Last week I attended one of my very first French dinner parties. In Finland, a dinner party is a series of one-on-one conversations. In France, it's a different social technology entirely: the salon is a four-hundred-year-old invention and operates under completely different rules.

The hosts conducted the room. They knew when to throw a question to the quiet end of the table, when to introduce a little friction, when to reframe what someone had just said so it opened to the whole room. It was magic to experience (and also an amazing three hour listening exercise for my French).

At some point, someone said (perhaps joking, perhaps not) that no real philosophy is done in English. Someone else yelled: “What about David Hume?” The first person waved his hand. “He did it in French.”

He didn’t, of course. But the Parisian table had claimed him anyway, which is its own kind of argument.

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I’ve been thinking about that exchange all week because I think it’s actually true, at this particular moment in computing.

The claim (no philosophy in English) is a real position in French intellectual life, and one I used to find more than a little self-satisfied. The argument runs roughly like this: what English-speaking academia calls philosophy is actually something else. Logic, probability, philosophy of language, philosophy of science.

But that’s not la philosophie in the French sense. I wouldn't have cared, except that this year I keep bumping into the same problem from the other side.

The architecture of large language models was built entirely on the analytic tradition's home turf. Probability, information theory, Wittgenstein's language games. Shannon, Turing, Russell, Wittgenstein: they all treat language as structure.

And yet what has emerged with large language models is something the analytic toolkit can’t quite explain. When I ask “does it understand?” or “is there someone in there?” I walk straight into the questions the French were asking seventy years ago. The continental tradition treats language in a completely different way. Saussure, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault - they all insisted that language doesn't describe the world, but constructs it. I don’t know enough about the French tradition to say where it takes us, but it makes me want to read more Foucault and fewer benchmark papers right now.

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This editions illustrations come once more from Dana Stewart’s computer science class at Catherine Cook School in Chicago (here is work they did on machine learning and training data). I got to meet the class over Zoom the other week and they were the best workday ending I could have asked for. Dana’s questions for the children: what does the Internet look like? What networks do you belong to? And how will Internet look like in 100 yeras?

And for a small activity on what the internet looks like, check this out.

3.

Riley Walz built a tool called In Every Language that shows the word for any concept across different Wikipedia languages, alongside each edition's chosen image. Here is the word "computer." The translated words alone are fascinating. Some languages borrowed the English ("komputer," "kompyuter," all the way to Jamaican Creole's "Kompyuuta"). Others invented their own: Finnish gave us tietokone (knowledge machine), Icelandic tölva (number prophetess), Chinese 電腦 (electric brain), Turkish bilgisayar (information counter). Each language had to decide, sometime around the mid-1950s: is this thing a calculator, an organiser, a brain, or an oracle?

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Made me smile: a D&D alignment chart for the verb you use when you're making something. Creating, crafting, constructing, concocting.. It reminded me of how Claude Code apparently shows fifty-seven different, playful and verbose status words while it works on something (Ruminating, Schlepping, Moseying, Honking). Cowork, the mode I use more often, shows plainer ones: "Searching newsletter archive," "Extracting quotes." Every one is a retrieval verb.

Claude Code is a tölva. Cowork is a tietokone.

6.

I spent a weekend building a personal Wikipedia from eighteen years of bookmarks. Like seemingly everyone else, I read Andrej Karpathy’s note on LLM knowledge bases. This is something my collector brain absolutely loved (and I’ve written about the importance of small archives before). Karpathy’s insight is that an LLM knowledge base isn’t only a search engine, but a way of having a conversation with your own past.

The raw material: my bonkers tendency to save links, notes, and remarks from 2006 to 2024 across del.icio.us, Kippt, Pinboard, and Are.na. 25 454 links, to be exact. The ambition is to turn this scattered archive into something I could actually think with and connect the dots I’ve been collecting since I was twenty-three (!!). Gosh, it's a fun time to be thinking.

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Not to destroy wonder! Could be from a Reggio Emilia lecture, is from one of the most ageless computer science thinkers, my very favourite Herb Simon.

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Tivadar Danka is at it again. This is the Marauder’s Map of my dreams: a machine learning knowledge graph with 2081 concepts and 5149 connections between them. You swirl around the graph, find connections, paths, and rabbit holes you didn’t know existed. Click on “ergodicity” and it shows you the 41 concepts you need to understand first. Makes my little computer science map seem ancient!

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There is a new Mary Oliver documentary coming out this summer. Here's a list of upcoming screenings. I still love this episode of On Being where Krista Tippett mentions that her child, at twelve, was assigned to memorise "The Summer Day." I plan to do the same with mine. One exchange from that conversation:

It’s Bouleau Germinal An CCXXXIV, greetings from Paris. For twelve years after the Revolution France ran on a calendar where every day was named after a plant, an animal, or a tool. The weeks were ten days. Months were named for weather by a playwright called Fabre d’Églantine. Germinal is the month of germination. Today belongs to the birch tree, bouleau. I love a calendar that pays attention.

Speaking of paying attention: I did some digging and discovered roughly 60% of you have been here since the beginning, five years ago, some from way longer. But that means almost half of you are newer. I started this newsletter during the pandemic and I've been writing as if everyone knows the backstory, so: a reintroduction.

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A year ago I sent out a reader survey (it’s still open, if you want to say hi). I wanted to know who’s here. Here are some of the people reading this letter alongside you:

A preschool teacher in Slovenia who discovered Seymour Papert and now teaches computer science to children aged one to six through unplugged, open-ended activities. She also plays ukulele.

A learning experience designer in Antigua, Guatemala, surrounded by three volcanoes.

A Syrian illustrator and programmer in Istanbul who collects things that are red.

A data engineer in London rediscovering the indie web through RSS and the fediverse. He said it brought him a more hopeful eye for our future.

A school principal in Nigeria whose dissertation was on educational robotics for little kids.

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Looking at these responses makes me proud of the people here. I love this little corner of the internet. Sometimes it feels strange to write about my everyday life, my readings, my obsessions - with no guarantee anyone is listening. These responses reminded me you are.

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So hi, I’m Linda.

I’m a Finnish writer and illustrator living in Paris. I started my career in the early startup scene in Helsinki, co-founding Rails Girls, building a disassemblable computer at Stanford, and working as the first community manager at Codecademy in New York.

In 2014, I put a children’s book about coding on Kickstarter. It was called Hello Ruby, and it changed everything. The book has since been translated into almost 40 languages, and I’ve spent the last twelve years thinking about how children learn to think with computers. Somewhere along the way I gave a TED talk, which over two million people have watched.

The biggest shift in my thinking came from a place that has nothing to do with technology: Reggio Emilia, a small town in northern Italy with a radical approach to early childhood education. Two ideas stayed with me. One: knowledge isn’t transmitted, it’s constructed. Two: the environment is the third teacher. That second idea led me from books to playgrounds - last year Helsinki built the world’s first playground designed to teach computer science through physical play.

This year I published my first book for adults, Nähdä maailma hiekanjyvässä, about how computers see the world. I’m working on a second one on biology, computation, and how life learns to become.

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One thing I've learned is that it helps to have an archive. I always envy artists who get a mid-career retrospective. It must be thrilling to see how your thinking evolves, laid out in front of you. I've started building mine: a writing archive on my personal website (since, who knows what will happen with these platforms). I think the value of a person is not only in what they produce, but in how they understand. Maintaining a thick archive, taking reading notes, documenting the ideas that influence us.. As time goes on, that difference matters more. A few favorites from past years:

• No. 18 - on why I teach algorithms with pancakes

• No. 8 - on the importance of drawing

• The Lost Coder - a piece I did for Helsingin Sanomat on punchcard operators and early Finnish programmers

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Here’s another thing I’ve learned: it helps to say out loud what you’re interested in. To find like-minded people in this fractured online world, you have to be specific. As the editors of The Logic once put it: the opposite of hype is not pessimism, […], but specificity.

So, specifically: I’m working on a new Hello Ruby book about large language models (and writing it as a secret). I’m trying to understand how to move several playground projects that are stuck in a bureaucratic no-man’s-land. Hoping to see Noguchi’s New York and some of these unrealised playgrounds in New York. I’m spending more time thinking about embodied cognition (all that Merleau-Ponty coming in handy finally!). I’m reading How Africa Works by Joe Studwell. I’m hitting refresh to get tickets to Black Pearl: meditations for Josephine at the Paris Opera.

Your turn: what, specifically, are you interested in?

Last week I was in Copenhagen, where I gave a talk at Rebuild. Rebuild is a work sprint to rebuild European social platforms, intended for protocol designers, product builders, and policy people.

I was, once again, the odd one out. A children’s book author who has been spending an increasing amount of time with urban planners, landscape architects, and playground designers doesn’t scream social platforms.

But I’ve known Thomas, one of the organisers, for years, and I trust his taste in event curation. He asked me to talk about children. So I did. And through the process found a way to say some things about children and the internet that I've wanted to say for a long time.

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There are roughly 80 million children under 13 in Europe. That’s about 15 percent of the population. I keep repeating this number to myself because what follows is so strange. We, the technology industry, collectively decided it was easier to pretend they don’t exist.

In 1998, the US passed COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which says you cannot collect data from children under 13 without parental consent. Europe followed with GDPR’s Article 8, setting the digital age of consent at 16.

In practice, this means the default experience for a child on the internet is to either be locked out or to lie. The pattern continues in 2026. Australia banned under-16s from social media entirely. France passed a bill to do the same for under-15s just weeks ago.

Children are the most imaginative, wild, full-of-potential users of technology, and the entire social internet is built as if they didn’t matter.

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There is a story I keep coming back to.

In 1966, a documentary producer named Joan Ganz Cooney was asked by the Carnegie Corporation to study whether television could be used to educate preschool children. The consensus on TV at the time was similar to today’s discussion on social platforms. They were considered uniformly bad for kids. A passive, ad-fuelled, commercial, brain-rotting medium.

The question was: what would she build for them to watch?Cooney spent months interviewing child development experts and television producers. She came back with a fifty-five-page report, The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education , that made a big argument. She noted that 96% of American homes already had television sets running sixty hours a week. Children were already singing advertising jingles.

That report became the blueprint for Sesame Street. The show was produced at the level of the best commercial television, but grounded in developmental research from the start. Sesame Street was the first show to put inner-city children and diverse families on screen. And it never stopped testing what it made: every segment was studied with real children, revised, studied again. Fifty-five years later, they’re still doing it.

