One of Dewey’s principal concerns was for the relationship between educationand democracy. He made the point that democracy is not just a form ofgovernment—it is, rather, ‘a mode of associated living, a conjoint communicated

Her motto was ‘never interrupt aconcentrating child’

Today, you either thrive on that word processor model or you don’t. I really don’t, which is why I’ve invested effort, as you have, in researching previous writing workflows, older than the all-conquering PC of the late 1980s and early 90s. At the same time, new writing tools are challenging the established Microsoft way, but in doing so are drawing attention to the fact that each app locks the user into a particular set of assumptions about the drafting and publishing process.

Donald Trump has Sonny Bono beat as a kind of used-car salesman.

I turn to Joan and say, “My word, Joan. I’m so impressed. Melissa knows Yiddish?” Joan goes, “No. She doesn’t know Yiddish and I don’t know Yiddish. But anybody who’s speaking to you in Yiddish is telling you a joke so you laugh at the end of it. I’ve taught her that much so nobody will think she’s stupid.” That was Joan in her 50s. She’s almost 80 now and she still treats her daughter the same way.

“And yeah, it goes on, and on, and on. And one day, we’re going to get a little intern who thinks they’re in show business and is going to sit and put each and every one of these cards onto a computer so that when I’m in England and I need a joke about doctors, I can just go into my computer and come up with a — oh, this is a tramp. This tramp donated all her organs for transplants, which should make the recipients happy because her body has never rejected anything. [LAUGHS]: So. But it just goes on, and on, and on. These are just jokes over the years, years, and years, and years of jokes. And when I die, I can sell this to some lucky, lucky comedian who will then, if they’re smart, have enough to keep them going for their whole life.”

In Carlin’s archives, by contrast, the jokes were “mainly scraps of paper organized into Ziploc baggies then put into a folder by topic.”

I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand, and enter in a little book short hints of what you find that is curious or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such particulars in your memory, where they will be ready either for practice on some future occasion if they are matters of utility, or at least to adorn and improve your conversation if they are rather points of curiosity.

Several English renderings have been published over the years. The following excerpt is from “Xunzi: The Complete Text” within chapter 8 titled “The Achievements of the Ru”. The translator was Eric L. Hutton, and the publisher was Princeton University Press in 2014. Emphasis added to excerpts:[1]2014 Copyright, Xunzi: The Complete Text, Translated by Eric L. Hutton, Chapter 8: The Achievements of the Ru, Quote Page 64, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. (Verified with … Continue reading Not having heard of it is not as good as having heard of it. Having heard of it is not as good as having seen it. Having seen it is not as good as knowing it. Knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. Learning arrives at putting it into practice and then stops . . .

The Zettelkasten method aims to help you forget.

“All of us are imperfect,” Professor Calkins said. “The last two or three years, what I’ve learned from the science of reading work has been transformational.”

circulation is the lifeblood of reading.

Jeff Zucker, the former NBC executive and now president of CNN, coined the phrase “trading analog dollars for digital pennies” in 2008.

‘The greatest pleasure,’ Rütiner wrote, ‘is to associate and converse with learned men.’

I am an academic, so a critic might say that intellectual masturbation is kind of my job description.

of course I had done a lot of thinking even before I ever used a ZK, but now I can record, retrieve, and elaborate these thoughts easily so that they accumulate over time to something bigger. Now, writing a paper or grant proposal often comes down to concatenating a bunch of notes.

The magic comes from the repetition of adding your thoughts to the notes you take and reviewing notes regularly.

But I wouldn't call them a ZK® (stealing Andy's shorthand!) but they were a box of notes (Zettelkasten?).

