Wisdom Of Isabel Allende

You need your space, and that ‘room of one’s own,’ as Virginia Woolf put it. That room is also your time, your space, your silence—that has to be sacred. I need to close the door to my office when I finish for the day, and no one should get in. I have the idea in my mind that the story is an entity that lives in that room, with the characters, the emotions that I have been putting together. And when I come back the next day, I open the door; it’s waiting for me, intact. I don’t want anybody to go in and vacuum, or use my computer. That would kill me if somebody used my computer!

When I finally close the computer for the day, I look at my desk and put things in piles, and I usually have a candle on, because for me the candle reminds me that I am in the process of writing—not because there’s anything magic about it. And then I blow out my candle—that ends the day. And I look around to see that everything is organized, and I leave. I’m incredibly organized, because that’s part of my structure. When I walk into my office, it looks like a lab. It’s impeccable. And when I leave, it’s impeccable. I never leave a messed-up place, because when I come back, if everything is disorganized, I feel the story isn’t there for me.

Writing is pretty much like training for sports. You train and train and train to be able to play the game. And nobody cares how much you’ve trained. Nobody cares about the effort. What matters is the performance at the end, the result. Sometimes I research a whole book for one sentence, but that’s part of the job, part of the training, so that the performance will be impeccable. Nothing comes out of thin air. But once I have my hands on the keyboard, and I start creating, then things start to happen immediately, almost immediately. But I need to get to that point. I spend hours and hours alone and in silence. Without the silence and the structure, I wouldn’t be able to do it.

- David Epstein Interview with Isabel Allende

The Ideology, Economics, & Psychology Behind The Modern World's Draining Of Color From Homes, Cars, & Everyday Objects.

If you go to slums of Bombay to Brazil to Mexico to Kenya, you will notice a riot of colors. Yes, there is crime there, most people who live on day to day paycheck are content and happy. 

Color helps psychologically! It’s “Biophilia" of living in a rainforest - its one of the least studied simple psychological boosters. 

Max’s home is a riot of colors - living room is yellow, basement is pink, bed rooms are other colors - no no to neutral colors. I learned this a long time ago and even my dress has a variety of colors. 

I noticed something weird maybe a year or two ago, 5 plus years since Max passed away - a lot of my new t-shirts etc., were greyish… so I cleaned up my wardrobe and brought back color to my life. I was subconsciously depressed without Max. 

Color is the simplest and easiest confidence and psychological booster we have but alas we, sapiens even tend to ignore it. 

Very good history of why this transformation of color to grey happened in US and spread to across the globe: 

From Hawaii to Maine, from Alaska to Florida, the most popular shade for your home’s exterior is some variation of gray, off-white, beige, or greige — a hue so existentially undecided that it can’t commit to being either gray or beige, and so ends up neither, and both.

But how can this be? America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Americans need a tin of house paint, do they so often reach for the neutral shelf? Why does the average house in this great and varied nation look like it’s been dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®?

The answer is a phenomenon dubbed “the grayening”: a gradual but relentless draining of pigment, not just from exteriors but also from interiors and from the stuff of everyday life, like cars and phones. In 2020, researchers at the Science Museum Group in London found evidence of the trend’s longevity. Feeding roughly 7,000 photographs of everyday objects — kettles, lamps, cameras — from the late 1800s to 2020 into an algorithm, they then asked it to track color distribution over time.

The result: a striking shift toward achromatic — that is, neutral — colors in material culture.

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In his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” Austrian architect Adolf Loos argued that ornamentation was not merely unnecessary, but a sign of arrested moral development. Truly evolved people, he suggested, would gravitate toward clean lines and plain surfaces. Applied ornament, including the use of color as decoration, didn’t enhance; it cluttered and distracted.

Loos’s polemical target was Art Nouveau, then in full frothy bloom. His arguments were influential on the Bauhaus school of art, which canonized restraint and straight lines. It, in turn, informed the International Style that swept global architecture from the 1930s onward, a style that favored glass, steel, and concrete. All gray: not just by default, but as a statement of seriousness.

