No. 112 — Utopia Parkway ⫶ Paging London ⫶ AMA

Language is what childhood is for

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

Hi, hi. It’s my end of year tradition: a Q&A edition (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024). I do these for selfish reasons: answering has been a good way to notice how I’ve changed. If you have questions, reply below or email me. I’ll keep questions anonymous.

Since the New York tips were so helpful, I’m paging London! I’ll be there in early December and would love an eat / walk / coffee with people working on play in public space and city-scale learning—city folk, foundations, developers, and community groups open to swapping notes.

1.

This editions illustrations come again from Dana Stewart’s computer science class at Catherine Cook School in Chicago:
AI models rely on training data. These are examples drawn by 2nd grade students. Imagine a robot that is programmed to be your friend. This training data could be used to teach the robot when you want to play, and when you want to be left alone. How would a robot know if you wanted to play?

(Here’s the Hello Ruby activity that served as the inspiration. Last time I shared the cats they did!)

2.

I’ve properly started work on a new book, so I needed a new pinboard (rhis one from Ferm living) I remember the gigantic noteboard on the set of The French Dispatch and thinking: this.

My second narrative non-fiction book will be a journey through embryogenesis, information theory, IVF, cellular automata, and computation. It asks a simple question: How does life know what to become? I’m using two lenses: computer science (now more and more reaching into developmental biology) and personal, embodied experience.

At the beginning, a book doesn’t feel like a book. It feels like a Christmas tree. I hang ornaments (ideas?) and sort through buckets. It’s important for me to keep key names, concepts, and visuals in sight while writing, and analogue works best for me.

3.

Speaking of Wes Anderson: if ever there were an exhibition custom-made for me, it’s The House on Utopia Parkway: Joseph Cornell’s Studio Reimagined by Wes Anderson. Anderson, working with curator Jasper Sharp, is turning Gagosian’s space at 9 rue de Castiglione into a walk-in version of Cornell’s Queens studio. Cornell, famous for his miniature worlds and reclusive habits, never visited Paris, yet dreamed of it all his life through postcards, guidebooks, and conversations. The show runs December 16, 2025 to March 14, 2026.

I first met Cornell through Michael Chabon’s essay, and bumped into him again in Stepanova’s Memory of Memory this summer. If you love boxes, reliquaries, and carefully arranged objects, this one belongs on the calendar.

4.

Hello Ruby: Journey Inside the Computer is in the Engineering gift guide of Purdue University!

It makes me so happy a book that is well over a decade gets this glowing recommendation. “For the young reader who’s always asking how things work, Hello Ruby: Journey Inside the Computer offers a whimsical and imaginative way to explore the world of technology”. Each year Purdue University reviews dozens of toys and kits, evaluating each for educational value, engagement and accessibility. The final list includes gifts that support hands-on learning, creativity and critical thinking. The other nine finalists look great too for a budding engineer!

5.

The Seventh Wonder of the modern world is a human child, any child. I used to wonder about childhood and the evolution of our species. It seemed to me unparsimonious to keep expending all that energy on such a long period of vulnerability and defenselessness, with nothing to show for it, in biological terms, beyond the feckless, irresponsible pleasure of childhood. After all, I used to think, it is one sixth of a whole human life span! Why didn’t our evolution take care of that, allowing us to jump catlike from our juvenile to our adult (and, as I thought) productive stage of life?

I had forgotten about language, the single human trait that marks us out as specifically human, the property that enables our survival as the most compulsively, biologically, obsessively social of all creatures on earth, more interdependent and interconnected even than the famous social insects. I had forgotten that, and forgotten that children do that in childhood. Language is what childhood is for.
- Lewis Thomas, “Seven Wonders,” in The Medusa and the Snail (1979)

Language is what childhood is for. I see it each day as my son build his French skills from noise into meaning. Robin Sloan’s point about memory fits here: real knowledge has provenance.

6.

The new essay collection Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith is gold. I’d read a few before (on Tár, Stormzy), but there are many new, sommersaulting pieces on girlhood, art, and more.

I’ve been listening to Rosalía’s “Lux” on nonstop repeat for the November blues. I, too, want to be visited by Björk the songbird.