I get by when I work by accumulating notes—a bit about everything, ideas cap-tured on the fly, summaries of what I have read, references, quotations . . . Andwhen I want to start a project, I pull a packet of notes out of their pigeonhole anddeal them out like a deck of cards. This kind of operation, where chance plays arole, helps me revive my failing memory.16

system was described by Charles Darwin:I keep from thirty to forty large portfolios, in cabinets with labeled shelves, intowhich I can at once put a detached reference or memorandum. I have bought manybooks and at their ends I make an index of all the facts that concern my work.Before beginning on any subject I look to all the short indexes and make a generaland classified index, and by taking the one or more proper portfolios I have all theinformation collected during my life ready for use.13

In a note, he dryly remarks: “Appearanceof the card index and constitution of the human sciences: another invention the historianshave celebrated little”.7

BJ Fogg is one of the leading authorities on habit change.  In his best selling book Tiny Habits he says: “Celebration will one day be ranked alongside mindfulness and gratitude as daily practices that contribute most to our overall happiness and well-being. If you learn just one thing from my entire book, I hope it’s this: Celebrate your tiny successes. This one small shift in your life can have a massive impact even when you feel there is no way up or out of your situation. Celebration can be your lifeline.”

“Content is king, but context is God.”

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose” Dolly Parton

Asking a computer to create a glossary for you doesn’t make you any smarter than having a book that comes with a glossary.

“From that time, now the native citizens and now the enemyhave triumphed ... up to the year of the siege of Mount Badon,when the last but certainly not the least slaughter of these lowlyscoundrels occurred, which, I know, makes 44 years and onemonth, and which was also the time of my birth.”

My magic trick (having faced a similar dilemma with many lovely notebooks over the years) is to turn to the first double page and write in large lettersDON'T BE AFRAID TO MAKE YOUR MARK UPON LIFE'S PAGE.And just like that the new notebook spell is broken and the pen is free to write again.

I somehow made myself write in it and started with a sentence that I think would make for an excellent essay title some day: "Cheap paper is the perfectionist's salvation."

’ve been studying notebooks for over a decade and I still haven’t landed on a perfect organization method. I have, however, found the perfect pen: uni-ball signo, .38mm. I discovered them while teaching in Korea in 2008 and haven’t looked back.

Write down all these slender ideas. It is surprising how often one sentence, jotted in a notebook, leads immediately to a second sentence. A plot can develop as you write notes. Close the notebook and think about it for a few days — and then presto! you’re ready to write a short story. — Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks

Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. —“Hours in a Library”

Even three or four words are often worth jotting down if they will evoke a thought, an idea or a mood. In the barren periods, one should browse through the notebooks. Some ideas may suddenly start to move. Two ideas may combine, perhaps because they were meant to combine in the first place. —Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

I highly recommend notebooks for writers, a small one if one has to be out on a job all day, a larger one if one has the luxury of staying at home.

As they flit like so many little bees between Greek and Latin authors of every species, here noting down something to imitate, here culling some notable saying to put into practice in their behavior, there getting by heart some witty anecdote to relate among their friends, you would swear you were watching the Muses at graceful play in the lovely pastures of Mount Helicon, gathering flowers and marjoram to make well-woven garlands. —The Adages of Erasmus

The bee plunders the flowers here and there, but afterwards they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment — The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne

We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, – in other words, our natural gifts, – we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came. —Epistle LXXXIV

I'd been looking at it like a collection of knowledge. A collection that has no purpose apart from... being a collection. But Zettelkasten should be a place for creativity, playing with ideas with output as the goal (at least for me). It should be fun. And managing it definitely shouldn't take more time than using it for your purposes.

Coleridge, Melville, Twain, David Foster Wallace, and a host of others made marginalia into a form of literary expression.

Josh Sargent, a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk community in upstate New York, where Hoover researched the impact of industrial contamination in the St. Lawrence River for her dissertation, said she’s “a good person and always welcome here.” Debates about her identity seem to be taking place in the “bubble of academia,” he said, while the real challenges facing Native people are being overlooked. He said she’s doing important work, and her book, “The River Is in Us,” accurately depicted the environmental harm suffered by his community. “I hope people read it.”

scarequotes

Tyrion Lannister : A wise man once said a true history of the world is a history of great conversations in elegant rooms.

Sometimes you must surrender the idea of steering the story toward a predetermined structure and destination. We all know how to do the latter, so it feels secure.

Writing about science means humbling yourself about how little you know, and then writing the story in the authoritative voice of a tentative expert.

Roy Peter Clark, writing scholar and coach at The Poynter Institute, says, “Reports give readers information. Stories give readers experience.” I would add: An article is generic; a story is unique.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.”

