when writing, it sounds like I am positioning the reader in the situation I am …

A good conversation

In episode #51 of The Knowledge Project, Celeste Headlee (opera singer, radio journalist, public speaker, author) says that a good conversation is like a game of catch: You can’t throw more than you catch. It’s a …

Recollection, with all the feelings that accompanied it

While reading The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler, I began to wonder about the difference between knowledge that feels like mine and knowledge that simply exists out there. Nayler wrote the following when a …

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 …

Leibniz’s monad concept

I am reading Didik Didik Freud by Serol Teber and Şenol Ayla and they referred to Tevfik Fikret’s lifestyle as “monadlaşmış” (monadic), describing the concept of monad as: Monad, ünlü filozof Leibniz’in bulduğu …

Posting a memory forward to a distant future

I am reading The Overstory by Richard Powers, and in the book Patricia tells her botany students (emphasis mine): “Billions of years ago, a single, fluke, self-copying cell learned how to turn a barren ball of …

An idea of a novel as a tool for noticing

I am reading Joan Didion’s book Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and she reflects on how she wrote her first novel, Run River, over five years, starting in New York. She had parts of the story that she didn’t know …

Thought associations and drifting memories

I'm listening to Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel Prize lecture (2017), where he shares a realization he had after writing a screenplay and a novel only a year apart: My first novel and my first TV screenplay were too …

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 …

Communication bandwidth

I have had this quirky idea for some time. Here it is: The amount of information we are expected to learn keeps expanding. Yet our primary channels of learning and communication remain constrained by the bandwidth …

Built over decades

I first noticed this pattern with Brompton bicycles. Founded by British engineer Andrew Ritchie, this folding bike has been continuously refined since 1975. The company has produced essentially the same bike, with …

The carrier bag theory in Prey

I watched Prey by Dan Trachtenberg the other night. I am not particularly keen on Predator sequels, but this one seemed promising: raw untouched nature, a Native American setting, and strong reviews. Right before …