Topic
creativity
- Latent space as a new medium
This piece from Kevin Kelly is both an interesting future-look at what LLMs may have in store for us (with Kevin's typical energizing optimism), and a great layman's primer on what the tech itself is actually doing —…
- Why you must create
A good reminder from The Culturist to spend more time creating new things than consuming from others. Nowadays, it is frighteningly easy to spend the best part of a day consuming the creations of others: listening, st…
- Orson Welles on Citizen Kane
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, withou…
- The Abstraction of AI
OpenAI launched a major update to Sora yesterday. There's something about AI video that just doesn't get me excited. Sound on. pic.twitter.com/QHDxq6ubGt— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 30, 2025 Sure, it's impressiv…
- Exploiting Locality
I recently wrote about the tendency of creators to keep messy versus clean workspaces. While sometimes the mess is a certifiable inefficient disaster resulting from laziness, the "organized chaoos" messy space acts li…
- Dana Gioia on Writing
This is a phenomenal extended (3 hour!) interview with Dana Gioia on his background, poetry, his writing process, and the habits he's curated that make him into a prolific and interesting writer.
- Copy First, Create Later
As I watch my kids learn, it sits with me how much we learn by copying. Imitation isn’t the enemy of originality — it’s the foundation of it. We learn by copying, refine through practice, and ultimately create somethi…
- A Funny Thing About Curiosity
A great little paean to curiosity from Henrik Karlsson: There is something frustratingly Tao about curiosity. (1) It is by following your curiosity that you can bring something new and beautiful into the world as a gi…
- Materials and Mastery
In the latest Res Extensa, I explored how craftsmen build expertise through deep understanding of their medium. It starts with the nature and properties of their raw materials, then moves to the individual parts, asse…
- Oblique Strategies
Oblique Strategies was originally a set of cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt back in 1975. Each card contains effectively a single prompt intended to help get you unstuck creatively. Prompts like: Use an ol…
- Where You Work Shapes How You Work
Our levels of productivity, creativity, and inspiration have an intimate, hard-to-articulate connection to our environments. And we all have different predilections — quiet vs. noisy, calm vs. bustling, light vs. dark…
- Adam Savages Workshop The Cave In 360
Adam Savage’s workshop, “The Cave”, in 360°. I love seeing peoples’ workspaces in detail. Creators form symbiotic relationships with their environments. Our environments shape our workflows, and we mold our environmen…
- Shaping Our Environments
Our environments heavily impact what we do in them. But we have the ability to engineer our environments, and therefore, our habits and behavior. “Choice architecture” means architecting our surroundings to coax the h…
- Making Mistakes Means You're Doing Things
I talk all the time about trial and error. The freedom to let yourself make mistakes, and the skill to make sure they're not too destructive, are superpowers. With every interesting innovation, company, or product, yo…
- New Metaphors
New Metaphors is a project to help spur creative thinking through metaphor. It's a deck of cards you can use in exercises to help stimulate new perspectives on an existing idea: A metaphor is just a way of expressing…
- Weekend Reading: Two Elites, DOS in VR, and Personal Brainstorming
🏛️ A Tale of Two Elites Martin Gurri on the growing similarities between west and east coast elites: The effect, I suspect, will be the exact opposite of the reactionary dream. In wild and seedy digital gathering-pla…
- Inventing on Principle
I refreshed myself this evening on Bret Victor’s amazing talk from 2012, “Inventing on Principle.” {% include video-vimeo.html id="36579366" %} He’s been working on and promoting his ideas on interactive, responsive t…
- Weekend Reading: Atlas of Moons, Opendoor and Redfin, and Thinking While Walking
🌕 The Atlas of Moons This is an absolutely phenomenal project showcasing each of the major satellites in the Solar System. The full interactive maps of each one are incredible. It shows how much data we've gathered a…
- Made By Hand
{% include video-vimeo.html id="31455885" %} Amazing story about hand made knives that goes deeper into the “Made by Hand” story. Beautifully shot film about someone making great, quality products.