- How To Stay Curious
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- CIA: Spies? Cooking? Games? All the above + cars keep no secrets + MORE!
CIA: Spies? Cooking? Games? All the above + cars keep no secrets + MORE!
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
- Ellen Parr (or was it Dorthy Parker?)
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While I believe curiosity is a super power, and helps build up other super-powers for us such as empathy and creativity - it’s actually the idea behind a concept called the progress principle driving this newsletter for me right now (my curiosity will rage regardless, no cure right!).
While geared towards employees and their work-days, I think it extends to any work or projects, to life in general: achieving consistent, small wins was the biggest indicator of a rich inner work life.
In the still pending Curiosity Primer, one of the challenges given is to simply start. Take a topic of project you’ve been curious about and dive in. Once the journey begins, when you’re on the move, things will start happening (doesn’t mean they’ll all be good things).
Primer is delayed as I decided to switch from another newsletter service to BeeHiiv. Then they updated their subscription plans and offerings, and I try and reset things to send from my own domain - as that’s now an option - and screwed everything up!
Technically, I’m not even sure this issue is going to send properly, but my simply start mantra says to do it anyways: the progress principle gets feed, and curiosity will either be served with success, or questions on what still needs to be fixed.
Being happy when faced with a new question might be one of the best outcomes of being a curious type. Does this work? We shall see….!
P.S. In general this intro section will probably explore ways to stay curious in a more direct manner (which I decided while writing the Primer/taking action). Another how to tip in the Primer is about building community, making connections with like-minded others - as a Timothy Leary quote used states:
Find the others.
For those of you here now/already - I see you, and I thank you.
Curiously Counting: Issue 0
Due to the questionable of this “first” issue, we’ll call it issue zero. And with each issue, we’ll focus on a story tied to that issue’s number. Today it is 0 - and the topic is alcohol. Can you guess the question? Keeping scrolling to find out.
HOW… |
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“It’s very hard to opt out of the data nightmare that comes off the lot - I was the first person to ask my Honda dealer how to turn off data sharing. It didn't go well.” - Sherwood
Internet usage, our phones, the apps on them, internet-enabled devices in our homes - most of us are aware of the privacy and data related issues with those. Next to be added to the list of concerns: our cars.
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‘Privacy Nightmare on Wheels’: Every Car Brand Reviewed By Mozilla — Including Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota — Flunks Privacy Test - Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included
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How to Figure Out What Your Car Knows About You (and Opt Out of Sharing When You Can) - EFF
WHAT… |
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The stunning deep sea footage scientists filmed in 2023 - Mashable
"We always discover stuff when we go out into the deep sea. You're always finding things that you haven't seen before," Derek Sowers, an expedition lead for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Ocean Exploration
Imagine growing up as a kid curious about the sea and/or sea creatures and that’s your job! Amazing
WHEN… |
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A new show about the Cold War, “Not All Propaganda Is Art,” reveals the dark, sometimes comic ironies of trying to control the world through culture - The New Yorker
From Benjamen Walker, the creator and host of “Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything,” “Not All Propaganda Is Art”. “It bears the marks of the feverish isolation of that time, conjuring a mid-century transatlantic world of left-wing intellectuals, the cultural Cold War, the C.I.A., mass culture, high culture, post-colonialism, and a whiff of conspiracy.”
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I think my brain choose that option for “When” just so I could also share:
CIA: Collect It All - A Game Designed By The CIA!
“Ever wondered what it’s like to be a CIA operative? The CIA designed a classified card game which they use to train their analysts. They recently declassified it and we’ve adapted the game so you can play it too. CIA: Collect It All is a competitive card game based on the CIA game Collection Deck. Players take on the role of agents who are collecting intelligence and tackling security threats over multiple rounds.”
Kickstarted in 2018, you can pay what you want for a download version to print yourself.
There is so much (fine) tuning that needs to happen behind the scenes, and visibly in this layout, that it makes this a great image to start with on the graffiti appreciation side of things (more to come in future issues on why graffiti!):
WHERE… |
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“I have good news and bad news. The good news is that websites didn’t go anywhere. There are currently one billion websites on the World Wide Web. Here’s a few from my bookmarks that are amazing. [view essay for those bookmarks]. Cool, right? So here’s the bad news— we are the ones who vanished, and I suspect what we really miss are the joys of discovery.”
