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"And all at once, summer collapsed into fall." – Oscar Wilde

Love & Work
A notebook about how we can work, learn, love and live for the common good.

Today Debbie and I are going to Provincetown to say goodby to summer. Tonight we're going to have dinner with friends on the beach. Tomorrow she'll swim again in the annual Swim for Life and Paddler Flotilla. For a couple more days we'll act like it was still August, before it finally collapses into fall.

Happy Friday.

Image of the Week

"The Rijksmuseum Research Library is the largest and oldest public art history research library in the Netherlands. The library is part of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The profile of the library collection parallels that of the museum. The online catalogue contains over 400,000 monographs, 3,400 periodicals and 90,000 art sales catalogues. About 50,000 art sales catalogues published before 1989 are not yet entered in the online catalogue. The collection grows, on average, by 10,000 to 15,000 books, auction catalogues, and periodicals every year." - Wikipedia

Innovation
How a small team of radical thinkers emerged as one of the world’s most renowned research and design labs.

Two weeks ago I told you that the Copenhagen offices of research and design lab SPACE10 had won a 2023 Fast Company Innovation by Design Award in the Workplace category, "projects built to make workers happier and more productive." The very next week the office - supported by and working exclusively with Ikea on innovative design concepts - announced that it would close on August 31.

Jon Abrahamsson Ring, CEO Inter IKEA Group said: "The collaboration between Space10 and Inter Ikea Group has been a great learning [experience] with multifaceted achievements and outcomes over the years. Space10 has challenged our mindset of thinking outside the box, they have been our eyes around the corner looking into the future, facilitating new partnerships and business ventures, helping us investigate how we can create a better everyday life for many people. But perhaps most significantly, the partnership between Inter Ikea and Space10 has motivated our internal innovation culture and inspired us in how we approach innovation at Ikea."

Wallpaper posted a nice Top 10 collection of the studio's projects that "shaped conversations in everything from technology to design, architecture and food."

Article: Ikea’s Space10: a Decade of Ground-Breaking Design Ideas

Learning, Social Transition
A rational management approach to saving our biosphere

To save our biosphere we need to learn to curb upstream consumption, not just downstream emissions. So says scientist and policy analyst Vaclav Smil in his book, “Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made”.

From a hundred or so years ago up to the 1970s, we were worried there would be too many of us. Now, Vaclav Smil says the issue isn't the number of people on the planet, it's their level of consumption. "Imagine," he says "if you had only two billion people on the planet, but they all consumed at the average American level. God forbid."

But he is hopeful. "Our greatest hope is to finally realize how wasteful we are. We simply need to do what I call “rational management.” And according to him, the science, technology and know-how we need to practice this new skill is already there.

I like his positioning of doing more with less as rational management. I like it a lot more than the concept of "degrowth," which is bad messaging as likely to garner more fear and scorn than understanding. Who doesn't want to be rational? Who doesn't want to manage well? Who doesn't want a higher quality of life, a more energy efficient house and a car that will last 35 years?

And I like that his doing more with less strategy can be accomplished in small, discrete and measurable steps. As he says "In 1997, nations agreed to limit the use of chlorofluorocarbons to repair the hole in the ozone layer. Today, we don’t worry much about that hole."

Author Interview: Want Not, Waste Not

Collaboration
Bernard Harcourt argues that simply by engaging in cooperative practices we can create a “snowball” effect, propelling cooperation into the mainstream of economic life.

"This may seem like a rather fanciful time to argue that cooperation is a realistic solution to life’s problems. There are spiraling rivalries both within and between nations, not to mention that much of our life is structured as a ruthless winner-take-all competition. But in his new book Cooperation: A Political, Economic, and Social Theory, legal scholar and critical theorist Bernard Harcourt sets out to make precisely that case. According to him, a new cooperative paradigm imbued with the core values of participation, equity, and sustainability is not only desirable, but also eminently realizable.

"Harcourt’s analysis rests on a few interlocking propositions. First, that the competitive models of politics, society, and economy that we live with today are antiquated. They were developed when the world was less interdependent and therefore less in need of radical transformation to avert imminent catastrophes. Second, that instead of breaking with these models, we have become stagnant in our thinking, locked in a pointless tug-of-war between a social democratic state-based model and a conservative market-based model.