Right now, we’re having the exact same conversation about social platforms that people had about television in 1966. And mostly we’re stuck on the same answer: keep kids away.

A 2026 version of Cooney’s question: what would the Sesame Street of social platforms look like?

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One of my favourite details from the Cooney story is the Distracter.

When Sesame Street went into production, the research team invented a method they called “the Distracter.” They would seat children in front of a television showing a Sesame Street episode. Next to it, they placed a second screen playing a slideshow of random, bright, constantly changing images.

Every time a child looked away from Sesame Street toward the Distracter, the researchers marked that moment. They compiled the data, mapped it against each segment of the show, and found which scenes held attention. Then they redesigned the segments that failed and tested again.

James Bridle recreated a few years ago an installation version at Kunsthaus Zurich of The Distractor. The original Distracter was built to make children's television better. Today, the distractor is the platform itself.

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I think architecture understands something about scale that the social internet has mostly ignored.

Christopher Alexander spent his life arguing that the most humane built environments are composed of smaller, semi-autonomous parts. They have places that feel alive, that draw you in. They work at multiple scales simultaneously: the doorknob, the room, the building, the street, the neighbourhood.

What if a social space for 200 children in a neighbourhood was considered a success? A year ago, the economics would have made that absurd. But the cost of building software has dropped so dramatically that a neighbourhood-scale platform is no longer a fantasy.

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At the gathering, Rebuild also worked on a taxonomy of social platforms. I kept thinking about what happens when you replace “social platform” with “playground.”

When I design playgrounds, I think about things that sound mundane. Is the space visible from the street? Are there edges and nooks where a child can find a quiet corner? How is the playground maintained? Who rakes the leaves? What are the rules, and who enforces them?

Now imagine we asked the same questions of a social platform designed for young people. Can you see who else is here? What if a platform wasn’t available 24/7, but opened at 3pm and closed at 8pm, like an after-school club? How would it change come winter?

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So we’ve arrived at the easiest answer: keep the children out of social platforms. I understand the instinct. Of course children should not roam the internet or social media freely.

But safety is something you build. And I don’t believe that locking children out gives them the experience of managing on their own. We prevent their fumbling attempts at independence. Social trust, cooperation, imagination: all of it goes missing too.

In Japan, there’s a television show called Hajimete no Otsukai (“My First Errand”) where preschool children run small tasks in their neighbourhoods. They are terrified at first. They try again. They ask for help. And when they come home, they are proud. The children aren’t safe because the dangers have been removed. They are safe because the city has been designed: narrow streets, visible neighbours, shopkeepers who know their names, older children who look after younger ones.

Instead of helplessness, I’d like today’s children to approach the internet the way a child moves through a Japanese neighbourhood. Free, brave, and a little wild, trusting that the space has been built to support them. And I'd like us to start designing those streets.

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I’ll be honest: I feel conflicted about the framing of this as a European project. The internet I grew up with didn’t have borders. The weird, handmade, personal web of the 2000s wasn’t Finnish or American or Japanese. It was just ours. The fact that we now need to specify “European social platforms” says something about how much has been lost.

And there is really interesting work happening beyond any single continent’s initiative. New_ Public is rethinking online public spaces. Metagov is working on online governance and if I were a political science student right now, their PolicyKit would be the most interesting thing in the world. In Taiwan, the g0v civic movement has been building open-source alternatives to government websites since 2012. Just this week, the Resonant Computing community launched its first gathering in New York.

Something is stirring. It doesn’t have one name or one address yet. But if you feel it too, check out letter.rebuild.net.

It’s been raining for forty days in France. By the Seine, there’s a stone soldier called le Zouave du Pont de l’Alma, and Parisians have used him to read the river since 1856. The water reaches his toes, and the city holds its breath. But spring is almost here, and things are beginning to crack open.

My son’s language, for one. Like any proud parent, I’m in awe of what comes out of his mouth. Unconventional, fresh, and weird. He says things no one has ever said before, in three languages, in combinations that shouldn’t work but do. I’ve been thinking about why. A language model is optimized for the most probable next word. He is optimized for the least probable one. The AI companies have linguists, mathematicians, physicists. What they need is a Korney Chukovsky.

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Theater has been on my mind since I finished Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia last week. The play blends two timelines in an English country house (one set in 1809, the other in the present day) braiding chaos theory, landscape gardening, literary detective work, thermodynamics, and a character who feels very much like a young Ada Lovelace. (It’s running at the Old Vic in London for another month!) It reminds me of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, which I saw years ago: Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Margrethe Bohr circling each other in the afterlife, trying to reconstruct a single conversation about uranium. Both plays talk about science on the surface, but are fundamentally about the limits of knowing. And in both, the knowing happens the way it always does on stage: through dialogue. People talking, disagreeing, circling each other, never quite arriving.

And in 2026 we are all, suddenly, in dialogue with machines. The strange thing about language models is that they’ve turned computing into a conversation. And it made me think of a passage from Sarah Ruhl’s 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write: “I’m not sure that I believe in progress, because I make theater. And theater, by its nature, does not believe in progress. We must constantly go back to go forward. Theater cannot believe in absolute knowledge, because usually two or three characters are talking and they usually believe two or three different things, making knowledge a relative proposition.”

Maybe that’s why I find it so interesting when theater people encounter generative AI. Chris Ashworth makes macOS software that automates lighting and audio for live theater productions, and runs a theater called Voxel in Baltimore. He used Claude Code to build a custom lighting design application for a very niche project, an app whose audience was three people (!). He’s careful, almost reluctant. “I really hate that I’m saying this,” he begins. I believe him. More software by people who can hold two or three truths at once, please.

2.

This spring, I’m running a workshop for twenty Texas K–8 teachers called Playful Computing.

Six Fridays on Zoom, May through July. It’s the workshop I’ve wanted to build for a long time, and everything I’ve learned about teaching computer science over the past decade. I’ve worked hard to make the course something beyond talking heads. The course is funded through WeTeach_CS at UT Austin, which means it’s completely free for participants. They also earn 30 hours of PD credit and a $350 stipend upon completion. The application deadline is April 8th!

(If you’re not in Texas but wish there were something like this near you—reply and tell me where. I’m keeping a list!)

3.

I’ve been trying to understand how to read protein structure visualizations. You know the shapes that are everywhere: the coiled ribbons, the pleated arrows. After AlphaFold, they’ve become the symbol of a certain type of science, or even a worldview.

But there is a language behind them. And that language has a backstory. The ribbon diagrams we all recognize were first drawn by hand by Jane Richardson, a biochemist at Duke, in the late 1970s. She drew the way a cartographer draws. What I love about Richardson’s work is that she looked at the data and found a visual grammar for it. Every molecular visualization tool today still uses her hand-drawn visual language. AlphaFold’s most celebrated outputs are rendered in Richardson’s ribbons.

4.

Molly guard in reverse by Marcin Wichary. In old-school computing, a "molly guard" is the little plastic safety cover over a button of significance. It’s named after an engineer's daughter who visited a datacenter and promptly pressed the big red button.

5.

Ten years ago, first grade teacher Autumn Zaminski led her students on a week-long adventure in search of Ruby’s missing gems, hiding clues in envelopes, building HexBug mazes, finding necklaces with green gems.. I remember seeing the photos on Twitter and thinking: whatever happens with this book, I’ve made it. Because that’s the kind of experience kids carry with them.

Now Ms. Zaminski is back, this time on the CT Cafe podcast, sharing her favorite computational thinking books.

6.

Last spring I started work on a new Hello Ruby book on sorting algorithms. But then something different started feeling more urgent. How words became compute. Or, put more simply: how to explain a large language model to a five-year-old.

Robin Sloan wrote something recently that read like a rallying cry: that AI language models are “a particularly, maybe even uniquely, human technology.” And that we all have a stake in this, simply by virtue of being a talking animal. I love that framing. It felt like enough of a reason to start drawing.

A few books have been sitting beside me as I work. I wanted to share them early, because I know how creative many of the educators reading this are at pairing picture books with computer science (just look at what you did with They All Saw a Cat in No. 68!).

• The Word Collector by Peter H. Reynolds, about a boy who collects words instead of stamps and discovers what happens when you start combining them.

• The Story Machine by Tom McLaughlin, about a child who finds a mysterious machine that turns letters into stories.

• Another by Christian Robinson, about a girl who slips into a world that mirrors her own, almost but not quite.

If you've used any of these in your classroom, or if you have other picture books that make you think about words, language, and machines, I'd love to hear about it.

We once had a real estate agent in Paris who was into Space Invader, the street artist whose pixel-art ceramic tile mosaics are all over the city. Cinquante points, she exhaled when we walked out of an apartment. She taught me to collect the points whenever I spot one. There are over 1,500 pieces in Paris alone. This Totoro has been on my list for a long time.

I’ve been waking up at weird hours and loving the uninterrupted hours of dawn. I’m playing Stone in Focus by Aphex Twin (and please this time, read the comments).

It’s now 5:41, and the day begins.

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The Ruoholahti Computer Playground curriculum won the Math Power! Prize. (I love the little exclamation mark.) This year the award went to projects that use physical models to deepen mathematical understanding.

It’s a lovely recognition, and a continuum of work that goes back to 2020. But to me it’s also a proof of concept: a public park can function as an operating system for ideas, not just a container for slides and swings.

The prize money will help us take the next step: building a library of play patterns around math and computer science concepts that can travel wherever public playgrounds do.

This is where I’d like your help.

I’d like to work with teachers and researchers to test these play patterns in real classrooms and playgrounds, and to understand what changes in children’s confidence and reasoning when math lives in their muscles, fingertips and tip of tongue. If you work in a city office wondering what “child-friendly” could really mean, if you’re an architect or landscape designer curious about spaces that teach, if you’re in a school, museum, foundation, or NGO thinking about STEAM or public space - I’d love to talk. mEducation Alliance is hosting a webinar on February 26th where I’m looking forward to meeting some likeminded people!

2.

"A welfare state solution would see the creation of a national corps of literary geishas, with degrees in literature and the psychology of writers. They would work full time with the writers whom no one read, listening to them, reading their work, praising them, and consoling them."

I finally finished So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid. It was excellent and I'll be returning to many of its lessons. But this little paragraph, written in 1996, made me smile. A literary geisha might be the most human job description for a modern language model I've come across.

