Two fascinating articles show quite different sides to Japan:
Deciphering the Hashihara Castle Town Map: The Imaginary Town of MOTOORI Norinaga
#CorporateCulture #JapaneseHistory #LongReads
Watched: Resurrection 🍿
An amazing experience. More fragmented than Bi Gan’s previous movies, but easily as engaging. There were many nods to cinema history, and an article by Xinyuan Wang helped. Essential viewing, and not just for the virtuoso 30-minute-long single shot near the end.
Some books on writing:
Hidalgo, César A. 2025. Infinite Alphabet: and The Laws Of Knowledge. Allen lane.
Fletcher, Angus. 2022. WonderWorks: Literary Invention and the Science of Stories. London: Swift Press.
Smith, Emma. 2023. Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers. Penguin Books.
The expert’s trap is where you start thinking of yourself as having gone beyond the need to learn anything new.
What did the legendary Zen maverick Ikkyū Sōjun teach about overcoming the expert’s trap? Find out in The Paradox of Mastery.
#ShuHaRi #Learning #Buddhism #ContinuousLearning #Japan
The Paradox of Mastery: Why the Expert Must Remain a Beginner
A Zen Buddhist master hands his successor a formal certificate of mastery. The successor burns it. Why?
No, it’s not a Zen koan but it almost could be.
The name for such a certificate in Japanese is inka. This word might be translated as a ‘seal of approval’, but it’s hardly that straightforward.
In the original transcripts of Shunryu Suzuki’s teachings, the foundation for his influential book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”, he describes the inka as both profound and vacuous at the same time.
The inka, this formal paper, might represent decades of practice, but it also subtly indicates the need to abandon the very idea of mastery. If you’re an intellectual hunting for a hidden formula, the paper might appear to you as a riddle to be solved. But to the practitioner who inhabits “beginner’s mind” (shoshin), there’s no clever secret to be interpreted, it’s just a transparent occasion for a sincere “Thank you.”
Westerners might be tempted or conditioned to treat the inka like a diploma. Is it proof you’ve arrived? Is it a trophy? Or is it a kind of finish line? In fact, the moment you view the paper as a “result” like this, you’ve fallen into the expert’s trap.
💬 “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot. For the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” — Marshall McLuhan
Whether you’re interested in making your own containers for ‘content’ or in challenging the whole paradigm, the key is to create new ways of being human.
Read more: What’s the future of creative work without human intent?
#AmWriting #Creativity #Fediblog #MediaTheory
Memory isn’t a static recording but a constant act of reconstruction. Every time we revisit a note or a book, we are weaving together the original content with our current environment and past self.
“We construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them.”
So how do we decide what’s worth preserving and what we must allow ourselves to forget? Explore the “differential allocation of attentional resources” in this look at the fallibility of memory.
Link: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#CognitiveScience #Philosophy #Memory
Is note-making an “aide memoire” or a replacement for the source? To distill a book into notes on it, is to change our relationship with the original text. Beyond just storing facts we are building a library of our own interpretations. There’s a friction between preservation and occlusion in our digital workflows.
“When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it.”
Read more: writingslowly.com/2026/05/1…
#Zettelkasten #PKM #NoteMaking
There’s a unique magic in the physical bookshelf. It acts as a spatial memory palace where a spine or a colour can trigger a flood of recollection. ‘Remembering What you Read’ looks at why reorganising a library feels like reorganising a mind, and what it really means to be “well-read” in this time of digital summaries and ephemeral content.
“The book shelves are a kind of ‘memory palace’ for the books themselves. In fact this realisation is quite important to me.”
#Bookstodon #HomeLibrary #ReadingLife