Andrei Stoica

"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things... See more

In The Image of the City (1960), Lynch identified the crucial role of the sense of place that ‘in itself enhances every human activity that occurs there and encourages the deposit of a memory trace’. This separation of ‘place’ in spirit and idea could, he argued, be differentiated physically and conceptually, as in edge, path, node, district and... See more

I designed & built a personal office / art studio in the forest behind my home. We call it "the nook,” and it took 4 months start to finish. Want to see inside? 🧵 https://t.co/t961FBtMPc

Note that the key phenomena are not movements. They are not collective efforts to build social capital around any particular idea or aesthetic or value. Nor are they forms of propaganda or prestige. The real core activities of culture are disciplines of craft aimed at actually achieving something great, regardless of what everyone else thinks. They... See more

Thinking about it a bit more, I realize that looking for the fun is a special case of a more general insight. There are other emotional cues that point toward the interesting, besides fun. Laura Deming, for example, describes her curiosity as a kind of rage (“ but what in Newton’s name is heat actually????? What is temperature????” ).

I also suspect that Americans feel that their society is a highly mobile one. John Steinbeck is often (mis)quoted as saying that “socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” But the flip side of this is that a lot of rich Americans see themselves... See more

Finding a soul as a product today seems rare in software. The rise of CSS frameworks like Tailwind and others has lowered the bare minimum entry for making a good-looking design. It made life easier but at the same time seemed to degenerate people’s creativity. Alongside trends that come and go, many products and websites look very much the same.