Unlike most AI-generated text, the metaphors people reach for when trying to describe these systems are genuinely exciting: Blurry JPEGs! Stochastic parrots! Summoning ghosts! Literary geishas! Large language models truly are third things.

3.

I've linked a few times to the Iranian educators coming up with joyful classroom activities around Hello Ruby. But this recent play is the most delightful thing yet: life-sized wearable cutouts of the different characters.

4.

I read Benoît Mandelbrot’s biography last year, and I keep bumping into his world. This time it was via Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, who noticed a resemblance between how many fractals are generated and how we train neural networks. The images are so beautiful they make me think of James Turrell. That cannot be a coincidence.

Related: was Mandelbrot a fox or a hedgehog?

5.

Shiny mud balls or dorodango. “Once Kayo teaches children how to make these mud balls, they become absorbed in forming a sphere, and they put all their energy into polishing the ball until it sparkles. The dorodango soon becomes the child's greatest treasure.”

6.

Excellent miso made from Jerusalem artichokes. Hugo makes it in Paris, along with a few other unusual flavors. Moments like this make me wish the physical world worked a bit more like the internet. This miso deserves to travel.

7.

“Forty years on [from when I first encountered a computer], the technology in the gray box is everywhere, shaping my life in every way, which is strange in itself, but perhaps stranger is the fact that I have never cared about it, just taken it for granted and seamlessly incorporated it into my life. Not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it, how it works in itself, how it works in me. It’s as if I had moved to a foreign country and not bothered to learn its language, as if I am content with not understanding what is happening around me and just settling for my own little world.”

Of all the people making the case for understanding technology, Karl Ove Knausgaard wasn’t on my list. But this is him at his best: direct, then suddenly, enchantment.

Hi, hi from the deep end of January. This year I’ve finally figured out what January is best for: head-down writing, drawing and researching new projects, without panicking too much about the lack of billable hours, meetings, and other visible signs of worklife. It feels good to have accepted this rhythm. Also, it’s been a big few weeks in the realm of coding/AI, and it’s nice to have had the time to, well, play.

1.

First:

“To make a lovable school, industrious, inventive, liveable, documentable and communicable, a place of research, learning, re-cognition and reflection, where children, teachers and families feel well - is our point of arrival” wrote Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of Reggio Emilia.

Now replace school with playground. Or website. Or app. Or (why not!) artificial intelligence. If the sentence breaks, that’s exactly where the work is.

2.

Last week I got asked the question that’s suddenly everywhere: is it still worth teaching programming?

I think programmers overlook one of the core cognitive skills they already have: software-shaped thinking. Most people don’t walk through life noticing the tiny levers, hidden knobs, and loose screws in our digital world. Places where adding a little computation can turn friction into lift.

The great thing is that large language models have lowered the cost of learning this way of seeing. They make it easier to try out self-expression and problem-solving with code. In the past week I built a system to track my reading list, fixed memory management on helloruby.com, organized my publishing contracts, and audited my website for broken links. And I had fun. Large language models change, once more, what a beginner means.

Yes - still worth teaching. Because learning to code was never really about producing programmers and memorizing syntax. It’s about giving more people access to that workshop of levers, knobs, and loose screws - so what we build next can be, in Malaguzzi’s sense, loveable, industrious, inventive, liveable, documentable and communicable.

3.

So, like much of the software-writing world, I spent last week with Claude Code. I loved how quickly a new feature was whipped together, and how patiently it helped me through local development and deployment issues. I understand the appeal of feeling productive all the time (that “it never gets tired of talking to me!” energy my three-year-old basks in). But I also felt the limits. I didn’t like the initial design choices it made (SO MUCH SHADOWS!!). And even with an agent in the machine, making something finished still took time to think, steer and revise.

Anyways, I shipped a new feature for Hello Ruby (hahah—first in 10+ years): you can now finally sort the different activities at helloruby.com/play according to difficulty, duration and category. Go give it a spin!

4.

Mid-January isn’t the most inspiring season to be a playground designer (or a parent). And then photos from Sakari Röyskö of the Leikkipuisto Ruoholahti under snow arrived. It’s like a new Fortnite island dropped overnight. (Fresh friction! Surprising glide paths! Mysterious lights!)

I showed the photos to a French friend. In Paris, playgrounds close when it gets dark, and often when it snows too. Helsinki, on the other hand, is a city that doesn’t pause play. It just ships a seasonal update, and everyone keeps going.

5.

Marcin Wichary lists his favourite technology museums. Talk about a to-do list!

6.

I finished Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection. For someone who spent time in the 2010s Berlin, it landed with the specific discomfort of recognizing yourself. (The book also landed on my desk just as 2016 started trending in my feeds, and suddenly it felt like accidental time travel.)

Latronico’s expat world of all-English headlines and minimalist apartments also made me notice something about my own. Either I’m getting older, or the times have changed, or both. Because it suddenly feels energetically important to belong to the place I’m in. To really be part of the local surroundings, not just a visitor with good taste and a good Wi-Fi connection. In my twenties I actively avoided that kind of old-fashioned rootedness. I used to joke that I knew Silicon Valley gossip better than my local municipal news. Now it feels like the whole point. (Hello, mayoral elections 2026 in Paris!)

7.

Some of you remember my pandemic obsession with that lo-fi hip hop channel. Now there is something even better: lo-fi microbes to relax/study to.

“You have to look at the world in small pieces at a time,” Corita Kent said. “Look at it. Just a small part of the world.” Then she passed finders to her students, small pieces of cardboard with rectangular holes in them.

This year I didn’t succeed in a lot of the things I tried. I had thought I could continue my career without missing a beat. I couldn’t. Other things failed too. However, this was also the year when I started to feel at home in Paris, when I finished two major projects, and when I began to think of my work as a studio.

What gave me direction was the idea of an ongoing practice, a body of work that keeps accumulating. Every year contributes in some way. I’m trying to think of each year as one of Corita Kent’s finders, each one small, each one showing a different part of the same work.

This is the twelfth time writing this. Here are 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014.

And here is 2025:

January

• I started the year ice skating at the Grand Palais. It felt glamorous, in the way only Paris can be. Then a few days in Spain for sunshine and friends. In January, E. & M. moved an hour away for a year. They were close enough to come visit often, which was lovely. I started the year with a biopsy that luckily came back benign. Still, it was a stressful few weeks.

• Lots of furious writing with the book manuscript. FIP saved my quiet afternoons again. I did an interview with Bryan about the playground. Sam’s Humanistic Computation List arrived. Later we did a podcast together.

• We had been looking for a place in Paris since the previous spring and finally, at the end of January, the move-in date arrived. For the first time I felt properly at home in Paris with our own furniture and our own corners (which I never quite managed to measure correctly). I kept thinking about Christopher Alexander’s “Couple’s Realm”: the idea that a home needs a small territory that belongs to the relationship itself, and scrolled through Rohmer interiors.

• Haptic nostalgia (for me, the metal shutter on the front of a 3.5" disk and how it would spring back with a snick). Ulla Wiggen’s computer work at EMMA Museum. I was quite excited about the launch of Quanta Books.

• Wrote Year in Review 2024.

Read:

• Lehmä synnyttää yöllä by Pajtim Statovci

• When in French: Love in a Second Language by Lauren Collins

• Powerhouse by James Andrew Miller

• Any Person Is the Only Self by Elisa Gabbert. I loved this.

• The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World―and Shapes Our Future by Samuel Arbesman

• Kaarna by Tommi Kinnunen

February

• We didn’t yet have furniture in the new home, but found a pair of old terrace tables from Café de Flore at Les Chefs des Vaisselles. The QR codes are still on them. J. came over to Paris many times this year, and I ate lohisoppa at Tour with the other J. I bought tiny plates for afternoon cake. I also had an inspiring breakfast with K. that led to strange places later in the year. Participated in a lovely wine tour of medieval and Roman Paris.

• Looking back at my calendar, I feel like I tried so many things: calls and emails that led nowhere. I went in the wrong direction so many times this year. This resonated a lot: “Papers are more durable than programs. Think Mozart — we have his sheet music, but not his implementation.”

• BBC wrote about the playground!

• Last two weeks of the month in Helsinki. Visited the Kindergarten Museum for the first time and tried to figure out a project that would allow me to visit their archive. I love how Finnish schools were doing phenomenon/project based learning in the early 1900s, with themes like cows, stars, clocks, and peas. PEAS for a month!

• This made me sit up straighter: At work alone

• I did a webinar where I looked back on my teenage self. Around the same time, I updated my website and for the first time since my teens, I feel like I have an online space that feels like me. It’s getting harder to fit everything I do under one umbrella, so I’m considering bringing the word studio into the framing. I also started thinking about how to talk about the book (and got to record a podcast with my cousins).

• French Kiss by Chilly Gonzalez. I’m starting to notice how my éclair, tonnerre, pomme de terre are getting better.

• Wrote No. 93 — Recently returned ⫶ The Language of Computation ⫶ Cursor Park and No. 94 — Hopscotch ⫶ Nassi-Shneiderman Diagrams ⫶ Heroes list

Books read:

• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

• Send Nudes by Saba Sams

• The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim

• Once There Was by Kiyash Monsef

• The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

March

• Still made miso beans with leeks over and over. Pleincoeur brought some hip boulangerie energy to our neighbourhood. Vikingur Ólafsson and Paavo Järvi at the Philharmonie. Had a memorable meal with B. at La Tour d’Argent with Savoy visiting.

• Learned a new helpful word for Paris politics: plébiscite (or referendum). L.’s birthday party. Furniture started arriving and I hauled over 300 kilos worth of stuff upstairs in one day. H. came for a visit and we went second hand shopping in Montmartre, as well as spending a weekend with the families. Hosted a brunch with S., V, and O

• Was in Brussels for a quick day trip and later in Helsinki for ScanAgile. Kept thinking a lot about institutions, LLM weights as pieces of history, and preserving the pre-generative AI internet. Later in the year, Anthropic commited to model weight preservation.

• At some point I got frustrated enough to consider consulting on AI essentials for fearful executives. I’m glad it passed. Throughout the year I visited a lot of indoor play spaces (Palomano, CAMP, Space, Octopia Kids), and each one made me itch to try my own version.

• Hypothesis: Tacit knowledge videos will burgeon as a field. Being able to watch competent people work, with or without AI, is a huge competitive advantage. Finally saw my first Turrell pieces at Gagosian’s Le Bourget location. Color therapy for the spring!

