Letting things build

This week I put together a reading list for my digital aura series. I recall starting to write around Thanksgiving — but when I looked back at my reading, I’d started reading for it months earlier. (No wonder it’s felt like such a big endeavor!)

Week 7: Microwaving gravy - Alex's Blog

The revolt of the reader | The Observation Deck

Reading is important to me. While I’m not a quick reader nor an especially voracious one, I have found that long-form reading has had a profound influence on me over my life. And because reading is important to me, writing is too: writing not only allows us to convey our ideas, but the very act forces us to test and distill them — at once making our ideas more robust while providing the vehicle by which to share them.

Melon's Thoughts

Fiddles!! This place is a mess, what a disaster! There are books and papers flying everyhwere!! Oh you remember you were warned about this, its Melon's Thoughs zone, where Melon keeps his thoughs... figures :-S

21 Very Short and Addicting Stories You Can Read Online

It can be extremely hard to find time to read these days. With our lives cluttered with work, school, life, and new amazing episodes of…

Confronting New York City's Lies About Toxic Air After 9/11

Plus, a selection of some of the best writing on 9/11, and more news to take you into the weekend.

On the Joy of Missing Out (Published 2018)

What’s happening? Who cares.

Blogroll – Manu

I believe we should all blog more and connect more with strangers. There's not much I can do as an individual. I can offer to be your first reader, …

On Writing #3

Periodically I like to gather various observations about writing, and share my perspective.

Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation

However, recent work on augmenting reading largely focuses on making reading more efficient, especially in knowledge-intensive contexts where people must rapidly make sense of research papers and other complex documents (Lo et al., 2024). These systems often aim to help readers skim, summarize, and synthesize large volumes of information in order to reduce cognitive effort and accelerate document- and corpus-level sensemaking at scale (Gu et al., 2025; Lo et al., 2024; Fok et al., 2023). At one extreme, the form of reading implicitly envisioned by these systems may resemble what we call “reading to discard”: extracting the essential, actionable informational core of a document as quickly and efficiently as possible, so that the rest can be swiftly tossed aside—much like we often process inbound mail. This motivates us to ask what scaffolding approaches might resist “reading to discard,” what alternative forms of reading we might scaffold, and what alternative views and values of reading might guide the conversation.