Le Corbusier, pioneer of what we now simply call modern architecture, made the point with characteristic charm, declaring that color “is suited to simple races, peasants and savages.” Ouch.

The desaturation didn’t stop at buildings. Car colors have been meticulously catalogued since the dawn of the automotive age, making them a useful proxy for the broader culture’s chromatic pulse. Black had its first heyday as a car color about a century ago, when Henry Ford famously quipped that his Model T was available “in any color the customer wants, as long as it’s black.”

How Not To Save The Planet

Wendell Berry, one of the few remaining writers in the older topophilic tradition, understands this better than anyone. In 1991, he wrote an essay for the Atlantic—a magazine for which Thoreau had written—in response to the then-common slogan “Think globally, act locally”:

Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people.

Global thinking is, for Berry, intrinsically and necessarily destructive of actual places:

Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place…. If we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe, we must do so by imagination, charity, and forbearance, and by making local life as independent and self-sufficient as we can—not by the presumptuous abstractions of “global thought.”

I would add to this that when global thought is not actively destructive it nevertheless tends to encourage depression in those who attempt it—which accounts, I think, for the gloomy and finger-wagging tone to which we have become accustomed.

[---]

This, I think, is an object lesson for those who wish to save the planet. If you would save the planet, forget The Planet; if you would sustain and repair nature, forget Nature. Remember the example of Gilbert White. Think only of the sensual properties of one dear place. If you learn to love a pond or a creek or a valley, then what you love others will love—and will perhaps also come to find some element of their own local environment dear to them, dear enough to conserve and protect. Our obligations arise from our deepest affections. You just have to show them how.

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Urban Evolution

The water flea Daphnia magna — a freshwater crustacean up to a few millimeters in size — is one species busy evolving in cities in response to heat, pollution and even local predators. These zooplankton can prevent algal blooms that overload ponds with toxic cyanobacteria, so this adaptation may have a big effect on freshwater ecosystems, says Kristien Brans, an evolutionary ecologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, who studies the water fleas.

One basic challenge in such urban investigations is to distinguish between two modes of response to altered environments: evolution (genetic alterations that appear across generations) and phenotypic plasticity (the flexibility to alter physical and/or behavioral characteristics in an organism’s lifetime).

For water fleas, it turns out that both are at play. Fleas raised in lab experiments at temperatures matching urban ponds are smaller, and mature and reproduce more quickly, than fleas reared at rural pond temperatures that tend to be several degrees cooler. (That’s phenotypic plasticity — no genetic changes have occurred.) But over time, urban water fleas living generation after generation in warmer, urban pond waters have genetically changed to have those same kinds of alterations. (That’s evolution.)

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GLUE took white clover’s cyanide production as a model to study three questions. Do instances of urbanization in different cities lead to similar local environments? Do those similar environments lead the clover to evolve along the same lines — display parallel evolution — in a trait of interest (in this case, cyanide production)? And if so, what environmental factors are driving the pattern?

In a new Science paper, the collaborators showed that urban environments do indeed end up quite similar to each other, with less vegetation, more impervious surfaces and higher summer temperatures than their outlying rural areas. (In fact, downtowns of cities such as Beijing and Boston are more similar to each other in such factors than they are to their rural areas, Johnson comments.) Analyzing more than 110,000 clover plants from 160 cities in 26 countries, the GLUE investigators also demonstrated a strong link between urbanization and clover cyanide production. And after sequencing more than 2,000 clover genomes and analyzing the urban-rural differences, the researchers showed that natural selection truly is at work.

[---]

Unfortunately, the genetic biodiversity that can fuel adaptation often dwindles in urban areas. A genetic survey by Chloé Schmidt working in Garroway’s lab, for example, found this to be the case, along with lower population sizes, for North American mammals living in more disturbed environments. That’s a concern during a period when so many populations of animals and plants are seeing their natural habitats degraded or simply destroyed.

Scientists don’t take urban environments as precise models for the impacts of climate change. But they say such studies will provide important clues to how creatures may respond to dwindling access to water and food, and exposure to pollution, heat, drought and other dangers.