“I wrote 86 episodes of ‘The West Wing,’ and every single time I finished one, I’d be happy for five minutes before it just meant that I haven’t started the next one yet, and I never thought I would be able to write the next one. Ever.”

Sorkin had been a heavy smoker since high school — two packs a day of Merits — and the habit had long been inextricable from his writing process. “It was just part of it, the way a pen was part of it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it too much, because I’ll start to salivate.”

In 1971, his reputation was beginning its ascent when he was interviewed by The Ohio Review. He described what he felt after completing a poem:Well, after the brief, and I think normal, period of exhilaration, there is a let-down. What I’ve done is written another poem. And what I have to do is write another one.

Art is thought that produces a thing. Art is muscle memory that produces a thing. Art is a search that produces a thing. Art is a practice that produces a thing.Art is work that produces a thing.

He preferred penning poems to typing them, because, he said, “A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript, and I don’t want it to seem finished before it is.” When he typed a poem, he said, he was reading it, but when he wrote a poem by hand he could hear it.

13:14 - [Aby] Telegram and telephone destroy the cosmos.13:18 Mythical and symbolic thinking13:20 strives to form spiritual bonds13:22 between humanity and the surrounding world,13:25 shaping distance into the space13:27 required for devotion and reflection,13:31 the distance undone13:32 by the instantaneous electrical connection.

We know, from the first generation of users,55:26 a person like Frances Yates,55:27 who have been writing about and speaking about later on,55:32 how much the structure of the library55:35 has helped them in defining their topics,55:38 and basically in their research,55:40 and how inspirational it was,

51:20 - [Aby] Not until art history can show51:22 that it sees the work of art51:23 in a few more dimensions than it has done so far51:27 will our activity again attract the interest of scholars51:31 and of the general public.51:36 Every serious scholar51:37 who has to venture on a problem of cultural history51:40 reads over the entrance to his workshop Goethe's lines:51:43 "What you call the spirit of the age51:46 "is really no more51:47 "than the spirit of the worthy historian51:49 "in which the age is reflected."51:57 In my role as psycho-historian,51:59 I tried to diagnose52:00 the schizophrenia of Western civilization52:02 from its images in an autobiographical reflex.52:10 May the history of art and the study of religion,52:13 between which lies nothing at present52:15 but wasteland overgrown with verbiage,52:18 meet together one day in learned and lucid minds,52:22 and may they share a workbench in the laboratory52:24 of the iconological science of civilization.

44:19 - [Claudia] The classification is anything but indifferent.44:24 The manner of shelving the books44:26 is meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader,44:30 who, looking on the shelves for one book,44:33 is attracted by the kindred ones next to it,44:36 glances at the sections above and below,44:39 and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought44:43 which may lend to additional interests44:46 to the one he was pursuing.

12:03 - For art is not only something which is aesthetic relevant,12:07 but it's relevant in so many other dimensions too,12:11 partially, and intellectually,12:15 and there's a lot of knowledge enclosed within the artworks.

06:57 The entire range of emotional stirrings,06:59 aggression, defense, sacrifice, mourning,07:03 melancholia, ecstasy, triumph, et cetera, is expressed07:06 through the revival of movements, gestures, and postures,07:11 that is pathosformel:07:12 the expressive formulas of emotion07:15 either taken from ancient modes07:16 or reappearing as mnemonic traces in successive works.

“My father stopped hitting me for my grades,” Mr. Lorayne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. “He hit me for other things.”

“They were professional poor people,” he told an interviewer, invoking his parents. “I remember having a potato for dinner.”

By the 1960s, Mr. Lorayne was best known for holding audiences rapt with feats of memory that bordered on the elephantine. Such feats were born, he explained in interviews and in his many books, of a system of learned associations — call them surrealist visual puns — that seemed equal parts Ivan Pavlov and Salvador Dalí.

Musician John Mayer, too, describes his typewriter as more of an emotional companion than a logistical tool. He laments writing lyrics with the judgemental “red squiggly line” of spell check, which he says stops the creative process because he feels compelled to fix the error, and turning to a typewriter which “doesn’t judge you, it just goes, ‘right away, sir, right away’.”

