[ thoughts ]
You know the feeling. You sit down to read something, and before the first paragraph is over your hand has already gone looking for a second screen. You watch an hour of short clips and nothing stays with you, nothing you could repeat to another person the next day.
The feed was engineered to be skimmed, glanced at, half-watched and scrolled past, and after enough years inside it, attention reshaped itself to fit the container.
Something surprised me this week, I posted five old televised essays: Carl Sagan's Cosmos. Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. John Berger's Ways of Seeing. Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. And Richard Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
I asked people what I was missing, and the replies came rolling in: James Burke's Connections, Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, Robert Hughes's The Shock of the New, and dozens more.
All of them traces back to the same person.
In 1571, Michel de Montaigne retired to a tower in the southwest of France and began writing in a way no one had before. He called the pieces essais, from the French essayer, to attempt, to try, to take a run at something, and that was the entire idea.
Montaigne would raise a question, circle it, wander into a story about his own habits, change his mind partway through a sentence, and leave the whole thing unresolved if that was honestly where the thinking had ended up.
That is what’s underneath televised essays: a single mind working something out in front of you, at the speed a mind moves.
Which is what a machine will not give you.
Large Language Models (LLMs, AI) do the opposite. It resolves, instantly, reaching for the most probable next word, continuation that best fits everything it was trained on, with no hesitation.
It hands you the verdict Montaigne spent his life refusing to hand anyone.
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[ creativity ]
Montaigne's idea travelled through a century of new technology.
The thing being carried from one medium to the next never really changes. What changes, each time, is how much of the person manages to come through the wire.
It began with the voice. In 1948 the BBC handed the philosopher Bertrand Russell six broadcasts and asked him to develop a single sustained argument over the course of them, the first of what became the Reith Lectures, founded on Lord Reith's old conviction that broadcasting existed to enrich the intellectual life of the country rather than merely to fill the evening.
Then it grew a face. Through the late sixties and seventies it passed into the hands of people who could hold a viewer's attention alone on screen for a full hour.
The camera added the one thing radio never could: now you could watch a person think, watch the idea actually cross their face. And nobody in the whole history of the form shows you why that matters more plainly than Richard Feynman.
In July 1983, the BBC sat Feynman in an armchair in his living room, pointed a camera at him, and simply let him talk.
He explains why fire is hot, why a stretched rubber band pulls itself back, why you cannot really see yourself in a mirror the way you assume you can. And the thing coming through the screen, the thing you actually remember a week later, is not the physics at all. It’s the experience of seeing him think.
You are watching his mind at work, in real time, and invite you to enjoy it with him.
"I don't want to take this stuff seriously," he says. "I think we should just have fun imagining it." And then the line that stays with you long after the facts about atoms have gone: the world, he says, is a dynamic mess of jiggling things, if you look at it right.
Now the form lives on the internet.
You no longer need a broadcaster to commission you or a studio to film it. Anyone with a camera and an idea can make one and put it where the whole world can find it, which is exactly why the form is more alive, and more available, than at any point since Montaigne first picked up his pen.
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[ making ]
This week, give one essay the time you would give a film. Pick one, Feynman in his armchair, Berger on seeing, Sagan on the cosmos, and watch the whole thing with your phone somewhere else, so the hour belongs to one thing.
Then notice what it leaves you with, and set it beside what an ordinary hour of the feed leaves behind. An hour of Feynman leaves an image you can still turn over a week later. An hour of scrolling is gone by morning.
Make your own version. Montaigne wrote to think rather than to record, and you can do the same in a notebook no one will ever read. Not necessarily a log of your day, but a place for things you have not worked out yet or questions you keep returning to.
Write it down before it's presentable, come back tomorrow and change your mind, and leave it open if that is where it ends.
Watching is the form received. The notebook is the form in your own hand, unfinished, which is the only place the thinking has ever really been yours.
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[ sign off ]
The list has grown well past my five, and I am still working through what people sent. I am keeping a record of the full list which will be available next week.
Next week, more from the workshop.
Thanks for reading.
See you next Sunday, anonymous reader behind the screen.
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