• Wrote No. 95 — Small Archives ⫶ Without Blurs ⫶ Lost Art of Logarithms and No. 96 — Sorting algorithms ⫶ Currently sitting on a pencil case ⫶ Seasonal family logistics shuffle

Read

• Käräjät by Markus Nummi

• Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight

• This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud. A favorite!

April

• A long weekend in Amsterdam with J. and A. watching the Dutch masters and exploring excellent parks. I tried to spot as many Aldo van Eyck playgrounds as I could.

• Published my first book for grownups. Narrative non-fiction on the big ideas of computer science, told with a humanistic style. Here’s a selection of what people have said of the book. My favorite anecdote is when B. went to ask for it in the store, he was told the book is somewhere between space and society.

• Finland for the Easter vacation. Egg hunt with R. and A. Got a beautiful birthday gift from B. A. published her first poetry book. I also did an event for the book at Oodi (Library as infrastructure!)

• I turned 39 and girlhood seems officially behind me (I notice myself irritated with all the girl dinners, walks and offices - this coming from someone who named a whole movement Rails Girls..) Zadie Smith on NPR said it beautifully though: “I find it really hard getting older. It’s really hard and melancholy. (…) Because I loved being young and I’m really gonna miss it. I’m sure you get over it. When I meet women, particularly in their later 50s and their 60s, there’s a lot of joy returns, but I think the moment of transition is melancholic for sure.”

• Crispy gnocchi with brussels sprouts and brown butter and the pickled mustard seeds one gets from Grande Epicerie were my favorite dinner of the month.

• Discovered that in the spring, sun starts to shine directly to my work table at 4 PM. It became the perfect cue to head out. Robin’s posters delighted me.

• Two Computer Sciences paired with this image. Same energy.

• Wrote No. 97 — To See The World in A Grain of Sand and No. 98 — The playground curriculum ⫶ Ted Nelson’s Junk Mail ⫶ But what are you trying to be free of?

Read

• The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City by Alexis Madrigal

• Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Cixin Liu

• Karkuteillä by Aura Nurmi

• Sielunpiirtäjän ilta by Joel Haahtela

• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

• Abundance by Ezra Klein

• Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold. Another big favorite.

• Kaskaat by Emmi-Liia Sjöholm

• Reunamerkintöjä - Kadonnutta Eurooppaa etsimässä by Ville-Juhani Sutinen. At this time I had no idea that I would end up later in the year travelling to the exact locations between Poland and Ukraine!

May

• May is so chopped up by vacations that I should just write it off. Long weekend in Les Arcs with family. Discovered a new French word: les chicoufs. Chic when the grandkids arrive, oufff when they leave. Very proud of my friend for experimenting with writing and performing music.

• “Vous avez trouvé votre bonheur?” the shopkeeper at Picard asked. She meant frozen goods. I kept hearing it as happiness.

• “Don’t hold your breath,” says Björk. I spent two weeks in a what now? haze. Then the impulse to work returned, and with it, material and direction quickly add up. It’s like being a musician. After a performance, you start working toward the next.

• Daytrip to Barbizon. Turns out Saint-Saëns lived in our quartier! L and R. came to visit while I was in Finland. Afterwards we went to see the Hockney exhibition and had a joyful lunch at Plaza Athene afterwards.

• Computational Public Space nailed a lot of ideas I’ve been toying around with. Also loved Alexandra Lange’s Designing Cities for Families. or graceful and genre-expanding writing about public spaces for families, deftly using interviews, observations and analysis to consider the architectural components that allow children and communities to thrive. Also: Cities are like compost heaps.

• I’m really happy that nowadays there exists more world-class children’s picture book illustration resources. Looking at Picture Books by Jon Klassen and Mac Barnett is a newsletter about how picture books work. Todays Special is run by Christian Robinson. Or this series of essays by Katherine Rundell. Also, child historians.

• Wrote No. 99 — The Force of Spring ⫶ Paris Bees ⫶ Curiosity Muscle and No. 100 - Hundred ⫶ Sata ⫶ Cent

Read

• Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir by Craig Mod

• Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler

• Les Yeux de Mona by Thomas Schlesser

• One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder by Brian Doyle

• Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays by Nicole Graev Lipson

June

• French has officially destroyed my Swedish, which is basically gone. It’s starting on my English, too. “Let’s profit of this weather,” I’d say, cheerfully. Paris Saint-Germain won the Champions League final and the whole neighbourhood erupted. I don’t follow football, but this was impossible to miss. Paris, c’est ici!

• I like this framing from Nick Cammarata: “neural network interpretability is fun both in the way going to the zoo is fun, and also in the way that doing math is fun.”

• Quick visit to Berlin with my publisher. Always a pleasure! B. was in India. Paris was full of block parties: La Peña, the early childhood party, La Fête de la Musique, and the family festival at Fondation LV. A. came for dinner. We bought bleu de travail for the whole family. L. and family visited, and we got to show them our Paris, including a lovely morning at the Jardin d’Acclimatation. mlaboratori was my favorite Instagram account of the year.

• I came across a list of what healthy communities tend to have, and it stuck with me. Things like running into people you know without planning it, having a school directory, hosting another family at least once a month, being a guest in someone else’s home at least once a month, and passing along kids’ clothes as hand-me-downs. I don’t have all of that yet. Still, naming what I’m missing makes it feel achievable. Our neighbours in Paris were a big part of why the city started to feel like home this year. Thank you, S. and C and everyone else.

• Luen tässä was the best interview I did this year, as I got to talk about Lawrence Weschler, Matias Riikonen, Tove Jansson and Ursula M. Franklin in one interview.

• A big disappointment in how life works. We are just huge weird messes. Went for a biking trip to process .

• Wrote No. 101 — Language for imagination ⫶ Richelieu’s rotunda in 2048 ⫶ Vous avez trouvé votre bonheur? and No. 102 — True to Life ⫶ Polyester ⫶ All the surfaces of things

Read

• Minun työni by Olga Ravn

• Helsinki - Erään kaupungin historia by Henrik Meinander

• Lessons from My Teachers: From Preschool to the Present by Sarah Ruhl

• The Hockney Interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist

• The Twilight World by Werner Herzog

• The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

• Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

• William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: Art, Poetry, and the Imagining of a New World by Philip Hoare

• Nelisiipinen lokki by Matias Riikonen

• Motherhood by Sheila Heti

• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

July

• As school year ended, it was time to explore Paris again with a toddler. La Parcelle in 19ème was a highlight, La Maison des Histoires with its new Bastille location and the newly opened Le Palais des Enfants at Grand Palais. Loved Matisse and Marguerite at Musée d’art Moderne.

• Went swimming in the Seine! During Bastille Day celebrations I left my phone in the taxi, but somehow got us home. My favorite rabbit hole this year started with our street sign, Rue de Prony. It turns out it connects my daily life to mathematics, early computing, and the most Parisian detail of all, hairdressers.

• Simon Sarris: “I find it hard to imagine Leonardo da Vinci or Sherlock Holmes spending so much time with summary. I suspect careful thinkers do not gain a mastery of mystery, or attention to detail, by scrolling Reddit or listening to current event podcasts or asking “AI” to summarize anything. Instead I imagine they spend their time with primary sources, correspondence, stories, engaging with their own senses in one way or another, or some other form of exploring the world in detail.”

• On our last night in Paris for the summer we went to Montmartre, had a glass of red, and saw Les Arenas Lyriques. Strong bookend for a season.

• Wrote No. 103 — Diagonal Movements ⫶ Pathfinder ⫶ Move our arms and legs at the same time and No. 104 — Summer books ⫶ Prony’s computers ⫶ Interactions between frequencies

Read

• Huomenna kerron kaiken by Juha Itkonen

• Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines by Evelyn Fox Keller

• The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

• Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

• Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship by Sarah Franklin

• State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

• The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood by Belle Boggs

• How to Grow a Human: Adventures in Who We Are and How We Are Made by Philip Ball

  

August

• I think we mastered the art of vacationing as a family. It was a mix of pre-planned events and impromptu ideas: Kopparnäs trail, Shii, Klaava Winebar, Moominworld, Olafur Eliasson in Kruunuvuorenranta, Vallisaari for Helsinki Biennal, visit to Hanko and Löpärö. At Söderlångvik manor we slept in a tent and saw Kim Simonsson’s mysterious children. I first met these statues in Lyon when I was pregnant in 2022, then in Helsinki in 2024 and now in Kimitö, where they will stay. Loved Yinka Ilori’s piece at Amos Rex and going to Skidit Festarit with C and I.

• Lived my social calendar to the max: E’s birthday party, finally visiting the summer home of A and E. met baby A and saw J.’s new home. Went to Tallinn with family and had Sushi with I. and A. Visited the Pippi Longstockings exhibition at Merkki Museum at least four times. A lovely summer evening in Lonna to celebrate H. And I got to run again as a part of my old running team.

• Favorite blog of the year: ResObscura, easily Here’s another great post on All Souls entrance exam.

• “Everything is burning, just at different rates.” What we perceive as aging is oxidisation, rusting. This is the same level of insight as when I first read Carlo Rovelli in 2018 and realized the second principle of thermodynamics, which says that entropy is always increasing is what time is about.

• Pierre Cardin’s Computer Coat is a whole look.

• Not much tv or movies during the year, prioritised reading. I think the only movies I saw during the year were The Phoenician Scheme, Complete Unknown and Petite Maman. I watched The Pitt, The Bear, Etoile and The Studio. Celine Sciamma fascinates me, I want to see everything from her.

• Wrote No. 105 — Eight play values ⫶ Détour ⫶ Low in entropy and No. 106 — Proust and the Squid ⫶ Memory and monuments ⫶ Counting spaces

Read

• Tove Jansson ja maailman lapset by Tuula Karjalainen

• Day by Michael Cunningham

• Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

• Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays by Siri Hustvedt

• Orbital by Samantha Harvey

September

• The fall passed in a blur. A. came over to finish work on the house. (I still want to visit the Féau Boiseries showroom with her). French politics made all of us a little crazy. Spent lots of time with little E. Made arancini with J. The wedding of A. and M. was a joyful opening to the season. - a fox memory, a worm memory, a moss memory.

• I was genuinely excited about a new work project, for the first time in years. It felt, and still feels, like the project my whole life has been pointing toward. Then the year steamrolled over me. Now I’m gathering the shards, Södergran style, so I can begin again.