Of all skill, part is infused by precept, and part is obtained by habit.SAMUEL JOHNSON

For the rules in textbooks of rhetoric cannot by themselves make expertthose who are eager to dispense with study and practice.DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS

the best predictor of whether we agree with the science is simply where we fall on the political spectrum.

TheSyntopicon invites the reader to make on the set whatever demands arisefrom his own problems and interests. It is constructed to enable the reader,nomatter what the stages of his reading in other ways, to find that part of theGreat Conversation in which any topic that interests him is being discussed.

Aristotle, who had said, many centuries before in Politics (BookVIII): ‘No one would dispute the fact that it is a lawgiver’s prime duty to arrangefor the education of the young. In states where this is not done the quality of theconstitution suffers.’

In his essay Of the Conduct of the Understanding, Locke frowned upon those

A political system, he said, needs people who are fair,open-minded, and think for themselves; it doesn’t want people who aresubservient to authority.

The Zettelkasten provides combinatorial possibilities that were never planned, never pre-meditated, or never designed in this way.

If you have to write anyway, it is pragmatic to exploit this activity by creating a system of notes that can act as a competent communication partner.

“The hardest thing I’ve learned over the years is that I’m getting paid a lot of money to produce a movie, but sometimes the best thing to do is nothing,” he told The New York Times in 1992, when he was making “Hoffa.” “I don’t need to impose myself.”Nonetheless, he knew he played a vital role.“It’s the creative urge that makes me work,” he told American Film magazine for a 1988 article. “The pleasure is, to some extent, vicarious, but it’s no less creative for that. It is creating a world by bringing together creative financing with creative filmmakers. In a sense, producing can be compared to conceptual art.”

Mr. Luddy at the 2017 Telluride Film Festival. The festival became a gathering of devotees to the religion of filmmaking, and Mr. Luddy was its most fervent believer and its main officiant.

It does not feel patriotic to have my students pay money for public-domain literature on their American heritage.”

Mentioned this to someone who moved to Bushwick and kept saying "I wish more of Brooklyn was like this" with a rebuttal saying "this is why the people who made it attractive to you aren't here anymore" and got the "it's not my problem" shit. https://twitter.com/hollley/status/1641149981678530560. I think that's where being a "transplant" into a different place becomes violent - your presence IMMEDIATELY disrupts the environments you're in (and because of that, you have an obligation to minimize it as much as possible).

I’m not sure I need a system around, for example, the best way to surface the minutiae from interstitial journaling. In fact, just using the phrase “interstitial journaling” is a dead giveaway that I’ve already been overthinking it. Settle down, Jack!

Ein Zettel, auf den kein anderer Zettel verweist, ist kein Zettel

"No one volunteers for res," she says, a little ruefully.

wenn man Sethes Lebensprinzip kennt: "Ich arbeite nur, wenn ich mag. Aber ich mag immer arbeiten."

‘‘So long as so-called A.I. systems are being built and deployed by the big tech companies without democratically governed regulation, they are going to primarily reflect the values of Silicon Valley,’’ Emily Bender argues, ‘‘and any attempt to ‘teach’ them otherwise can be nothing more than ethics washing.’’

Right before we left our lunch, Sam Altman quoted a saying of Ilya Sutskever’s: ‘‘One thing that Ilya says — which I always think sounds a little bit tech-utopian, but it sticks in your memory — is, ‘It’s very important that we build an A.G.I. that loves humanity.’ ’’

‘‘I think it lets us be more thoughtful and more deliberate about safety issues,’’ Altman says. ‘‘Part of our strategy is: Gradual change in the world is better than sudden change.’’

Universities are factories of human knowledge. They’re also monuments to individual ignorance.

Writing is rewarding. Writing is empowering. Writing is even fun. As human, we are wired to communicate. We are also wired for “play.” Under the right circumstances, writing allows us to do both of these things at the same time.

In a piece like this, writing is the expression and exploration of an idea (or collection of ideas). It is only through the writing that I can fully understand what I think.

one of the things I value about writing, is the act of writing itself. It is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind, the same way a vigorous hike through the woods can put me in touch with my body.

