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I can set myself free by creating a playful distance between myself and whatever identity I use as my interface with the world.

There is a small, aspirational gap between my inner self and my interface.Or rather, and this is the point: there was a gap. The gap has shrunk. I pla

There’s an idea in philosophy that certain things don’t exist until they get a name. Abstract things like justice, nostalgia, infinity, love, or sin.

They were telling me what things meant instead of showing me what they felt like.I needed a way to interrupt that habit.

I didn’t care about being well known. I cared about being known well.

A personal brand is the specific territory you occupy in other people’s minds. It’s the answer to the question: when this person’s name comes up, what

A line is a dot that went for a walk -Paul Klee

As more human jobs become automated or replaced by artificial intelligence, we have to shift our focus to areas where we have a competitive advantage

What if, instead of working toward something for decades and barely tolerating the day-to-day process, we created a different value system around labo

basically the function of your professional life is to find the most natural capital structure that allows you to turn the things you do as naturally

Yet to my mind real art is cheap, even at the price that must be paid for it. That price is, in short, the providing of a handicraftsman who shall put

Every builder's first duty is philosophical: to decide what they are building for, in the deepest sense. Abdication works when designing a sign-up flo

AI has opened a new continent, and like Franklin in the New World, philosopher-builders will determine what kind of civilization takes root there.We m

The activist and technologist Pia Mancini once told me about the emergence of a new word in Barcelona: yosotros— a combination of “I” (”yo”) and “We”

And, you know, I concluded that at least the kinds of computers we now have will not become conscious. And I can lay out that argument. The argument m

AI has opened a new continent, and like Franklin in the New World, philosopher-builders will determine what kind of civilization takes root there.We m

I see a lot of technologists, particularly the CEOs of Silicon Valley companies, pontificating grand ideas about artificial intelligence and what huma

A beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. And so the ability to ask beautiful questions — often in very un-beautiful moments — is one of the great

Asking vs Prompting the language we use in relation to these tools reveals how we understand ourselves in relation to them. gone are the days of askin

Franklin's approach reveals what distinguishes philosopher-builders from ordinary builders: the intellectual courage to question prevailing assumption

Friction is a contact force that opposes the relative motion (or attempted motion) of two surfaces touching each other.

Because while the digital world has removed all friction, the physical world is where the friction still lives. Not the good kind, the effort of doing

That’s what happens when we remove friction. The only thing left is the output, it feels meaningless, empty, like there’s no texture to it. So we stil

PROMETHEUS was the Titan god of forethought and crafty counsel who was given the task of moulding mankind out of clay.

Water reminds usthat intelligence did not begin with machines.There is intelligence in rivers carving canyons.In tides pulled by the moon.In rain retu

Not only human and machine.But human and human.Matter recognizing itself.

This relationship between form and function means that we can’t really understand the molecules of life until we know their structure, how they are bu

Beauty saves us by keeping us human enough to remain in a world that often feels inhuman. It is the thin, golden thread, the Songline, that leads us b

AI can make the contents of libraries more accessible than ever, and help us to magnify and make connections among what we discover. But it cannot yet

We read magazines and the glass of wine in my hand refills itself thanks to the magical properties of women gathered in a room.

Any situation is fixable if you’re good with words because words literally make up the meaning infrastructure, control the traffic of desire, and reor

storytelling is the ultimate compression algorithm for human attention. everything else, data, logic, tech feeds into it, but if you can’t wrap it in

In a world of 7 billion people, there’s clearly no single myth or set of myths that will work for all of us. Instead, we all need to discover and dev

"I also often hear the word evolution. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in art. If a work o

He thus becomes an alchemist, transforming a material with apparently little expressive potential into a stylised, hybrid female body, whose apparen

Looking at art and reading art history are activities with opposite shapes. When you see a person from many perspectives, a sharper, narrower image co

But curiosity about a new medium is not automatically betrayal of the old one. Picasso did not become less of a painter because photography existed.

Ann Carson's interview with Jenny Rydén of the Nobel Prizes: Q: Which of your books should readers start with if they're unfamiliar with your work

zero to one work is soul exposing. you’re making something out of nothing, then dragging it into reality by force of will while everything around you

I think. I have an idea. I work.

You'll probably have to find the city where you feel at home to know what sort of ambition you have.

The Impressionists show the typical pattern: they were born all over France (Pissarro was born in the Caribbean) and died all over France, but what de

We, who live here and now, are not for a moment satisfied in the time-world nor confined in it; we incessantly flow over and over to those who precede

Ma in Japanese culture[edit] In modern interpretations of traditional Japanese arts and culture, ma is an artistic interpretation of an empty space, o

People fear nothingness. However in zen, we are taught to value emptiness as a source of potential and creativity. Think of it as an empty garden or a

value shifts from intelligence, efficiency, and metrics toward felt experience —bodily, emotional, textural, relational. biology, materials, design:

5 Questions on Material Stewardship with Harsha Kotak

People can feel care and discern quality. Though they cannot articulate it consciously, when given the option and when within their means, humanity se

Instead, they are asking something far more unsettling for brands: Does this mean something?Does this object reflect who I am – or who I aspire to be?

If your mind is truly, profoundly stuck, then you may be much better off that when it was loaded with ideas. p269

But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in

The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, a

The inability to imagine a world in which things are different is evidence only of a poor imagination, not the impossibility of change. — Rutger Br

When you reflect on what you collect, you start noticing patterns. You connect dots that once felt totally unrelated. You move from passive consumer t

But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in

It wounds us because it reminds us of the distance between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be. This is why beauty is inherently danger

Beauty acts as that great psychic liver, filtering the toxins of existence and turning the raw material of pain into the refined gold of meaning.

The world today is fractured by a “failure of imagination.” We find it easier to imagine the end of the world than a world that is beautiful. We have

But technology is simply the making of things and the making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there would be no possibility for beauty in

If I want to be a writer who is any good, I really think I am going to have to be bored more often, which means sequestering my attention to my surrou

Time is the best editor. If you have it, time is the easiest trick for self-editing. Simply put your work away long enough so when you come back to it

'The trouble is that essays always have to sound like God talking for eternity, and that isn't the way it ever is. People should see that it's never a