P.S Me, sending this newsletter after two weeks of school vacation plus an extra Armistice Day off:

No. 111 — Vernacular computation ⫶ We Computers ⫶ Like-minded internet

Shelf-discussions

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

“Shelf-discussions as a way of organising,” I wrote the other day as our long-awaited bookshelves finally arrived, the piles began to disappear from floors, and strange book pairings emerged on the shelves. Outside home, book-fair season has kicked off, and it feels both familiar and new to be among other authors. I’ll have some fun news about my non-fiction book soon, but first I’ll wrap up the fall holiday weeks with a small writing retreat at the charming bookstore Vinhan kirjakauppa.

Scroll down for a Texas teachers opportunity, inspiration from a Chicago school, and the weirdest book I’ve started this year.

1.

Last week I did a talk called AI Is Our Multiple-Choice Test. The best part was an educator who reached out afterward to share the work their classes have been doing.

2.

So, this editions illustrations come from Dana Stewart’s computer science class at Catherine Cook School in Chicago. 3rd- and 4th-graders visualized how an AI model might “see” a cat as a part of their AI learning.

For inspiration, see the activity in No. 68 — They All Saw a Cat ⫶ How Big is YouTube? ⫶ Moonbound or the follow-up workshop in No. 74 — They All Saw A Computer ⫶ Lavender Velvet ⫶ Inventing Kindergarten (Shared with permission.)

3.

We Computers by Hamid Ismailov is the weirdest and wildest AI book I’ve read this year. It’s about French, Persian and Uzbek poetry and large language models, with real style and depth. Here’s a lovely discussion between the author and his translator.

I like when literature tries to figure out how AI or non-human computer intelligence might sound. A notable example: Robin Sloan’s chronicler in Moonbound.

4.

Fall means it’s almost book-awards season. So why are the trophies so often like office paperweights?

Two delighful Paris exceptions:

Prix de Flore. The winner doesn’t just get money. They also receive the right to drink a glass of Pouilly-Fumé at Café de Flore every day for a year, served in a glass engraved with their name and kept at the café.

American Library in Paris Book Award. Each year the Library commissions two hand-bound copies of the winning title from Parisian artisans, one for the author, one for the Library’s Special Collections.

5.

I’ve loved these 30-minute conversations: from Guatemala to Seattle, from Rotterdam to Helsinki. They feel like what the internet promised, meeting like-minded people across the globe.

I’ve decided to keep the calendar open, so pop by!

If you want to talk about what you’re working on, trying to work on or thinking about working on and think I might be able to help, schedule a time.

6.

Brian Doyle’s “Their Irrepressible Innocence” (2017) sums up my method. When tech–AI–2020s culture talk gets too loud, I head to a kindergarten.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a moist, gray November in my soul; whenever I find myself expecting to be cut off in traffic, to be shortchanged at the store, to hear an ominous clank in the transmission, to catch a cold, to be ludicrously overbilled by the insurance company, to find the library closed early, to endure computer malfunction, to discover the wine sour, to lose my keys, to discover a city of slugs in the cellar, and to find a dead owlet under the cracked front picture window, then I account it high time to get to a kindergarten as fast as I can

If you give them time and afford them the clear sense that you are not judging or assessing or measuring them in any way, they will stretch out and tell you tales of adventure and derring-do that would make filmmakers and novelists drool.

7.

I found an interesting passage in Margaret Wertheim’s Does a sea slug understand hyperbolic math?

Early modern artisans refined techniques for imitating nature, then wrote about them in pamphlets, creating an early form of technical writing that shaped how we think about knowledge. Historian Pamela H. Smith calls this vernacular natural history: hands-on, material inquiry running alongside the academic story of science. Wertheim proposes valuing vernacular mathematics too, the quiet, non-academic practices in craft and making that carry deep mathematical ideas. And yes, I immediately started thinking about what vernacular computing might look like.. (there are a few google hits, delightfully many years apart, but still a lot of space to think!)

8.

Are you a K–12 teacher based in Texas, or know someone amazing there?
I’m planning a new Playful Computing professional development workshop for 2026.

It will be fully funded (no cost to teachers), and participating educators will receive a stipend for completing the course. Also eligible would be Texas librarians, instructional coaches and regional education service Center (ESC) personnel.

