There’s an old story about Octavia Butler that I often return to: A young man once asked the visionary science fiction novelist the answer to ending all the suffering in the world. “There isn't one,” Butler replied. “So we’re doomed?” he asked, confused. “No,” said Butler. Then she delivered the words that would remake my understanding of the... See more
I was delighted when I found the contemporary French philosopher Alain de Botton and his book “The Architecture of Happiness,” about the philosophical and psychological relationship between architecture and our identities.
De Botton writes: “The buildings we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol the values we think... See more
Scott details a pattern of disaster that repeatedly manifests around legibility. His opening example is from the late-18th century discipline of “scientific forestry”.
A natural forest is illegible. A tangle of plants. This is inconvenient from the standpoint of harvesting lumber. How do you quantify yield? Can you even make a meaningful map of this... See more
It is the brilliant minds and beautiful hearts of new generation explorers like Kei Kreutler who give me hope for the future. In this talk she integrates multiple domains of knowledge to explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of mediums of memory. Her passionate search has a deep and higher framework that... See more