As Stephen Webb observes in this short but substantive commentary, "the status of taxonomy is pretty low. . . . Why be content to describe the world when you can develop theories to explain it and, better yet, change it?" Yet being able to name and order the world is one of our distinctively human qualities. The Encyclopedia of Life is an invitation to cultivation, and to contemplation.

animals, cultivation and creation, names, natural sciences, nature, stewardship

Andy

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Far from being an ancient myth with no contemporary relevance, the story of Adam’s task has inspired and shaped human endeavor throughout the centuries. Modern science got its start in the golden age of exploration, when collectors began cataloging exotic plants and animals in the hope of restoring Adam’s complete knowledge of the world. Some sixteenth-century scholars, like Benito Montano (1527–1598), gave Hebrew names to the places Columbus discovered, because they assumed that the Bible must contain all the words we need to understand the New World. Others realized that there were more things to know and to be named than they ever imagined. Francis Bacon exhorted gentlemen of means to build gardens “with rooms to stable in all rare beasts and to cage in all rare birds . . . so you may have in small compass a model of the universal nature made private.” Adam’s sin, Christians believed, not only expelled the first couple from the Garden. Plants and animals too had been dispersed, but now scholars could imagine a return to paradise by achieving universal knowledge.

If God were to bring all the animals before man today, the line would be too long. This scene could only take place on the computer, which is exactly what the new Encyclopedia of Life proposes. This remarkable project aims to gather descriptions of every species known to science on a single website. Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson has been the driving force behind the Encyclopedia, and his enthusiasm for it is unbounded. “It’s going to have everything known on it,” he said, “and everything new is going to be added as we go along.” Nearly two million species are known, but scientists estimate that ten times that many are yet to be discovered. Most of these unknown species are bacteria, fungi, and insects. We can name them because we know, or want to know, everything about them.

Two design consultants offer simple ideas for how to cultivate the discipline of noticing—which, of course, is such a foundational skill for our big and small efforts to create and cultivate (and, for that matter, just enjoy) culture.

cultivation and creation, design, disciplines, noticing

Nate

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Soltzberg: So given that there are all these patterns and themes around us, yet being adept at noticing requires practice, how can people sharpen their noticing “chops?”

Portigal: I’ve assigned students to routinely maintain a noticing log, either a blog (words with pictures) or a Flickr account (pictures with words). The exercise helps sharpen noticing skills by giving people permission to simply observe and document. There’s never any requirement to suggest a fix; indeed what they observe may not be broken in any way. It just has to arouse their interest, and in documenting it make the details of that interest explicit. Establishing some discipline for this behavior can be very helpful.

Soltzberg: Sometimes I do an exercise with workshop groups, which works in a similar way. Everyone takes a turn describing something they saw or experienced between the time they got up and the present moment; something that they haven’t talked about with anyone that day. It could be something unusual or something really mundane—just a quick description with maybe one or two details. People are always surprised when they realize how many things they are actually experiencing but not really noticing. It’s such a simple activity, but people have told me later on that they felt much more awake after doing it.

Portigal: That’s a good place to be solving problems from. Well, let’s get out there and keep noticing.

Who needs omelets when you can just cook your eggs properly in the shell?

eggs, europe, food and drink, france, omelets, technology and change

Nate

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“Cooking eggs is really a question of temperature, not time,” says This. To make the point, he switches on a small oven, sets the thermostat at 65°C, or 149°F, takes four eggs straight from the box, and unceremoniously places them inside. “I use an oven in the lab; it’s easier. But if the oven in your kitchen is not accurate, cook eggs in plenty of water, using a good thermometer.” About an hour later—timing isn’t critical, and the eggs can stay in the oven for hours or even overnight—he retrieves the first egg and carefully shells it. “The 65-degree egg!” he announces. The egg is unlike any I’ve eaten. The white is as delicately set and smooth as custard, and the yolk is still orange and soft. It’s not hard to see why l’oeuf à soixante-cinq degrés is becoming the rage with chefs in France.

