For the Best Opening That Violates Elmore Leonard’s #1 Writing Principle, perhaps also the first paragraph of the Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, although it's rather about the sea and not the weather per se:
“THE SEA WHICH LIES BEFORE ME as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold.”
Anlam, this is gorgeous, thanks so much for sharing it. Whether the weather or the sea, I think one clearly has to be exceptional at description to pull it off as an opening — and Murdoch obviously does. For some reason, I especially like this simple line: "We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea."
Hey David, I wish you and yours very happy and healthy holidays too 🙌 this is a nice, light hearted post to round off the year.. thanks for all of the newsletters throughout 2023, I know that I always get a little boost when I see the e-mail landing! It gave me a little lift at times when I needed a boost. If you get around to it could I ask if you had a favourite 3/4 books of 2023? I know you referenced a lot of books in the newsletter like 'Discipline is Destiny', 'Master of Change', 'Quit' etc. I picked up 'Power and Progress' after you recommended it and I'm liking it so far (i also picked up 'Nobody's Fool') , you seem to have been reading a massive volume of material (I guess partly due to book prep) and I was wondering is this intensely focused for the book prep process or more broad in the theme of Range?
Hey William, thank you, and best wishes to you and yours too! Regarding my reading, it's a mix of book prep and just my own desire to keep expanding my horizons, as it were. When possible, I like to have these two things converge. So with the Virginia Woolf reading I've been doing, it is book prep, but it's part of book prep because I'm interested in the steps to innovation in her career. That said, I didn't have to read The Waves for my book reporting, but once I got interested in the topic, I just got more interested, and I do think I'll probably have one sentence describing The Waves, in any case. (Overall, fiction has more diverse structures than non-fiction, so I like to read fiction and think about the structural possibilities...I'm just starting to write my new book, and experimenting with a new structural strategy. It might fail, but the attempt has me engaged.) In terms of a few favorites of 2023, I think my favorite non-fiction was Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. Those two authors, who wrote Van Gogh: The Life (possibly my favorite non-fiction book, period), are just incredible. Incredible writers, and researchers. Even their endnotes are extremely interesting, and a master class in research. My favorite fiction of the read was Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, but I had to read it very slowly, and I really appreciated having the Norton annotated edition. For a quicker work of fiction that was just pure enjoyment for me: Piranesi. (If you like fantasy.) While reading it, I was thinking it must be inspired by Borges (one of my favorite writers), and then I read a profile of the author, and it said she came up with the idea for Piranesi while reading Borges. And this isn't what you asked but I just watched (on DVD, because I couldn't find it streaming) a PBS series called "The Mystery of Matter," and I loved it. It's basically about seminal breakthroughs in understanding the elements starting with the discovery of oxygen. And the site for the series has a ton of additional material. I'm really interesting in learning about the progression of human ideas, whether in science or art or industry, and so this was constructed perfectly for me.
That's really interesting as I picked up Range the other day to read a few pages about Van Gogh to my Mam and two sisters! I'm guessing 'Van Gogh: The Life' was a good part of your research on him (along with the letters to his brother) I just searched their Jackson Pollock book and it sounds fascinating, one issue for me is that I note it's 934 pages (I know that shouldn't be a negative but I'm a slow reader!) just as an example, approx how long would you spend reading a book of that length? Silly question I know.. it boggles my mind how you read and think so much in research for books, like where you say above that you read 'The Waves' and you'll probably have a sentence in on that, but I get that you were reading Virginia mainly for structure ideas which makes sense. I guess it's all funneling into ideas and structures for the new book but it is wild to think what a blank canvas a new book project really is. It's all good though! Fun and learning along the way.. hope it's going well.
My Van Gogh interested started with an exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute where it was discussing some of his previous careers. That led me to the book, which blew me away. And those authors set up a web site where you could search through their sources, and that in turn led me to the letters. It was a wonderful reporting experience, and along with my progression-of-ideas interest, gave me a grounding in a transitional period of art that really changed the way I experience a museum. Regarding the Pollock book, for what it's worth, I think the main text is more like 800 pages, and their end notes are really long. So, it's still not short, but I'm also very much a proponent of reading parts of books. For Pollock, I was reading it slowly and intermittently. I like to find natural stopping points, so I'd read to a section break or two at a time before bed, basically. It definitely wasn't fast! ...Regarding the challenge of the blank canvas, well, there's a reason I got interested in productive constraints as the topic of my new book;) And, just to note: I really enjoy these exchanges.