Reply here to stay in the loop, or share this with a Texas teacher who might love to join.

9.

P.S Me, trying to summon a Substack API that does not exist. I miss 2010s, when getting a feed of your own writing wasn’t behind tricks and tooling..

No. 110 — Papert’s Principle ⫶ Computers got weird ⫶ Calder Gardens

large, uncompromising feeling

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

From Tour Montparnasse, one of the most controversial buildings in Paris. For many years, Paris banned building over seven storeys in the city centre.

France runs on eight-week school cycles: six to study, two to rest. As the first break nears, I am surprised by how reassuring the rhythm is.

I spent last week in Tampere leading a full-day AI workshop for educators from across Europe. These sessions let us move past inspiration into practice, and I always learn from the realities of the classroom. If your school, municipality, or organization wants something similar, send me a note. And you can still tune in for my Wednesday talk AI as our multiple-choice test.

1.

I joined Samuel Arbesman on Orthogonal Bet podcast to talk about how children, educators, and cities can relate to computing. I also made a case for reconnecting computing with early-childhood traditions like Piaget, Papert, and Reggio Emilia, and for restoring a bit of historical memory to a tech culture that forgets its own origins.

If you enjoy smart, cross-disciplinary discussions, this podcast is for you. Some of my favorite episodes: Nadia Asparouhova, Chaim Gingold, Ben Reinhardt, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Omar Rizwan.

2.

Speaking of Piaget: I finished The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick a few days back (thank you, Diana, for the recommendation!). Benoit Mandelbrot’s story was marvellous (“Woe to the poet born in an interesting piece of geography in a violent time”), and to my surprise he also spent 1955–1957 in Geneva to collaborating with Piaget at the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology.

3.

We finally read Margaret Wise Brown’s classic The Dead Bird (with tender illustrations by Christian Robinson). It was moving to watch my three-year-old encounter death for the first time. After we finished, he wanted to replay the burial and the singing, again and again. This is a new kind of reading joy for me too: it reminds me of large, uncompromising feelings of my own from when I was his age

4.

History rides again. I love this credo from Robin Sloan: “One really must not become insensate to the fact that computers got super weird, super fast.” Whenever I work with educators, I try to explain this gargantuan shift.

5.

Calder Gardens looks amazing: Philadelphia, Alexander Calder’s work, nature, art, and architecture. From The New Yorker: “In Philadelphia’s Calder Gardens, a Dynasty Comes Home.”

6.

Marvin Minsky came up with the term “Papert’s Principle” to describe how some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows. It reminds me of the discussion around LLM agents and makes me hope we will one day have tiny Papert controls built into our models..

7.

Alison Gopnik is giving a talk at the Santa Fe Institute on October 21, 2025 7:30 PM (also streaming on YouTube). I think Gopnik is such an interesting thinker and I like how she jumps between computer science and early childhood in such a seamless way.

The extended human childhood allows a period of protected broad-ranging exploration and truth-seeking, adulthood allows exploitation and resource gathering, and post-menopausal elderhood allows caregiving and cultural transmission. Each period involves motivations and computational capacities that are in tension with those of other periods, but the full suite of development allows for maximal adaptation to changing and variable environments. The human life history offers lessons for AI, suggests Gopnik. Different types of AI enable different capacities: intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning can help enable exploration and truth-finding, while Large Language Models are means of cultural transmission.

8.

My reader notes are the best. This is such an interesting observation:

I’m interested in childhood-based approaches to learning for adults, myself included. I learned in Gabriel Winer’s book Fluent Forever that each language has an order in which all students learn its verb tenses—both native child speakers and second-language-learning adults. Nobody who learns english understands “she dances” before “she IS dancING.” I want to understand coding like a kid does.

No. 109 — Paris fall exhibitions ⫶ Pots, pans, and stoves ⫶ What’s in Jane’s bag?

Running back to a former self

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

Last week I was in New York, feeling what I felt some thirteen years ago when I first lived there. In many ways it was like running back to a former self. The Flatiron area, the gossiping Stumptown baristas and Y7 yoga studios take me straight to 2012. (What is that version of me doing now? What is she thinking?)

