No. 107 — La rentrée rush ⫶ 3books ⫶ the McPhee method.
build your volitional muscles
My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.
The rentrée rush has begun! I’m back at my desk, mirabelle plums are in season and the Parisians are as busy as ever. I find this new rhythm of vacationing in August very interesting as it makes the rest of the year even shorter.
Anyways. My early fall took a surprising turn and I’ll be in New York on September 14-17 for a fun project. Who should I meet while there, working on play in public space / city scale learning? Looking for city folk, foundations, developers, communities to swap notes.
1.
What is color space? A gorgeous, interactive and visual explainer for digital color.
2.
You learn best and most effectively when you are learning something that you care about. Your work becomes meaningful and something you can be proud of only when you have chosen it for yourself. This is why our second self-directive is to build your volitional muscles. Your volition is your ability to make decisions and act on them. To set your own goals, choose your own path, and decide what matters to you. Like physical muscles, you build your volitional muscles by exercising them, and in doing so you can increase your sense of what’s possible.
LLMs are good at giving fast answers. They’re not good at knowing what questions you care about, or which answers are meaningful. Only you can do that. You should use AI-powered tools to complement or increase your agency, not replace it.
Love this: volitional muscle. Agency, imagination and curiosity feel too gauzy. A more muscular word suits our times. I wrote about this need for better words a few months ago.
3.
We had a few sick days in Helsinki. Stuck in a small apartment, the surprise hero was my ten-year-old inkjet. We printed paper toys, coloring pages, weather charts, paper cities and ice cream stalls. Greatest hits: Mr Printables, Sago Mini Printables, Canon Creative Park and Made by Joel.
For older kids Offline.kids seems promising! I’m jealous of the filterable index of screen-free activities, I should do something with the play section of Hello Ruby..
4.
I’m very big on John McPhee (I’ve written about his diagrams and Oranges before). If you like “structure as craft,” this short piece by James Somners is a lovely doorway into the McPhee method.
5.
3books is a browsable, searchable archive of books recommended at the end of The Ezra Klein Show. My favorite question on the podcast, the books are always interesting.
I’d love to build a similar public index forHelsingin Sanomat “Luen Tässä” series (people talk about a book that’s moved them). If you’re a tinkerer who wants to help with scraping / light curation / hosting, reply!
6.
A few random books from the pile that had arrived while I was on summer vacation.
Share your rentrée books, please! Best time of the year for reading.