vulnerability is essential to the art of asking questions.

But the more fundamental need to take away something tangible from the experience of reading is one of the things driving the return of commonplace books – personal, curated collections of facts, insights, musings, quotes, and research originally invented in 19th century Europe as a way to deal with the information explosion of the Industrial Era.

Brenda Salgado writes: “Nature has taught me so much about moving with the seasons, that we need to honor times of harvest and times of rest. That the frenetic pace of doing, doing, doing, without being present with each other and the season we are in, what is happening around us, is unnatural and counter to life. So it has made me realize how impo

Learn (and fail) in public

We don’t change our behavior out of shame, or punishment, or pressure, or even desire.

Agriculture has been rationalized — made transparent, predictable, largely automated, requiring increasingly less human attention, and shrinking in its contribution to GDP.

Being organized, in both senses, involves arranging your environment so that you have ready access to the greatest resources at your disposal.

make a commitment to learning it in public, including your mistakes.

“I am socialized to seek achievement alone, to try to have the best idea and forward it through the masses. But that leads to loneliness and, I suspect, extinction. If we are all trying to win, no one really ever wins.”