Thanks David, I do really enjoy hearing tidbits about your process, whether that's reading, writing or thinking.. I've gone to a couple of exhibitions recently with my mother and a sister (incl. Van Gogh 'The Immersive Experience' in Dublin and an Andy Warhol art exhibition in Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin 'Andy Warhol Three Times Out' and they are new to me, I feel a bit of imposter syndrome at them (and in general tbh with regard to lack of knowledge), it must be cool to appreciate museums on another level through some of that research! And sounds like you loved that book which is a nice bonus, curiosity seems an important trait of writers like yourself, at times I have it but tbh a lot of times I struggle for the motivation.. one thing I have taken on board is what you mention above regarding reading parts of books (I used to be very stubborn and read a book start to finish and not pick up any other books in between) currently I'm probably reading (slowly, occasionally, inconsistently but hopefully) 4/5 books and I'm not as tied down as previously. I love reading rigorously researched books on interesting topics (who doesn't) and I note your comments on the research of the two authors you mentioned above in this regard so I'll definitely take note of those books for future reference and maybe new year reading list additions! Thanks again 👍
"It was a dark and stormy night..." was the beginning of every novel Snoopy wrote. What exactly was Charles Schultz implying? That Snoopy was the Captain, Snoopy was the Sailor, or that he simply liked recursive story telling?
Edward, I am so mad I didn't know that and include it in this post! That is a great tidbit, thank you for sharing. ...And now I'm going to be stuck thinking about the Borgesian Snoopy conundrum you've posed here;)
Mariam, I always feel like these are little treasures you leave. This one triggered somewhere deep in my brain the feeling of a line from a Neruda poem about a clock fallen into the sea. I can't bring it to the front of my mind enough to remember which poem it was, but the image of the clock sinking stuck with me.
A good news, I am compiling a poetry book of these writings , hoping that I find the right publisher and editor for that. Thank you so much for this much needed validation from a writer I have been reading since 3 2 years and TED talk that I saw too. Neruda is my favorite poet. That means a lot , :O
I find very interesting the connection (correlation?) between Nobel prize winners and Olympic athletes. Possibly related, I’ve noticed over the years at my daughter’s ballet studio that the graduating high school seniors (so far all women since my daughter started there) typically receive multiple, significant college scholarship offers and are almost always at the top of their academic classes. These women have typically been dancing for years and often go on to study dance in college or postpone college to perform professionally. Those opportunities establish that they are also at the top of their cohort for ballet.
I often wonder if one skill (academics or ballet) drives the other, or if there are a set of skills, focus, and drive that the dancers apply to both ballet and academics. Granted, my N is about 12 and the observation is limited to one pre-professional suburban studio over a handful of years. But it still interests me that these women are performing very highly on multiple levels and I wonder if there are any correlations.
Jake, thanks for sharing this. Your comment reminds me of the work of a scientist, Marije Elferink-Gemser, who I interviewed years ago. She was studying young athletes in the Netherlands, tracking them for years from age 12 up until young adulthood. There certainly wasn't perfect overlap between the best students and best athletes, but the accomplished athletes did tend to be better students. One of the qualities that she pointed out that was common to those who excelled in athletics and academics was a propensity for "self-regulatory learning" — basically thinking about and taking some accountability for your own learning. I remember she told me that if she had to some it up in one word, it was: "reflection." Those individuals tended constantly to be reflecting on what they had done in training or school, thinking about what did or didn't work, and then adjusting going forward. Sometimes, she noted, these kids were a challenge for coaches, because they might ask a lot of questions, or suggest that they had mastered one thing and needed to work on something else. Perhaps this sort of learning-how-to-learn quality is some of what you're seeing. It seems to me that some people come to this quite naturally, but most do not, and just about everyone can improve at it.
I love the Year End Awards, especially the part where your deep science background peaks through! I'm wondering two things: (1) what was your organizational process for coming up with these awards? Did you just think "from what I read this year, what is still sticking with me?"? Did you go to your master thought list? Or something else? I guess I'm asking because it's a list of cool things you've learned, and I struggle to actually recall cool things I've learned after a bit of time. (2) After reading your great exchange with William Murphy, I'm going to steal a question from Adam Grant: what is something that you've changed your mind about this year? Seeing how much you read, I imagine there might be a lot of things!