I'll say this as strongly as I feel it: The movie studio Pixar is one of the most positive forces of cultural creativity in Western culture. Their work is not only commercially successful—meaning that they get to keep doing it!—it gets more and more daring and dazzling with every release. There is a certain other movie-production company, much beloved by evangelical Christians, that specializes in creating generally high-quality adaptations of existing children's literature, and more power to them. But Pixar is telling brand new stories, perfectly suited for the medium in which they work, and their stories are without exception (so far) absolutely full of the kind of vision and values that Christians would hope to offer to the world. (Indeed, the last two films, Ratatouille and WALL-E, happen to be beautifully realized depictions of the two postures I celebrate in Culture Making: creating and cultivating, respectively.) This article from HBR is well worth reading carefully and thoroughly (and is available free, as of this posting, if you just click diligently). Three cheers—no, thirty cheers—for Pixar.

3 12 120, community, creation, cultivation, movies

Andy

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What’s equally tough, of course, is getting talented people to work effectively with one another. That takes trust and respect, which we as managers can’t mandate; they must be earned over time. What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone’s creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion and accomplishments make the community a magnet for talented people coming out of schools or working at other places. I know what I’m describing is the antithesis of the free-agency practices that prevail in the movie industry, but that’s the point: I believe that community matters. . . .

After Toy Story 2 we changed the mission of our development department. Instead of coming up with new ideas for movies (its role at most studios), the department’s job is to assemble small incubation teams to help directors refine their own ideas to a point where they can convince John and our other senior filmmakers that those ideas have the potential to be great films. Each team typically consists of a director, a writer, some artists, and some storyboard people. The development department’s goal is to find individuals who will work effectively together. During this incubation stage, you can’t judge teams by the material they’re producing because it’s so rough—there are many problems and open questions. But you can assess whether the teams’ social dynamics are healthy and whether the teams are solving problems and making progress. Both the senior management and the development department are responsible for seeing to it that the teams function well.

A response to Nicholas Carr's Atlantic Monthly article about the ways in which easy outside access to information might be changing (and weakening) the ways we think, remember, and process information. (Kevin Kelly had his own fascinating retort to Carr's article here.)

books, google, horizons of the possible, internet, kevin kelly, language, proust, reading

Nate

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When I think about it, my ability to “read deeply and without distraction” is not impaired at all when it comes to 9,000 word articles in Harper’s or The Atlantic on, say, trends in urban crime, thick with policy analysis and statistics, or for that matter, “Is Google Making us Stupid?” It’s just when I try to read Proust, or heaven forbid, JR by William Gaddis—a novel that I greatly anticipated reading, but which quickly became a coaster for the glass of water on my bedside table.

A more important question, I think, is why our brains now seem to better tolerate nonfiction. Regarding Proust in particular, Carr’s argument is, for me, especially ironic: The way that I have found to actually read those long complex sentences is, in fact, to skim them—to ride along on the surface from one detailed, beautiful image of village life to another, without trying to unpack them too literally or rationally.

Evidently if you can take less food, you waste less food. But the wider ripples—from environmental impact to dishwashing methodology to socialization—emerge when the humble cafeteria tray gets taken away.

behavior, cultual worlds, education, environmentalism, food and drink, horizons of the possible, waste

Nate

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From the University of California at Santa Cruz to Virginia Tech, cafeteria trays are disappearing, enabling universities and food-service companies to reduce food waste, lower energy costs and make college campuses more environmentally sustainable. The reasoning goes like this: when students are allowed to use trays, they tend to roam around the cafeteria grabbing food with abandon until space on the tray runs out. If you remove their trays, you make it impossible for them to carry a surplus of dishes, and they will make their selections more carefully and be satisfied with less food overall. That saves on food. Further, getting rid of trays means dishwashers have less to wash. That saves on water and energy.

