Diana Kimball Berlin @dianakimball - Tumblr Blog

How I Decided to Join Quip

I started my new job at Quip earlier this week, and got inspired to write up the story of how I made my decision:

By doing the hard work of developing a sensible, high-performing, fair working environment, Quip’s founding team has built a foundation that doesn’t cave under women’s contributions and ambitions.

Read the rest of the story on Medium.

Books I Read in 2015

My six favorites:

Non-Fiction: The Power of Glamour, by Virginia Postrel

Memoir: The Folded Clock, by Heidi Julavits, and H is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald

Self-Improvement: Rising Strong, by Brené Brown

Fiction: The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson

Audiobook: Why Not Me?, by Mindy Kaling

Find the full list of over 30 books on Medium.

Save for Later: Bookmarking Apps and the Wish Economy

My latest major essay, including an extensive analysis of eight apps spanning the bookmarking spectrum. A taste:

To wish is to “feel or express a strong desire or hope for something that cannot or probably will not happen.” To bookmark is a tentative act, verging on fatalistic; there are no guarantees. And that’s why, compared to the other signals that comprise the Database of Intentions — The Query, The Social Graph, The Status Update, The Check-In, and The Purchase — The Bookmark can be frustrating. The Social Graph and The Purchase map the past; The Query, The Status Update, and The Check-In map the present. They’re accurate. They’re reliable. They’re sensible. They’re also limited. Past is almost always prelude, but it doesn’t capture the ways in which we’re willing to change.

By contrast, the future is fractal. And in their capacity to structure abundance, bookmarks are, too. The wish economy matters because it catalogs all of the possibilities we’re open to. In aggregate, the incorporation of bookmarks into the Database of Intentions gives companies new tools for persuasion. But at a personal level, the tender utility of bookmarking remains…

Read the rest on Medium.

A Pocket History of Technology

My biggest research project in years: a history of handheld devices and the pockets we’ve put them in.

#pockets #apple watch #iphone #history

I suppose my essential position is that I’m against any kind of imagination police, whether they’re coming from marketing reasons or from class snobbery.

“Let's talk about genre”: Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation

As a technology, writing has many merits. It complements verbal and visual communication. It’s sturdy and can stay put. It’s cheap. It’s easy to change or reproduce. And it moves faster than ships or airplanes. Writing makes it possible to propel knowledge and intent forward through time.

Nicole Fenton, “Words as Material”

If you have a good interface on your system, and a budget of money and time, you can work on your system. If your system has bugs or is too slow, you can improve it. But if your system has a bad interface, you basically have nothing. It won't matter if it is a work of the highest craftsmanship on the inside. If your system has a bad interface, no one will use it. So the interface or surface of the system, whether to users or other machines, is very important.

Matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto), creator of Ruby, in conversation with Bill Venners. Found via Erik. (Only after digging up that tweet did I realize we were both drawn to the exact same passage—symmetry.)

This applies to more than just software.

Even unknown buskers inspired squeals and selfies: as in Pascal’s wager, little was lost if the singers turned out not to be stars, and—who knows?—maybe they’d be stars tomorrow.

The Stars of YouTube and Vine - The New Yorker

After six book selections across several years, I’m saying goodbye to 24-Hour Bookclub.

“As in our earlier experiment, we measured our participants’ personality traits and emotions before and after reading. We had expected that people who read a piece of fiction would experience the greatest fluctuation in their personality scores, but we didn’t find this. The genre of the text — fiction or nonfiction — didn’t matter much; what mattered was the degree of perceived artistry. Those who read a story or essay that they judged to be artistic changed their personality scores significantly more than did those who judged what they read to be less artistic.”

How Writing Transforms Us, via illbelieveinanything

A Decent Digital Commonplace Book System

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been looking for a sustainable commonplace book system. My ideal system would be:

Broad. Because I read online articles and ebooks in equal measure, an ideal system would address both.

Effortless. If I highlight a passage anywhere, I want it to be stashed automatically. Any system that requires manual transcription or entry is a system that won’t last long.

Discrete. For maximum recombinability, I want each highlight to be stored individually, with a reference back to the larger work.

Associative. I want highlights to resurface in my life opportunistically.

