Podcaster. Writer. 👋 Hello, I want us to go from simply having conversations, to actively creating better conversations — https://craigconstantine.com/ has more about me, and my ongoing projects.
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Access, for the win
The Whole Earth Catalog — 55 years old, largely inaccessible, suddenly digitized and available again — warms a dark, frozen, disenchanted heart. Epictetus offers the sturdier handle: every event has two, and which one you grab determines everything. And the source of struggle in creative flow turns out to be entirely self-invented — the moment…
I do have some rules
The knife has been useful for a hundred thousand years and will likely be useful a hundred thousand more — which is more than can be said for TikTok. That Lindy Effect framing opens an issue tracking a personal transition from the age of fire (carving, denting, defacing) to the age of water (flowing, shaping,…
Dignity
A one-year-old journal entry arrives like a long-distance conversation with someone insightful, who crafted their phrasing carefully and had something striking to say — and it was clearly you. That experience of past-self writing to future-self threads through an issue that opens with seven rhetorical questions about privacy, dignity, and autonomy, and closes with the…
Derivative
Interoception — that liminal, inner sense between the clearly objective and the fuzzy perception of the body — turns out to be exactly what years of running and jumping and playing had been quietly developing all along. Alongside it: the disquieting realization that succeeding at everything you once dreamed of can still fill you with…
This may figure in
Decades of poor hearing may be the secret to being an amazing listener — because when you can’t rely on your ears, you learn to listen with your whole body, inhaling everything from someone’s eyes to the story told by their hands. Around that unexpected realization: Paul Graham’s recipe for great work, which arrives about…
Moving scenery
Every process has a magic middle step that resists being subdivided — and that tension, when you get it just right, is where the magic actually happens. The issue turns on the Japanese shokunin ethic of honor in the work itself, regardless of recognition, and arrives at a quietly subversive question: what if, rather than…
Work only we can do
Seven years and somewhere around two thousand podcast episodes later, the math still feels impossible — and the real takeaway isn’t the number, it’s cycles: everything flows and ebbs, and the work is finding a way to keep being reminded of that. Mandy Brown frames the reader as your own personal anthology, with you as…
Actively decide
On December 17th, 2023, exactly thirty years to the day after buying it, a perfectly functioning HP-42S calculator gets new batteries — and the label inside the door still has the original date. It’s just a coincidence. Probably. Around it: the flywheel mind that only stops screaming when confronted with hard physical movement, Rilke’s reminder…
Hey, pay attention
The journal is a place to talk to your future self — recording wins, losses, dumb ideas wisely dropped, and how you feel and why — but the true wizardry, it turns out, is in the years-later rereading. For 2024 the touchstone word is humility, chosen precisely because it feels difficult to aspire to, and…
Chop wood, carry water
John von Neumann, barely whispering near the end of his life, said that a machine would have to grow, read, write, speak — and play, like a child — before it could think like a human. That sits alongside John McPhee writing a thousand puns at Time magazine, and a trumpet player’s quiet correction to…