• I finished Benoit Mandelbrot’s biography and went down a rabbit hole on the theory of roughness. I still love how it makes me think of Italo Calvino and Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The best parts were about realizing “roughness” was not formless at all, and then, years later, finally coining a name for the whole terrain: fractal. It makes me excited for how many new words we’ll end up inventing around technology.

• Visited Ukraine for a memorable week and took part in Summit of First Ladies and Gentlemen, organised by the Zelenska foundation. Amid the ongoing war there is also a hopeful message of Ukrainian resilience, beauty and rebuilding I’ve wanted to be a part of.

• The following week I flew to New York, with a perfect excuse: Ruoholahti Playground had just won a Fast Company Innovation by Design honorable mention. New York brought back early-2010s memories. It often felt like visiting an older version of myself. Liz’s Book Bar, the Brooklyn Library (and Moomins), Viola’s Room, and a run in Central Park with R. New York also gave me a real breakthrough in how I sell the playground work. Thank you, D. Thank you also for my parents for all the help at home with the globetrotting.

• Dan Hollick’s work with Making Software feels generous, intellectual curiosity that the internet makes possible. Parker Henderson’s Are.na channel, Aesthetic Computers, is a small delight. I also keep a close watch on Ben Barry’s Active Matrix.

• My favorite X is Diana’s links. Give me an API for just that, as a timeline.

• Dan in Breakneck gave me a useful definition of technology that I keep returning to. Technology is tools, like pots and pans. It’s recipes, how you assemble them into something coherent. And it’s process, the practice of making and maintaining.

• Wrote No. 107 — La rentrée rush ⫶ 3books ⫶ the McPhee method, No. 108 — Reading brain ⫶ Rebuilding something new ⫶ The State of the Braid and No. 109 — Paris fall exhibitions ⫶ Pots, pans, and stoves ⫶ What’s in Jane’s bag?

Read

• Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang

• The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick by Benoît B. Mandelbrot

• What Now? by Ann Patchett

• In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

• Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

• The Dance of Life: The New Science of How a Single Cell Becomes a Human Being by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz

October

• Quick trip to Copenhagen and a long overdue coffee with M. Received news on a writing grant for the next book, which felt amazing. Finally went to visit several sections of La Petite Ceinture, an old railway track that goes through our neighbourhood. Futucast was one of my favorite discussions of the year.

• The bookshelves arrived, and I felt oddly accomplished. This is who I am, this is what I value. They keep my thinking visible. I liked Emmanuel Quartey’s system for tracking recurring questions. That might be a project for next year.

• Finland for the fall holidays. I loved watching C. and I. play detectives from Louvre, solving le casse du siècle. Visited Helsingin Kirjamessut for the first time in years. Saw Hyena’s Dagar at the theatre and spent two lovely days at Vinha bookstore with friends for a writing retreat. Le Paysan made me want to design my own childhood-inspired font.

• This reasoning-with-your-hands thing was still a theme this year, which I continued in the fall with AI is our multiple-choice test.

• “To really understand a concept, you have to "invent" it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn't come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models.” Francois Chollet, a constructivist.

• One of my favorite talks of the year was How the universe thinks without a brain by Claire L. Evans

• Just a collection of really good Nausicaä gifs.

• Wrote No. 110 — Papert’s Principle ⫶ Computers got weird ⫶ Calder Gardens and No. 111 — Vernacular computation ⫶ We Computers ⫶ Like-minded internet

Read

• Jatulintarha – Lisääntymisemme oudot polut by Vaula Helin

• Tinna by Satu Rämö

• Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee

• Nurkkahuone. Eräänlaiset päiväkirjat 2001–2022 by Björn Wahlroos

• Toujours Provence by Peter Mayle

• Les Guerriers de l’hiver by Olivier Norek

• The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

• Nyt kun kirjoitan tätä by Merete Mazzarella

November

• I think living in cities obsessed with removing friction, like Helsinki and San Francisco, trained me to expect seamlessness. Paris does the opposite. Paperwork and queuing are annoying, but they also make the chain of people visible. That seems healthy. (I appreciate the precision this Wikipedia article offers on human scale.)

• Linear algebra explains why some words are untranslatable. The most exciting thing for me about LLMs is that they treat language like a mathematical system: vectors and matrices. I wish there were more stories like this! This is also somehow related: How do animals sound across languages?

• November had a lot of great art. CAVE by Hofesh Shechter and the Martha Graham Dance Company was as close as I got to a nightclub (Dynamo’s spinning classes might also count). I saw Kustaa Saksi at the Finnish Institute, where I started as a board member this fall. I visited the new Fondation Cartier. We heard an excellent program of Prokofiev, Wagner, and Scriabin with Esa-Pekka Salonen, Yuja Wang, and the Orchestre de Paris. I always forget how physical music at this level is.

• Pekka Halonen at Petit Palais was a proud moment for a Finn, but my favorite exhibition of the year was Orangerie’s Berthe Weill. One of my favorite talks of the year was How the universe thinks without a brain by Claire L. Evans

• A day trip to Finland for a work event. A. came to visit, it’s her third or fourth time here this time of the year. Made granola à la David Lebovitzr, with some tahini and espresso to make it more interesting. This year’s Beaujolais Nouveau was better than the last few.

• I published two Are.na channels, one on memory and one on time. I ended the month with melancholy, complicated feelings, and a partial success.

• Wrote No. 112 — Utopia Parkway ⫶ Paging London ⫶ AMA and No. 113 — Berthe Weill ⫶ Continent of Play ⫶ Benchmarks for AI

Read

• Kvanttikilpajuoksu – Supertietokoneiden vallankumous by Tommi Tenkanen

• Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith

• Sandwich by Catherine Newman

• A.I. Virtanen työtoverien silmin by Unknown Author

• The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2) by Katherine Rundell

• We Computers: A Ghazal Novel by Hamid Ismailov

December

• Treated myself to a Works in progress subscription and bought myself earrings from Bangla Begum. Air did a TinyDesk concert. Setlist: Le Voyage de Pénélope, Cherry Blossom Girl, Highschool Lover, and Dirty Trip!! Music-wise this was a year of young women. Listened to a lot of Zaho de Sagazan and Rosalía.

• The Claude debates reminded me how much software engineering is its own practice, and how far I’ve drifted from it. I’ve spent the last few years deep in the foundations. In 2026, I want to rebuild some (volitional) muscle.

• N. and J. were in town for our now-traditional visit. Then to London for a few days. I hope the Royal Albert Hall and the BBC Radio Orchestra’s children’s concert becomes a tradition too. I spent far too long at Hatchards and the London Review Bookshop (with a new cafeteria!). Back in Paris, E., P., and E. stayed with us, and we made it to the Saint Lucia concert at the Swedish Church. Another tradition: a week of being sick right in the middle of the busiest time of the year.

• Last work trip of the year was to Copenhagen. Loved reconnecting with old friends and having a more optimistic gathering around what it means to be European and working in technology.

• A child entered a model of the computer playground into a legendary gingerbread competition! Headed for Christmas in Switzerland and Finland with a belly full of optimism.

• Wrote No. 114 — It’s Books, Darling ⫶ Gingerbread Playground ⫶ La Manche to London and No. 115 — Under-95-cm applications ⫶ Rules of Resonance ⫶ How LLMS work

Read

• One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeannette Winterson

• Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

• Assembly by Natasha Brown

• Playful by Cas Holman

• Mothers and Others by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

This is the first year I felt Christmas season in Paris was too short: so much we didn’t get to do. The silver lining: in France, holiday cards double as New Year’s cards, so I’m still on time for that. Now I’m in Switzerland, typing away at my in-laws’ kitchen table, trundling towards the end of 2025.

This is a short one, as I’m editing together the last of the Year in Review, to be published after the holidays.

Joyeuses fêtes de fin d’année, as they say.

1.

European social platforms need a rebuild. That was the message Ditte, Thomas, and their team at Rebuild shared last week in Copenhagen. Messaging, groups, communities, creator tools, photo sharing.. it is time to build European alternatives made for people. There is real energy in rethinking scale beyond the hyper-stretched, one-size-fits-all model we have been offered.

I’m watching the children’s layer with special interest. What would a web for users under 95 cm look like? How could Europe-built products offer something new for parents and communities on the big questions around our children and screens? What would app development modeled like a city play-catalogue look like?

If this sparks something, or you know someone in Europe building or dreaming of this, tell me, and point them to apply for the Rebuild cohort.

2.

In similar spirit: Resonant Computing Manifesto which outlines some of the design principles to move away from the monolithic, magnetic, and all-encompassing tech. Build products that are private, dedicated, plural, adaptable and prosocial. Here, here! It’s always hard to imagine alternatives, and yet they exist.

3.

Sam Rose explains how LLMs work with a visual essay. I love all the small interactive explorables here: the exploding matrices and the attention heatmaps. Sam has great essays on memory allocation, load balancing and big O notation.

4.

I really liked this post by Mason Currey on where ideas come from. He strings together a lovely chain of quotes from André 3000, Elizabeth Gilbert, John Cage, Elif Batuman, Terry Riley, Solvej Balle, to Lynda Barry around the notion of acting like ideas are hovering just above our heads is a productive creative stance.

Paul Holdengräber: You know, there’s a line I’ve always loved of Leonard Cohen. He said, “If I knew where the good songs came from, I would go there more often.”

David Lynch: Absolutely. People, we don’t do anything without an idea. So, they’re beautiful gifts. And I always say: Desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook. It can pull them in. And if you catch an idea that you love, that’s a beautiful, beautiful day—and you write that idea down so you won’t forget it. And that idea that you caught might just be a fragment of the whole whatever-it-is you’re working on. But now you have even more bait. Thinking about that small fragment, that little fish, will bring in more, and they’ll come in and they’ll hook on. And more and more come in, and pretty soon you might have a script, or a chair, or a painting, or an idea for a painting.

PG: But they come as—

DL: More often than not, small fragments. I like to think of it as: In the other room, the puzzle is all together. But they keep flipping in just one piece at a time.

PG: In the other room?

DL: Over there.

PG: In a sense, David, there’s always another room somewhere.

DL: Mm-hmm. That’s a beautiful thing to think about.

PG: Let’s think about it a bit.

DL: No, you think about it.

For me, the tell is an itch. I’m holding a single puzzle piece (a shard of a sentence/style/image). The rest is work.