If we assume students want to learn - and I do - we should show our interest in their learning, rather than their performance.

Learning has to be knowledge. 00:10:07 And learning has to be based on understanding. And what you understand you can absorb, internalize and it becomes knowledge. What you know, you don't forget. You can block something that you know, but not forget.

Ollendorff's name is used as an epithet in H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau:[10] "Yesterday he bled and wept," said the Satyr. "You never bleed nor weep. The Master does not bleed or weep." "Ollendorffian beggar!" said Montgomery, "you'll bleed and weep if you don't look out!"

Witness the unapologetic swagger of "FORGET WITH IMPUNITY" vs. its wimpy cousin Evernote's "Remember Everything".

Beware the “alibi of photocopies”! Photocopies are indis-pensable instruments. They allow you to keep with you atext you have already read in the library, and to take homea text you have not read yet. But a set of photocopies canbecome an alibi. A student makes hundreds of pages ofphotocopies and takes them home, and the manual laborhe exercises in doing so gives him the impression that hepossesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts thestudent from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo ofaccumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens tomany. Defend yourself from this trap: as soon as you havethe photocopy, read it and annotate it immediately. If youare not in a great hurry, do not photocopy something newbefore you own (that is, before you have read and annotated)the previous set of photocopies. There are many things thatI do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxedas if I had read it.

We create product not to show how good we are, but to measure how good we are.

None of this is easy. In the words of Jill Lepore, one of our finest historians, “Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.”

“Wisdom is the tears of experience,” the eminent sociologist Daniel Bell told my graduating class at Brandeis University.

A Zettelkasten is a system of notes that fit the criteria of being a system. Being alive vs. being a machine is a good metaphor to understand the difference. A Zettelkasten is alive, a conventional note taking system is a machine.

My translation of Niklas Luhmann (1997): Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. S.11: “Bei meiner Aufnahme in die 1969 gegründete Fakultät für Soziologie der Universität Bielefeld fand ich mich konfrontiert mit der Aufforderung, Forschungsprojekte zu benennen, an denen ich arbeite. Mein Projekt lautete: Theorie der Gesellschaft; Laufzeit: 30 Jahre; Kosten: keine.”

Principles are higher than techniques. Principles produce techniques in an instant. —Ido Portal

Posted byu/A_Dull_Significance6 hours agoWhat’s something you do with your Zettelkasten that you’re “not supposed to do”? .t3_11awtrx._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionI think the title says it all.There are lots of ideas about things you should, or shouldn’t, do with you zettelkasten. What is something that works for you that you’re “not supposed to do”?For me, it’s the idea you shouldn’t keep quotes. I have a section (56/2) which is mainly a collection of different quotes on the topic of writing complexity and ease of comprehension. Some are for complexity, some against. Some place the burden on the writer, some on the reader, some mutual. I find it fruitful.What about you? What “rule” do you break?

I’m an imposter-perfectionist

Life in Zettelkasten is more like dance than a factory.

Remember that life in a Zettelkasten is supposed to be fun. It is a joyful experience to work with it when it works back with you. Life in Zettelkasten is more like dance than a factory.

Indeed, Martin Anderson, Reagan’s former domestic policy adviser, says that Reagan’s system did wonders for his ability to give speeches. Reagan was able to approach a lectern with no sign anywhere of a prepared speech. Only those seated on the stage behind him could see his left hand drop into his suitcoat pocket and pull out a neat, small packet of cards and slip off the elastic band with his right hand as he set the cards down. And as for helping him in preparing the speech material, “his system was unrivaled,” Anderson remembers. “Before the speech Reagan would pore over the packs of cards, then pluck a few cards from one pack, a few from another, and combine them. In a matter of minutes, he would create an entirely new speech. The system was as flexible as a smooth gold chain.”

“These cards are the tools of his trade. He can take any speech and insert some of these zingers and one-liners. Let’s say he’s speaking to a Kiwanis Club. He knew what to put in. If he was talking to a group of firemen, he had a joke about putting out a fire. If you’re really looking for the hand of a president, and how his mind is working, all of these note cards together, in a way, give you the magic of Ronald Reagan.”