And all in all, thanks for another great year of posts, David. I've moved around a lot this year, and (as strange as it sounds) getting to read your thoughtful reflections and responses has been one of my few and favorite constants. Happy holidays to you and your family!
Hey Matt, so glad you enjoyed! And that you appreciated the science trivia. I feel like there are so many incredibly cool science tidbits all around us, and that one needn't know much to appreciate some of them, that I enjoy an excuse to try to share a bit. I'd like to do that a little more, actually. To your questions: 1) I think probably a month or so ago, realizing I'd like to do a post like this, I opened a draft and just started dropping things into it as they occurred to me. Of course, once I decided to do that, things started occurring to me everywhere, and then the challenge was removing things so the post wouldn't be too long. So I think setting the container attuned me to look out for things that I thought would be interesting. This shows up as recency bias in the selections, too. I picked that copy of Dorian Gray off the shelf of my parents' house over Thanksgiving; the Munger obit was very recent; I just went to a talk by David Helfand where I grabbed his book; the Saxon riddle was mentioned in a recent New Scientist article about ice; Firebird is sitting on a shelf near my door, so once I had the draft, anything in my line of sight became potential material ...I can't remember where the heck that Rudyard Kipling one came from though! The Elmore Leonard bit, I can't remember why I was reading an article about him, but when I saw his #1 tip, it immediately brought to mind The Waves, which I'd read recently, and Samantha Hunt's book, which I read a few years ago, but the epigraph really stuck with me for some reason. So, for the most part, strong recency bias in the awards show. That said, I do a version of this constantly. Some vague idea interests me, so I make a section on my master thought list, or open a page in Roam, or on my notes app, and once I have the general idea, I'm sensitized to seeing things that fit, and so I start dropping stuff in there. I mention this because I think it is exactly this exercise of connecting things in a semantic network that causes me to remember many of them. So I recommend a master thought list! It's annoying to start, but I do think it's an incredible memory aid, because you start categorizing stuff. Overall, I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I appreciate Oliver Burkeman's take that you shouldn't try to remember everything you take in, and just trust that it alters your sensibility. I think that's true. On the other hand, I do want to be able to make connections, so I want some more formal ability to recall. The exercise of attempting to categorize stuff you learn, I think, is really helpful. It obviously slows you down some, but I think the payoff in retention is well worth it, and then you also have your own little wiki of your brain to refer to if you want. So, for me, the tradeoff of a bit less consumption time in return for semantic-network-building time that makes it accessible is worth it. Am I making any sense? (Also, have you ever tried Readwise for ebooks? You can highlight and make notes, and it feeds them back to you at intervals...kind of a neat way to be reminded of things you found interesting.) 2) The first thing that came to mind: back when I was enmeshed in environmental science, I'd say I adopted an attitude that might rightly be called "anti progress," at least in terms of human innovation. As of a few years ago, I got about as far from that (thought I'm still not a reflexive "techno-optimist") as I've ever been. Reading some economic history this year pulled me back toward some middle ground. For all our challenges, I think it's truly almost unbelievable what humans have accomplished, and particularly in the last 250 years. For hundreds of thousands of years, human life was pretty similar, then the neolithic revolution, then again pretty similar for like 10,000 years, for most people, then an absolute explosion of change, and billions of people lifted out of poverty along the way. What I was oblivious to in my admiration for the industrial revolution was the so-called "Engels' pause," a period of about a half century at the start of the industrial revolution where productivity sky-rocketed, and yet worker wages stagnated, and working conditions got worse. I didn't realize the extent to which that was possible, and it definitely moved the needle for me regarding my confidence in innovation automatically lifting all ships. That led me to reading about more recent tech innovation, and now I see things through a lens of not so much the innovations themselves, but rather the institutional context around them that determines whether they lead to shared prosperity or increasing misery. Power and Progress is the work that made the biggest impression on me in this way, and now I think about it basically daily. Is that a fair answer? I'd love to hear your answer!
And thanks so much for being on the 2023 All-Range Widely Supporters First Team!
I think I really agree with you on the master thought list, and I've been sold ever since your paying-up-on-your-bet-to-me post about it. It also makes me think of Adam Alter, who I think you mentioned said that he keeps a list of what is exciting him these days. I'm going to try and make "what is exciting you these days?" and "what is worth talking about?" normal parts of my conversation. I've resisted ebooks for a long time because I just like having paper copies so much, but can you make the pitch to me for them? Why should I give them a try and be slightly more techno-optimist ;) (btw, in their newsletter from this morning, Stuhlberg and Magness linked to this piece by Cal Newport on techno-selectionism: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/its-time-to-dismantle-the-technopoly -- that sentence featured so many of your people and a topic you just mentioned that I figured I had to share it. have you seen and read it yet?) I also like your line on saying keeping a master thought list slows you down a bit. I think I relate to something else you said recently that your problem is often going too fast rather than too slow. I feel something similar in that I think I ought to chew on ideas longer than I do at the moment.