I like the idea that ideas float in the universe, because it maps neatly onto large language models. The ideas are there, but the connections still have to be found.

The underwater tunnel that connects Calais to Folkestone runs beneath the English Channel, which the French call la Manche. In just two and a half hours, it takes me from Paris to London and it’s honestly one of the best tricks living in this city has to offer. Poof, I’m back in my childhood England.

Every time I return to London, I realise how much I’ve missed the bookshops. Not the algorithmic “you might also like” rows, but the REAL tables: loosely connected piles of books that share a feeling rather than a genre, something only a bookseller’s hunch can see.

1.

I’ll share the full list of everything I read in 2025 in my upcoming Year in Review, but since this is peak book-buying season, here are a few small constellations/recommendations/tables from this year’s reading – all books I genuinely enjoyed. (Some linked books lead to Bookshop.org, and I earn a small commission each time someone uses the link to purchase a book.)

Technology writing that made me smile in 2025:

• Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold

• The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World―and Shapes Our Future by Samuel Arbesman

• Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee

• The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick by Benoît B. Mandelbrot

Books that belong to a a bookshelf in the New Global Ministry of Infrastructure (formed sometime in 2045):

• Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang

• The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City by Alexis Madrigal

• Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Lab notes on making a human:

• Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines by Evelyn Fox Keller

• The Dance of Life: The New Science of How a Single Cell Becomes a Human Being by Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz

• How to Grow a Human: Adventures in Who We Are and How We Are Made by Philip Ball

• Mothers and Others by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy

• Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays by Siri Hustvedt

Long, knotty stories about families (my favorite genre!)

• This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

• The Sisters by Jonas Hassen Khemiri

• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai

Finnish favorites in 2025

• Kaarna by Tommi Kinnunen

• Reunamerkintöjä – Kadonnutta Eurooppaa etsimässä by Ville-Juhani Sutinen

• Karkuteillä by Aura Nurmi

• Kvanttikilpajuoksu – Supertietokoneiden vallankumous by Tommi Tenkanen

Books about looking carefully

• William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love by Philip Hoare

• The Hockney Interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist

• Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith

Essays and other pilgrim books

• Lessons from My Teachers: From Preschool to the Present by Sarah Ruhl

• Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir by Craig Mod

• One Aladdin Two Lamps by Jeannette Winterson

• Any Person Is the Only Self by Elisa Gabbert

Reading, memory and language

• Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

• In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

• When in French: Love in a Second Language by Lauren Collins

• Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

For kids, creatures, and other companions

• The Poisoned King (Impossible Creatures #2) by Katherine Rundell

• Once There Was (Once There Was #1) by Kiyash Monsef

• Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

• Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper

Stories of containers:

• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

• Les Guerriers de l’hiver by Olivier Norek

• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

• Orbital by Samantha Harvey

2.

“In a collection of essays, Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Daniel Heller-Roazen reproduces a story about Abū Nuwās, the great eighth-century Arabic poet.

When first setting out, the young Abū Nuwās approached a local master, Khalaf al-Ahmar, and asked permission to compose.

A much later biographer tells the tale:

Khalaf said: “I refuse to let you make a poem until you memorize a thousand passages of ancient poetry, including chants, odes, and occasional verses.”

So Abū Nuwās disappeared; and after a long while, he came back and said, “I’ve done it.” “Recite them,” said Khalaf. So, Abū Nuwās began, and got through the bulk of the verses over a period of several days. Then he asked again for permission to compose poetry.

Said Khalaf, “I refuse, unless you forget all one thousand parts as completely as if you had never learned them.” “That’s too difficult,” said Abū Nuwās. “I’ve memorized them quite thoroughly!” “I refuse to let you compose until you forget them,” said Khalaf.

So Abū Nuwās disappeared into a monastery and remained in solitude for a period of time until he forgot all the lines he’d learned. He went back to Khalaf and said, “I’ve forgotten them so thoroughly it’s as if I never memorized anything at all.” Khalaf then said, “Now go compose!”” - Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

Somehow this rhymes with Dave Friedman’s Where large language models break. The old Arab master wants his student to read a thousand poems and then forget them so completely that what remains is not quotation but style, a space of possibilities. Contemporary models don’t do this. As Friedman writes, “When the two AIs reached the limits of their world models, they, too, began producing language that remained elegant but weightless, rhythmic but unmoored, all motion and no locomotion. (…) Beckett is what interpolation looks like after it loses the ability to connect to the world.” Beckett!!

3.

The ultimate compliment for an architect: a kid turned our Ruoholahti Computer Playground into a gingerbread house for the Helsingin Sanomat competition. Iconic!

You can vote until Dec 12 here.

4.

Recently I fell down a small internet rabbit hole thanks to an old Dwarf Fortress bug report that read, with complete sincerity: “babies are born worshipping unknown gods.” I love that we live in a world where a bug tracker, of all places, can cough up a sentence like this. More DwarfFort bugs here.

5.

At Hatchard’s I was waiting for B. who had vanished into the the first and modern editions section. An older husband was already exasperated: I’ve been calling you several times, he sighed down the stairwell. His wife emerged, unbothered, brushing past him: Oh, it’s books, darling, as if that settled not only the argument but the entire question of how to live.

Fitzcarraldo Editions has a new The First Decade Collection, a limited edition series of ten hardbacks. I’m eyeing Dillon & Ernaux! I wish more publishers understood this particular joy.

Hi, hi. These days I’m most grateful for the very smart raincoat I got last year, one of the wettest springs in Paris since 1886. We’re slipping into moody, cinematic city season. A month until Christmas!

Bisou,
Linda

1.

Last weekend I saw my favorite exhibition of the year: Berthe Weill at the Musée de l’Orangerie.

Weill, a French Jewish gallerist who championed emerging artists in early 20th-century Paris, helped launch names like Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani. The show mixes luminous favorites by Dufy, Valadon and others with archival material from her gallery.

It also fits a thread I love at the Orangerie: exhibitions that read modern art through its dealers. Modigliani & Paul Guillaume, Heinz Berggruen, now Berthe Weill. A decade in the making, the project traveled via the Grey Art Museum and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and is on until January 26.

This interview by Lindsey Tramuta traces the intense choreography of loans between museums and private collections, and what changes when a show is staged in three different contexts. This kind of persistent work makes me so happy (and I love all the humanity and patience it requires). Here’s a discussion I’m sad I missed at the American Library in Paris,“Berthe Weill and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” with Rachel Donadio, Lynn Gumpert and Sophie Eloy.

2.

As readers of this letter know, I’m hopelessly devoted to Reggio Emilia. The other night, I bought tickets to The Language of Computation: Constructing Modern Knowledge in Reggio Emilia. It’s June 15 - 19, 2026 and I haven’t been in Reggio in forever. Join me?

3.

The Kids Should See This has the best holiday gift lists for kids.

For grown-ups, my perennials: La Cavalerie olive oil; La Tour d’Argent apricot jam;a book and a hat (any kind!); and the vase Acorn.

4.

Big picture, there are two visions for the future of computing: cyborgs and rooms.
- Matt Webb, Spinning up a new thing: Inanimate

Team room! Team room! Also check out Matt Webb’s new studio Inanimate.

5.

Last week Spotify rolled out audiobooks in Finland. It’s a weird social experiment we’ve been living through in the Nordics for the past few years, with subscription listening.

As someone without easy access to Finnish books or libraries, I’ve personally benefited from the model: I can keep reading. On the other hand, it is strange and sad to watch books get folded into the undifferentiated stream of content.

Frank Chimero wrote beautifully this fall about systems that “eat everything,” invoking No Face from Spirited Away, the masked spirit who mimics and consumes whatever’s around him, growing as he eats.

Anyways, here are my.. books? Audio editions? …content?

Finnish authors have a clear wish list for platforms, publishers, and subscription services: a first-year fixed-price window; a streaming levy on audiobook/ebook platforms earmarked for national literature; appropriate, proportionate remuneration in contracts (not per-minute dilution); transparent, platform-level royalty reporting with timely payouts; no forced exclusivity, plus clear opt-out and windowing rights by service and territory. Countries without these guardrails would be wise to set them early.

Books and technology could be so much more. It’s the path not taken that saddens me. Books could be campfires, venues, classrooms. They could schedule events, keep version histories, host marginalia.

I’ve had some horrible experiences with traditional publishing contracts and brittle terms. Technology licensing could also widen the circle: first readers share upside, neighborhoods with local licenses.. Books could even ship with small language models tuned to the text.

I keep thinking about an author’s life’s work. If I’m lucky, I get to make many books over time, some self-funded, others with partners. Books, and especially an author’s body of work, are cultural assets. We should protect them, and the people who make them.

6.

Is anyone in Europe building social platforms for kids that are privacy-first, ad-light, and community-owned? A few friends are assembling a program. In the same key, Continent of Play is a blueprint that treats play as civic infrastructure and is exactly the energy I think we need.

7.

After all, most of the interesting personal use cases for an LLM are very different from answering questions on the International Math Olympiad. (…) We might be using these things to format spreadsheets or spam sales emails. But they are also ghost-like, faux consciousnesses built on a vast archive of human history, flitting between timelines, languages, and personae without ever inhabiting any of them, and doing so in a way that even their creators don’t quite understand.
- Benjamin Breen, How well can Gemini 3 make a Henry James simulator?

I like this idea making your own benchmarks for language models.

Simon Willison asks every model to draw a pelican riding a bicycle in pure SVG. Ethan Mollick checks otter images, tiny games, and T. S. Eliot pastiche. Benjamin Breen builds Henry James RPG. Mine could be building activities with Papert’s Principle (can the model do administrative re-wiring rather than content dump)? Or some kind of Reggio Emilia activity (famously vibe-y, material, very little online documentation and no worksheets)?

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:

“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..

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.

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..)

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.

The rentrée rush has begun! I’m back at my desk, mirabelle plums are in season and the Parisians are as busy as ever. I find this new rhythm of vacationing in August very interesting as it makes the rest of the year even shorter.

Anyways. My early fall took a surprising turn and I’ll be in New York on September 14-17 for a fun project. Who should I meet while there, working on play in public space / city scale learning? Looking for city folk, foundations, developers, communities to swap notes.

1.

What is color space? A gorgeous, interactive and visual explainer for digital color.

2.

