Scenes from homeschool:
👧 “What does ‘dour’ mean?” 👱🏻♂️ “If only there was some sort of book that listed words alphabetically alongside their meanings.”
Be a fox, not a hedgehog
One interesting idea in Matthew Syed’s Sunday Times piece on how social media sound bite culture is destroying nuance in complex debates:
In a wise essay in 1953, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin contrasted two types of thinker: the hedgehog and the fox. The hedgehog has one big idea. It reduces everything to this one idea. Everything else is filtered out. The fox, conversely, has lots of ideas. It likes to see the broader context, how concepts fit together, and is anxious to bring more information to light.
Berlin’s point — although he made it subtly — is that it is psychologically easier to be a hedgehog, but to understand a complex world, it pays to be a fox.
We need more foxes.
Fascination read about Mar-a-Lago: the secret history of Trump’s Florida retreat
Repeatedly misspelling “audience” is probably not good, when you’re running a new module called “Audience Strategy”.
And I just misspelled “strategy” and had to correct it, too. 🤦🏼♂️
Podcasting is 20 years old today. Here’s the story of the first podcast feed.
Trump, QAnon and the limits of the “viral” metaphor to describe online communities — some thoughts on the challenges that lie ahead.
Some ocean-based learning resources for parents struggling with homeschooling.
Oh, this is just perfect:
It deeply bothers me that on-going access to a whole load of important and significant writing from the last few years is entirely based on the continued existence of only two companies: Medium and Substack.