Regarding your answer, that is a very fair one. It was so compelling that I just ordered a copy of Power and Progress. I've been thinking about this for a few hours and still don't have a great answer, but here are some thoughts that come to mind basically based on books I've read that have stuck with me. (1) Aschwanden's findings that all that we know for sure really matters is to just listen to my body, avoid stress, and sleep a lot has really helped me stop freaking out about optimization (2) I read a book by autism advocate Pete Wharby called Untypical where he talks about the experience of being neurodivergent in a world for neurotypical people. It was an amazingly eye-opening read about how the world is structured for neurotypical people mostly because NT people just don't know what it's like to be neurodivergent so they don't think twice. I've been way more aware of it since. (3) James Davies' Sedated has the thesis that we think about mental health from a lens that is too pharmaceutical and not sociological enough. Essentially (and he cites a LOT of research that convinced me) too often our health care system will pathologize and medicalize too quickly when instead we should see what has happened to the person and try to help them out. A surprising amount of it came down to social fitness (just like that famous 80-year Harvard study). My own personal experience has confirmed the importance of social fitness for my mental health as well. (4) Lastly, tomatoes. I used to think they were gross, and now I've learned to love them :)
Hey Matt, first just wanted to say thank for all the generative thoughts and questions you've shared here this year. You take to this newsletter in exactly the spirit of thinking out loud that I intended it, and you've enriched my experience of doing it. ...You also ask a lot of questions that I'm either infrequently or never asked, sometimes forcing me to think about parts of my own process, so I really appreciate that. (I should add, I'm a big fan when interviewing of asking the same question repeatedly, as people often give successively deeper answers — perhaps because they've had time to mull a little — and I think I do the same when answering.) In any case, thanks for mentioning Cal's piece! I haven't read that one, but it's definitely up my alley, so I'm putting it right atop the reading list. Last time I saw Cal, actually, we were discussing Power and Progress, and I've been going back and reading some of it (including the long bibliographic essay). I mention that because I want to make a plug for re-reading. I think I've increasingly found that revisiting the same book, article, painting, piece of music, etc. can be really fruitful. With Power and Progress, for example, reading it through sort of sensitized me to the issues, and then going back through (skipping the first few chapters), the facts that are really important to my major takeaways stick much better. It's almost like the first round created the broad semantic network, and the next go through I'm registering some of the more granular facts. .... this was going to segue into e-books, but I just realized I should get to a gate for a flight! So I'm going to continue this soon and make the pitch for including ebooks here and there. Back to you soon...
Thanks, David and happy new year! Maybe a good New Years Resolution for me is to re-read some books. We'll see if I can make it happen because you made a good case for it. Thanks for always entertaining my questions, and I completely agree with the point about asking the same question repeatedly when interviewing. By the way, do you have any new years resolutions?
A brillaint read and so insightful and reflective for this time of the year David. I'll now be ingnoring most road sign on my jorney home for Christmas (It might take me a while to get there!). Only just joined and already reading some of the past posts - thanks.
Haha, thanks Peter! And I'm very glad to have you here. I should say, I read an article recently arguing that, on long, straight, lonely stretches of road, distracting signs can be useful because they keep people alert, and collisions with other vehicles aren't an issue on those roads anyway. So perhaps I have to do a follow-up on that, just to make sure we keep in mind the type of road we're dealing with. Happy holidays!
Playing off the Wilde and Whistler exchange: https://youtu.be/uycsfu4574w?si=jkUXdLTF6sF2UcJg
This is amazing! I would love to have been in the writers' room when they were coming up with that.
Hysterical and brilliant! Never, ever gets old! Thanks for sharing!
For the Best Opening That Violates Elmore Leonard’s #1 Writing Principle, perhaps also the first paragraph of the Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, although it's rather about the sea and not the weather per se:
“THE SEA WHICH LIES BEFORE ME as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold.”
Anlam, this is gorgeous, thanks so much for sharing it. Whether the weather or the sea, I think one clearly has to be exceptional at description to pull it off as an opening — and Murdoch obviously does. For some reason, I especially like this simple line: "We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea."