You learn best and most effectively when you are learning something that you care about. Your work becomes meaningful and something you can be proud of only when you have chosen it for yourself. This is why our second self-directive is to build your volitional muscles. Your volition is your ability to make decisions and act on them. To set your own goals, choose your own path, and decide what matters to you. Like physical muscles, you build your volitional muscles by exercising them, and in doing so you can increase your sense of what’s possible.

LLMs are good at giving fast answers. They’re not good at knowing what questions you care about, or which answers are meaningful. Only you can do that. You should use AI-powered tools to complement or increase your agency, not replace it.

Recurse center: Developing our position on AI

Love this: volitional muscle. Agency, imagination and curiosity feel too gauzy. A more muscular word suits our times. I wrote about this need for better words a few months ago.

3.

We had a few sick days in Helsinki. Stuck in a small apartment, the surprise hero was my ten-year-old inkjet. We printed paper toys, coloring pages, weather charts, paper cities and ice cream stalls. Greatest hits: Mr Printables, Sago Mini Printables, Canon Creative Park and Made by Joel.

For older kids Offline.kids seems promising! I’m jealous of the filterable index of screen-free activities, I should do something with the play section of Hello Ruby..

4.

I’m very big on John McPhee (I’ve written about his diagrams and Oranges before). If you like “structure as craft,” this short piece by James Somners is a lovely doorway into the McPhee method.

5.

3books is a browsable, searchable archive of books recommended at the end of The Ezra Klein Show. My favorite question on the podcast, the books are always interesting.

I’d love to build a similar public index forHelsingin Sanomat “Luen Tässä” series (people talk about a book that’s moved them). If you’re a tinkerer who wants to help with scraping / light curation / hosting, reply!

6.

A few random books from the pile that had arrived while I was on summer vacation.

Share your rentrée books, please! Best time of the year for reading.

August holidays brought an unplanned pause. I’ve been mostly off the computer, so just a short list of links this time. La rentrée is around the corner, and regular programming returns soon.

Some selected summer in Finland 2025 recommendations: Söderlångvik manor and Kim Simonsson giant moss statues. Klaava winebar. Helsinki Biennial, if only for Vallisaari. Shii. Naantalin kirjajuhlat. Day screening of Phoenician Scheme. Olafur Eliasson’s Long Daylight Pavilion in Kruunuvuorenranta. The sea, everywhere.

1.

I’ve been wrapped up in Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, a tour of how reading was invented and how it rewires us. It is neuroscience told with a novelist’s brain.

An example. Wolf walks you through a 233 word Proust passage at speed and explains what happens in our brains:

Let’s go back to what you did when I asked you to switch your attention from this book to Proust’s passage and to read as fast as you could without losing Proust’s meaning. In response to this request, you engaged an array of mental or cognitive processes: attention; memory; and visual, auditory, and linguistic processes. Promptly, your brain’s attentional and executive systems began to plan how to read Proust speedily and still understand it.

Next, your visual system raced into action, swooping quickly across the page, forwarding its gleanings about letter shapes, word forms, and common phrases to linguistic systems awaiting the information. These systems rapidly connected subtly differentiated visual symbols with essential information about the sounds contained in words. Without a single moment of conscious awareness, you applied highly automatic rules about the sounds of letters in the English writing system, and used a great many linguistic processes to do so. This is the essence of what is called the alphabetic principle, and it depends on your brain’s uncanny ability to learn to connect and integrate at rapid-fire speeds what it sees and what it hears to what it knows.

Then, after you integrated all this visual, conceptual, and linguistic information with your background knowledge and inferences, you arrived at an understanding of what Proust was describing: a glorious day in childhood made timeless through the “divine pleasure” that is reading!

That’s the everyday miracle of reading. I knew all of this, but still the wonder of it had been lost on me.

Now for the part that made me grin:

Years ago, the cognitive scientist David Swinney helped uncover the fact that when we read a simple word like “bug,” we activate not only the more common meaning (a crawling, six-legged creature), but also the bug’s less frequent associations—spies, Volkswagens, and glitches in software.

Swinney discovered that the brain doesn’t find just one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it. The richness of this semantic dimension of reading depends on the riches we have already stored, a fact with important and sometimes devastating developmental implications for our children. Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts

Words are vectors; read a lot early and the model sharpens. We bring our entire store of meanings to whatever we read.

2.

The spacing fin.

When Robin Sloan’s latest landed in my inbox I delayed reading it until evening. And I’m glad I did, because when I ran into the section called Dragon Science, my scalp started to tingle.

Mathematician and AI researcher Daniel Murfet traces the embryology of language models during training, showing how structure buds into tissues, organs, and new anatomies. My favorite: a spacing fin, a whole sub-system specialized for counting spaces.

See Murfet’s thread for the “baby serpents” and training maps, and the full paper for the technical story.

3.

The Palindrome is one of those “how is this free?” publications.

Their mathematics for machine learning reads like a roadmap to the core tools you need to poke and prod models. I’d love to hear from a high-school math teacher: how does this arc (linear algebra, calculus, and probability) line up with what’s taught today? We talk a lot about reading and writing in the age of generative AI; how should math change too?

4.

Outdoor physical activity is more beneficial than indoor physical activity for cognition in young people.

During the summer I’ve been visiting the computer playground. I keep seeing graceful wear and new features ship themselves. The cat sculpture’s tail, not its back, turned out to be the ride; a kid once lay flat and ran the carousel like a hamster wheel.

5.

Claire L. Evans: “There’s no distinction between memory, the memorizer and the act of remembering.” from What can a cell remember?

Maria Stepanova: “Rancière’s most important point is this: in his writing about history, he contrasts ‘document’ and ‘monument’. A ‘document,’ for him, is any record of an event that aims to be exhaustive, to tell history, to make ‘a memory official’. A ‘monument’ is the opposite of ‘document’, in ‘the primary sense of the term’: that which preserves memory through its very being, that which speaks directly, through the fact that it was not intended to speak – the layout of a territory that testifies to the past activity of human beings better than any chronicle of their endeavours; a household object, a piece of fabric, a piece of pottery, a stele, a pattern painted on a chest or a contract between two people we know nothing about…” from Memory of memory.

I love when fiction and non-fiction I’m reading start to rhyme.

6.

On my fall list: Brian Potter’s The Origins of Efficiency. I read with delight his Construction Physics newsletter and the recurring question, where do efficiency gains really come from, works for book lenght work so well. I’m also eyeing Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle, a near-future fiction (with a great website!); and Sophia Jansson’s Kolme saarta – isä, äiti ja minä (out in Finnish and Swedish and no doubt soon in English too).

7.

What makes summer for me is how time goes porous. I’m never more than an eyeblink from being both very young and very old. Great-grandparents, aunts, and cousins collapse into small, sticky summer souls. Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book catches this perfectly. I reread it every year (and read it aloud for the Finnish listeners too!). And this year, there’s the film, too.

8.

Carrying this little printout everywhere. I understand research better when I print it.

• Thoughts About Biology — James Bonner

• Perspectives on Theory at the Interface of Physics and Biology — William Bialek

• A Mathematician’s View of the Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics in Biology — Alexandre Borovik

• Is the Cell Really a Machine? — Daniel J. Nicholson

• Biology Is More Theoretical Than Physics — Jeremy Gunawardena

• A systems biology timeline — Gunawardena Lab

• On Being the Right Size — J. B. S. Haldane

• Theory in Biology: Figure 1 or Figure 7? — Rob Phillips

• Schrödinger’s “What Is Life?” at 75 — Rob Phillips

• Molecular “Vitalism” — Marc W. Kirschner; John Gerhart; Timothy J. Mitchison

• Can a Biologist Fix a Radio?—Or, What I Learned While Studying Apoptosis — Yuri Lazebnik

• Life at low Reynolds number — E. M. Purcell

It’s the weirdest personal pull/push moment in August. Finland declares it’s autumn: back to work! Let’s meet! France says: finally, it’s vacation! Do not call until September!

Both countries take their vacation time extremely seriously, so here I am, in between.

(Here’s a list of recommendations on summer Paris, before the rentrée rolls in.)

1.

In Singapore, Playgrounds Are Capsule of National Identity. In the early 1970s, the Housing and Development Board in Singapore launched an ambitious program to build distinctively Singaporean playscapes in the heart of new housing estates. The country’s first playground designer, Khor Ean Ghee, was trained not as an architect but as a watercolorist and interior designer. Between 1974 and 1984, he created over 30 sculptural playgrounds, featuring dragons, pelicans, elephants, and sampans.

From a 2018 interview:

“When the (play elements) don’t move… The children cannot play. They sit down and take photographs. Only with things like swings and see-saw… Ah, that’s when they really play!”

I love this idea, especially important in a time when a lot of playscape risks becoming visual backdrop for photo-ops. And from Maria Boey, another play designer.

“There should at least eight play values in each playground.”

Eight! How delightful to have a specific number. Makes me also think of what my play values are..

There’s even a map of the retro playgrounds in Singapore.

2.

I’ve been reading Evelyn Fox Keller’s Making Sense of Life. In it, she explores how biologists and mathematicians see the world through different lenses. One grounded in experiment, the other in formal reasoning.

While teaching medical students, Fox Keller showed how a biological problem with eleven variables could be reduced to just three worth measuring. The rest, she explained, followed logically.

The students bristled. “But you haven’t tested it—how can you be sure?”

It’s funny how a question from 2003 suddenly gives language to something I’ve been circling in my own work. How can you be sure?

Today, with computers playing a bigger role in biology, it feels important to notice and name these different ways of thinking.

3.

When is the earth going to not have more life? How fast can a peregreen falcon fly? How hard is coyotes bite? Are you alive? What’s the next planet to be found? Could there be a 9th planet in our solar system? What’s your favorite food? What do you like to play? What do you like to do?

Sample questions for AI from the research paper Children's Mental Models of Generative Visual and Text Based AI Models. The research feels very topical. Right now, kids are still figuring out what AI is and what it can do. Their mental models are open and flexible. In a few years, those ideas might be harder to change.

Reminds me also of Sherry Turkle’s early work on how children made sense of living versus non-living things. I’ve written about her here and here.

4.

Can information theory help explain why we find AI generated text so tedious?

I’ve been brushing up on Claude Shannon’s work lately. One of his key ideas is that the more unpredictable something is, the more information it carries. A random string like SDSUGDSMDKNEERR is full of information because I couldn’t have guessed it. This essay walks through the math behind it.

