Learn what excellence is, how to identify it...This is not a big reading assignment – excellence is scarce, lognormal, long-tailed. Acting on this knowledge is liberating, freeing oneself from vast piles of triviality, knock-offs, petty connoisseurship, over-publishing, and the short-sighted, trendy, greedy. Excellence is long-term knowledge, even forever knowledge.
Excellence, like good taste, is perhaps a universal quality. Analytical thinking is about the relationship between evidence and conclusions, and is fundamental to all empirical work, regardless of field, discipline, specialty. Thus it is possible at times to assess credibility of nonfiction work without being a content expert. Thinking eyes may well have an eye for excellence, regardless of field or discipline.
In your head, you'll probably find two models for writing.
One is the familiar model taught in high school and college—a matter of outlines and drafts and transitions and topic sentences and argument.
The other model is its antithesis—the way poets and novelists are often thought to write.
Words used to describe this second model include "genius", "inspiration", "flow", and "natural", sometimes even "organic".
Both models are useless.
I should qualify that sentence.
Both models are completely useless.
You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren't genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him?
You are undoubtedly familiar with this situation: You’re struggling with a problem—a tough work or school assignment, a complicated relationship, the prospects of a career change—and you cannot figure out what to do. So you decide to take a walk, and somewhere along that trek, the answer comes to you.
Knowledge is not an accumulation of facts, nor is it even a set of facts and their relations. Facts are only rendered meaningful within narratives, and the single-page document is a format very conducive to narrative structure. The hypertext books that have gained popularity (I’m thinking here of Meaningness.com) have largely conformed to this in two ways: 1) there is an intended reading order, and 2) the longer essays within the project do most of the heavy lifting in terms of imparting the author’s perspective to readers.
On the other hand, the notion of the “document” that is intrinsic to web development today is overdetermined by the legacy of print media. The web document is a static, finished artifact that does not bring in dynamic data. This is strange because it lives on a medium that is alive, networked, and dynamic, a medium which we increasingly understand more as a space than a thing.
The web is still a very young medium, and it has been influenced more than anything else by print media design. There is so much more that can be done with text on a screen than is being done today. Citations, drawing, chat, speech-to-text. There are opportunities everywhere, and the bar is low! If we are serious about unlocking the value of knowledge we should consider how to improve every part of the knowledge production stack, and that includes reading. As Laurel Schwulst says:
Imaginative functionality is important, even if it’s only a trace of what was, as it’s still a sketch for a more ideal world.
What you are looking at is an scroll-locked iframe that links to a quote I picked out of my blog post “Notes on Comparative Psychology.” You can use Open Transclude anywhere you can drop an <a> tag on your own site.
Open Transclude:
Works anywhere on your own domain
Compatible with most static site generators / templating engines
12 lines of HTML, 80 lines of SCSS, 22 lines of JS (4.5 kb total)
Has 0 dependencies — this is native web technology
Open Transclude is extremely simple, and the heaviest part of the code is the CSS, which you can simplify at your whim. That’s why I am referring to it as a UX pattern. This is not a protocol. The code is really a commodity. What’s interesting about it is the idea and the design, and this is just one viable implementation! Feel free to adapt it however you like.
The principal improvement over a block quotation is sense of context.