Hey David, I wish you and yours very happy and healthy holidays too 🙌 this is a nice, light hearted post to round off the year.. thanks for all of the newsletters throughout 2023, I know that I always get a little boost when I see the e-mail landing! It gave me a little lift at times when I needed a boost. If you get around to it could I ask if you had a favourite 3/4 books of 2023? I know you referenced a lot of books in the newsletter like 'Discipline is Destiny', 'Master of Change', 'Quit' etc. I picked up 'Power and Progress' after you recommended it and I'm liking it so far (i also picked up 'Nobody's Fool') , you seem to have been reading a massive volume of material (I guess partly due to book prep) and I was wondering is this intensely focused for the book prep process or more broad in the theme of Range?
Hey William, thank you, and best wishes to you and yours too! Regarding my reading, it's a mix of book prep and just my own desire to keep expanding my horizons, as it were. When possible, I like to have these two things converge. So with the Virginia Woolf reading I've been doing, it is book prep, but it's part of book prep because I'm interested in the steps to innovation in her career. That said, I didn't have to read The Waves for my book reporting, but once I got interested in the topic, I just got more interested, and I do think I'll probably have one sentence describing The Waves, in any case. (Overall, fiction has more diverse structures than non-fiction, so I like to read fiction and think about the structural possibilities...I'm just starting to write my new book, and experimenting with a new structural strategy. It might fail, but the attempt has me engaged.) In terms of a few favorites of 2023, I think my favorite non-fiction was Jackson Pollock: An American Saga. Those two authors, who wrote Van Gogh: The Life (possibly my favorite non-fiction book, period), are just incredible. Incredible writers, and researchers. Even their endnotes are extremely interesting, and a master class in research. My favorite fiction of the read was Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, but I had to read it very slowly, and I really appreciated having the Norton annotated edition. For a quicker work of fiction that was just pure enjoyment for me: Piranesi. (If you like fantasy.) While reading it, I was thinking it must be inspired by Borges (one of my favorite writers), and then I read a profile of the author, and it said she came up with the idea for Piranesi while reading Borges. And this isn't what you asked but I just watched (on DVD, because I couldn't find it streaming) a PBS series called "The Mystery of Matter," and I loved it. It's basically about seminal breakthroughs in understanding the elements starting with the discovery of oxygen. And the site for the series has a ton of additional material. I'm really interesting in learning about the progression of human ideas, whether in science or art or industry, and so this was constructed perfectly for me.
That's really interesting as I picked up Range the other day to read a few pages about Van Gogh to my Mam and two sisters! I'm guessing 'Van Gogh: The Life' was a good part of your research on him (along with the letters to his brother) I just searched their Jackson Pollock book and it sounds fascinating, one issue for me is that I note it's 934 pages (I know that shouldn't be a negative but I'm a slow reader!) just as an example, approx how long would you spend reading a book of that length? Silly question I know.. it boggles my mind how you read and think so much in research for books, like where you say above that you read 'The Waves' and you'll probably have a sentence in on that, but I get that you were reading Virginia mainly for structure ideas which makes sense. I guess it's all funneling into ideas and structures for the new book but it is wild to think what a blank canvas a new book project really is. It's all good though! Fun and learning along the way.. hope it's going well.
My Van Gogh interested started with an exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute where it was discussing some of his previous careers. That led me to the book, which blew me away. And those authors set up a web site where you could search through their sources, and that in turn led me to the letters. It was a wonderful reporting experience, and along with my progression-of-ideas interest, gave me a grounding in a transitional period of art that really changed the way I experience a museum. Regarding the Pollock book, for what it's worth, I think the main text is more like 800 pages, and their end notes are really long. So, it's still not short, but I'm also very much a proponent of reading parts of books. For Pollock, I was reading it slowly and intermittently. I like to find natural stopping points, so I'd read to a section break or two at a time before bed, basically. It definitely wasn't fast! ...Regarding the challenge of the blank canvas, well, there's a reason I got interested in productive constraints as the topic of my new book;) And, just to note: I really enjoy these exchanges.
