The Rise And Fall Of Vibes-based Literacy
How to work with “stupid” people
Entropy: Why Life Always Seems to Get More Complicated
Some food for thought
"We're often told that utility comes before beauty. That practicality is more important than, and antecedent to, delight. Delight and fun and all that frilly stuff is something that happens after the serious hard core responsible work is done.
For example, there's this notion that agriculture came first, and that flower gardens came after, once people's basic food needs were met. But there's ample archeological evidence that the order was actually reversed. Robert Pogue Harrison, in Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, talks about how, since domestication comes to fruition only after several generations, the first gardens must have had to have "more to do with enchantment than procurement," an idea we love here at Stamen. People seem to have cultivated small gardens for flowers and psychedelics first and the idea for farming happened after people were making themselves pretty and getting high. Beauty came first.
There's nothing efficient about the way a cherry tree produces a show of blossoms in the spring and drops them all over the ground. But there's something very effective about it. We want to be more effective than we are efficient. ... a flower is serious. A flower is resolutely, relentlessly, amazingly (did you know they emit heat that the bees can see?) committed to getting fertilized by a bee and will do everything it can to be as beautiful as it can. There’s something about a radical commitment to beauty as an essential part of data-drive communication that I love."
— Eric Rodenbeck, Founder of Stamen
That's all for today, folks. Will see you tomorrow with another banger. Till then, take care and enjoy this beautiful Sunday evening. Happy reading!
