The Curious Corner / Issue #11

Before you read this issue of my newsletter, thank you for your patience as I made my way back to a new issue after some gap thanks to travel and unexpected circumstances. But I’m so glad this issue is finally out there. So, without any additional context, here are some reads that really made me think in the last few weeks -?

• With age, I have come to appreciate a very particular quality in people around me - earnestness. Sometimes this quality becomes very difficult to describe. But those who are earnest make it feel like the easiest thing to live by and live as. Earnest people are straight, uncomplicated and sometimes naive to a fault. But they believe in true effort and change and the general direction of making things better. What better way to surround yourself with? Loved this?essay on earnestness by Paul Graham?- though it also focusses on Silicon Valley and startups, I loved the theme of earnestness that runs throughout.

“When you call someone earnest, you're making a statement about their motives. It means both that they're doing something for the right reasons, and that they're trying as hard as they can. If we imagine motives as vectors, it means both the direction and the magnitude are right. Though these are of course related: when people are doing something for the right reasons, they try harder”

• I love thinking about thinking. When I come across people who can think differently, think better, think in their own way, I am deeply interested in how their minds work. And that is why I really enjoy reading about thinking traps - things that separate decent or good thinking from great thinking.?This read about the most common thinking traps?was a nice reminder to think about thinking more. Maybe it will make you think.?

“Researchers suspect that many of these biases are evolutionary, says Ahn. During times of scarcity, our ancestors had to make quick judgments in order to survive among predators or thrive in a difficult environment. But in a time of abundance, she adds, these quick judgments don't always do us good.”

• 18-24 September is marked as Banned Books Week. Books and the ideas they contain are so potentially powerful that for a long time, the people in charge have sought to control their power by banning them. It is not new for us. The banning of books continues but the power they hold still remains. This was a?fascinating read on the global history of book banning. Read it for a great list of banned books and how state-nations have attacked books and the power of ideas over the last decades.?

“Books carry knowledge. They are pollinators of our minds, spreading self-replicating ideas through space and time. We forget what a miracle it is that marks on a page or screen can enable communication from one brain to another on the far side of the globe, or the other end of the century.”

• Our relationship with the concept of play is fractured by the time we become adults with jobs. And so, we don’t necessarily think a lot about toys and what they mean. How the toys we had were signs of the culture we grew up in and how things are changing (and remaining the same). Why do some toys endure? Why do the LEGO blocks and Rubik’s Cube remain mainstays? This was a?wonderful, insightful long read on what goes behind making the “perfect” toy.Loved reading it!?

“In 2016, Jane Eva Baxter published an article in the International Journal of Play that considered the role of nostalgia in keeping two particular items alive: the rotary-style Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone and wearable Mickey Mouse ears. Toys, she wrote, are often thought of as tools of preparation. It’s the reason parents buy Lego (to encourage creativity and cognitive thinking) or dolls (to simulate caregiving). It’s why most daycares and kindergarten classes have colourful blocks with the alphabet printed on the sides: to teach, to set kids up for future success.”

• You know I will never pass on an opportunity to share good copywriting when I see it. Kudos to Ogilvy and Sportsweek for this one that is a tribute to Federer retiring.?

Some quotes to end this issue with -?

“Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

- C.S. Lewis

“I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways. It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.”

- John Connolly

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

- Malcolm Gladwell

“Is beauty important? Maybe, sometimes, it’s boring. Maybe what’s more important is “the interesting”—+ everything that’s interesting eventually seems beautiful.”

- Susan Sontag

Until next week - stay curious!