Durable. Platforms come and go, but I want my highlights to last forever.

So far, my quest has been futile. Sure—once every few months, I’ll go down an evening-long rabbit hole and emerge on the other side with some new tools and workflows that seem promising. Sometimes, a tool will stick on its own merits. (Evernote is one tool that made it through the gauntlet.) But when it comes to complete systems, I’ve had little luck.

Until now! Tonight’s rabbit hole took me to a good place. Not a perfect place, but a place that’s exciting enough to outline in public.

My Commonplace Book System, For Now

Kindle highlights get exported to Evernote as individual notes via Clippings.io. Since Clippings.io doesn’t—yet?—run in the background, I’ve set a reminder to email me once every two weeks with a nudge to initiate collection and export.

Instapaper highlights get exported to Evernote as individual notes via IFTTT.

That’s it!

Background

Three preconditions in my life make this system possible:

90% of the books I read, I read on Kindle.

I’ve been on a continuous Evernote kick for the past 1.5 years. Because of its proven utility (for me) and persuasive (to me) corporate philosophy, I’m comfortable relying on it. I’m also already a premium subscriber, so I never worry about running out of space. Plus, Evernote’s contextual notes feature helps related highlights to edge into my peripheral vision at opportune moments, addressing my goal of associativity.

I want this badly enough that I’m willing to pay for it.

Three recent rediscoveries unblocked me:

Instapaper is amazing. I’ve known this for a long time—I even wrote a love letter to Instapaper three years ago—but when Betaworks bought the app, it fell off my radar for a while. Recently, though, a colleague was singing the praises of Pocket, the other main “read-it-later” service. And I thought—hey, maybe I should get serious about reading things later again. While going down the mini-rabbit hole of setting up Pocket, I came across this article by Marius Masaler comparing Pocket and Instapaper, wherein he concludes “I may have been using the wrong service all along”—the wrong service, for his needs, being Pocket. One of the key Instapaper features Marius mentions is…highlighting! Specifically, “a Kindle-like way to delineate and keep the best passages from an article.” I dimly remember hearing about this feature a while back, but Marius’s article jogged my memory at just the right time for me to take action.

IFTTT is the bomb. No surprise there. IFTTT is an elegant, powerful way to daisy-chain APIs. By hitching the Instapaper API to the Evernote API, I was able to assemble this recipe to export Instapaper highlights to Evernote. Each highlight is stashed in more-or-less-real-time, complete with a link to the source.

Clippings.io got good. Amazon doesn’t offer an API of your Kindle highlights, much to my sadness, so a recurring theme of my rabbit hole quests has been “how in the world will I get my highlights out?” Clippings, which advertises itself as a way to “organize the notes you make on your Kindle,” is now my best answer. This isn’t the first time I’ve come across Clippings; the last time I went down the commonplace book rabbit hole, I ran into it while searching something like “export Kindle highlights to Evernote.” Clippings was okay back then, but the bookmarklet that collected Kindle highlights felt brittle, and I never fully integrated it into my workflow. I rediscovered Clippings today while running a similar search, and was very impressed by how far it’s come. The Clippings Chrome extension now works like a dream, and I’m heartened that they’re collecting a monthly subscription fee (just $1.99); this gives me hope that they’ll be able to afford continued development even for this admittedly-niche need. The Evernote export functionality is also excellent, fulfilling my wish for discrete notes that each link back to the larger work.

Fine Print

As I mentioned, the system’s far from perfect. I have three modest wishes for the future:

Dear Amazon: please make a Kindle highlights API!

Until then: dear Clippings, I hope you’ll consider adding a “collect and export highlights in the background” option to your Chrome extension. Even just a periodic notification on the extension icon would help.

As long as I’m dreaming: Clippings, I’d very much like the option to name each note with the book’s title in addition to the quotation’s location. Also, a blank line between the end of the quotation and the citation.

Total cost of the system: ~$10 / month

Clippings.io Chrome extension subscription: $1.99 / month.

Instapaper Premium, which lifts the “5 highlights per month” cap: $2.99 / month. (Bonus: the website accepts payment via Stripe.)

Evernote Premium, which I use for lots of other things, too: $5 / month.

How Does the System Stack Up?