“We’re in the Anthropocene, and we don’t understand how we’re changing the environment on every level, from greenhouse gas emissions to changing the evolution of life around us,” Johnson says. “People realize this research is part of the solution.”

- More Here

Aristotle & His “Not Even Wrong” Ideas

Unbelievable bullshit people like Aristotle made the shit up without any epistemic humility but the real issue, these folks are still respected. People like Norman Borlaug, Robert Trivers names nor their works are known to anyone. Well, god bless my species. 

In the 4th century BCE, the philosopher Aristotle had two theories about this. He postulated that they hibernated during the winter as other animals did. Swallows, for example, encased themselves in little balls of clay and sank out of sight to the bottom of swamps. His other idea was that the missing species transformed themselves into the birds that did stick around for the winter, and changed back when summer came.

The little old man in de Bergerac’s tale was an imagined Spanish soldier called Domingo Gonsales, and he was the hero of another story. In 1638, just a couple of decades before Cyrano’s “A Voyage to the Moon” became available, the English cleric Francis Godwin published “The Man in the Moone,” a fictional account of Gonsales’ lunar adventure. In the book, Gonsales trained 25 swans to pull an ‘engine’ he had made. One day, he took a jaunt in his swan carriage which happened to coincide with the time birds were accustomed to disappear, as it seemed, from Earth.

Gonsales was about to find out the answer to the mystery. To his surprise, the swans flew upwards, until they reached what we would think of as orbit and became weightless. French scientist Blaise Pascal’s experiments demonstrating the lack of atmosphere in space had not yet filtered through to Godwin, as both birds and man breathed as usual. In 12 days they reached the Moon, where he found other migrating terrestrial birds, such as swallows, nightingales, and woodcocks. When the swans started to show signs of agitation, he divined that they were ready to return to Earth; and so he harnessed them again and sailed home in nine days, gravitational pull on his side.

This was a ripping yarn for sure, but some thought it was a plausible alternative to Aristotle’s theories, especially as there was a Biblical passage that seemed to allude to it. In the King James translation, it goes:

Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming (Jeremiah 8:7).

Meta Value - 47

In unexpected moments in life, an insight, an epiphany, a beautiful question, or an answer pops out of nowhere. 

I have forgotten a lot of them because of the sheer arrogance of my ability to remember. 

Work in progress: I try to jot them down immediately since some of these can be life altering moments. 

On Steve Jobs

“Having been in Silicon Valley for 50 years, I’m an expert in assholes, okay?” says Guy Kawasaki, Apple’s early developer evangelist. “And 99.9 percent of assholes are egocentric assholes. But Steve is one of the very rare mission-driven assholes. He was driven by a mission to make the greatest computer by the greatest company. And if you got in the way of that, he would run you over. He would run you over, back up, and run you over again.”

[——]

No executive, before or since, has incorporated comedy so memorably into product presentations. When, in 2002, Jobs wanted to cajole an auditorium full of software companies to rewrite their programs for Apple’s new Mac OS X operating system, he staged a full onstage funeral for the outgoing Mac OS 9, complete with a live organist, a eulogy he read himself, and a casket occupied by a four-foot–tall Mac OS 9 box.

[—]

If you encountered Jobs in only one context, you were like one of the blind men in the parable of the elephant. You’d have to have known him for years to see the whole man, and even then you might get a picture that felt fractured or incomplete.

“He was a man of contradictions,” Hertzfeld says. “Almost any adjective you could think of could apply to him at different times.”

- More Here

The Irony Of American Righteousness - Reinhold Niebuhr

Reinhold Niebuhr was born in 1892 in Wright City, Missouri. After studying at Yale Divinity School, he began his pastoral work in Detroit in 1915, where he spent thirteen years witnessing the harsh realities of industrial capitalism. Beneath the shadow of Henry Ford’s factories, Niebuhr saw workers exploited and discarded. These experiences shaped his entire theological outlook and dispelled the optimistic Social Gospel theology in which he had been trained.

