flâneur

Anita Ilango

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on the atlas — 14

highlights — 22

  • One of the best parts of my job as CEO of Figma is playing anthropologist. Over the past five years, I’ve seen firsthand how working in a collaborative digital space moves teams from a mindset of “my ideas” to “our ideas.” This requires a radical shift — a level of trust and transparency that many of us are still catching up to. In many ways, design is deeply personal, and opening up that work to others to build on and remix can feel like opening up a part of yourself. But that’s why this change is so important.
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  • In Understanding Media Marshall McLuhan writes about how “all technologies are extensions of our physical and nervous systems.” But at its best, Figma is much more than a digital extension of our physical self—it’s an invitation to leave ego at the door and create shared consciousness with others. It’s an opportunity to embrace the messy bits of creativity, to celebrate failure and bring more people into the process along the way.
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  • Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.
    Solitude | Walden
  • Leave a comment on paragraph 1223I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers. A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will. Solitude is not measured by the miles of space that intervene between a man and his fellows. The really diligent student in one of the crowded hives of Cambridge College is as …
    Solitude | Walden
  • I was talking recently about whether Oprah’s book club was beneficial and someone pointed out that those of us who are writers and academics are accustomed to a world where we have someone else to talk to about what we read. But for most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don’t have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the p…
    "There's No Place to Go But Up" - bell hooks and Maya Angelou in conversation - Lion's Roar
  • I think that sometimes we become lethargic out of fear. It’s not really laziness so much as it is timidity. We’d rather bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of, when in truth the place where one is standing may be untenable, it may be dangerous, it may be stultifying, and it’s better to just step on.
    "There's No Place to Go But Up" - bell hooks and Maya Angelou in conversation - Lion's Roar
  • I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer. I think the worst thing that can happen to us is to lose sight of the power of empathy and compassion.
    "There's No Place to Go But Up" - bell hooks and Maya Angelou in conversation - Lion's Roar
  • Melvin McLeod: It strikes me you are suggesting that reading is a more powerful way to develop empathy with people of different races or classes or times than even our normal day to day relationships. bell hooks: Well, this is so because reading requires that you have to use your imagination. When I’m reading Wuthering Heights I have to imagine what Heathcliff looks like, I have to imagine what Katherine is like. I have to imagine and so my mind has to be working.
    "There's No Place to Go But Up" - bell hooks and Maya Angelou in conversation - Lion's Roar
  • For me, one of those is where you’re talking about the need for solitude and the need to stay away from company that betrays you, that corrupts you, and you have that wonderful line, “It’s never lonesome in Babylon.” I read this line to so many people, and I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.
    "There's No Place to Go But Up" - bell hooks and Maya Angelou in conversation - Lion's Roar
  • I will tell the truth. I may not tell the facts; facts can obscure the truth. You can tell so many facts you never get to the truth. Margaret Walker says you can talk about the places where, the people who, the times when, the methods how, the reasons why, and never get to the truth.
    "There's No Place to Go But Up" - bell hooks and Maya Angelou in conversation - Lion's Roar
  • The reason for saying we need to do ‘an exceptional, near-perfect job of execution’ is this: When you want something really bad, you will put up with a lot of flaws. But if you do not yet know you want something, your tolerance will be much lower.
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • What we are selling is not the software product — the set of all the features, in their specific implementation — because there are just not many buyers for this software product. (People buy “software” to address a need they already know they have or perform some specific task they need to perform, whether that is tracking sales contacts or editing video.)
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • In the best case, there is a dialectic at play here: the product itself and the way people use it should suggest new ways of articulating the value — and refinements to how we communicate the value should lead to principles which clarify decision-making around product features and design
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • Just as much as our job is to build something genuinely useful, something which really does make people’s working lives simpler, more pleasant and more productive, our job is also to understand what people think they want and then translate the value of Slack into their terms.
    We Don’t Sell Saddles Here. The memo below was sent to the team at… | by Stewart Butterfield | Medium
  • To write in a real voice, an alive voice, I have to trust my own eyes, what I see before I start to think. Of course my observations will be flawed—all individual perspectives are partial and distorted—but the only way I can gain autonomy is to write from my incomplete point of view. Put like that, autonomy comes from trust in the self, in subjective vision. It’s a rejection that the answer lies in any narrative framework. I find that when I write from life and not theory, I am most able create something that feels unpolluted by all the ideas I’ve consumed, all the things I endlessly regurgita…
    writing as autonomy - by Ava - bookbear express
  • It seemed to be that the people who were writing books for children and young adults actually did think life was special: they didn’t treat it like an endless chore they had to trudge through. They were paying attention to the good things and the bad things, the elation and the disappointment and the injustice and the humiliation of growing up, and transforming it into a story. They were practicing alchemy. I wanted to do the same.
    specialness - by Ava - bookbear express
  • p.s. “If you can't explain it to a 6-year-old, you don't understand it yourself.” — Another small disagreement, more implicit. You shouldn’t be so concerned about whether or not you understand something before you try to explain and share. Some things can only grow in the light of others.
    Long Distance Thinking - by Simon Sarris
  • We believe the delineation between process and result, or between published and not published, is artificial—we see this relationship instead as a smooth gradient.
    The founders of Are.na talk about the history of their online platform - Artforum International
  • To keep it specific, I’ll call the storytelling version of strategic intuition narrative intuition. Harmon appreciates, possesses, and values narrative intuition in spades, and it shows in his attention to the choice of stories to tell over the details of how to tell them. McKee dimly senses the existence of such a thing, but heads off in exactly the wrong direction in search of it, and ends up venerating and fetishizing craft instead. His ends up, therefore, at an essentially Straussian posture — a scholar of Great Storytellers, but not of Greatness in Storytelling
    Storytelling — Harmon vs. McKee
  • To travel the world visiting everywhere only once can hardly bring understanding. You must return several times before a place opens up to you. Returning to the same place brings a new set of emotions, and eventually, some familiarity. So it is with many many other things. More than I think we realize at first
    Familiarity and Belonging - by Simon Sarris
  • What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of information that he can draw back on now for more than 70 years worth of data.
    Curius / Onboarding