Thought provoking

This is why the skill of simple awareness is important, as is the ability to tolerate ambiguity. Psychologists David Gard and Lawrence Leung define ambiguity tolerance as “the ability to hold in mind complex psychosocial information without rushing to judgment or a conclusion about its meaning”. They go on to delineate that “the process of... See more

Contrary to the deep stories of consumerism and Western heroic mythology, interacting with meaning is actually something much closer to the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi (difficult to succinctly encapsulate, but basically the idea that beauty depends on the imperfect, incomplete, impermanent, humble, and unconventional) vs. a compulsive cycle of... See more

What Friend misses is not knowledge (it has the Internet) but intimacy, in all its complex form, in its disagreements, its hiccups, its letdowns and its compromises. It has text but no texture.

To see what’s really there in an enchanted world, you need to see beyond or through the surface. You need to discover what’s hidden, what’s concealed, by the merely material form, and that requires something more than sensory perception. It requires extrasensory perception. In this framing, the contemplative gaze is not just unlocking what lies... See more

In “Against Interpretation,” the 1964 essay that made her name as a critic, Susan Sontag railed against the digging of “meanings” out of works of art. She felt that interpretation, by turning art into “content” that can be parsed intellectually, drains it of its wild, unruly vitality, makes it “manageable, conformable.” Interpretation “is the... See more

Challenge is to capture the mood while it’s happening. To be able to get something to resonate with the the vibe of the moment, we should look at contradictions, inversions, oddities, and coincidences in our culture, economy, and society.

Brooklyn-based art collective MSCHF describes this phenomenon:

"No one talks about the future anymore. Instead, everything accelerates the present to a fever pitch, intensifying and weirding the dysfunctions of the current moment. There’s a hole where the future used to be, and all that remains is the increasingly spicy present."

In the 1990s or 2000s someone created a social network designed to make it possible to tell that you were about to take a flight with someone with whom you have something in common. The idea was you could reach out to them and spend flight time in conversation with someone who might become a friend or at least a useful contact.

And it starts with a simple truth: To invent the future, you have to subvert the present. And the present is shaped by an invisible force few are trained to see: the monoculture.