Information theory is one of those ideas that changed how I see things around me. Art feels interesting, because it’s unexpected, or in other words it has more information. AI-generated text feels annoying, because it’s made to avoid surprise and thus has less information. (Or in Shannon’s terms it’s low in entropy.)

5.

AE2025 is a ten-week cohort program to make an Applied Experiment: a functioning prototype of technology that enables people to exercise either care, self-control, inquisitiveness or a combination thereof. The program provides language, space, guidance and $7,000 to anyone anywhere in the world who is creating technology that brings out the best in us. Deadline: August 15th!

I especially loved the Library, which maps all the references, research and projects that influence the program.

6.
To close: Détour is an 11-minute love letter to French summer, cinema, and small tricycle adventures. Directed by Michel Gondry and shot entirely on an iPhone 7, it’s playful and tender. Gondry, who directed Björk’s Human Behaviour and Bachelorette, is part of my formative visual language.

Yesterday was 14 Juillet here, France’s national holiday, and while trying to explain the fête to my toddler, I started to notice myself.. softening? I arrived in France feeling mostly indifferent, but by this fourth year something has shifted. I might even be a little enamored, with a crush for Paris?

Poudre de perlimpinpin delivered with a shrug. The pride in being débrouillard. And, of course, the unapologetic ease of j’ai la flemme déjà, can’t be bothered, not today. (A special thank-you to Lauren Collins’ wonderful Lettre Recommendée for helping me figure out it’s Macron’s oddball vocabulary I want to learn next in my French journey.)

That said, I’m really looking forward to being back in Finland for the entire month of August. If we haven’t seen each other in a while, maybe this is our chance.

At the end of this letter, you’ll find a list of the books I’ve read so far this year. There’s been some interesting discussion in Finland lately about how reading, rather than literature, has become the thing and how reading is just another piece of our performative online selves. I’m not entirely sure where I land on that. But I do love reading about what others are enjoying. So hopefully this feels more like sharing than showing off. Previous summer recommendations live here: 2024, 2023, 2022.

1.

One of the more delightful rabbit holes I’ve followed: I live on Rue de Prony, which is named for mathematician Baron Gaspard de Prony (1755–1839).

After the Revolution the French National Assembly commissioned de Prony to organize production of huge logarithmic and trigonometric tables to help with a land-survey project. de Prony designed the formulas, mid‐level workers turned them into step‐by‐step instructions, and roughly ninety human computers executed the arithmetic.

These human computers? Unemployed Parisian hairdressers, who found the post-Revolution fashion embracing simpler and cropped haircuts meant a lot less work than Marie Antoinette’s sky-high wigs. The hairdressers were used to meticulous and repetitive work and excelled at computing. de Prony’s factory of numbers eventually inspired Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1822.

Rue de Prony: your unexpected landmark in the annals of computing (and pixie cuts).

2.

“I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany,” writes Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

I was reminded of this last week while watching Claire L. Evans’ talk How the Universe Thinks Without a Brain and reading Oliver Sacks’ account of Darwin’s original love of botany. Evans’ 20-minute talk is deeply impressive, worth watching for its fresh, sprouting ideas.

3.

This 30-minute Studio Ghibli Nature Loop premiered already in 2020, but is a keeper. It’s a compilation of all the best nature scenes in the classic Ghibli films and makes me notice many beautiful, peaceful moments anew.

4.

In Helsinki, I used to live right next to Tove Jansson’s atelier. When I started working with my current literary agency, the Moomin family kindly allowed me to visit. I remember being in complete awe of the bookshelves, wishing I could spend hours there just browsing. It felt like the kind of space where you didn’t even want to take photos, so I’m glad there are finally good ones out there now (though I wouldn’t mind a few close-ups of those shelves!)

5.

I love a good thread, the kind where one of the comments turns out to be from Terry Tao, Fields medalist, talking about metaphors in mathematics:

I think one reason why one cannot communicate most of one's internal mathematical thoughts is that one's internal mathematical model is very much a function of one's mathematical upbringing. For instance, my background is in harmonic analysis, and so I try to visualise as much as possible in terms of things like interactions between frequencies, or contests between different quantitative bounds. This is probably quite a different perspective from someone brought up from, say, an algebraic, geometric, or logical background. I can appreciate these other perspectives, but still tend to revert to the ones I am most personally comfortable with when I am thinking about these things on my own.

6.

My summer book recommendations for 2025, based on what I’ve read this year.

Fiction

• Bel Canto – Ann Patchett. I’m slowly making my way through Patchett’s entire oeuvre, and this one feels especially right for summer. Graceful, suspenseful, and moving.

• Once There Was – Kiyash Monsef. Marketed as YA, but it’s full of wonder and magic that easily spills over for adult readers too.

• Dream Count – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Well, loved this.

• This Strange Eventful History – Claire Messud. Messud’s writing hooked me completely. In my opinion, the perfect summer book, there is a family, time, layers and life.

Technology / Business / Systems

• Building SimCity – Chaim Gingold. Keep thinking about this on a weekly basis - on design, systems, and the playful roots of technology.

• The Pacific Circuit – Alexis Madrigal. I loved the books structure and scope, weaving tech, culture, and politics into one big narrative.

• The Magic of Code – Samuel Arbesman. I blurbed this earlier in the year, but it still easily tops my list of favorite technology books.

Memoir / essays / cultural reflections

• Lessons from My Teachers – Sarah Ruhl. Ruhl’s writing has such tenderness, and I loved the glimpses into the theater world she offered me.

• When in French: Love in a Second Language – Lauren Collins. A charming exploration of language, love, and identity.

• Any Person Is the Only Self – Elisa Gabbert. Sharp, playful, and thoughtful in equal measure.

• One Long River of Song – Brian Doyle. My first shimmery Doyle.

• The Hockney Interviews – Hans Ulrich Obrist. I think I got more new ideas from this than from any other book this year

Finnish:

• Kaarna – Tommi Kinnunen. A finely observed novel that lingers.

• Reunamerkintöjä – Kadonnutta Eurooppaa etsimässä – Ville-Juhani Sutinen. A beautifully wandering travelogue in search of forgotten Europe.

• Karkuteillä – Aura Nurmi. A fine debut, with Japan, videogames, motorbikes and softly strange encounters.

All Books read in 2025

(Some linked books lead to Bookshop.org, and I earn a small commission each time someone uses the link to purchase a book.)

January

• Lehmä synnyttää yöllä by Pajtim Statovci

• When in French: Love in a Second Language by Lauren Collins

• Powerhouse by James Andrew Miller

• Any Person Is the Only Self by Elisa Gabbert

• The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World―and Shapes Our Future by Samuel Arbesman

• Kaarna by Tommi Kinnunen

February

• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

• Send Nudes by Saba Sams

• The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant by Tae Kim

• Once There Was by Kiyash Monsef

• The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

March

• Käräjät by Markus Nummi

• Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

• The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight

• This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud

April

• The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City by Alexis Madrigal

• Of Ants and Dinosaurs by Cixin Liu

• Karkuteillä by Aura Nurmi

• Sielunpiirtäjän ilta by Joel Haahtela

• Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

• Abundance by Ezra Klein

• Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine by Chaim Gingold

• Kaskaat by Emmi-Liia Sjöholm

• Reunamerkintöjä - Kadonnutta Eurooppaa etsimässä by Ville-Juhani Sutinen

May

• Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir by Craig Mod

• Where the Axe Is Buried by Ray Nayler

• Les Yeux de Mona by Thomas Schlesser

• One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder by Brian Doyle

• Mothers and Other Fictional Characters: A Memoir in Essays by Nicole Graev Lipson

June

• Minun työni by Olga Ravn

• Helsinki - Erään kaupungin historia by Henrik Meinander

• Lessons from My Teachers: From Preschool to the Present by Sarah Ruhl

• The Hockney Interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist

• The Twilight World by Werner Herzog

• The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li

• Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell

• William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: Art, Poetry, and the Imagining of a New World by Philip Hoare

• Nelisiipinen lokki by Matias Riikonen

• Motherhood by Sheila Heti

• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

1.

Still on Hockney: this concert at Fondation Louis Vuitton (streaming until August 25, 2025) is a musical tribute to David Hockney. It’s also the first time I saw Hockney’s Wagner Drive, a video work in which Wagner’s music is mapped to the landscapes of Californian roads at dusk.

It was also my introduction to Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy, and to the genre of four-hands piano. There’s something physical and choreographic about it. I loved the drama the multi-hands piano introduced: diagonal, then side-by-side, and how touching the physical interweaving of limbs felt. It also made me think of the game It Takes Two the co-op video game by Hazelight.

See also: No. 48 Multiplayer Mode, or: how do we "move our arms and legs at the same time to express joy, friendliness, and grace" with the help of computers?

2.

“In a 1956 essay, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” Lewis wrote that he loved the fairy tale for “its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections and ‘gas.’ “ from Katherine Rundell’s Fantastic Four, New Yorker June 11, 2025.

That word gas made me laugh out loud.

3.

Pathfinder. I love Matthew Siu’s tiny tool Pathfinder, a tool for exploring the space between two concepts. It made me wish every text editor came with an Illustrator-style panel for thinking:

• Divide – Splits an idea into overlapping parts.

• Trim – Cuts hedges, fillers, softeners.

• Merge – Fuses related ideas into one clear thought.

• Crop – Focuses on what matters. Hides the rest.

• Outline – Shows the bare structure without tone.

• Minus Back – Deletes context or audience to see what remains.

Most text editors offer little more than copy, paste, and spellcheck. If new language lives inside LLM matrices, we need better tools for poking it.

4.

All the fake books in Wes Anderson Multiverse. Will generative AI eventually bring them to life? If not with Anderson’s oeuvre, probably with some of the other multiverses out there. Bizarre times.

I somehow missed the Moonrise Kingdom animated short when it first came out.

5.

For my Scottish friends: Kerry Hudson wrote about the computer playground in Herald Scotland with the perfect headline: Want to get kids away from screens? Put them inside one.

Bonus: here’s Monstrum writing about the curriculum of the playground.

I’m currently working on two new playground concepts (one inspired by semiconductors, the other by synthetic biology) and I have room for one more.

If you’re a city official, real estate developer, educator, or policymaker curious about building learning into public space, I’d love to hear from you.

6.

A blurry 1993 roundtable: Sacks, Sheldrake, Dennett, Toulmin, Dyson, Gould. They sit around a table and ask what science has done to us.

It’s both extremely slow and extremely fast. I wish more podcasts moved like this.