August 18, 2026 • #
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Microblog
Orson Welles discusses making Citizen Kane at age 25.
I love his comments in deference to his cinematographer on Kane, Gregg Toland. He credits him with giving him the confidence to create from his imagination, without the baggage of the experienced filmmaker, and functioned as the "professional" backstop that helped make Welles's vision a reality.
One thing you notice in this interview is his humility and respect for his collaborators. I noticed in my recent viewing of the film that in the credits, he puts every performer's name ahead of his in the billing. And on the final credits shot, he puts Toland's name right alongside his own as director.
Tyrell's owl. Blade Runner, 1982.
Life is indeed terribly complicated—to a man who has lost his principles.
Michael Whelan's inspiring cover art for Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two.
Father/son duo Brian Owens and Thomas Owens, Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come."
What a phenomenal duet.
C.S. Lewis's tips for becoming a better writer.
How quaint to think of a time when the radio was the only external stimulus.
10M →
Search an archive of artworks by mood, feeling, style, or similarity.
How I Take Notes in the West End of Toronto →
Vin Varma's thoughtful notes on his note-taking process.
As my understanding deepens, it naturally precipitates into action.
Projects start to emerge at various scales.
The form follows the understanding. As confusion decreases, experimentation naturally increases.
For collaborative projects, crystallization takes on another dimension. My role often becomes directional, translating insights and patterns into clear documentation or prototypes that guides team decisions.
Also worth observing his latest workflow merging Obsidian and Claude, on Greg Isenberg's recent podcast.
Flexport Atlas →
Flexport built a slick app for visualizing global shipping and rail traffic.
The Initiation Well at the Quinta da Regaleira estate in Portugal.
Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus, he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.
What the American Constitution established was not simply a particular system but a process for changing systems, practices, and leaders, together with a method of constraining whoever or whatever was ascendant at any given time.
In today's accidental internet discovery, I ran across the "gulet", a two-masted style of sailboat from Turkey.
But the strongest prop of American order, Tocqueville found, was their body of moral habits. “I here mean the term ‘mores’ (moeurs) to have its original Latin meaning; I mean it to apply not only to “moeurs” in the strict sense, which might be called the habits of the heart, but also to the different notions possessed by men, the various opinions current among them, and the sum of ideas that shape mental habits.” Their religious beliefs in particular, and also their general literacy and their education through practical experience, gave to the Americans a set of moral convictions—one almost might say moral prejudices, as Edmund Burke would have put it—that compensated for the lack of imaginative leadership and institutional controls.
“It is their mores, then, that make the Americans of the United States, alone among Americans, capable of maintaining the rule of democracy; and it is mores again that make the various Anglo-American democracies more or less orderly and prosperous,” Tocqueville concluded.
“Europeans exaggerate the influence of geography on the lasting powers of democratic institutions. Too much importance is attached to laws and too little to mores. Unquestionably those are the three great influences which regulate and direct American democracy, but if they are to be classed in order, I should say that the contribution of physical causes is less than that of the laws, and that of laws less than mores... The importance of mores is a universal truth to which study and experience continually bring us back. I find it occupies the central position in my thoughts; all my ideas come back to it in the end.”
For the rest, we should look for the improvement of society, as we seek our own individual improvement, in relatively minute particulars. We cannot say: 'I shall make myself into a different person'; we can only say: 'I will give up this bad habit, and endeavour to contract this good one.'
So of society we can only say: 'We shall try to improve it in this respect or the other, where excess or defect is evident; we must try at the same time to embrace so much in our view, that we may avoid, in putting one thing right, putting something else wrong.'
Herbie Hancock on his introduction to Miles Davis.
Herbie got his start with Donald Byrd. And Byrd gave him the push to go seize the opportunity to join Miles's second great quintet.
My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file →
Jeff Huang writes about his 14 year old productivity system of simply using an ever-growing single text file to house everything.
To-dos, meeting notes, ideas. Everything.
Good reminder that you can have a high production function without 27 productivity tools.
In a wealth of information there is a poverty of attention.
Leuven Town Hall. Flemish Brabant, Belgium.