Broad. ★★★★☆ Between Instapaper and Kindle, I estimate that I’ll be able to catalog 80% of all my reading.

Effortless. ★★★☆☆ Better than ever, but the need to manually trigger Clippings.io is not ideal.

Discrete. ★★★★★ Individual notes in Evernote with links back to the original source—yes! As close to a shoebox of index cards as digitally possible.

Associative. ★★★☆☆ Evernote’s Context feature gets me most of the way there, but I’d still like to find a way to extend the associativity beyond the boundaries of Evernote.

Durable. ★★★★☆ I trust Evernote as much as I trust any service, due to their strong export functionality, viable business model, and corporate philosophy. The missing star represents general healthy skepticism of any business’s ability to stick around and stay good forever.

Overall: ★★★★☆ (76%). Not bad!

Why Go Down All These Rabbit Holes At All?

Reading is the most reliable way I’ve found to reenergize myself. I read a lot already, but I want to read even more, and knowing that every reading session emanates useful information helps the act to feel more intentional.

Many of the thinkers I most admire seem to keep formidable clip files, and collecting highlights is how I lay the groundwork for writing I’m proud of. I want to stash other people’s ideas in a single place where they can tangle and braid.

The most basic truth, though, is that I find it endlessly satisfying to stitch services together to meet my needs. Doing so helps me to understand myself and my tools more deeply. Getting this close to realizing the dream is intoxicating, but I’m guessing the next rabbit hole is hiding not too far ahead.

#books

Books I Read in 2014

It’s a well-known fact that I love book lists like nobody’s business, so I didn’t want to let the year end without posting my own. Thanks to my friend Rick Webb for posting his list and encouraging me to dig into my own Kindle order history. (“Think it would be less than 20,” I told him. “Scared to look.” I was basically right.)

After reflecting on everything I read this year, here are my top four six picks:

Fiction: The Wallcreeper and Dept. of Speculation

Memoir: Not That Kind of Girl

Nonfiction: Show Your Work!

Self-Improvement: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

Audiobook: The Art of Asking

(I originally posted just four, but then I took a transatlantic flight in the dying days of 2014 and finished two books that blew me away.)

The full list:

Peak, by Chip Conley. An application of Maslow’s hierarchy to business.

So Good They Can’t Ignore You, by Cal Newport. As noted on Amazon, this book argues that “Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before.” This idea looped back into my mind many times this year; I’ve now recommended it to countless people since, and sent it to a few.

Show Your Work!, by Austin Kleon. Shipped this to my hotel room in San Francisco in February and read it in one big gulp. Since then, I’ve ordered several copies as gifts for friends.

Just Kids, by Patti Smith. Recommended by Anthony in response to a question I posted to Twitter in February: “Any books you’ve loved lately? Seeking glimmering, sturdy writing & fascination.”

The Reason I Jump, by Naoki Higashida. Recommended by Michele in response to the same question. (I did a lot of flying in February, and all year.)

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. Finished under a canvas canopy in Amsterdam.

Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill. My favorite work of fiction this year.

The Cloud of Unknowing, by Mimi Lipson. Musical narrative.

Nicely Said, by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer-Lee. A treatise on writing for the web by two of the nicest writers I know.

The Hotel Eden, by Ron Carlson. Our June 24-Hour Bookclub pick.

And the Heart Says Whatever, by Emily Gould. I ended up liking Gould’s voice so much that I followed her on Twitter, where her voice graces my feed a few times a day.

Divergent, by Veronica Roth. One weekend, I found myself wishing for a book reminiscent of The Hunger Games series and found Divergent on a BuzzFeed list of “15 Book Series to Read if You Enjoyed The Hunger Games.” It did the trick.

Stuff Matters, by Mark Miodownik. Recommended by Deb Chachra in response to a question I posted on Twitter back in September: “any friendly, sharp introductions to materials science worth reading?”

Not That Kind of Girl, by Lena Dunham. All my love for Lena Dunham.

Bad Feminist, by Roxane Gay. As a collection, I found it disjointed, but some of the component parts were arresting.

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters. Picked this one up after listening to a Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast episode where the members of the roundtable raved about it. I was happy to see, earlier today, that Emily Gould loved it, too.

