🪡 🌁 Last week was special with Objet -we threw our second soirée in SF on Friday and got lucky to see some great folks share the love.
What Saumya and Colt are building is so important. Check their work out: Build IRL Newsletter #22. And especially if you’re living in SF, they always share some cool events you can join. That’s how I knew about the new IRL Movie Club for instance and got to watch the Join or Die documentary.
I can’t agree more with Caitlin and really liked her invitation to move from volume to value: Less Volume, More Value. I also agree with her ‘medium-hot take’: “volume-based growth lacks imagination”.
🍄 👜 Dirt also introduced their new column -Objet- in collaboration with us. They’ve asked five writers to write about a single object that is significant to them and will be publishing these essays in the coming months. For its first: Marlowe Granados on the cathartic potential of a second-hand bag: The Bakelite Bag.
I like to think of them [old things] as talismans of the past. I don’t just put them on display but use them as they were made to be used.
There’s also a sense that whatever it witnessed through my ownership is just a minor chapter in the bag’s life. It holds my secrets but also the mysteries of those that came before me. I can only hope to pass it on as the common thread between me and generations of stylish women.
🏫 Every parent should read that one from Henrik -and I’ve shared it countless times myself already- it’s pretty unusual to see Montessori classrooms and Jesuit colleges next to each other but in Culture Studies Henrik looks at both these distinctive cultures to understand why and how students in both settings learn more than a core curriculum.
If the culture in a school is at odds with its pedagogical goals, energy will be wasted trying to deal with the friction between these value systems: You get disruptive students and motivation issues. An educator might have an easier time if they found a way to align the peer culture with the pedagogy. But crafting aligned cultures is not how mainstream education works.
Culture is a catalyst. It multiplies the effectiveness of all other interventions and tools. A kid that grows up in an academically oriented family might use the internet to accelerate their rate of learning. The same kid in a different context might use the same tool to distract herself. Knowing how to scale up cultures that support us would be immensely useful, but it is a difficult problem.
“Children are biologically programmed to imitate the behavior of our older peers. There are no actions that an adult can take to rival the effectiveness of older children modeling desired behaviors for younger children.”
⭐️ I generally appreciate what Jason is doing with The Roots of Progress. This is such an important topic. I’ve written myself in the past how now is the greatest time to be alive. In The Life Well-Lived, he wonders ‘what’s the point of material progress?’.
The conception of well-being as value-fulfillment is solid enough to ground us in reality, but rich enough to point us towards a life that is about far more than simply staying fed, clothed, sheltered, and alive. Yes, we pursue health, longevity, and comfort—values which are directly provided by material progress. But we also seek meaning and personal fulfillment: a career that uses our talents and does good in the world; loving relationships with friends and family; the enjoyment of art and music; an understanding of our place in the universe. And we seek self-actualization: the full exercise of our skills and abilities, regardless of whether this is needed for any practical end.
🔌 Being more intentional with everything that surrounds us is a topic very close to my heart. This is after all what we’re doing with Objet re: what we buy and consume. Re: our tech tools, many things Matt pointed out in Unplugging Is Not The Solution You Want resonated.
Instead of pointing out, “What tech is doing to us...” what if we asked, “What are we doing to ourselves?”
🏙 Here’s an interview between 2 people I truly enjoy reading on a weekly basis. Kai B. from Dense Discovery -highly recommend his newsletter- and Brian Sholis from Frontier Magazine. More than the people though, the topic they covered speaks to me: how could we design better buildings? Especially ones that boost social interactions and connections.
Kai lives in Nightingale Village [in Melbourne, Australia], a complex of six buildings designed by six different architects that has received many awards since it opened in 2022.
🚇 And talking about architecture, here’s a new type by Jake -I’ve obviously signed up right away to his latest experiment in collaborative links: Greenwich. Check it out: I've built a city, now it needs residents!