Thanks David, I do really enjoy hearing tidbits about your process, whether that's reading, writing or thinking.. I've gone to a couple of exhibitions recently with my mother and a sister (incl. Van Gogh 'The Immersive Experience' in Dublin and an Andy Warhol art exhibition in Hugh Lane Gallery Dublin 'Andy Warhol Three Times Out' and they are new to me, I feel a bit of imposter syndrome at them (and in general tbh with regard to lack of knowledge), it must be cool to appreciate museums on another level through some of that research! And sounds like you loved that book which is a nice bonus, curiosity seems an important trait of writers like yourself, at times I have it but tbh a lot of times I struggle for the motivation.. one thing I have taken on board is what you mention above regarding reading parts of books (I used to be very stubborn and read a book start to finish and not pick up any other books in between) currently I'm probably reading (slowly, occasionally, inconsistently but hopefully) 4/5 books and I'm not as tied down as previously. I love reading rigorously researched books on interesting topics (who doesn't) and I note your comments on the research of the two authors you mentioned above in this regard so I'll definitely take note of those books for future reference and maybe new year reading list additions! Thanks again 👍
"It was a dark and stormy night..." was the beginning of every novel Snoopy wrote. What exactly was Charles Schultz implying? That Snoopy was the Captain, Snoopy was the Sailor, or that he simply liked recursive story telling?
Edward, I am so mad I didn't know that and include it in this post! That is a great tidbit, thank you for sharing. ...And now I'm going to be stuck thinking about the Borgesian Snoopy conundrum you've posed here;)
I wrote this , after reading your newsletter. If life, this year and things in spectrum:
Illusions keep us in a safe haven,
If they break, the realities are seen as it is.
Are we willing to face them head on?
Is the truth bigger than us all?
Only few of us know the cost of losing illusions.
Once seen, it cannot be changed.
All the lines, missing flags are seen.
All along, they were there and the society.
Now, I wouldnt trade off for anything less than.
Detached unstitched words, situations, circumstances and people.
The doors are closed forever.
That's okay, for truth shapes us and makes us - far from delusional world.
Never better , than now to see what it was: I got way more cuts from roses ,that had unseen blades.
The prayer was accepted.I put a jar on the blades and thrown it in ocean.
Now, roses bloom fully in the garden.
I sit with those roses and see their light, in its full spectrum- fragmented.
I became that rose-with their eyes of water to become a bouquet of Ruhi Flowers.
-Mariam Saeed Khan
Mariam, I always feel like these are little treasures you leave. This one triggered somewhere deep in my brain the feeling of a line from a Neruda poem about a clock fallen into the sea. I can't bring it to the front of my mind enough to remember which poem it was, but the image of the clock sinking stuck with me.
A good news, I am compiling a poetry book of these writings , hoping that I find the right publisher and editor for that. Thank you so much for this much needed validation from a writer I have been reading since 3 2 years and TED talk that I saw too. Neruda is my favorite poet. That means a lot , :O
I find very interesting the connection (correlation?) between Nobel prize winners and Olympic athletes. Possibly related, I’ve noticed over the years at my daughter’s ballet studio that the graduating high school seniors (so far all women since my daughter started there) typically receive multiple, significant college scholarship offers and are almost always at the top of their academic classes. These women have typically been dancing for years and often go on to study dance in college or postpone college to perform professionally. Those opportunities establish that they are also at the top of their cohort for ballet.
I often wonder if one skill (academics or ballet) drives the other, or if there are a set of skills, focus, and drive that the dancers apply to both ballet and academics. Granted, my N is about 12 and the observation is limited to one pre-professional suburban studio over a handful of years. But it still interests me that these women are performing very highly on multiple levels and I wonder if there are any correlations.
Jake, thanks for sharing this. Your comment reminds me of the work of a scientist, Marije Elferink-Gemser, who I interviewed years ago. She was studying young athletes in the Netherlands, tracking them for years from age 12 up until young adulthood. There certainly wasn't perfect overlap between the best students and best athletes, but the accomplished athletes did tend to be better students. One of the qualities that she pointed out that was common to those who excelled in athletics and academics was a propensity for "self-regulatory learning" — basically thinking about and taking some accountability for your own learning. I remember she told me that if she had to some it up in one word, it was: "reflection." Those individuals tended constantly to be reflecting on what they had done in training or school, thinking about what did or didn't work, and then adjusting going forward. Sometimes, she noted, these kids were a challenge for coaches, because they might ask a lot of questions, or suggest that they had mastered one thing and needed to work on something else. Perhaps this sort of learning-how-to-learn quality is some of what you're seeing. It seems to me that some people come to this quite naturally, but most do not, and just about everyone can improve at it.