Seven Steps to Leading a Gender-Balanced Business, by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox. Discovered Wittenberg-Cox’s work in an interview on The Broad Experience, one of my favorite podcasts. Short and eminently pragmatic.

Yes Please, by Amy Poehler (audiobook). Parks & Recreation is one of my favorite shows on TV, and my renewed devotion to podcasts got me thinking that I might finally be ready to try audiobooks in earnest. Audible’s pace of one audiobook a month feels about right to me so far.

How to Be a Woman, by Caitlin Moran. Part of my “women in comedy” kick, which constituted about a quarter of my reading this year.

Girl Walks Into a Bar, by Rachel Dratch (audiobook). I wasn’t even watching SNL when Rachel Dratch was on, but after Yes Please, I was so taken with the “women in comedy” + “books in my ears” combo that I gave this a shot anyway. I actually liked it a lot.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondo. The inspiration for my final contribution to The Pastry Box this year.

The Wallcreeper, by Nell Zink. Another Emily Gould-related entry! She tweeted this Paris Review interview fragment with Zink, which I found delightful, so I tucked the book away in my mind and downloaded it just before a long flight. As I posted upon landing: “[The] Wallcreeper, by Nell Zink, is exquisite. Two hundred pages of taut, wry prose. Everyone must read.” I’m bumping it up to share top billing with Dept. of Speculation.

The Art of Asking, by Amanda Palmer (audiobook). Another transatlantic winner. Over eleven hours of intense self-awareness, punctuated by music. “Intimate storytelling structured like a song.” One summer, I read everything Amanda Palmer had ever written online, in feverish anticipation of maybe writing a case study on her work. I never wrote the case study, but it turns out I didn’t need to. This is that and more.

Five Wishes, by Gay Hendricks. Recommended by Amber Rae. The ideas of completion and upper-limiting resonated.

Number of books bought and started this year, but not finished: 18 16

Other book lists worth checking out:

Rick Webb

Zara Rahman

Rachel Mercer

Vincent von Doom

Samman Chaudry

Marcin Wichary

Austin Kleon

Christina Cacioppo

Asad Chishti

Emily Claire Reese

Tanay Jaipuria

Julie Zhou

Largehearted Boy’s list of book lists (thanks to Sonal Chokshi for the link)

Thom Cummings

Laura Dunne

Sara Watson

Kenyatta Cheese’s recent “incomplete list of interesting books about economics”

Luke Leighfield

Claudia Mei

Kate Kiefer Lee

Max Fenton

Jennie Rose Halperin

Yours? (Message me and I’ll take a look!)

#books

4cp

How do you overcome procrastination?

To overcome procrastination, I do a whole lot of timeboxing. Timeboxing is where you set a timer for a certain amount of time and stay focused on the dreaded task until the timer goes off. My favorite desktop timer is called Timebar; I sang its praises in my interview for The Setup.

ghostphotographs

In progress, gold ghost in red shoes

24hourbookclub

We’ll wake up first thing in the morning, crack open our copies of The Hotel Eden, and start tweeting up a storm using our usual #24hourbookclub hashtag. We’ll be looking out for your tweets, too, and reading them between chapters.

dianakimball

24-Hour Bookclub is one of my favorite things, and our next literary flashmob is around the corner! Join us on Saturday, June 7th for a marathon reading of Ron Carlson’s The Hotel Eden.

Step 1: Get the book. Step 2: Follow @24hourbookclub on Twitter. Step 3: Wake up on Saturday morning and read like there’s no tomorrow. Step 4: Tweet (and Tumbl!) all about it. :)

hope to see you soon— Diana

Just remembered this collage, which I love. Last summer, my friend Jia invited me to participate in an interview series called “Give Inspiration” that she helped put together for Givology, an education non-profit. We met up in NYC and spoke for a while about some of the people and projects that inspire me; a few months later, a snappy 96-second video went up.

But the project had a second part, too. Over the course of coordinating the interview, Jia asked for some words and images connected to my sources of inspiration. Then, an artist named Tori Rafael created this collage based on those words. Looking at the end result gives me a Reading Rainbow-like sense of endless possibility.

Thanks to Jia, Tori, and Givology for letting me be a part of this.

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Diana Kimball Berlin