The enduring value of a notebook and “long thinking”
November 2025
Here are two things I believe. One: we’re living through a period of enormous technological and social change. Two: there is no greater piece of technology than a simple spiral notebook and a couple of hours to be alone with your thoughts.
A favorite writer of mine, Cal Newport, suggested as much in a new essay this week, which is well worth the (quick) read. “There’s a deeply human satisfaction to retreating to an exotic location and wrestling with your own mind, scratching a record of your battle on paper,” Cal writes. “The innovations and insights produced by this long thinkingare deeper and more subversive than the artificially cheery bullet points of a chatbot.” He continues:
Key quote: “The problem facing knowledge work in our current moment is not that we’re lacking sufficiently powerful technologies. It’s instead that we’re already distracted by so many digital tools that there’s no time left to really open the throttle on our brains. And this is a shame. Few satisfactions are more uniquely human than the slow extraction of new understanding, illuminated through the steady attention of your mind’s eye. So, grab a notebook and head somewhere scenic to work on a hard problem. Give yourself enough time, and the enthusiastic clamor about a world of AI agents and super-charged productivity will dissipate to a quiet hum.”
Builders of the lost ark
I loved this week’s Noema piece by Jess McHugh, a journalist whose work I’ve followed over the years. Her piece is called “The Ark-Builders Saving Fragile Bits of Our World,” and it’s about a ragtag group of scientists around the world all pursuing the same mission: preservation in a world of change.
Some of these scientists are drilling deep into melting glaciers to save ancient ice cores; others are encoding human languages onto metal disks and launching them into space — small acts of hope left behind for someone (someday) to discover.
Key quote: “Like the Biblical Noah loading pairs of animals onto his ark, scientists and archivists are salvaging fragile bits of our world that are at risk of disappearing forever. They’re doing everything from drilling ice cores in the Arctic and freezing endangered species’ cells to encoding ancient languages onto tiny disks sent into space. And in the process, these new Noahs are posing profound questions about what humans believe is worth saving — and how to preserve something for a distant future that we can’t quite imagine.”
A few more links I enjoyed:
Key quote: “So how am I feeling in these last few hours? A little unsettled by just how prevalent AI is. I’d like more transparency. It seems important to know when an image or email is AI-generated. And I’d like more control over the algorithms that influence my life.”
Key quote: “This is why so many great writers swear by deliberately messy first passes. John McPhee describes his early creative process as “flinging mud at a wall.” If we’ve any hope of completing a first draft, he explains, we’ve got to “blurt out, heave out, babble out something — anything.” This method works precisely for its arbitrariness; you’re tricking the [mind’s] DMN (default mode network) to hand you something — anything — tangible, then protecting that something from early prosecution by delaying the ECN (executive control network).”
