Friday Finds (Girard, Architecture, Malcolm X, MKBHD, Marriage)

Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

First, some fun news: I passed 300,000 followers on Twitter this morning, which is absolutely bonkers.

Second, an announcement: I've spent the past six months working on a 7-part lecture series about René Girard's ideas. To make it, I teamed up with Johnathan Bi, who recorded 70,000 words worth of scripted video. We made this because Girard's ideas are life-changing, but hard to understand.

If you'd like to learn more about the series, click here. If you'd like to receive an email when the lectures go live, click here.

Here's what I want to share this week:

1. How Philosophers Think: Philosophers are the best thinkers I know, not necessarily because of the ideas in their head, but because of their process for dissecting ideas. In this essay, I tried to provide a blueprint for thinking like a philosopher. If you prefer the video version, you can find it here.
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2. How to Win by Being Low Status: Studying Girard made me appreciate just how many opportunities people miss because they care so much about status. Since big things start small, the highest status positions are generally reserved for people who are comfortable with being low status for a little while. My latest YouTube video explores this concept in detail.

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Today's Finds

Christopher Alexander: The news of Alexander's death is heartbreaking to me. He was the person who best articulated how spaces can feel alive, whether they are a collection of atoms or bits. To date, A Timeless Way of Building is one of the best books I've ever read because of the principles it presents for quality design — and by extension, a quality life. The book is written so masterfully that I feel a spiritual connection to it. Some of my favorites are: (1) Change the walking surface and the light quality to create a "transition space" between home and street, (2) the best rooms have light from two sides, and (3) in the northern hemisphere, if you want to maximize the natural light in your home, make sure the southern side has large windows. If you'd like to learn more about Alexander's work, I recommend this Twitter account and this talk by Ryan Singer.

​How Malcolm X Learned to Read: Here’s an inspiring story if there ever was one. Malcolm X learned to read by reading the dictionary and learning each word, one by one. Crazy, right? He was in prison at the time, and as his vocabulary broadened, he binge-read books in the isolation of his prison cell. As he recounted: “When I had progressed to really serious reading, every night at about ten P.M. I would be outraged with the “lights out.” It always seemed to catch me right in the middle of something engrossing. Fortunately, right outside my door was a corridor light that cast a glow into my room. The glow was enough to read by, once my eyes adjusted to it. So when “lights out” came, I would sit on the floor where I could continue reading in that glow." Here’s the full story.​

​Shock of the New: A book and a documentary from the famous art critic, Robert Hughes. It’s by far the best thing I’ve seen about the history of modern art, from the 1870s to the 1970s. It focuses on a variety of themes, from the failure of modern architecture, to the rise of pop culture, to the legacy of the world wars, to the transition from impressionism to cubism (which is my favorite part of art history). It’s a dazzling piece of scholarship and I can’t recommend it enough.

​The Meaning of Marriage: The institution of marriage isn't as strong as it once was. Divorce rates have doubled since the 1960s and the percentage of American adults who are married has fallen from 72 percent in 1960 to only 50 percent in 2008. What's gone wrong? The premise of this book is that we've become disillusioned with marriage because our expectations of it are too high. Using Christian principles, largely from the book of Ephesians, the author argues that successful marriages happen when two people are committed to serving others more than they serve themselves. If you prefer to watch a lecture by the author, this is a good one to start with.

MKBHD: If you're a creator and feeling down about the quality of your work, remember this clip from MKBHD — who is one of the biggest tech YouTubers in the world. Today, his channel has more than 15 million subscribers and his videos have been viewed ~3 billion times. But his 100th YouTube video looked like this.