My main reason for visiting was an honorary mention on urban design that the Ruoholahti playground received from Fast Company’s Design Awards. It was also a wonderful chance to see old friends, discover new playgrounds, and gather ideas from a city that keeps changing.

1.

Here are some Paris exhibitions I’m excited for in the fall (a checklist for myself!):

• Pekka Halonen: Un hymne à la Finlande — Petit Palais (4 November 2025 to 22 February 2026). Painting snow is a Finnish specialty, much like Gallen-Kallela showed at the Musée Jacquemart-André a few years back. The exhibition also includes kids’ workshops.

• Exposition Générale — Fondation Cartier (25 October 2025 to 23 August 2026).
  Mostly for the brand-new-location energy; I have been watching this space while in 1st arrondissemen.

• La licorne, l’étoile et la lune — Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (14 October 2025 to 8 March 2026). One of my favorite museums in the city, with a great shop.

• Gerhard Richter — Fondation Louis Vuitton (17 October 2025 to 2 March 2026).
  Pair with a make-your-own-paintbrush workshop.

• Paris 1925 : L’Art déco et ses architectes — Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine (22 October 2025 to 29 March 2026). Paris gave Art Deco to the world! Musée Zadkine also has a Zadkine + Art Déco companion show coming up.

• L’Empire du Sommeil — Musée Marmottan Monet (9 October 2025 to 1 March 2026). Marmottan is my contender for the best one-stop museum in Paris: interesting temporary shows, breathtaking Monets, and even a house-museum.

• Berthe Weil: Galeriste d’avant-garde a— Musée de l’Orangerie (8 October 2025 to 26 January 2026). I loved Heinz Berggruen, un marchand et sa collection and the permanent Collection Walter-Guillaume : le parcours - there is something about the eye of a collector that makes for a great exhibition theme.

• John Singer Sargent: Éblouir Paris — Musée d’Orsay (23 September 2025 to 11 January 2026). “Madame X” is on loan from the Met, which is reason enough to visit.

• Minimal — Bourse de Commerce (8 October 2025 to 19 January 2026). The Bourse is the perfect size: always something interesting, never too exhausting.

• Anything at Grand Palais. In the past year we have skated, browsed books, and gotten lost in a children’s museum here. It has quietly become our town square... The Pompidou is staging many exhibitions there while under renovation.

• Les illusions retrouvées. Nouvelles utopies à l’ère numérique — CENTQUATRE-PARIS (11 October 2025 to 11 January 2026). Technology meets art, and the center has a lovely children’s space. There are almost always people dancing in the corridors.

2.

A conversation with a reader last week reminded me how much I enjoy serendipity. So I opened a handful of free 30-minute calls over the next three weeks. If you want to talk about what you’re working on, trying to work on or thinking about working on and think I might be able to help, schedule a time.

3.

On a fall Sunday with dinner guests, everyone will love ragù (beef / porcini) and spaghetti shared from a platter, a sharp green salad, and cold champagne. Period.

4.

Why is it a bumper year for acorns?

I learned this from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: every few years, some trees produce an overwhelming crop of seeds. The collective term is mast, so we call it a mast year, when trees make more food than animals can possibly eat. It is an old survival strategy for oaks and their companions.

So this year I plan on scattering acorns with abandon.

5.

AI is our multiple-choice test. AI gives us speed and scale, and it’s tempting to use it in education, but much like the multiple-choice test AI can flatten our creativity. Come think with me about classrooms that keep room for ambiguity and wonder. This is the third webinar I’m doing with EU CodeWeek, and the details to join (for free!) are below:

When: October 15, 15:00–16:30 CET
Where: Online (Zoom) — Registration link
Format: Talk + discussion

6.

Two recommendations:

I just finished Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It is a model of a good framing: a big geopolitical question (what might an engineering society like China and a lawyerly society like the US learn from one another?), grounded in lived experience, told with narrative momentum.

The idea that stayed with me comes from an earlier Wang blog post: “Technology should be understood in three distinct forms: as processes embedded into tools (like pots, pans, and stoves); explicit instructions (like recipes); and as process knowledge, or what we can also refer to as tacit knowledge, know-how, and technical experience.” Read the book to see which country excels at which.

Looking ahead, Joe Studwell’s How Africa Works arrives in February 2026. I loved How Asia Works, so I am eager for this one.

