An online commonplace book
“I am devoted to your generation.”
A generous woman delivering insightful and important lectures. The Sarah Paine and Dwarkesh team up is a must rewatch for 2026.
The latest will open your mind to the virtue of incremental reform, George Bush Sr. the statesman, and German unification.
Happy New Year.
A few of my favorite bits:
Dan’s mother being one of the rare mother’s who follows through on the military school threat:
COWEN: What did you learn from your time as a Royal Canadian Army cadet?
WANG: I think the trite answer is just a lot of discipline. I think that I was a bad kid growing up. I was absolutely not a good child, and I’ll be the first to admit that.
COWEN: What does that mean concretely?
WANG: Ottawa is not only the federal capital of Canada, but it is also the drug capital of Canada. It is very easy to fall into a mischievous crowd when you’re over there. I was playing hooky from school a little bit too much, and running off, and trying to do whatever I found fun and not going to school. I never had good grades growing up. To this day, I will admit that I was academically challenged.
I always just enjoyed taking a book to read in the park or something, rather than sitting in class. My main issue was that I played hooky a little bit too much, raised the ire of my parents. My parents threatened to give me to the army, and I laughed that off, because no parents ever do that. Then, my mom did it. She gave me to the Royal Canadian Army cadets, and they straightened me out.
Taking the opportunity seriously and reconceptualizing tough tasks:
I was a very good army cadet. I was awarded recruit of the year. I was the fastest person in my regiment to be promoted to corporal. I was in the marching band, and I did excellent drill as well. Something I take away from some of the commanding officers whom I grew close to, they would tell me that the ethic of the army was that whatever you imagine is the most difficult thing, you should simply reconceptualize it as the easiest thing, and then you just do it. It turned out to have been a fairly robust lesson.
and writing exercises for the curious and ambitious:
COWEN: How did you learn how to write so well?
WANG: I have always grown up loving to read. My grandfather bought so many books for me, first picture books that had text underneath. Then, my mother also encouraged a reading habit. We had so many books growing up. I think that if I were thinking about writing, first and foremost, I pay attention to cadences. I think about beat. I think about the musicality of the effect.
I think that it is really, really valuable to just have a sense of how the words sound before it falls out of your pen. I have a sense of practice. When I was a musician, every so often I would take some time when I was still a college student to just go to the music library, check out some scores. I did this with a Mahler symphony as well as some Mozart symphonies, to just simply copy out the scores, and just write it all out.
I did this exercise also when I was early in my writing. I would just take a New Yorker article that I really liked, and simply rewrite the entire thing. When you engage in that sort of exercise, you really have a sense of what the composer was thinking when he was plotting out the harmonies. When you do that with a really good piece of writing, whether that’s a New Yorker article, or a really good book, you start having a sense of the choices that the author was making in terms of syntax, in terms of sentence length, in terms of the word choices, and being in a position to make those sorts of choices, I think, is very valuable.
I would like people to go away having not just been entertained or gotten some useful information, but be better people, in however slight a sense. To have an aspiration that web pages could be better, that the Internet could be better: “You too could go out and read stuff! You too could have your thoughts and compile your thoughts into essays, too! You could do all this!”
Gwern and the role he wants to fill. As heard on The Dwarkesh Podcast.
The AI avatar is creepy. For me, audio listen only. Brilliant interview – insightful and inspiring.
Too many adjectives on this post?
Patel, Dwarkesh. “Gwern Branwen – How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI’s Trajectory.” Dwarkesh Podcast (blog), November 13, 2024. https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/gwern-branwen.
The thing you should try to do in your writing is to be grateful for being alive. Just to be suffused with gratitude at what is given you.
– Dana Gioia
A masterclass on tap. Coincidence that two of America’s best writers, The Gioia brothers, are also openly very metaphysical?
Brett McKay: Do you keep a commonplace book?
Roland Allen: Do you know what? Literally two weeks ago, I thought I’m going to have to do this. I started one and what I did was I went and got a little Moleskine address book. I’m holding it in my hand now. You know, the sort which has the tabbed pages.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Roland Allen: Because what I wanted to avoid was having to go through and if I would need to write down the Alphabet and all the head words hundreds of times. So, yeah, so I’ve got those little tab pages down the side and I’ve made a few entries, but really, I should be making more. You’ve reminded me. But like I say, keeping a commonplace book is hard work.
