Collections

Photo by Vincent van Zalinge  on Unsplash For much of my life, my automatic cognitive stance was black-and-white thinking. If something annoyed me, it was bad, and everything around it was awful. If someone said something that hurt my feelings, I'd break off contact and never speak to them again. Today, I was reflecting that I think that's no longer the case. In fact, I think my automatic stance became seeing both sides. I was thinking about the British Library and how, on th

Photo by Emilipothèse  on Unsplash I was listening to Ezra Klein interviewing Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, and he said something that is both insane and makes perfect sense at the same time. He said: "...when you start to train these systems to carry out actions in the world, they really do begin to see themselves as distinct in the world... But along with seeing oneself as distinct from the world seems to come the rise of what you might think of as a conception of

Photo by Tim Mossholder  on Unsplash Today I'm thinking about the word taboo. In Hebrew, the same word has two meanings: the first is a legal property term, derived from the Turkish word tapu , meaning proof of ownership of a property (a land or part of it). A registration in the taboo, in Hebrew, means the land is legally yours. The second meaning of the word comes from Polynesian and means sacred or forbidden . I was sure these two meanings came from the same word, but t

Photo by Aedrian Salazar  on Unsplash Today I'm thinking about the futility of making art. David Speed (excellent podcast , highly recommend) says that all the artists he talked to say that you just need to keep making things. Which is decent advice, I guess. But he doesn't interview the thousands of people who kept making things their whole lives and stayed obscure; no one ever heard of them, and only very few people even engaged with their work. It's not that I intend to st

Photo by Sepp Rutz  on Unsplash When I started the collections, I was super excited and couldn't see this rather predictable slump coming. On many days, I feel like I don't have anything interesting to contribute. Today, for example, I feel like a dilettante--there are no consequences for my success, so really I'm just dabbling in writing, surely. Then I say, well, if I don't have anything interesting to contribute, then I'm just making noise, and the internet already has qui

Picture taken this weekend I've never seen myself as a "dance mum". With the equivalent "hockey mom" (in Canada) or "football mum" (when we just arrived in London), the term connotes, for me, a kind of relentless pushing of the child who may or may not be interested in the relevant sport. I was always a proponent of laid-back parenting, and when my daughter said she wanted to take ballet, I assumed this was an opportunity for her to stay an hour after school, giving me a bit

Photo by Ian Barsby  on Unsplash I finally got around (read: scheduled time) to reading Zadie Smith's excellent essay titled The Art of the Impersonal Essay . While I don't necessarily connect to her fiction, I think she's a very clear thinker, and I admire that. I've taken notes. I don't think I was taught how to write an essay at school, and in university, I mostly learned how to write academic papers, which aren't exactly the same. I loved the permission she gave writers t

Sakamoto Kaori at the team event When we lived in Ottawa, we discovered the Olympic Winter Games. When it's -26 degrees outside and pitch dark at 4 pm, anything would do. Plus, there's hockey . Despite the excitement, Olympic hockey isn't as good as NHL hockey, and when I watch the winter olympics I opt mostly for the more creative stuff: figure skating (although I can't connect to ice dancing, however hard I tried), big air (jumping with a snowboard), slopestyle (jumping wi

Photo by Aleksandar Cvetanovic  on Unsplash I was thinking about resting today, since it is Sunday. I've been trying to take Sundays off, with mediocre success (as evident by the fact that I'm currently writing). Now that the young people are no longer young children, the household rhythm has changed on weekends. We're no longer constantly on call, and so Sunday can be a day of rest. A sort of Sabbath, if you will. But then I thought about the word rest, and the two meanings