"Prosperity is something created by businessmen for politicians to take credit for."

"If at first you don't succeed, do it the way she told you."

"Room bugged? Every time I sneezed the chandelier said, 'Gesundheit!'"

"I won't say he should be put in a mental institution, but if he was in one, don't think I'd let him out."

"Never start an argument with a woman when she's tired -- or when she's rested."

"Don't say he's old, but every time there's a knock on the door he yells 'Everybody hide, it's Indians!'"

"You can talk to any number of President Reagan's speechwriters over the years, and when they might hand him a speech, the speeches would come back with a quote, or an expression or a joke that they hadn't seen before," John Heubusch, executive director of the Reagan Library, told CBS News' Mo Rocca.

"Nothing like a vote in the U.N. to tell you who your friends used to be."

The Zettelkasten Method is not a thing; it is a manual to productivity.

The reason is that the journaling is in part an accumulative method: There is a long period of low-structured input which benefits manifest first acutely (writing in itself seems to be healing through understanding). After you amassed a time-line of thoughts you can try to find throughlines and patterns which then gives you access to deep insights if you have the right tools. Most of the time people use psychologists which I think is in a similar way problematic that people use physical therapists for too much of their problems: Many problems are best solved by the person that has immediate access to the ego-perspective (phenomenological layer, subjective access, etc.) of the problem. This is of course dependent on self-education on basic concepts of what I call true self-care. Self-care seems to be associated with stuff like doing pleasant things (hot bath, nice walks in the sun) nowadays. If you take the antifragile nature of us humans into account this is just another way of the modern hedonist to keep stuck. (This is important for my approach to incorporate journaling into the Zettelkasten Method)

If Seneca or Martial were around today, they would probably write sarcastic epigrams about the very public exhibition of reading text messages and in-your-face displays of texting. Digital reading, like the perusing of ancient scrolls, constitutes an important statement about who we are. Like the public readers of Martial’s Rome, the avid readers of text messages and other forms of social media appear to be everywhere. Though in both cases the performers of reading are tirelessly constructing their self-image, the identity they aspire to establish is very different. Young people sitting in a bar checking their phones for texts are not making a statement about their refined literary status. They are signalling that they are connected and – most importantly – that their attention is in constant demand.

If you treat a metaphor as a second order perception (first order perception = senses) you can create Pseudo-Synesthesia which may increase divergent thinking.

One student’s rabbinical thesis, also completed that year,opened with the declaration: ‘We must not forget that History is a Science. Its facts cannever be doubted. One may indeed, differ as to the interpretation of facts but neverdispute the fact per se!’ (orig. emph., Holtzberg, 1916: Introduction).

Anecdotes’, he concluded, ‘havetheir historic value, if properly tested’ – reflecting both his interest in details and also theneed to ascertain whether they were true (Deutsch, 1905b).

“I only dowhat is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If Ifalter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.”(Luhmann et al., 1987, 154f.)[4]

we have preserved Eco’s handwritten index cardresearch system in all its detail, precisely because it is the soulof How to Write a Thesis.

“you’ll never be able to sanitize the Internet.”

“The reality is that tech companies have been using automated tools to moderate content for a really long time and while it’s touted as this sophisticated machine learning, it’s often just a list of words they think are problematic,” said Ángel Díaz, a lecturer at the UCLA School of Law who studies technology and racial discrimination.

at a time when anything that takes more than a few minutes to skim is called a “longread”—it’s understandable that devoting a small chunk of one’s frisky twenties to writing a thesis can seem a waste of time, outlandishly quaint, maybe even selfish. And, as higher education continues to bend to the logic of consumption and marketable skills, platitudes about pursuing knowledge for its own sake can seem certifiably bananas.

Consider Eco’s caution against “the alibi of photocopies”: “A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many.” Many of us suffer from an accelerated version of this nowadays, as we effortlessly bookmark links or save articles to Instapaper, satisfied with our aspiration to hoard all this new information, unsure if we will ever get around to actually dealing with it.

More provocatively, great writing is transgressive — it subverts expectations and challenges the reader.