[---]

At the core of Niebuhr’s ideas is a paradox: human beings can strive for justice but are also prone to injustice. In his 1944 key work The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, Niebuhr provided what might be the most insightful one-sentence defense of democracy ever written: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

His 1932 book *Moral Man and Immoral Society* made a key distinction: individuals can sometimes go beyond self-interest through love and reason, but groups almost never do. Collectives like nations, corporations, or movements tend to combine individual selfishness into a “collective egoism” that is far more resistant to moral constraints than any person’s conscience. This idea became his main theme: the danger of self-righteousness. “Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people,” he warned, “but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.”

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Later, Niebuhr used his theological ideas to analyze American identity. He argued that the United States had developed an “innocent self-image” that made it blind to its own moral faults. America thought it was immune to the corruptions affecting other great powers.

The irony of American history, Niebuhr argued, is that the nation’s virtues turn into its vices. The work ethic that built prosperity becomes worship of money. The faith that held communities together turns into theocratic pretension. The confidence that led to victories in war gives rise to imperial hubris. “No laughter from heaven,” he wrote, “could possibly penetrate through the liturgy of moral self-appreciation.” When political rallies resemble worship services and when a partisan victory is declared to be divine approval, we have entered territory that Niebuhr mapped decades ago.

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Niebuhr famously defined democracy as “a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems.” This straightforward formulation offers both warning and hope. The warning: human problems are never permanently resolved. The hope: even without final solutions, we can develop workable arrangements that balance competing interests and limit concentrated power. 

What would Niebuhr advise for our current times? First, humility truly involves recognizing that we are limited, flawed, and self-deceived. Second, engaging without self-righteousness means making difficult choices among imperfect options while acknowledging that choosing involves us in the complexities of power. Third, a revival of irony, not cynical detachment, but the ability to see tragedy in victory and grace in defeat. Finally, forgiveness: “the recognition that our actions and attitudes are inevitably seen in a different light by friends and foes than we see them.”

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The Many Roots Of Our Suffering - Reflections )n Robert Trivers (1943–2026)

In March 2026, three prominent thinkers died within a day of each other. Lavish obituaries immediately marked the deaths of the always-wrong environmentalist Paul Ehrlich and the often-obscure political philosopher Jürgen Habermas. But two weeks after the death of Robert Trivers, one of the greatest evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin, not a single major news source has noticed his passing. This despite Trivers’s singular accomplishment of showing how the endlessly fascinating complexities of human relations are grounded in the wellsprings of complex life. And despite the fact that the man’s life was itself an object of fascination. Trivers was no ordinary academic. He was privileged in upbringing but louche in lifestyle, personally endearing but at times obstreperous and irresponsible, otherworldly brilliant but forehead-slappingly foolish. 

Trivers’s contributions belong in the special category of ideas that are obvious once they are explained, yet eluded great minds for ages; simple enough to be stated in a few words, yet with implications that have busied scientists for decades. In an astonishing creative burst from 1971 to 1975, Trivers wrote five seminal essays that invoked patterns of genetic overlap to explain each of the major human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, partner with partner, and a person with himself or herself. 

The fallout for science was vast. The fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, behavioural ecology, and Darwinian social science are largely projects that test Trivers’s hypotheses. The ideas took pride of place in E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology in 1975, Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene in 1976, and many other bestsellers in the next three decades such as Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal (1994) and my own How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002). In 2007 the ideas earned Trivers the Crafoord Prize, the equivalent of a Nobel for fields not recognised by Nobels.

[—]

In another landmark, Trivers turned to relations among people who are not bound by blood. No one doubts that humans, more than any other species, make sacrifices for nonrelatives. But Trivers recoiled from the romantic notion that people are by nature indiscriminately communal and generous. It’s not true to life, nor is it expected: in evolution as in baseball, nice guys finish last. Instead, he noted, nature provides opportunities for a more discerning form of altruism in the positive-sum exchange of benefits. One animal can help another by grooming, feeding, protecting, or backing him, and is helped in turn when the needs reverse. Everybody wins. 

