questions are the guide to life
The questions we ask reshape our reality.
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers
Questions attract, drive, and distinguish.
We talked a little bit about attracting . This is what happens to me when I’m writing a piece. Suddenly, I discover useful tidbits without even looking for them.
Packy McCormick • Long Questions/Short Answers
Writers know this. Staring at a blank page with no question to answer is felt proof of Sartre’s observation: “Humans are condemned to be free.” (Maybe it had to be a writer who made that observation.) Fire up a blank page with a question in mind, however, and the world becomes grownup Blue’s Clues. You’re reading something or talking to someone and
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When research is your leisure activity, you’ll end up making connections between your existing interests and new ideas or topics. Everything gets pulled into the orbit of your intellectual curiosity. You can go deeper and deeper into a narrow topic, one that seems fascinatingly trivial and end up learning about the big topics: gender, culture,
... See moreCeline Nguyen • research as leisure activity
It’s why fashion writers end up writing about the history of gender identity (through writing about masculine/feminine clothing) and cross-cultural exchange (through writing about cultural appropriation and styles borrowed from other times and places) and historical trade networks (through writing about where textiles come from).
Algorithms today feel similar — we’re given little ability to choose where we’re going. We’re being fed content, post after post, pushed in directions predetermined by an amorphous representation of your interest. We get the dopamine hits, and we find ourselves entertained but are often left with a tinge of emptiness at the end of a binge. A... See more
River
research as leisure activity is exuberantly undisciplined or antidisciplinary .
Celine Nguyen • research as leisure activity
Our brains have evolved to detect patterns and attribute significance to events that are entirely random, imagining signal where there is mostly noise. This tendency is probably hypertrophied in writers, who are constantly seeing the world in terms of narrative. In fact, for a while, encountering this very sentiment in books became yet another
... See moreCeline Nguyen • research as leisure activity
Research begins with a desire to ask and answer questions, thereby contributing to the greater sum of human knowledge and culture . Research often involves some hypothesis, question, or avenue of inquiry. Why is this plant a particular color? Why is this plant species a different color in different soil conditions or ecosystems? How is this color
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