Michael Brooks
@mike
Michael Brooks
“Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit... See more
YouTube: The Learning Machine
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
— Annie Dillard, ’The Writing Life’, 1989
Emergency preparedness is one of those areas in which a federal government ought to be both proactive and at the national forefront. The reason for this is pretty simple: the capacity to mitigate and manage national disasters varies wildly between provinces and municipalities. When Calgary flooded in 2013, it could rely on its newly built emergency... See more
"It’s so strange how we’re able to carry forward this mystery of personal identity even when our present selves are so different from our future selves and from our past selves most of all. I think a lot about this question of, what is a person? Am I the same person as my childhood self? Sure, we share the same body, but even that body is so... See more
Maria Popova • Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age
Connecting into why it’s valuable. Sometimes you get so lost in a project that you forget why you started it in the first place, or why doing this kind of work is important to you at all. If you reconnect to that, you’ll raise the perceived value of doing the work in your brain—and it will make it easier to stick with. Try writing about why the... See more