Trivers called it reciprocal altruism, and noted that it can evolve only in a narrow envelope of circumstances. That is because it is vulnerable to cheaters who accept favours without returning them. The altruistic parties must recognise each other, interact repeatedly, be in a position to confer a large benefit on others at a small cost to themselves, keep a memory for favours offered or denied, and be impelled to reciprocate accordingly. Reciprocal altruism can evolve because cooperators do better than hermits or misanthropes. They enjoy the gains of trading surpluses of food, pulling ticks out of one another’s hair, saving each other from drowning or starvation, and babysitting each other’s children. Reciprocators can also do better over the long run than the cheaters who take favours without returning them, because the reciprocators will come to recognise the cheaters and shun or punish them. 

All this was quickly snapped up by game theorists, economists, and political scientists. But in a less-noticed passage, Trivers pointed out its implications for psychology. Reciprocal altruists must be equipped with cognitive faculties to recognise and remember individuals and what they have done. That helps explain why the most social species is also the smartest one; human intelligence evolved to deal with people, not just predators and tools. They also must be equipped with moral emotions that implement the tit-for-tat strategy necessary to stabilise cooperation. Sympathy and trust prompt people to extend the first favour. Gratitude and loyalty prompt them to repay favours. Guilt and shame deter them from hurting or failing to repay others. Anger and contempt prompt them to avoid or punish cheaters. 

And in a passage that even fewer readers noticed, Trivers anticipated a major phenomenon later studied in the guise of “partner choice.” Though it pays both sides in a reciprocal partnership to trade favours as long as each one gains more than he loses, people differ in how much advantage they’ll try to squeeze out of an exchange while leaving it just profitable enough for the partner that he won’t walk away. That’s why not everyone evolves into a rapacious scalper: potential partners can shun them, preferring to deal with someone who offers more generous terms.

[—]

And since humans are language users—indeed, reciprocity may be a big reason language evolved—any tendency of an individual to reciprocate or cheat, lavish or stint, does not have to be witnessed firsthand but can be passed through the grapevine. This leads to an interest in the reputation of others, and a concern with one’s own reputation. 

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But Trivers rapidly spotted what everyone else missed, and still misses, together with the less biologically obvious concept of self-deception, so there must be another piece to the puzzle. During his junior year at Harvard, Trivers suffered two weeks of mania and then a breakdown that hospitalised him for two months. Bipolar disorder afflicted him throughout his life. I can’t help but wonder whether Trivers’s fecund period was driven by episodes of hypomania, when ideas surge and insights suddenly emerge through clouds of bafflement. Gamers sometimes “overclock” their computers, running the CPU at a higher speed than the rated limit, which boosts performance but risks instability and crashes. Did Trivers experience bursts of overclocking in the early 1970s? It would explain another fact about the man that was obvious to anyone who met him later: Trivers reeked of marijuana. His heavy use may have had a source other than his Jamaicaphilia. One wonders whether Trivers was self-medicating, with long-term costs to his clock speed. 

- Steven Pinker

Frank Lloyd Wright As A Mirror Of The American Condition

The fixation on Wright’s paradoxes obscures a deeper contradiction embedded in the culture that produced him. Namely, that the United States has always been ambivalent about the individual: we valorise self-reliance but distrust those who stand too far apart; we celebrate democratic ideals but are uneasy with idiosyncrasy; we admire originality while punishing the disorder it brings. Wright lived squarely inside that tension. He took seriously the idea that one could make a life and a world from first principles – an act of courage in the best light. Hubris in the worst.

Seen through that lens, Wright becomes less an outlier than a mirror. His contradictions, less personal failings than reflections of the American condition. Our yearning for freedom is matched by our fear of its consequences; our desire for order by our suspicion of conformity; our reverence for the natural world by our relentless reshaping of it. Wright’s work endures because it speaks to these tensions with a force that resists resolution. If we judge him only by his wounds or only by his wonders, we see only half the man – and half the nation that shaped him. The truth, harder and more interesting, is that both are inseparable. His greatness is entangled with his flaws, his vision inseparable from his unruly humanity. To reduce him to saint or sinner is to miss what is most alive in his work: a belief that the individual, in all their contradictions, is still worth building for.

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