Topic
writing
- Surface, an Obsidian plugin for Readwise
I read a lot, and most of what I read flows through Readwise. If you haven't used it. Readwise (and its companion app Reader) captures highlights from your Kindle, articles, RSS, and even YouTube transcripts. Everythi…
- C.S. Lewis's tips for writing
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.
- Essay Architecture
I just watched this excellent interview with Michael Dean on the How I Write podcast. Michael is an architect and writer, and his writing project is fascinating. He's built a framework for thinking about writing that…
- 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.
- 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…
- Muse Prompts For Journaling
Sometimes in a journaling session it’s hard to get yourself writing. You need a kickstart, an idea to latch onto and get your brain moving. I know I do when it’s 5:30am and I sit down to write. So I built a simple too…
- Muse, a tool for journaling prompts
So far this year I've gone headlong into what's possible with AI development, specifically using Cursor. I've been using it to write code, write blogs, and even write this post. The potential for "personal software" i…
- Walking And Talking
Low-tech dictation is a new technique I’ve adopted for creativity.
- Walking and Talking
I've been looking for a way to use outdoor time as a spur for creativity. Many of us do our best thinking when our brains and bodies are otherwise occupied — we even call them "shower thoughts" for a reason. Running a…
- Monthly Links March 2024
My most interesting links from March.
- Scenes Pattern Languages And Nested Systems
My latest essay. Comparing the notion of “pattern languages” across domains, like writing and architecture:
- Screenshot Essays
A recent tweet from David Perell prompted me to give this concept a shot. A short essay on @DavidDeutschOxf's two forms of the Enlightenment: the British vs. Continental modelContinental: We can perfect societyBritish…
- Eliot Peper on Foundry
I love what Eliot Peper does with Substack as a sort of behind-the-scenes look at his writing process. I wish more authors and content creators spent the time to show their workflow. It's incredibly insightful to see…
- Areopagus
If you don't follow Cultural Tutor on Twitter, I'd highly recommend. One of the few threadposters who consistently sends me down unrequested-but-fascinating rabbit holes. Architecture, classical history, music, art —…
- Explorations of Style Archives
I stumbled across a post from this writing blog recently. It's oriented toward academic writing, but the archives are a treasure trove of interesting pieces about different aspects of writing — drafting, mechanics, pr…
- Substack Notes and Long vs. Short Form
Substack has entered the arena of the social network wars, taking it to Twitter head-on with a new product called Notes. It's a short form feed style of posts that runs in a parallel track to your long form newsletter…
- Unbundling Tools for Thought
Fernando Borretti gets real on the likely-useless time sink that is the perfectionist "tools-for-thought" space: > People have this aspirational idea of building a vast, oppressively colossal, deeply interlinked knowl…
- Daily Journaling with Morning Pages
About a year ago I started experimenting with the idea of a daily journal. From someone within the Roam community, I heard about the concept of Morning Pages, which is a tool for creative writers to build a muscle for…
- Scenes, Pattern Languages,and Nested Systems
Last week I picked up Scene and Structure on a recommendation I saw from Nat Eliason. I've seen him mention experimenting with writing fiction, which this book is about — the process of narrative structure, staging sc…
- Reboot
"Bring yourself back online..." — Bernard Lowe When I pumped the brakes on my daily writing routine last year, I had designs on some other interesting projects to spend time on that the daily demand wasn't giving me s…
- Two Years of Everyday Writing
Earlier this month I passed the 2-year mark of writing on this site every day. If on that first day, deciding to embark on this streak, you'd told me that in October 2020 I'd still be going, 2018 me would've laughed i…
- Phase Transitions
David Perell's been putting out a series of 100 posts, 1 per day, brief essays about writing. I enjoyed this one about the evolutionary, and recombinant, nature of ideas: All creativity is inspired by other people’s i…
- Plus Minus Next Journaling
Anne-Laure Le Cunff created this simple journaling format that looks interesting: Open your notebook, write the date at the top of a page, and draw three columns. At the top of each column, write “+” for what worked,…
- Res Extensa
I've finally joined the newsletter club! Today I sent out the first issue of a new project, a bi-weekly email newsletter called Res Extensa. My intent right now is for the newsletter to be a less-frequent companion to…
- The Idea-to-Reality Production Stack
A great overview of mental models, thinking approaches, and techniques to, as the piece says, go from "idea to reality."
