Hello friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
This week, my friend Amit and I decided to challenge ourselves to Tweet once a day for thirty days. We have no real goal besides just having a little fun. Coming up with something to Tweet about on a daily basis is surprisingly hard. I’m a big believer in creative constraints so if anyone has any good framework to share, please send it my way!
Thank you for reading,
Florian
Camera Obscura
My dad sent me an old picture of my Italian great aunt this week. In the shot, she seems surprised by the camera, caught in the meditative act of sipping her morning coffee.
This picture, along with a few hundred other ones my father unearthed from old shoe boxes, has a particular quality to it. It’s impossible to know who took it or when exactly it was taken.
I’ve had a look at how many pictures I took with my phone in the last ten years. Google Photos tells me it’s more than 50,000. It is a hodgepodge of family reunions, promising food plates, work events, faraway travels, book passages and way too many bills, IDs and evidence of broken things that need fixing.
What will it look like for my son and the generations to come to dig into the past the way my dad dug out these old pictures?
Weekly Wisdom
🚸 Open House for Butterflies: Since I’ve started reading books to my son at bedtime, I fell in love with children literature. It’s so fascinating how much meaning children’s books can condense in such few words. Open House for Butterflies is one of my favorites.
📈 Trends versus variations: This video of a dog and its owner illustrates the difference between trends and variations in statistics and how it’s so easy to confuse the two. This is going in my pantheon of all-time greatest analogies.
🚫 Cheems Mindset: Some phenomena need to be given a name so that we can start seeing them play out in ourselves and in the world around us. Jeremy Driver describes the “Cheems mindset” as the automatic reflex of dismissing an idea on the grounds that it is too hard or cannot be done. In the policy world, an example would be opposing the approval of a new vaccine based on the fact that it hasn’t been done before. The individual manifestation of this mindset is the kind of self-sabotage that consists in finding reasons not to do something even if the upsides far outweigh the downsides (e.g not applying for a job because “what if I don’t get it?”).
Lateral Thought
“It is one thing to know something, it is another to write about it, and often knowing stands in the way of writing.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard