Brian Wiesner

Incense has been used for timekeeping in China and Japan for centuries, constituting a different, olfactory way of experiencing time. Lighting a stick of incense when welcoming someone at the door is a gentle way to signal that one has (or has not yet) overstayed their welcome. The more intricate incense clock originated in China in the Song... See more

I dream of many different careers, many different lives, many different loves, many different renewals of my ‘self’ as if I was an immortal being who was able to experiment and explore across an endless timeline.

Everything around us is literally vibrating. As we’ve discussed before, that’s why you feel the difference when you sit in an IKEA chair versus something handcrafted. You may be saying, well, a chair is a chair—but even in the most strictly utilitarian worldview, the quality is different. And though you may justify this through modes of mass... See more

“The American dream was Every man gets his castle ,” Todd Gannon, the head of architecture at Ohio State University's Knowlton School, told me. Above all else, the suburban life is one of independence, a self-contained homestead where the American family can realize its desire and potential, unperturbed by others. Even the family car gets its own... See more

Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a... See more

Everyone is trying to over-engineer this thing, but it is actually pretty simple.

Because there are very few people who are networking, even fewer are networking well .

I present you with the opportunity to be one of the few. One of the scrappy. One of the curious. One of the brave who decide that networking isn’t defined by the amorphous icky... See more

There is a striking uniformity in the way creative people-artists, writers, mathemati-cians, scientists, and philosophers-speak about the process of production and problem solving. Ghiselin (1952) has collected into one volume a number of essays on the creative pro-cess by a variety of creative workers from Poincare to Picasso. As Ghiselin... See more

In contrast to Berlin's nachtgestalten (rough translation: c reatures of the night ), Sydney is home to a lively dawn chorus of early morning run clubs, beachgoers and surfers. Bondi at sunrise could be mistaken for a beach in Europe during sunset; crowded to the brim, hundreds of people basking in the warm glow of first light.