- Newsletters, Bundles, and Indie Publishing
In his latest issue of The Diff, Byrne Hobart looks the economic models behind the boom in independent publishing and unbundling of analysis and journalism happening on platforms like Substack: Bundles tend to grow un…
- A Blog that Changes Your Life
I enjoyed this deep, transparent history from Nat Eliason on how he built up his website over the past several years. He covers basic technology, content, habits, promotion, and monetization. The precis: Tech stack do…
- Library Notes
Jumping off from my Friday post on literature notes, I’ve taken the first step here in what will hopefully become something more meaningful over time. I just finished up filtering back through all my highlights and no…
- Literature Notes for the Library
With the last several books I've read, I've been trying to force myself to work through and document literature notes for my highlights, key ideas, and takeaways from books. Using a process (that perhaps I'll one day…
- Multilayered Content
I saw Patrick O'Shaughnessy share this yesterday, a cool addition to his podcast: Ok trying something new: A detailed transcript, including some images, that is also segmented by topic. Would love feedback on what you…
- Mermaid Diagrams
Mermaid is a neat project to add a custom syntax layer in Markdown to support rendering diagrams like flowcharts and sequences. Roam just recently added support for Mermaid in Roam graphs, which renders your diagram l…
- Digital Gardeners
The "digital garden" concept is gaining in popularity. I've seen a dozen of them recently, with groups like the Roam community taking to publishing their own open notebooks. Maggie Appleton (an awesome, prolific membe…
- Strategy Writing
Some excellent works here from Eugene Wei, Joel Spolsky, Steven Sinofsky, and more.
- Owning Your Internet Property
Ben Thompson posted this a few days ago, something I’m glad to see getting so many likes and retweets: Blogs = still the best representation of the Internet’s promise. Everyone should have a site that they own, not ju…
- A System for Publishing Evergreen Notes
In Sönke Ahrens's book How to Take Smart Notes he describes the "zettelkasten" system (the "slip box") developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann created the system to help himself organize notes and thou…
- Roam Tools
The roamcult has been on a streak of creating tools to extend and improve Roam Research. Here are a few that I've been using lately. Better Roam Research This one is a simple Chrome extension that reskins Roam with a…
- Live Writing with Jason Fried
A couple of years back, Jason Fried recorded this video of his writing process for drafting an article: I like seeing the behind-the-scenes of how others work.
- Knowledge Synthesis in Roam
What does it mean to "synthesize" knowledge? Joel Chan, author of this post and professor of human-computer interaction, describes it as "creating a new whole out of components." In reading, digesting material, and ta…
- Sönke Ahrens on How to Take Smart Notes
{% include video-vimeo.html id="275530205" %} I'm currently reading his book How to Take Smart Notes, which is based on, and talks a lot about sociologist Niklas Luhmann's Zettelkasten system.
- 6am Writing
With the lockdown, the kids always at home, and no transitions between personal life and work, I've been thinking about how to harness the morning time for thinking more effectively. My most productive hours are early…
- awesome-roam
A sign your tool, library, community, or science has made it is when it gets the awesome lists treatment. I've got an upcoming post in the works on my experiences with Roam so far. Lots of the resources listed here ar…
- Weekend Reading: Readwise with Roam, WWI Naval Intelligence, and Interaction Density
📖 Readwise2Roam I'm liking so far the process of manually typing notes in Roam from highlights in my books. Something about it feels more efficient and leaves me with more meaningful, succinct notes. This could come…
- How to Make a Memex
Been reading more about how others are using Roam the last few days. In this post, Sarah Constantin draws an apt connection to Vannevar Bush's "memex" concept from his 1945 paper "As We May Think". It was an early inf…
- Roam: A Tool for Metacognition
I'm deeper these days into Roam for info storage and notes. It empowers a looser, free-form version of writing (or as Roam describes it "networked thought") that's hard to do in a linear note document. I've been worki…
- Weekend Reading: Chess, COVID Tracking, and Note Types
♟ Chess Tom MacWright on chess. Reduce distraction, increase concentration Once you have concentration, you realize that there’s another layer: rigor. It’s checking the timer, checking for threats, checking for any of…
- A Text Renaissance
Venkatesh Rao with his position on the state of text media (the "Four Horsemen of Textopia"), from blogs, to Twitter threading, to ebooks and zines. On blogs and experimenting: One element of my broader response to th…
- Tyler Cowen on Practice
Tyler Cowen is one of the most prolific people out there. His batting average on producing high-quality content is unreal. Just following his blog, podcast, and Twitter makes one wonder how he also has time for so muc…
- Weekend Reading: Enemies of Writing, Wealth, and the Superhuman Inbox
✍🏼 The Enemies of Writing A great piece from the Atlantic's George Packer, a transcript of his acceptance speech for the Hitchens Prize. At a moment when democracy is under siege around the world, these scenes from o…
- William Gibson on Agency
A fun piece on William Gibson's latest work of speculative fiction, Agency. I've read a bunch of his bibliography, but my favorites (in order) are still Neuromancer and its sequel, Count Zero. Here's an interesting bi…
- Weekend Reading: Soleimani, Prosperous Universe, and Roam
🇮🇷 The Shadow Commander This 2013 piece from Dexter Filkins gives an excellent background on Qasem Soleimani, an important figure now well known after his killing a couple of weeks ago, but prior to that hardly know…