Sublime

Dealing with deadlines, mastering the crafts of editing (at Encyclopedia Britannica) and consulting (at Institute for the Future), dealing with clients, and trying to fashion myself into someone who looked like a Productive Worker, didn’t leave a lot of time for reflection about why I was working the way I was.

I thought this was how smart people worked. Creative accomplishment isn’t organized, it doesn’t obey rules, and it has no respect for the clock or the needs of the body.

When it comes to AI, we need to aim higher than the question: “What if you could press a button to generate an essay?” AI can produce infinite amounts of content; quantity is its game. Quality, intention, taste, originality, vision—that’s where we come in.

Our interfaces should facilitate prose-sculpting, meaning-architecting, memory-augmenting, and

The skilful bookshop owner and the gifted editor have lessons for our professional lives as well as our pleasures. Can you make connections other people cannot? Can you identify a helpful analogy? Will you bring an outsider’s perspective? Can you reconfigure existing information in a new and original way? Can you take one position while still inhab