I love the Year End Awards, especially the part where your deep science background peaks through! I'm wondering two things: (1) what was your organizational process for coming up with these awards? Did you just think "from what I read this year, what is still sticking with me?"? Did you go to your master thought list? Or something else? I guess I'm asking because it's a list of cool things you've learned, and I struggle to actually recall cool things I've learned after a bit of time. (2) After reading your great exchange with William Murphy, I'm going to steal a question from Adam Grant: what is something that you've changed your mind about this year? Seeing how much you read, I imagine there might be a lot of things!
And all in all, thanks for another great year of posts, David. I've moved around a lot this year, and (as strange as it sounds) getting to read your thoughtful reflections and responses has been one of my few and favorite constants. Happy holidays to you and your family!
Hey Matt, so glad you enjoyed! And that you appreciated the science trivia. I feel like there are so many incredibly cool science tidbits all around us, and that one needn't know much to appreciate some of them, that I enjoy an excuse to try to share a bit. I'd like to do that a little more, actually. To your questions: 1) I think probably a month or so ago, realizing I'd like to do a post like this, I opened a draft and just started dropping things into it as they occurred to me. Of course, once I decided to do that, things started occurring to me everywhere, and then the challenge was removing things so the post wouldn't be too long. So I think setting the container attuned me to look out for things that I thought would be interesting. This shows up as recency bias in the selections, too. I picked that copy of Dorian Gray off the shelf of my parents' house over Thanksgiving; the Munger obit was very recent; I just went to a talk by David Helfand where I grabbed his book; the Saxon riddle was mentioned in a recent New Scientist article about ice; Firebird is sitting on a shelf near my door, so once I had the draft, anything in my line of sight became potential material ...I can't remember where the heck that Rudyard Kipling one came from though! The Elmore Leonard bit, I can't remember why I was reading an article about him, but when I saw his #1 tip, it immediately brought to mind The Waves, which I'd read recently, and Samantha Hunt's book, which I read a few years ago, but the epigraph really stuck with me for some reason. So, for the most part, strong recency bias in the awards show. That said, I do a version of this constantly. Some vague idea interests me, so I make a section on my master thought list, or open a page in Roam, or on my notes app, and once I have the general idea, I'm sensitized to seeing things that fit, and so I start dropping stuff in there. I mention this because I think it is exactly this exercise of connecting things in a semantic network that causes me to remember many of them. So I recommend a master thought list! It's annoying to start, but I do think it's an incredible memory aid, because you start categorizing stuff. Overall, I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, I appreciate Oliver Burkeman's take that you shouldn't try to remember everything you take in, and just trust that it alters your sensibility. I think that's true. On the other hand, I do want to be able to make connections, so I want some more formal ability to recall. The exercise of attempting to categorize stuff you learn, I think, is really helpful. It obviously slows you down some, but I think the payoff in retention is well worth it, and then you also have your own little wiki of your brain to refer to if you want. So, for me, the tradeoff of a bit less consumption time in return for semantic-network-building time that makes it accessible is worth it. Am I making any sense? (Also, have you ever tried Readwise for ebooks? You can highlight and make notes, and it feeds them back to you at intervals...kind of a neat way to be reminded of things you found interesting.) 2) The first thing that came to mind: back when I was enmeshed in environmental science, I'd say I adopted an attitude that might rightly be called "anti progress," at least in terms of human innovation. As of a few years ago, I got about as far from that (thought I'm still not a reflexive "techno-optimist") as I've ever been. Reading some economic history this year pulled me back toward some middle ground. For all our challenges, I think it's truly almost unbelievable what humans have accomplished, and particularly in the last 250 years. For hundreds of thousands of years, human life was pretty similar, then the neolithic revolution, then again pretty similar for like 10,000 years, for most people, then an absolute explosion of change, and billions of people lifted out of poverty along the way. What I was oblivious to in my admiration for the industrial revolution was the so-called "Engels' pause," a period of about a half century at the start of the industrial revolution where productivity sky-rocketed, and yet worker wages stagnated, and working conditions got worse. I didn't realize the extent to which that was possible, and it definitely moved the needle for me regarding my confidence in innovation automatically lifting all ships. That led me to reading about more recent tech innovation, and now I see things through a lens of not so much the innovations themselves, but rather the institutional context around them that determines whether they lead to shared prosperity or increasing misery. Power and Progress is the work that made the biggest impression on me in this way, and now I think about it basically daily. Is that a fair answer? I'd love to hear your answer!