7.

What’s in Jane’s bag?

From Jane B. par Agnès V, a film from 1988. This would be me with a Birkin. (Also, the clothes..)

No. 108 — Reading brain ⫶ Rebuilding something new ⫶ The State of the Braid

now with more bird facts!

My name is Linda. I write a bi-weekly newsletter about computer science, childhood, and culture.

Your resident playground designer observing playgrounds in Kyiv.

Every once in a while I find myself in the most surprising places. I spent last week in Kyiv, Ukraine.

Amid the ongoing war and blaring air alerts there was also a hopeful message of Ukrainian resilience, of beauty and of rebuilding something new. The train ride back to Poland took over twelve hours, plenty of time to think about how “Education Shaping the World” means investing in curiosity, care, and play already now. That’s work I want to be part of.

Slava Ukraini 💙💛

1.

I finished Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf. Her argument is that over centuries, reading rewired the brain into a “reading brain,” letting us enter the thoughts of others, absorb consciousnesses far from our own, and develop new cognitive capacities. At the end she turns to Socrates, who feared that reading only mimics knowledge.

Ultimately, the questions Socrates raised for Athenian youth apply equally to our own. Will unguided information lead to an illusion of knowledge, and thus curtail the more difficult, time-consuming, critical thought processes that lead to knowledge itself? Will the split-second immediacy of information gained from a search engine and the sheer volume of what is available derail the slower, more deliberative processes that deepen our understanding of complex concepts, of another’s inner thought processes, and of our own consciousness?

Socrates’ questions linger. I wonder what he would have said about the speed and ease of AI.

2.

A reader asked me, a bit paraphrased: If you were traveling through Scandinavia, looking at how technology, crafts, and childhood go hand in hand, what should you pay attention to?

So I made a small itinerary of museums, libraries and workshops. For each visit, I’d carry a handful of questions, like a lens for seeing Scandinavian culture.

• Do the spaces want us to move together, or wander alone? How do they make belonging visible?

• When technology appears, is it tool, toy, or companion? And how does it sit beside wood, clay, fabric, paper?

• Who decides what happens: the grown-ups, the designers, or the children? How much can a child bend the rules, or write their own?

• What is the shape of safety, and where does risk begin? Where are the pauses: the coffee, the fika, the pancakes waiting at the end?

• How are the things children make treated? Are they hidden away, or displayed with the same dignity as adult work?

• And can you feel the old Nordic promise, that everyone is welcome, that all can take part?

Finland

• Käsityökoulu Robotti. After-school arts-and-tech craft school.

• Arkki. Architecture lessons scaled to children’s bodies.

• Annantalo. A house for children’s art and culture.

• Oodi Urban Workshop. A library filled with tools (and seeing all the dads on paternity leave in Playground Loru!)

Sweden

• Junibacken. A Story Train through Astrid Lindgren’s worlds.

• Tom Tits Experiment. Machines that need many hands.

Denmark

• H.C. Andersen’s House. Light, sound, fairy tales in motion. I love especially Ville Vau.

• KU.BE. A building for movement! Love love this.

• Dokk1. A library as public square, with a Monstrum playground.

Norway

• Bitraf. A community makerspace.

• Deichman Bjørvika. A glass library full of ramps.
  

What should I add?

3.

How big are our embeddings? I love Vicki Boykis’ clear way of writing about embeddings and dimensionality. (Dimensionality is a topic I keep circling back to. I remember when a few hundred dimensions felt sufficient. Now 768 is standard, and many models stretch to 4,096 and beyond.)

4.

The State of the Braid. This made me laugh: the wandering essay format that blends personal material with other themes: hawks, stars, water/swimming, Greek mythology. Or, like the article puts it: “the story of my breakup, now with more bird facts!”.

Braided non-fiction remains still my favorite genre.

5.

Internet phone book is in reprint. An annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, now in collaboration with Metalabel. I wish I still had the little notebook where I wrote down the websites I liked, kept beside my childhood computer. It felt like a spell book.

6.

One of the little internet pockets I like checking from time to time: Scratch projects that use Hello Ruby sprites, stories or characters as inspiration. They are small, glitchy, and full of charm.