Mitchell strikes me as perhaps the best example of a writer who sees the value not just in investigating what's behind the everyday, but in really pondering things—figuring out, often over quite a long time, just what he makes of the people and places he's writing about. It's interesting to write elegiacally about Mitchell as the type of writer now rarely seen, considering that his own best pieces were also elegiac—writing about things that were overlooked and, often as not, dwindling as the great mid-20th-century rambled on.

cultural worlds, joseph mitchell, journalism, new york, story, writing

Nate

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This summer marks the 100th birthday of the late Joseph Mitchell, who helped to redefine the art of journalism. In 1938, when Mitchell wrote his first profile for the New Yorker, the notion of the reporter as stylist was still a novelty. By 1992, when the omnibus ”Up in the Old Hotel” hit bestseller lists, it was ubiquitous. The recent republication of Mitchell’s finest collection, ”The Bottom of the Harbor”, brings back into focus innovations that have faded into familiarity or fallen into neglect. It couldn’t have come at a better time. Our current crop of reporter-stylists would do well to study the qualities that make this book remarkable.

Chief among these is patience. Contemporary magazine journalism often seems torn between ratifying conventional wisdom and railing against it. The twin temptations of sensationalism and contrarianism hover over online discourse, in particular. Not that technology is solely to blame; as a newspaperman in the 1930s, covering the Hauptmann murder trial and interviewing George Bernard Shaw for the Herald Tribune and the World-Telegram, respectively, Mitchell was near the centre of the media circuses of his day. Once the New Yorker freed him from deadline pressure, however, Mitchell conserved his attention for (and lavished it on) subjects he felt it might dignify.

It turns out just about anything is fascinating if you look at it hard enough. What Mitchell chose to look at, in his increasingly lengthy “profiles”, were the remnants of Old New York that were disappearing beneath the city’s relentless growth: waterfront rooming-houses (“Old Mr Flood”), petty criminals (“King of the Gypsys”), Epicurean ritual (“All You Can Eat for Five Bucks”) and, in “The Bottom of the Harbor“, the maritime life of a city most people forget is an archipelago.

On the one hand this is simple—a heartbreaking example of how rising food prices squeeze out the poorest. But something is lost in the cultural translation, I think—or at least, what's being described is a very culturally specific (and culturally creative) response to local hunger, one involving a complex mini-industry of manufacture and distribution that was around before food costs went up and ushered in a grimmer consumer demand.

caribbean, cultural worlds, famine, food and drink, haiti, hunger, poverty

Nate

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At first sight the business resembles a thriving pottery. In a dusty courtyard women mould clay and water into hundreds of little platters and lay them out to harden under the Caribbean sun. The craftsmanship is rough and the finished products are uneven. But customers do not object. This is Cité Soleil, Haiti’s most notorious slum, and these platters are not to hold food. They are food. Brittle and gritty—and as revolting as they sound—these are “mud cakes”. For years they have been consumed by impoverished pregnant women seeking calcium, a risky and medically unproven supplement, but now the cakes have become a staple for entire families.

It is not for the taste and nutrition—smidgins of salt and margarine do not disguise what is essentially dirt, and the Guardian can testify that the aftertaste lingers - but because they are the cheapest and increasingly only way to fill bellies. “It stops the hunger,” said Marie-Carmelle Baptiste, 35, a producer, eyeing up her stock laid out in rows. She did not embroider their appeal. “You eat them when you have to.”

The final twentieth-century figure John Stackhouse examines in Making the Best of It is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who is in many ways the most compelling and complex. Bonhoeffer challenges all of us with his radical commitment to Christ, which led to his execution by the Nazi regime. As I comment in Culture Making, surely the Nazi regime warranted the gesture of condemnation. Yet Stackhouse reminds us that Bonhoeffer's radical commitment was nothing if not realistic about the opportunities and limits of his cultural moment.

condemnation, dietrich bonhoeffer, john stackhouse, power, revolution

Andy

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[Bonhoeffer] joined the Abwehr (military intelligence) originally in order to assist surreptitiously in the rescue of Jews and also to engage in political and diplomatic work on behalf of his country. . . . Bonhoeffer played this dangerous game fully. In 1940, upon the fall of France, Eberhard Bethge recalls an announcement being made in a café in a small German town. Everyone lept to their feet, began singing, “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” and raised their arms in the Nazi salute. To Bethge’s perplexity, Bonhoeffer raised his arm as well, and then whispered to his friend, “Raise your arm! Are you crazy?” Afterward he said, “We shall have to run risks for very different things now, but not for that salute!” This kind of pragmatism, for Bonhoeffer, is what it meant to serve Christ in the real world.