01/01/1970: Meetings can be a black hole that sucks your soul from your body. Priya Parker describes how to make them more intentional.
I have long been obsessed with intention in even the mundane tasks in life. Priya Parker has put intention into gatherings and meetings. I talked to her about her book and her ideas on Prime Time 3/16/23 as a part of our shifting workplace special. We wanted to talk to her because if the workplace is changing and companies need to improve their culture to make work a place worth returning to then they’re going to have to be more intentional about making meaning out of the day:
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03/25/2023: A Voluptuary under the horrors of Digestion
The Met has a wonderful write-up of all that is going on in this etching: James Gillray’s famously brutal caricature of George, Prince of Wales encapsulates the effects of uncontrolled self-indulgence upon the heir to the British throne. Sprawled in his chair after a lavish meal, the prince picks his teeth with a meat fork; […]
03/25/2023: In the days of easy poison
When people dropped dead for any variety of reasons, it was much easier to poison your enemies,and have your murder written off as just another one of those episodes where a person was dropping dead because people dropped dead all the time. This seems to have been what happened. In the case of. William Longespee […]
03/24/2023: We Have Three Questions on Prime Time
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03/24/2023: This is how we beat the robots
I’m not kidding. When artificial intelligence becomes so good at copying human behavior, we will need to get really good at head fakes. Remember this simple rule: head fakes beat deep fakes. This is how we will beat Chat GPT. https://t.co/CZoZUpjYBk — John Dickerson (@jdickerson) March 24, 2023
03/24/2023: Chat GPT on the difference between how to think about important issues.
There is a gap in American public conversation between what gets covered and what is objectively important. Presidential campaigns exacerbate this gap. I asked Chat GPT to list the important stories and then I asked Chat GPT to list the stories about issues that impact the greatest number of Americans, which is a rough proxy […]
03/23/2023: Beethoven's Grit and Gut
You’ve probably seen the stories about how scientists used strands of Beethoven’s hair to examine his DNA. They did so in the hopes of trying to learn more about the cluster of illnesses that troubled the composer throughout his life. He was a mess. I knew that he was afflicted–most notably by a loss of […]
03/22/2023: John McPhee on reading out loud.
From The Paris Review. INTERVIEWER Is reading your work aloud still important? MCPHEE Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. […]
03/22/2023: Historical Shade and political anti-intellectualism
Governor Ron DeSantis gave this response to Donald Trump’s nickname “Ron Sanctimonious” in a recent interview: “I don’t know how to spell the sanctimonious one. I don’t really know what it means, but I kinda like it, it’s long, it’s got a lot of vowels. We’ll go with that, that’s fine.” The nickname thing is […]
03/21/2023: How Imprint helps me beat the morning and makes the day richer
For those of you who have read my Atlantic essay on recapturing my day, you know about my daily fight to beat the morning. I have found an extremely useful tool: The Imprint app. I have developped a pretty good routine for keeeping focus while at my desk (thank you Calk Neport, Marshall Goldsmith, David […]
03/18/2023: Writing: The leaving out
I’ve written a lot in this space about the space in which art takes place. In the writing I’m working on now I’m working on that puzzle. How to say what you need to say, and how to evoke and how to carry along a reader without giving them too much. I don’t want to […]