I’m hoping through THIS newsletter to introduce a lot of the cool sites I find online PLUS, a lot of the sites I use to find those other cool sites.
This would also be a good spot to note: if YOU have cool sites, or aggregator sites, please share! (just reply to any issue of the newsletter).
WHO… |
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Nardwuar is a Canadian music legend of his own making. There is no one else like him in the music scene. I can’t even say I’m the biggest fan, but for a curious person, I have to give him full respect. His research skills are legend; as noted by a Reddit user:
lol so does Nardwar basically find everyone’s mom’s phone number and do recon?
40 minute compilation of Canadian journalist/research savant Nardwuar the Human Serviette exploding artists’ minds with super-specific personal questions and obscure trivia and gifts - via Reddit
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Nardwuar’s 10 Most Entertaining Interviews, Ranked - via DJBooth
WHY… |
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I always wondered about the need to go to a culinary school in order to be a chef. If I’ve been cooking my entire life, shouldn’t that count? Evidently Asma Khan thinks so and I love her take on it! (I do acknowledge there are definitely service and operational, as well as cooking tips, I would certain benefit from learning in any culinary program but still…)
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Here’s a chance to mention the CIA again and more times in one newsletter than I probably guessed I would ever! BUT - this is time it’s actually the Culinary Institute of America, which features prominently in what just might be the most enjoyable book on productivity I have read (you’ll also learn a fair bit on how to run a kitchen!):
Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind by Dan Charnas
 BONUS QUESTION(S) CONTENT |
Worthy of sharing in its own right, I was also curious about how I was going to actually share the Primer, so to test this as a method, you get this idea filled doc from Rob Hopkins. From his site:
“Since 2020, the fortnightly ‘From What If to What Next’ podcast has invited two guests to time travel into the 2030 that resulted from our doing absolutely everything we could possibly have done, and to describe that world to the listeners. In late March 2024, I stopped the podcast at its 100th episode in order to focus on other projects, but it remains as an amazing body of work.
Alongside the main episodes, Patreon subscribers also received bonus Ministry of Imagination podcasts, in which they were inaugurated as Ministers at the Ministry itself (part-Hundertwasser, part-Hogwarts, part-Yellow Submarine) and invited to choose 3 policies each that would rapidly accelerate our transition to a world in which those changes had happened. The result was over 600 deeply thoughtful, considered, audacious and ambitious policies covering everything from free art materials for all, to a Universal Basic Income and every company having to list all their failures as well as their successes in their annual reports.
This year, perhaps now more than ever, we need a taste of what policymaking underpinned by the radical imagination looks like. Recognising how extraordinary and powerful this collection of possibility-infused policies from an eclectic mix of people from all around the world (including Brian Eno, Rutger Bregman and Kate Raworth – ecologists, renegade economists, artists, prison abolitionists, somatic trauma therapists, printmakers, politicians, disability activists, rewilding practitioners, prison abolitionists and so many more) I felt it was important to collect them all in one accessible place. And so ‘The Ministry of Imagination Manifesto: an imagination-based manifesto for times that need one’ was born. We’ve painstakingly edited together all the policies, under subject headings, and the whole thing has been beautifully designed by Capella Andrean of The Creative Bloc.“ Than
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Curious Counting: The Solution
As a lover of IPAs, and nice peat-free whiskys - this one raises more questions than I may care to consider as the weather gets nicer and summer patios beckon.
How much alcohol is safe to consume?
Zero - is the amount of alcohol that is safe or healthy for anyone to drink.
It’s a known carcinogen. And literally poison really. Most delicious poison I would assume tho…
Even a Little Alcohol Can Harm Your Health - NYT
Limit alcohol - Canadian Cancer Society
Canada gets new guidelines to recognize and treat high-risk drinking - CBC
A Beginner’s Guide to the ‘Sober Curious’ Movement - Healthline
Thanks for joining me - let’s see where this all goes!?!?!!
Closing Curiosity
"It might seem counterintuitive to worry about extreme cold as the planet warms, but if the main Atlantic Ocean circulation shuts down from too much meltwater pouring in, that's the risk ahead," the authors wrote.
If you made it this far, THANK YOU.
Until next week - stay curious!
Rob
P.S. - The section below will alert you to any changes or updates back on the site you may want to check out:
 Back on HowToStayCurious.com, what’s new: | Blog Posts - nadda |