Hi friends,

I just published a short film.

It's the ultimate distillation of the mission behind my work. Where has modernity gone astray? What's the magic of the Internet? Why write online?

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(Watch it on Twitter or YouTube)

If the film moves you to write, our next Write of Passage cohort begins on October 2nd, and you can enroll now.

If the price of the course is prohibitive for you, apply to one of our scholarships. We're offering up to two full-rides to anybody who blows us away with their ideas, vision, grit, passion, story, or experience. Whatever. Knock us off our feet, and the spot is yours. Let us know why we'd be crazy not to include you.

For a taste of the live Write of Passage experience before committing to five weeks, come test drive the experience. I'll teach you some of the foundational concepts, crack some bad jokes, and show you what we mean whenever we call it 'Zoom like you've never seen it before.'

Today's Finds

​Intelligence Killed Genius: Where did all the geniuses go? Well, perhaps, they were killed by the concept of intelligence. And they may have been killed by a kind of humility too. Genius requires vision. It requires a mind that links together ideas in strange and unpredictable ways, often leading to unprecedented, outsized outcomes. As Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote, “talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." Think Ramanujan with math equations, Jobs with personal computing, Austen with the novel. Genius, then, is distinct from raw, intellectual horsepower.

​The Gospels and the Myths: The Gospels' resemblance to timeless cross-cultural myths have been used as an argument against their validity. René Girard insists there are a few key differences between ancient myths and Christian Scripture. One example is the way the crowd turns against Jesus after enthusiastically welcoming him into Jerusalem. That goes against the grain of classical mythology because it suggests violence can arise without a deep-seated hatred for the victim. I also liked learning about the Greek word skandalon. It translates to "stumbling block," but it so much more than that. It refers to an "unavoidable obstacle that somehow becomes more attractive (as well as repulsive) each time we stumble against it." Satan is skandalon personified. Also, if you've ever wanted to ask René Girard a question, AskGirard is a good place to start.

​Gut Feelings: Michael Polanyi once said: “We know more than we can tell.” All of us have centuries of evolutionary wisdom inside of us that we ignore whenever we ignore our intuition. That’s why I’ve long been skeptical of the way we bash cognitive biases. There’s wisdom in things like the sunk cost bias and the availability bias. While we should educate ourselves on the shortcomings of intuitive thinking, this book argues that we should give heuristics and gut feelings more respect. If you’re looking for something shorter, this article is a good introduction to the author’s thinking.

​Artists Have Forgotten How to Draw: The generic and sterile flatness of modern design drives me insane. Hand movement is inherently distinct. The shapes, the lines, the textures, the hues, the gradients. Painters can have to draw everything by hand. There’s no copy & paste function when you’re standing at your easel with single canvas. Computers are different. Rare is the designer who begins a project with a pen instead of a mouse. And the genesis of their design is a template, instead of their unconstrained imagination. The result of this trend is the homogeneity of modern design.

​The Condition of the Working Class in England: How did the Industrial Revolution change society and consciousness? This account from Friedrich Engels was written in 1845 and had a major influence on Karl Marx. It describes the horrid working conditions in industrial cities like Manchester and Liverpool, where people were divorced from nature, suffered through horrid working conditions, and disproportionately died from diseases like measles and smallpox. Though the whole book is available for free, the introduction and Wikipedia page provide good introductions. If you want more, you’ll like this lecture.

How I Write

Kevin Kelly is one of the most influential tech writers of the last half-century. He's published 14 books, founded WIRED magazine, and may have traveled to more places in Asia than anybody in human history.

Plus, he has the kinds of writing maxims you only come up with when you've been doing it for decades:

1. Don't aim to be the best. Be the only.
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2. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
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3. Writing is not selfish; it's for the rest of us. If you don't do your thing and share your writing, you are cheating us.
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4. Productivity is often a distraction. Don't aim for better ways to get through your tasks as quickly as possible. Instead, look for writing projects that you never want to stop doing.
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5. To write something good, just do it. To write something great, just redo it, redo it, redo it. The secret to publishing great writing is to spend a lot of time rewriting.

(Listen to the full interview: Apple | Spotify | YouTube)

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