Benjamin Laufer
72 followers · 49 following · 1704 views
on the atlas · 345
- washingtonpost.com: Unabomber Special Report15 savers
- Map–territory relation4 savers
- Answering the ‘Call for a New Aesthetics’ - Fast Company1 savers
- Raising Makers - by Nicole Ruiz and Simon Sarris1 savers
- A Vital Education | The Point Magazine1 savers
- Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon Sarris1 savers
- What's up with Gefilte Fish? - Vera's Rumination Station1 savers
- How can we rejuvenate the social fabric?2 savers
- Things You Learn Dating Cate Hall - by Sasha Chapin52 savers
- Robin Sloan5 savers
- Links · Patrick Collison1 savers
- Leave a Line of Retreat - LessWrong7 savers
- (Y)our creative studio | School3 savers
- Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson70 savers
- Whole Earth Redux | Editor’s Note1 savers
- Mary Douglas1 savers
- Arjun Appadurai, Gastromythology, and the Construction of National Cuisine – GASTROMYTHOLOGY1 savers
- “Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirect1 savers
- Looking at Attention by D. Graham Burnett2 savers
- Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss75 savers
- Text is king - by Adam Mastroianni - Experimental History5 savers
- How DoorDash and Other Food Delivery Apps Are Reshaping Mealtime in the U.S. - The New York Times1 savers
- about – The Marginalian2 savers
- Choose Good Quests - by Trae Stephens and Markie Wagner44 savers
- The Monks in the Casino11 savers
- 50 things I know - by Cate Hall - Useful Fictions2 savers
- Crossing the cringe minefield - by Cate Hall2 savers
- Attention and the Treewalk1 savers
- Everything is Fertile17 savers
- Unpacking Perception - MOLD :: Designing the Future of Food1 savers
- 2025 letter | Dan Wang62 savers
- John Carey, Literary Eminence Who Excoriated Snobbery, Dies at 91 - The New York Times1 savers
- Rilke Pages4 savers
- on reading proust - Nabeel S. Qureshi5 savers
- 2-What-corporations.pdf1 savers
- friendships, play, and love | arielle lok28 savers
- Building tech that's relational, place-based, participatory, and ~weird~1 savers
- Cities and Ambition42 savers
- please don't say things are increasingly happening - by BDM4 savers
- Radical fun - by Ava - bookbear express4 savers
- The paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, I change2 savers
- Agentic fragments - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland2 savers
- Behind Index, a Growing Network of Community Spaces | Are.na Editorial1 savers
- What Is the Third Oikos? - by Nicole Ruiz - The Third Oikos2 savers
- boz.7 savers
- Personal1 savers
- About Craig Mod — Bio and contact information2 savers
- Means and Meaning - Not Boring by Packy McCormick7 savers
- you can just do stuff - alice maz9 savers
- Confront reality (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)6 savers
- musings and rough drafts – unpolished, semi-edited, streams of thought2 savers
- Building a better memory system9 savers
- The Smalltalk Question (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)3 savers
- Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past – The Marginalian4 savers
- What It Means To Be An Intellectual (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)3 savers
- Essays · Gwern.net17 savers
- Why Emotional Excess is Essential to Writing and Creativity – The Marginalian3 savers
- Existential Pessimism vs. Accelerationism: Why Tech Needs a Rational, Humanistic "Third Way"3 savers
- The logic of waking up early8 savers
- Peter Thiel Is Taking a Break From Democracy - The Atlantic7 savers
- Why and how to write things on the Internet | benkuhn.net19 savers
- On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking ‹ Literary Hub3 savers
- What maximum productivity looks like for me3 savers
- Escaping Flatland | Henrik Karlsson | Substack4 savers
- Incomparable Things Said Incomparably Well: Emerson’s Extraordinary Letter of Appreciation to Young Walt Whitman – The Marginalian2 savers
- Tyler’s guide to falling in love with NYC28 savers
- Home | Deep Springs College2 savers
- The People Who Prioritize a Friendship Over Romance - The Atlantic9 savers
- You'd Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don't You?10 savers
- metatechnology and cultures of innovation - by Molly Mielke4 savers
- dillard_weasel3 savers
- Vacant to Vibrant2 savers
- How Food Powers Your Body | The New Yorker4 savers
- https://www.matthewsiu.com4 savers
- TKS alumni have raised over $80M... nuts. - by Navid Nathoo2 savers
- The Last Psychiatrist: How To Create: Motivation for 20102 savers
- FREE-GAME3 savers
- What Did We Learn From Lex Fridman's Book List?5 savers
- FREE GAME PT 2 - by Reggie James4 savers
- (self) concept - by Molly Mielke - Mind Mud9 savers
- mirrors - by Molly Mielke - Milky7 savers
- How To Be Successful96 savers
- Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland94 savers
- Staring into the abyss as a core life skill88 savers
- Theory of Change (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)84 savers
- You and Your Research82 savers
- How to Do Great Work80 savers
- What Should You Do with Your Life? Directions and Advice - Alexey Guzey75 savers
- The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman73 savers
- Advice · Patrick Collison69 savers
- Why books don't work66 savers
- Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born65 savers
- i wish we’d grown up on the same advice - by vincent huang61 savers
- Quit Your Job59 savers
- An Opinionated Guide to ML Research59 savers
- Even if you beat me - The Dublin Review58 savers
- There’s no speed limit57 savers
- Here's to the fools who dream54 savers
- Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People54 savers
- Milan Cvitkovic52 savers
highlights · 1210
as in Newell’s restructuring of the Liberal Education program at the University of Utah.