"The third point, to which the bulk of the book is dedicated, is a positive argument that cooperation can break this stalemate without needing a massive revolution. That’s because cooperation is something that we do all the time, and not only in our personal lives. As Harcourt points out at great length, different forms of cooperative enterprises—from international mutual insurance companies to flour makers in Vermont to behemoth cooperations in Catalonia—are already flourishing, and they have a proven track record of delivering quality goods and services in a way that respects both workers and the environment." - Avram Alpert

Book Review: Cooperative Ideals at the Heart of Everything: On Bernard Harcourt’s “Cooperation”

Communication
Terms like ‘triggered’, ‘toxic’ and ‘narcissist’ are now bandied about in daily conversations. Is this mere psychobabble or are they useful tools in a complicated world?

llustration: Phil Hackett/The Observer

“'By virtue of being human beings, we’re masters at distancing ourselves from difficult aspects of emotional life,' says Dr Jonathan Shedler, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco. 'One way we distance ourselves is through words. What we’ve got now is this kind of pop-psychology language of clichés, abstract concepts and turns of phrase that are so different from speaking from the heart.'

For Shedler, modern therapy-speak is 'not actually a product of reflection and examination'. In psychotherapy, he says, 'we always move from the general to the specific. People will say something general or abstract and a good therapist is always asking for examples. If a person says that they felt stressed, we might say, ‘OK, tell me more about that. How did you experience the stress?’ If a patient is using therapy-speak, the goal of the work has to be to move away from this to something more immediate and emotionally alive.'” - Eleanor Morgan

Article: ‘That’s Triggering!’ Is Therapy-Speak Changing The Way We Talk About Ourselves?

Creativity, AI
"The goal was not to remove the rapper from the process but to keep the rapper in the process in a more empowered and more informed way."

"The goal is to introduce you to working with language in ways that you probably wouldn't have thought about."

Lupe Fiasco is a Grammy-award winning rapper who has been credited as a pioneer of the conscious hip hop movement which focuses on social issues. With a big emphasis on lyrics, he views hip-hop as a medium for storytelling. He calls himself "a rapper, professor and friend of words. I'm a data gathering machine".

Take this video with a grain of salt. It is an unapologetic promotional video for a suite of Google AI products called TextFX. In it he positions Large Language Models (ChatGPT is a LLM) as valuable creative partners. And, he's a great salesperson. He starts by reminding us that "rap was born out of technology", that technology is deep in rap's DNA. From direct drive turntables through limitless tracks and plug-ins that can mimic any sound, "a lot of science, and a lot of math, and a lot of physics create the sound that rap takes as its own."

He articulates how Large Language Models help him go deeper with words, rhyme and meaning. He says "These tools, they generate similes, they create acronyms, they parse words. It's an entire suite of different kind of possibilities dealing with text and language."

Video: Rapper x Large Language Models | Google Lab Sessions

Communication
“I think there's a way to talk to each other that is healthy and good and that helps us more deeply understand things."

"...Interviewing is more common than most of us realize. We ask questions every day because we need to know something, or because we need information so our next decision will be an informed one, or we want to be able to share wisdom, or we want to avoid trouble, or maybe we are just nosy.

"Mostly, we are trying to gain perspective on something. If we depend solely on our own thoughts and observations and don’t take into account the thoughts and observations of others who are not just like us, we run the risk of coming to inaccurate conclusions and possibly taking harmful actions. Other perspectives reveal our own biases and assumptions. And think of what could have been accomplished (and avoided!) in our history had we just asked a few more questions. Asking good questions keeps us from living in our own echo chambers." - Dean Nelson

Author Interview/Book Excerpt: 'Talk To Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro'

Good Advice
"Be on time and show respect."

Web page: Found In A Library Book

One-liners

Article: Why befriending people of different ages is vital in an ageist society

Article: The first social network? Actually, it was postcards

Article: The way we view free time is making us less happy

Playlist

Video: Allie Sherlock & Fionn Wheelan sing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah on the street

Yes, I featured Leonard Cohen singing live in London last week. Typically I don't repeat artists back to back. But that was before 18-year old Allie Shelrlock, an accomplished street musician, invited 13-year old Fionn Wheelan to join her in singing Cohen's Hallelujah. This rendering brings tears to my eyes. Look at the crowd. We all are crying for little hallelujah.

"As famous as 'Hallelujah' is these days, it wasn't bound to become a hit in the beginning. It wasn't until 1991 when John Cale recorded a new version–and inspired yet another famous cover by Jeff Buckley in 1994—that it became widely known. In 2001, the song reached global fame when it was featured in the Shrek soundtrack. About the song, Cohen said, 'This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that's what I mean by Hallelujah.'” - Regina Sienra

Article: 13-Year-Old Joins a Busker in the Streets of Ireland for a Beautiful Cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah"

Weekly Mixtape
The days are still warm, but they're shortening.

Playlist: Blue September

What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
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