Resonant Thoughts
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Resonant Thoughts: James Rebanks’s “The Place Of Tides” (2025)
“Our lives are a series of choices – about what we do, and don’t do. Over time we decide what to let go of, what must die, and what we will fight to keep alive. Sometimes these are big, deliberate decisions, other times change happens in a thousand thoughtless little moments” (91). “There is no Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Craig Mod’s “Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir” (2025)
“Mostly, I remember anti-patterns. Teaching in what-not-to-dos” (29). “Although I’m walking roads, I’m also walking this map representing things beyond what we can see. A layering deeper and weirder than we ever dreamed” (53). “A series of astonishments” (56). “And so each time I walk these routes, these same paths, the conversations come back as Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Matthew B. Crawford’s “Shop Class As Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work” (2009)
“The craftsman’s habitual deference is not toward the New, but toward the objective standards of his craft. However narrow in its application, this is a rare appearance in contemporary life—a disinterested, articulable, and publicly affirmable idea of the good. Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of the new capitalism, Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Steve Tupai Francis’ “Kraftwerk’s Computer World” (2022)
“When composing music together, one member, often Ralf or Karl, would introduce a melodic riff or coda, and the other members of the band would ‘jam’ on their synths for several hours. Florian would focus on altering the texture and sound of the music during these sessions. Once locked into a groove they liked, the Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Philip Ball’s “Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does” (2016)
“Perhaps the most curious thing about natural patterns is that they come from a relatively limited palette, recurring at very different size scales and in systems that might seem to have nothing at all in common with one another” (12). “What is a pattern, anyway? We usually think of it as something that repeats again Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Nadia Asparouhova’s “Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading” (2025)
“Creative self-expression is the only way we will continue to make our mark as humans in times of uncertainty, and it doesn’t come from doing what you think will sell to other people “(21). “Antimemetics are a shadow city built on thoughts, knowledge, and practices that do not spread easily, despite their importance to our Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Paul Graham On The Rhythm Of Writing
“When writing sounds good, it’s mostly because it has good rhythm. But the rhythm of good writing is not the rhythm of music, or the meter of verse. It’s not so regular. If it were, it wouldn’t be good, because the rhythm of good writing has to match the ideas in it, and ideas have Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Jordan Mechner’s “The Making of Prince of Persia” (2011)
“I’m having trouble preserving that fluidity and realism when I clean it up and stylize the figures” (33). “The unlimited potential has been replaced by the concretereality of what I programmed today” (103). “Level design is a creative process, like screenwriting: you can’t just sit down and put in ten hours at a stretch, you Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Alex Hutchinson’s “The Explorer’s Gene” (2025)
“It turns out that minimizing surprise is equivalent to minimizing entropy, which in turn is equivalent to minimizing another mathematical quantity (borrowed from physics) called free energy. In this way, the goal of minimizing surprise explains both perception and action. We act […] in order to ensure that our predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies” (58). “The Continue reading
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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch” (2019)
“intuitive knowledge exists, silent wisdom exists, instinctive insight exists, and I believe this unarticulated understanding of the world comprises a much larger part of our self than we usually imagine” (42). “No art is free of morals, for the simple reason that all art entails a set of assessments of reality, and they are always Continue reading
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