("JP")

Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “I would not give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.”

MS. TIPPETT:

I love that.

MR. LEDERACH:

And that is what the haikuist is after. So I do a variety of things. One of them is that I’ve become much more respectful of, I think, the... See more

Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world . We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.

Shifts in values and beliefs slowly change the topography of our cultural landscape, but in some places we experience landslides that happen so quickly, we can lose our bearings. Cultural borders that we thought fell in one place now, strangely, fall in another, and the way we measure the distance between our values requires an update.

The spaces in... See more

I prefer old school Audre Lorde’s version of risk:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to

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Compared with the fragmented, D.I.Y. Web I knew, social media felt strangely predictable. User profiles on new sites like LinkedIn or Flickr were templated and surrounded by ads. They offered preset options from categories and drop-down menus—age, location, institutional affiliation—and quantified influence through friend and follower counts. The... See more

Getting a job through compulsive tweeting marked my first exposure to the digital attention economy that was beginning to monopolize the Internet. I grasped a new formula: content = attention = followers = profit. Anything that made enough noise online could be monetized in one way or another. My online presence increasingly felt like a carefully... See more

People often think of advantage in networks in terms of being connected to powerful people. But when it comes to creating value, the advantage lies with people who are connected to those who aren’t themselves connected. These disconnects –- between people not already talking to one another or coordinating with one another –- are called holes in the

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This is why I feel like people who are less cerebral and less aware of all of the ways in which they are imperfect, they just blast past everyone else. Because they're just doing things. And they get better so much quicker. So I think that's a message I want to give to the world. You're good to go. Just start doing things.

Kinsey’s methods as a sex-researcher were forged with his entomological research. Studying wasps, he learned that the key to biological discovery is in large sample sizes—in collecting as much information as possible, and then charting individual variation. Even Kinsey recognized his scientific practice as a form of collecting:

Most of us like to

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