No. 116 — 🧭 Year in Review 2025

Just a small part of the world

“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