It is hard.
Worth it.
As heard on the latest Art of Manliness podcast: The Power of the Notebook — The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper
McKay, Brett. “Podcast #1057: The Power of the Notebook—The History and Practice of Thinking on Paper.” Art of Manliness, [Date of Publication]. https://www.artofmanliness.com/living/reading/podcast-1057-the-power-of-the-notebook-the-history-and-practice-of-thinking-on-paper/.
What you also need to do is keep working on your judgment. Keep working on your judgment. That means—and this is something you do, but I’m not sure how many writers actually do it as rigorously as they should—that you have to read a lot. There’s no substitute for that. You have to read a lot. You have to read it with a critical mind. When you read a great piece, reverse engineer it. Read it again with that specific eye where you’re looking at the craft.
When you read a piece by someone you like but this particular piece hasn’t worked, do the same thing. Read it with a critical eye. Figure out why didn’t it work this time. What went wrong? Why did it feel off? You have to hone the reader in yourself, which will automatically make your judgment better, which will automatically lift your ability with it because then you’ll have to work that much harder to please the critic in you.
Rajagopalan, Shruti (2023, June 8). The Creator Economy (No. 81) Ideas of India. https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2023/06/08/ideas-of-india-the-creator-economy/
Creative judgement. For those of us without editors, it’s an essential skill to hone.
Listen to Shruti’s interview with Amit in its entirety below:
“I had not before encountered this sort of ambition, unabashed frankly egotistical, communicating it’s excitement, and extorting sympathy.
It was not that he was without the faculty of self-criticism. He could laugh of his dreams of glory and he had an impish fun.”
Unnamed journalist from the Manchester Guardian. The Rest is History podcast episode 241, Young Churchill: Prisoner and Fugitive
That from The Rest is History podcast, with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. The backstory here is young Churchill is traveling on a ship with a journalist from the Manchester Guardian. After spending a few days observing young Winnie this was his brilliant description.
Ambition combined with the ability to laugh at one’s self. Potent mix, that.
Listen to more exquisite Rest of History pods below:
From The Art of Manliness podcast:
The founding fathers had a general physician. His name? Benjamin Rush. The name sounded familiar, but truth is I knew nothing about him. But after an introduction from Brett McKay and Stephen Fried, I wasn’t surprised to learn he kept a commonplace book.
Brett McKay: Even the founding fathers did it. Something that really… You really hit home. And it really impressed me about Rush. Ever since he was a child, very curious, this self-starter, and something that he did that a lot of young upstarts did back in 17th century, 18th century, is he had a common place book and the guy just wrote down everything. How did that mental habit shape him for the rest of his life?
Stephen Fried: He did. And you know, what’s interesting, I found… I had the same question you had, and then I looked into it and I saw that even then there’s apparently a debate about how memory works. Of course, we’re still debating that, and the debate was, do you take notes and that makes you remember, or do you listen and not take notes, and that makes you remember? Most of Rush’s teachers thought you shouldn’t take notes, but Rush took notes. And so, what’s wonderful was after a certain point, we have them. I mean, a lot of things that Rush wrote are gone, I’m still hoping they will bubble up somewhere, but his commonplace books are wonderful. And part of the value of them is, of course, he did it when he was a kid, he did it when he was a student, and then when he was in the Continental Congress, he kept them about what it was like to be in the Continental Congress.
He would write little sketches about what he thought about the people in the Continental Congress, no holds bar. So he just… He wrote a lot, and so we have a lot of it, and we’re missing a lot of it, but everything we have is… What’s really nice about it also is that he wasn’t a formal writer. So he wrote in a style that we would today think of as almost like magazine writing. And it’s part of the reason that he was such an accessible intellectual and such an accessible writer is because, his writing style and of course, his penmanship were really readable, and when you read them today, they seem quite contemporary.
The AOM Podcast #813: The Fascinating Life of America’s Forgotten Founding Father. Brett McKay and Stephen Fried
Listen to the interview in its entirety below:
Floodlights and Goalposts 