Friday Finds (Commitment, Christianity, Parliament, Human Rights)

Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

I hosted a team retreat this week and was so exhausted this morning that I pulled a teenage boy move and slept in until 11 am.

The good news is that we're leveling up as a company. To throw another adolescent metaphor out there, it feels like Write of Passage is finally tall enough to go on the big, upside-down roller coasters. By that, I mean that it's time to scale. We have a full-time team of five now, and by the end of the year, we'll be up to ten.

Speaking of online education, Building a Second Brain — the best course I've ever taken — is open for enrollment until Wednesday. If you're interested in the principles of note-taking and knowledge management, here's the podcast I recorded about it with Tiago Forte, who teaches the course (Listen Here: Apple | Overcast | Spotify).

Here's what I want to share this week:

1. Interview about Christianity: Dr. Steve Greene interviewed me about my exploration of Christianity in the past few years, and more recently, Judaism. I increasingly feel like if you'd like to understand the West, you should get familiar with the Bible, even if you're not religious. Listen to the podcast here.​
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2. Hugging the X-Axis: Our society has a commitment problem, and quite frankly, so did I. We love to celebrate youth and first dates, but forget to celebrate the wisdom that comes with age and the depths of love that emerge out of long marriages. In this essay and now, this YouTube video, I present some language for thinking about the benefits of commitment.

Today's Finds

​Civilization: A 13-part documentary on the history of art, culture, and philosophy since the Dark Ages. When it was published in the 1960s, it received unprecedented viewing numbers for a high art series. More than 2.5 million people watched it in Britain. In America, that number totaled more than 5 million. Each episode is about an hour. The documentary was so popular that it inspired a book on the same subject.

20th Century Technology Theorists: The gift that keeps on giving. Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media is probably the most influential book I’ve read to date. Looking through the footnotes has led me to other philosophers of technologies like Lewis Mumford, who wrote Technics and Civilization and Water Ong’s Orality and Literacy (here’s my book review). Their work gives you a framework to evaluate all kinds of new technologies and reveals how the Internet is changing society.

​Hiring for the British Parliament: Here’s a job description from Dominic Cummings, the brilliant architect behind Britain’s Vote Leave campaign. He’s bringing a fresh approach to politics by changing how political decisions are made and welcoming the dissent required to make radical changes to government. Cummings isn’t looking for the kinds of well-spoken and well-networked people you usually find in government. No. He’s looking for weirdos, scientists, and mathematicians. My friend called this post “the most promising thing I’ve seen out of Western government in a decade.” And he might be right. If you’re looking for an introduction to Dominic Cummings, I recommend this 30-minute talk.

​Pete Davis' Harvard Commencement Speech: My life improved dramatically once I stopped chasing optionality and committed to the things that mattered to me most. The catalyst was an article called The Trouble With Optionality, which I can’t recommend enough. On the same theme, this commencement speech is a critique of what the philosopher Zygmunt Bauman called “Liquid Modernity,” a state of ambivalent identities where people switch between identities without committing to any of them, just so they can “keep their options open.”

​The Problem with Human Rights: Trigger warning: this video might shatter your worldview. At least, it did for me. The substrate of human rights rests on Judeo-Christian theology, and in particular the idea of imago dei (every human is made in the image of God), which is one of the biggest reasons I’ve been drawn towards faith. So with that, take a big ol’ swig of water and confront this red pill.