And thanks so much for being on the 2023 All-Range Widely Supporters First Team!
I think I really agree with you on the master thought list, and I've been sold ever since your paying-up-on-your-bet-to-me post about it. It also makes me think of Adam Alter, who I think you mentioned said that he keeps a list of what is exciting him these days. I'm going to try and make "what is exciting you these days?" and "what is worth talking about?" normal parts of my conversation. I've resisted ebooks for a long time because I just like having paper copies so much, but can you make the pitch to me for them? Why should I give them a try and be slightly more techno-optimist ;) (btw, in their newsletter from this morning, Stuhlberg and Magness linked to this piece by Cal Newport on techno-selectionism: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/its-time-to-dismantle-the-technopoly -- that sentence featured so many of your people and a topic you just mentioned that I figured I had to share it. have you seen and read it yet?) I also like your line on saying keeping a master thought list slows you down a bit. I think I relate to something else you said recently that your problem is often going too fast rather than too slow. I feel something similar in that I think I ought to chew on ideas longer than I do at the moment.
Regarding your answer, that is a very fair one. It was so compelling that I just ordered a copy of Power and Progress. I've been thinking about this for a few hours and still don't have a great answer, but here are some thoughts that come to mind basically based on books I've read that have stuck with me. (1) Aschwanden's findings that all that we know for sure really matters is to just listen to my body, avoid stress, and sleep a lot has really helped me stop freaking out about optimization (2) I read a book by autism advocate Pete Wharby called Untypical where he talks about the experience of being neurodivergent in a world for neurotypical people. It was an amazingly eye-opening read about how the world is structured for neurotypical people mostly because NT people just don't know what it's like to be neurodivergent so they don't think twice. I've been way more aware of it since. (3) James Davies' Sedated has the thesis that we think about mental health from a lens that is too pharmaceutical and not sociological enough. Essentially (and he cites a LOT of research that convinced me) too often our health care system will pathologize and medicalize too quickly when instead we should see what has happened to the person and try to help them out. A surprising amount of it came down to social fitness (just like that famous 80-year Harvard study). My own personal experience has confirmed the importance of social fitness for my mental health as well. (4) Lastly, tomatoes. I used to think they were gross, and now I've learned to love them :)
Hey Matt, first just wanted to say thank for all the generative thoughts and questions you've shared here this year. You take to this newsletter in exactly the spirit of thinking out loud that I intended it, and you've enriched my experience of doing it. ...You also ask a lot of questions that I'm either infrequently or never asked, sometimes forcing me to think about parts of my own process, so I really appreciate that. (I should add, I'm a big fan when interviewing of asking the same question repeatedly, as people often give successively deeper answers — perhaps because they've had time to mull a little — and I think I do the same when answering.) In any case, thanks for mentioning Cal's piece! I haven't read that one, but it's definitely up my alley, so I'm putting it right atop the reading list. Last time I saw Cal, actually, we were discussing Power and Progress, and I've been going back and reading some of it (including the long bibliographic essay). I mention that because I want to make a plug for re-reading. I think I've increasingly found that revisiting the same book, article, painting, piece of music, etc. can be really fruitful. With Power and Progress, for example, reading it through sort of sensitized me to the issues, and then going back through (skipping the first few chapters), the facts that are really important to my major takeaways stick much better. It's almost like the first round created the broad semantic network, and the next go through I'm registering some of the more granular facts. .... this was going to segue into e-books, but I just realized I should get to a gate for a flight! So I'm going to continue this soon and make the pitch for including ebooks here and there. Back to you soon...
Thanks, David and happy new year! Maybe a good New Years Resolution for me is to re-read some books. We'll see if I can make it happen because you made a good case for it. Thanks for always entertaining my questions, and I completely agree with the point about asking the same question repeatedly when interviewing. By the way, do you have any new years resolutions?
A brillaint read and so insightful and reflective for this time of the year David. I'll now be ingnoring most road sign on my jorney home for Christmas (It might take me a while to get there!). Only just joined and already reading some of the past posts - thanks.
Haha, thanks Peter! And I'm very glad to have you here. I should say, I read an article recently arguing that, on long, straight, lonely stretches of road, distracting signs can be useful because they keep people alert, and collisions with other vehicles aren't an issue on those roads anyway. So perhaps I have to do a follow-up on that, just to make sure we keep in mind the type of road we're dealing with. Happy holidays!