Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • The Bible a Prerequisite for Understanding Literature?

    Poet Laureate Andrew Motion (incidentally, the first Poet Laureate to not hold the position for life) suggests that the classics and the Bible should continue to be taught in school, as to cease doing so will prevent a whole generation being able to understand great literature and culture. I can’t help but find myself agreeing…

  • Are the Risk Appetites of Successful Traders Innate?

    Given that confidence and risk tolerance are correlated with high levels of pre-natal testosterone, John Coates—Wall Street trading floor manager turned academic—wondered if the behaviour of high-frequency, successful traders is similarly influenced, and thus innate. Unsurprisingly it was; but it was the extent to which it was found to be true that was surprising: Coates,…

  • Ira Glass on Effective Storytelling

    Ira Glass is a master storyteller, as anyone who has ever listened to This American Life can attest. Below, in a series of occasionally hilarious videos and articles, Ira reveals his secrets of effective storytelling: from how to tell when a story isn’t working, to turning the creative process into a polished, finished product. The 13 principles to creating “more, better…

  • What it Takes to Do What You Want

    In an inspired and inspiring essay on “everything [she believes] about writing”, author Elizabeth Gilbert talks about what it takes to do what you want (in her case, write). I believe that – if you are serious about a life of writing, or indeed about any creative form of expression – that you should take…

  • The Personal, Printable CEO

    Freelancer David Seah realised that he needed a novel system to keep himself productive, efficient, and continuously developing. Borne from this need he developed The Printable CEO system: The Printable CEO was born from a desire to focus my time more productively. For me, that means things that make my freelance practice sustainable and fun. The…

  • Wasting Our ‘Cognitive Surplus’

    From a speech he gave at the Web 2.0 conference in April 2008: Clay Shirky tracks the history of our cognitive surplus, explaining what we could, or need to do with it: So how big is that surplus? If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every page, every edit,…

  • The Art of the Commencement Speech

    The Art of the Commencement Speech is a project by The Humanity Initiative to collect the best commencement addresses since 1936. To date there are 29 speeches available, from John F. Kennedy (American University, 1963), VĂĄclav Havel (Harvard University, 1995) and The Dalai Lama (Emory University, 1998). The commencement ceremony affirms each student’s search for…

  • Google as the Extended Mind

    In response to The Atlantic’s article, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Discover Magazine’s Carl Zimmer argues that Google is actually making us smarter thanks to the ‘extended mind’ theory—the idea that the mind exists not only in ourselves but is extended out to the technology we use. via Mind Hacks

  • Evaluating Decision-Making

    With a hat tip to Robin Rubin’s commencement speeches at NYU (1999) and Harvard (2000), Venture Hacks implores us to evaluate decisions by the decision-making process itself, rather than the results produced. Decisions tend to be judged solely on the results they produce. But I believe the right test should focus heavily on the quality of…

  • Get Your Own Eponymous Law

    Always wanted to achieve intellectual immortality? Now it’s possible thanks to Samuel Arbesman—a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School—who shows us how to get a theorem, formula or law named after yourself, in a few easy steps. Of course, before you go out and begin to grace the world with your newly minted eponymous idea,…