Hobbyist Academia #14
To those of you who found your way here via Dense Discovery, welcome! I collect, curate, and develop content organically, so these vary in length and frequency. I aim for twice a month.
Engage and Interact
Architecting Curiosity offers research-backed masterclasses and workshops that will guide you on a journey to build a practice of curiosity into your life. It’s a really interesting concept, that being curious in a consistent and intentional way can give you the tools to simultaneously embrace uncertainty, increase compassion, and get clearer about what you want.
The next session of Follow Your Curiosity starts in January of next year. In the meantime, I highly recommend joining their email list. They started a monthly newsletter last month. I’ve also discovered some new additions to my To Read list from their list of works that have inspired their research.
Read
I just realized that I have somehow not yet talked about the brilliance that is Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study. Anne Helen Petersen has a background as a journalist and a professor, and this newsletter is the epitome of what I miss about college classes for my media theory major. She writes for her readers, not an algorithm, and you can feel it. I’m a paid subscriber and it is absolutely worth it.
I’ll particularly highlight the newsletter from July 20th, “How to Show Up For Your Friends Without Kids — and How to Show Up For Kids and Their Parents: aka How to Be in a Community”.
The July 17th edition of The Jungle Gym, “Against Engagement Farming,” is an excellent read about philosophies of audience building on social media. This is very much in line with my own approach, which is slow, steady, and genuine. The Jungle Gym is a newsletter about finding fulfillment in your career by integrating your work with your life.
Adam Grant writes a monthly newsletter called Granted. Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, author, and podcast host. I heard him speak at the Massachusetts Women’s Conference a few years ago. He’s also part of the Next Big Idea Club, a book club in which he selects books alongside Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Cain, and Daniel Pink. They produce accompanying guided reading and discussion materials. His newsletters are thought provoking and relevant.
Finally, “What We Gain From a Good Bookstore” in The New Yorker: a piece about the role of bookstores in community building and in offering individuals the experience of browsing in a physical space instead of scrolling on the Internet. Instead of every book in existence available at your fingertips, there has been an aspect of human curation. Someone chose to buy copies of a book to carry on the shelves of the store, where to display that book, what to put it near, and how to categorize it.
Save This For Later
I thought I hadn’t added that many books to the To Read list since the last issue of Hobbyist Academia, but I thought wrong.
We have:
Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: Tight and Loose Cultures and the Secret Signals That Direct Our Lives by Michele Gelfand
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Writers & Lovers by Lily King
How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds: Calming the Chaos from The School of Life
The Uncertainty Mindset: Innovation Insights from the Frontiers of Food by Vaughn Tan
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation by Carl Benedikt Frey
The Quantum Rules: How the Laws of Physics Explain Love, Success, and Everyday Life by Kunal K. Das
The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning by Gautam Baid
Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption edited by Daniel Jones
A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman
Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It by Ian Leslie
Why?: What Makes Us Curious by Mario Livio
If you enjoyed this, check out The Collection on my website.