I decided it was time to improve my writing. It felt both forced and stifled: artless, lifeless, joyless and uninteresting. And my reading was falling off too, both in quantity and quality. The two problems — with writing and reading — seemed connected. I hoped reading more (and more importantly, reading better) would help me write [...]
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books,
borges,
chekov,
david foster wallace,
discipline,
fiction,
geoff dyer,
learning,
literature,
pessoa,
practice,
reading,
self-improvement,
writing
I just had a crazy thought about The Social Network. It turns on this controversial and often-repeated remark (found here) by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin: I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling. I’m #TeamInternet all the way but I appreciate where Sorkin is coming from. I’m sort [...]
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cultural evolution,
facebook,
fiction,
film,
generativity,
internet,
movies,
narrative,
stories,
storytelling,
truth,
web,
writing
I love that it’s constantly changing. For now. It’s still pretty unpredictable, like the midst of a great big game — like the kind of games that Calvin & Hobbes played. It isn’t just the outcomes that change; our boundaries and rules keep changing too, without much notice. And we can change them (or at least [...]
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authority,
expertise,
information,
internet,
knowledge,
learning,
lifestreaming,
medium theory,
social media,
technology,
twitter
Lately I’ve been scouring the nets and local book-lenders for guidance and inspiration on writing. I stumbled on this at Nieman Storyboard [recommended, and the source of this post's title]: Now, just as I don’t know what a story is going to be when I start out working on it, I have no idea how to [...]
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beginners,
david foster wallace,
discipline,
disciplines,
discovery,
entrepreneurship,
history,
hunter s thompson,
journalism,
learning,
outsiders,
reporting,
work,
writing
There’s an astonishingly bad article at Spiegel Online citing some research that has got a lot of discussion, arguing that notions like “digital natives“ and “the Net Generation” have been wrong because young people say that the Internet isn’t important to them. But the evidence all seems to confirm the ideas behind the “digital native” metaphor: Young [...]
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computers,
digital natives,
generations,
internet,
learning,
technology
Here’s the completely unrequested bibliography for Truth, Will & Relevance (minus a few cosmetic references): Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams, 1918. Ariely, Dan; Norton, Michael; “Conceptual Consumption.” Annual Review of Psychology, 60. 2009. Argyris, Chris; Schön, Donald. Theory in Practice. 1974. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy. 1869. Barzun, Jacques. Of Human Freedom. 1939. Barzun, Jacques. Clio [...]
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book,
generativity,
relevance,
research,
will to relevance,
writing
It’s amazing how much insight and inspiration can come from babies, as I was reminded after visiting my seven week-old nephew yesterday. Most of time we were there we listened to “the baby’s music” which is supposed to make him happy (I’m a baby-newbie so forgive me if I’m embarrassing myself), but it made the [...]
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babies,
behaviour,
change,
development,
emotions,
groups,
growth,
learning,
mood,
music,
nurturing,
psychology,
relationships,
social,
switch
I’m not joking: when I was a kid I went through a phase of wanting to grow up to be someone who wrote “famous quotes.” From time to time I’d think of something that sounded profound and I’d think, “that isn’t so hard!” But then I wondered, “So now… how does this clever quote become [...]
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advertising,
blogging,
change,
craft,
craftsmanship,
discipline,
learning,
marketing,
persuasion,
philosophy,
quotes,
rhetoric,
writing
How much do I love Jacques Barzun? The exemplary historian and teacher, proponent of the Great Books tradition, Dean of Faculties and Provost at Columbia University for over a decade, who also graced the cover of Time magazine for a feature on American intellectuals, etc, etc, etc… wrote this about amateurs: A world of professionals [...]
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amateurs,
expertise,
higher education,
history,
jacques barzun,
learning,
professionalism,
professions,
universities
This month’s Utne Reader has an article featuring yours truly; the subtitle includes a term that I used, somewhat spontaneously during an interview: “radical self-educators challenge the ‘tyranny of credentials.’” I’ll explain what I meant by “tyranny of credentials.” (Regular readers may remember the original article which appeared in full at Rabble.ca and TheTyee.ca, written [...]
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diy,
edupunk,
higher education,
learning,
love of learning,
maker culture,
mastery
A recent tweet reminded me of Clay Shirky’s excellent observation: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Kevin Kelly called it The Shirky Principle, using the example of unions to illustrate: Unions were a brilliant solution to the problem of capital management which tended to exploit uncapitalized workers. But [...]
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change,
clay shirky,
generativity,
ideas,
institutions,
kevin kelly,
organizations,
relationships,
relevance,
theories,
trust,
will to relevance
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields One of 2010′s most talked written-about books. For anyone interested in writing and storytelling this might be worth owning and occasionally flipping through for inspiration. A lot of great insights about truth and fiction — and whether either can really exist in pure form — much of which [...]
Tagged as:
anthropology,
books,
clay shirky,
evolution,
fiction,
history,
literature,
nicholas carr,
non-fiction,
reading,
richard florida,
sociology
