Hobbyist Academia #20
I’ve been consuming media by reading more than listening or watching recently. I’ve also been leaning into regular cadences of content from specific newsletters; I’ll be highlighting multiple editions of writing from some familiar faces in my corner of the Internet.
Engage and Interact
Jess Janz writes about writing, poetry, and building community. Her work is tender and gentle; it lives and breathes and evolves. Beyond her writing, she is the host of Dinner with Strangers, a monthly dinner series that brings strangers together to break bread and join in guided, intentional conversation. Her one rule? No talking about your 9-5.
Everything about her work- her creative process, her writing, the way she gathers people- is reminiscent of Priya Parker’s principles of gathering. I don’t know if she was a direct inspiration for Jess, but I love finding examples of gatherings done well out in the wild. Explore her site; it’s a delightful portal of intentionality and creativity.
Rahaf Harfoush wrote a thoughtful and actionable piece about how to build and manage our own social networks. She explains the benefits of doing this well, and offers a framework for auditing the state of your current network and devising a plan for how to nudge it closer to its ideal state. The audit is a simple, reflective exercise, and the act of doing it will naturally expose areas of improvement for the health and wellbeing of your network.
Read
How to Be in Public is a newsletter in which Leslie C. Smith lets her curiosity guide her as her understanding of how to structure and co-create a society evolves. Her series on systems starts here; there’s already a second part, and more reflections before and after the series are here in her archives.
Sari Azout’s newsletter Startupy continues to be one of my favorite weekend reads. In the month of March, she shared thoughts on search engine design and the role of machines in a newsletter including an AI-powered search engine for browsing Startupy itself. She also highlighted curator Kalyani Tupkari on the topic of time (scroll to the bottom for the curator spotlight section of the newsletter in which Kalyani elaborates on why this topic is interesting and shares related media worth consuming and projects worth following).
Finally, she wrote about how working on a serious, curation-focused project changes the very fabric of how you interact with the wealth of content on the Internet. She connects an essay from Henrik Karlsson to the Startupy “manifesto 2.0” about driving creative and intellectual aliveness in your life through curating and collecting interesting things. I’ll draw the connection one layer further; this really resonated with me and why I continue to curate Hobbyist Academia. Consuming the world through the lens of this project- and sharing what I collect- gives me purpose and shapes the way I interact with content.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about something Ingrid Fetell Lee has been writing and posting about, which is the fact that our homes are meant for living in, not for being catalogue-ready at any moment. This article from the New York Times Magazine (linked as the Read of the Week in a recent edition from Lauren Martin’s Words of Women) further explores the palpable tension of existing within a picture-perfect interior and contrasts it with the freedom of letting a home exist imperfectly and reveal its use. (You may have to verify that you’re a human to view the link.)
Oliver Burkeman wrote about one of his basic principles of life, that “striving toward sanity never works. You have to operate from sanity instead.” It’s a useful lens for life, and he explains it well.
Priya Parker’s recent newsletter explores how to curate an intentional relationship with our technology for ourselves and our guests when we gather. It’s more complex than simply saying that all use of technology during an event is bad. It’s about giving deep consideration to how technology will impact the human experience of an event and of how that event can live on in the digital world (or not) depending on what choices are made during the event.
The Slowdown published an excellent interview with William Middleton about his latest book, the biography Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld. It was a fascinating behind-the-scenes with the author that made me excited to read the book. The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will also be exhibiting a retrospective on Lagerfeld opening May 5th.
Save This for Later
A couple weeks ago I had the distinct pleasure of browsing in person at The Strand’s Upper West Side location on a very rainy Saturday afternoon, as well as in Three Lives & Company in Greenwich Village on a blustery Monday afternoon. I love to tour a city through the eyes of its independent bookstores. Browsing in person brings serendipity into my reading list.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
Paradise Now: The Extraordinary Life of Karl Lagerfeld by William Middleton
Glow in the F*cking Dark: Simple Practices to Heal Your Soul, from Someone Who Learned the Hard Way by Tara Schuster
Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May
Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life by Dacher Keltner
Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
Editor’s Note: I’ve been dipping my toes into fiction again for the first time in a long time, and I struggle to define if fiction is part of the Hobbyist Academia topics of focus.
The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms by Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones
You’re reading the Hobbyist Academia newsletter. I curate media at the intersection of digital sociology, design, business, and personal development. Explore The Collection on my website.