A Vital Education | The Point Magazine“What makes a place habitable? What does it mean to inhabit it well?”
A Vital Education | The Point Magazineit was “a place to become powerful.”
A Vital Education | The Point MagazineNewell said. Integrated, real-world projects that are beyond one’s skills but not one’s capacity.
A Vital Education | The Point MagazineOne of the more promising offshoots was imported to the States by the Danish teacher Soren A. Mathiasen, who started what he called a “people’s college” in the Poconos in 1923. Mathiasen’s school did not shy away from the full meaning of folk: cooperative living, a broad liberal arts curriculum, the discussion of the immediate social and economic problems the students faced. By the beginning of the 1930s Mathiasen had attracted the veritable who’s who of educators, including John Dewey and W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote, “I am tremendously interested in the story of the Peoples’ College as you ou…
A Vital Education | The Point MagazineGrundtvig’s idea was to restore the connection between education and everyday life, to cultivate a love of learning among the masses that would instill pride in themselves and their native communities, and in so doing lay the foundation for a flourishing social democracy
A Vital Education | The Point Magazinesaw self-formation as an aim rather than a byproduct
A Vital Education | The Point MagazineFor Nunn, education should bring us into contact with what is real about ourselves and humanity broadly: the labor required to sustain life, the creative work that makes the world durable and the political action required to effect change in the world.
A Vital Education | The Point MagazineThe consequences of missing an irrigation shift or blowing off a reading are real and immediate
A Vital Education | The Point MagazineThe stakes of running a microcollege have always been high; it’s because of those stakes that the work has meaning.
A Vital Education | The Point MagazineBut we didn’t have a shared project, or even much of a shared sense of reality. I, like everyone else, had my small vehicle of interests, career goals and stories about myself. My responsibilities were only to Yale and to myself
A Vital Education | The Point MagazineSimon: If you want to do something, you should try to shorten the path between thinking about it and acting on it. You might think, “It would be so cool if I did hand pottery.” If you do, you should search for a class immediately, click sign up, and spend the money — before you’re even sure you can make it that week. You must make an effort to make the rest of your life route around your real desires. A lot of problems in life seem to come from a thin film of inertia spread over everything. But you can pierce it.
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon SarrisFinding a spouse is a subset of finding and being found, and you should try to think hard about how, exactly, you can be found. And if someone discovers you, if they’d like what they found.
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon SarrisAll of my advice really boils down to a wish to get people to take their own lives a little more seriously.
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon SarrisThere’s definitely downsides to learning that way. If you want to learn about something specific, it’s much better if you go to Wikipedia, click through to a lot of other pages, and learn a lot of other adjacent stuff that you would never have known if you’d just been given an answer. There’s a massive benefit to the people who don’t reach for LLMs, but read around the problem. Maybe you thought something was Art Deco, but really it’s Eastlake. If you asked an LLM only about Art Deco, and never searched the web normally for pictures of what you were looking at, you might never come across the …
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon SarrisBooks are no substitute for YouTube, where a guy down on his hands and knees is showing you, “This is how you finish the floor. This is how you set a nail if it pops up.” You can become a pro-amateur at anything now, compared to when our parents were young.
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon SarrisTechnology like Pinterest or Instagram can help but they can also get you stuck into repetitive feedback loops. You have to use such technology very carefully so that you keep exploring, and it doesn’t start shaping and steering you. I worry about this with people and LLMs.
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon SarrisSimi and I know a family nearby that we’re very fond of, with children our children’s ages. If they lived in town, we would see them probably every single day. But they’re far enough that we have to organize it, which is too bad.
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon SarrisThere’s something very powerful about realizing you can be agentic both in your paid work life as well as in your home and community.
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon Sarrisbeautiful homes, a beautiful walkable community, and also a collective culture that everyone feels invested in. That part is very difficult to engineer. Simon: Even here, everyone would love it if there were a beautiful café in town that served beautiful food and excellent coffee, and there’s not one. If someone could make it, that would be great. The auto garage is actually up for sale right now, and I passively dream of converting it into a cafe – though in reality I’m overloaded with projects – because it’s very romantic to be able to give that to a town. But it doesn’t happen. People see s…
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon SarrisIt’s hard to build something beautiful unless you want to buy the 200 acres and plan it out from scratch, and most people are unwilling to do that. The California Forever people or the Esmeralda people might succeed. The American Housing Corporation will probably succeed in making beautiful housing, but I assume it will be here and there — a nice house or set of houses — not the same thing as a village.
