Friday Finds (School, YouTube, McLuhan, Wagner, Girard)

Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

I spent the week recording 65,000 words worth of scripted lectures about the philosopher René Girard, which were hosted by my friend Johnathan Bi, whose been studying his work intensely for the past five years.

No philosopher has shaped my worldview more than Girard. But as of now, there's no good audio + video introduction to his ideas. We set out to change that. The interviews will go live later this year, and you can click here if you want to receive them by email.

Here's what I want to share this week:

1. ​How Philosophers Think: I study philosophy not just to grasp the ideas but to understand how they think. They're the most rigorous thinkers I know, and in this essay, I explain their tricks to help you apply them in your own life.
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2. Write Like a Movie Composer: The premise is simple. Here's my mini-essay.​
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3. ​Writing Online, with Sahil Lavingia: If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, you definitely know Sahil's work. We recently discussed his process for writing The Minimalist Entrepreneur and for this video, I turned that discussion into a systematic way of thinking about how writing online can make you a better entrepreneur.

Today's Finds

​Manufacturing Intellect: A treasure trove of old interviews with notable intellectuals. The owner of the channel looks for rare and unavailable video and audio, restores the video through all kinds of fancy tricks that I don't know the first thing about, and then repairs the audio so it sounds good on YouTube. While the rest of the Internet is focused on the Never-Ending Now, it offers a chance to disconnect from the never-ending now and explore the wisdom of brilliant but oft-forgotten figures like Joan Didion and Susan Sontag.

​Venkatesh Rao’s Quora Answers: Venkatesh is one of those writers who has influenced almost all of my friends’ thinking but is virtually unknown outside of my social circle. That’s partially because his recent writing has been so hard to parse. But his early writing on Quora is unbelievably clear, and his article on improving your writing is a must-read.

​McLuhan Unbound: This is a hidden gem, but I’m not sure how to describe it. I could call it a book, but it’s too short for that. I could call it a collection of pamphlets, but the ideas are too sophisticated for that too. We’ll go with an anthology of essays. They were written in the most creative period of Marshall McLuhan’s life after he published The Gutenberg Galaxy but before he published his seminal book: Understanding Media. I like it both because it’s colorful (which means I can keep it in my living room) and because it’s designed to be read for 10 minutes at a time. Since it’s so easy to read, it doubles as spaced repetition for one of my favorite writers. If you’re looking for an intro to McLuhan, I also recommend The Medium is the Massage and this talk with Terence McKenna.

Stephanie Tolan: You know somebody’s writing is going to be good when the articles are old, the design is ugly, and the articles are still popular. This site is Exhibit A. Stephanie writes about childhood education, mostly through the lens of gifted children. To begin, I recommend an article called Is it a Cheetah?

Richard Wagner: I’ve always been familiar with Richard Wagner’s music, but only recently did I begin to understand its tense history. At once, Wagner’s work set the stage for the kinds of dramatic movie scores you see in movies like Interstellar. His music wasn’t just sound. It was theater. But at the same time, his work has always been associated with antisemitism, in part because he was Hitler’s favorite composer. But that’s what makes him such a fascinating person to study. As the music critic Alex Ross said: “With Wagner, you never leave reality, and everything sublime and magnificent and moving in Wagner is inseparable from this corruption, this darkness, this evil. And I think that makes him a very human, unfortunately, exemplary human phenomenon, where the greatness and the darkness are all mixed together because that’s who we are as a species. And Wagner really exemplifies our species, in some ways, in terms of this mixing together of creative and destructive energies all at once, and you can never separate them — if that’s not too drastic.” Damn, that’s good. To learn about Wagner, I recommend Alex Ross’ interview with Tyler Cowen and this one on Open Source.