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon SarrisNew houses assume you’re going to turn the lights on from 8am onwards. We want to have them off as much as possible, and when it’s time to turn them on, we want them to be very low. It was very hard to find anything that was not old that respected light.
Can The Internet Enable a More Hands On Life? With Simon SarrisOne of Lennart’s catchphrases is that it is mandatory to make mistakes. Th
How can we rejuvenate the social fabric?The employees, whom he refers to as “co-creators,” are given a lot of leeway and responsibility, and are expected to do stuff they have no idea how to do
How can we rejuvenate the social fabric?self-organized study groups (in 1970, 10 percent of Sweden’s population were active members of at least one such group!) and community centers known as Folkets Hus
How can we rejuvenate the social fabric?ociety, from the bottom up, can rejuvenate itself culturally and morally
How can we rejuvenate the social fabric?plus a bunch of informal WhatsApp groups where people coordinate to come at the same time to play ping pong or where neighbors in the same apartment house coordinate to eat dinner together
How can we rejuvenate the social fabric?they say no to central heating, for instance, because they want the family to gather around the fireplace rather than to disperse into separate rooms.
How can we rejuvenate the social fabric?The sum of these and other decisions is a feeling that this is a place where it is ok to strike up conversations with strangers and build bonds with your neighbors.
How can we rejuvenate the social fabric?a vision for technology at the scale of individuals, communities, and ecosystems.
Whole Earth Redux | Editor’s Note“Rather than do the usual succession of things we prefer to cease supply, let demand create its new sources.”
Whole Earth Redux | Editor’s NoteCatalog, which represents a comparatively small part of Whole Earth’s history. CoEvolution Quarterly, Whole Earth Software Review, Whole Earth Review, Whole Earth Magazine, and a host of special publications
Whole Earth Redux | Editor’s Noteit argued that technology could be personal, living could be communal, and information could be free.
Whole Earth Redux | Editor’s NoteDouglas introduced the interrelated concepts of "group" (how clearly defined an individual's social position is as inside or outside a bounded social group) and "grid" (how clearly defined an individual's social role is within networks of social privileges, claims and obligations).[25] The group-grid pattern was to be refined and redeployed in laying the foundations of Cultural Theory.
Mary Douglasfood is not merely sustenance but a semiotic system—a mode of communication that shapes national consciousness
Arjun Appadurai, Gastromythology, and the Construction of National Cuisine – GASTROMYTHOLOGYArup K. Chatterjee’s notion of gastromythology, a concept that examines how culinary myths create, sustain, and manipulate cultural identities.
Arjun Appadurai, Gastromythology, and the Construction of National Cuisine – GASTROMYTHOLOGYculinary narratives shape national identity.
Arjun Appadurai, Gastromythology, and the Construction of National Cuisine – GASTROMYTHOLOGYAs Alan Warde reminds, eating practices are mostly made in an intimate context, and therefore subject to a low regulation and coordination
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirecthe practice of fermentation appeared to have a structuring effect on connected practices
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectThe practice of fermentation itself is embedded in a larger network of other practices, and can be considered, like cooking, as a compound practice
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectbecause you need to keep an eye on what you do when you ferment
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectThe communities of fermenters on Facebook were also cited: “[…] So we joined this group and when I made the first batch of cucumbers and it didn't work because it was mold on top. So, I asked the group what did I do wrong, because it was my first time and obviously I did something wrong
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectbut also adds a symbolic value to the food.
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectYeah, like I said the yogurt I give it to my friends. And the water kefir I give it to my mother
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectAnd then the variety itself is a good thing. Of course, it's not completely safe because you always, you have to be very careful, you know, and attentive to the process, you know, see what's going on. Does it taste, does it smell bad? Does something happen, etc.
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectIt might be that, by incorporating live microbes, one symbolically incorporates life
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectthree key components of practices: meaning, material, and competences.
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectWe also consider that food practices are embedded into routines that are related to other aspect of the social life of individuals.
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectIn addition, microbes can be perceived as allies of health, but also as enemies, as discussed by Paxson (2008), introducing ‘Pasteurian paradigm’ (where the aim is to fight microbes) and ‘post-Pasteurian paradigm’ (where the aim is to make microbes the allies of health).
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirectCultural appropriateness, defined by House et al., 2023 as “the qualification of particular foods as appropriate to eat, in a particular manner, in a particular context” should also be taken into account. The socio-cultural acceptability of fermented foods as such has been, to our knowledge, poorly studied.
“Fermenting is not about the cooking”. The social practice of fermenting foods at home. - ScienceDirect