Aaron Swartz on intellect, language, and writing:

When I think of intellectuals, though, I don’t really think of Hollywood producers or politicians or even newspaper columnists. But the people I do think of seem to have something else in common. They don’t just love thinking, they love language. They love its tricks and intricacies, its games, the way it gets written down, the books it gets written into, the libraries those books are in, and the typography those books use.

Upon reflection this makes perfect sense. Language is the medium of thought and so it’s no surprise that someone who spends a lot of time thinking spends a lot of time thinking about how to communicate their thoughts as well. And indeed, all the intellectuals that come to mind write, not because they have to or get paid to, but simply for its own sake. What good is thinking if you can’t share?

Mira Ptacin, on visiting the home and town of E.B. White:

Three months ago, Andrew and I did the same thing that E. B. did nearly seventy-five years ago: took a clean break from city life in search of a much simpler existence. We said goodbye to all that and hello to more peace, more quiet and less distraction. Early this morning, we left our house on Peaks Island, took a ferry into Portland, got into our car, and drove north. We passed sagging barbershops and rainbow-colored trees, hand-painted campaign signs sharing yards with baying hounds. There was the Belfast curling club, a poultry concentration camp, and so many “For Sale” signs that I wondered if they’re for sale because everyone here is old and dying. We passed a public supper, a scarecrow contest, some steeples and sailboats until we crossed the Narramissic River and drove into the town where E. B. White wrote, hid, lived, and died.

White is one of my heroes—his prose is clear and simple and honest, he left the bustling New York for a quiet existence in Maine, and he valued the simple life, free of distraction.

Steven Johnson (author of one of my favorite books of last year Where Good Ideas Come From has a new blog on Medium called The Writer’s Room. In his first post, he writes about the idea of what he calls a spark file, a running repository of all his ideas and hunches that aren’t quite ready for execution (much like how people use Moleskines or Evernote):

Now, the spark file itself is not all that unusual: that’s why Moleskins or Evernote are so useful to so many people. But the key habit that I’ve tried to cultivate is this: every three or four months, I go back and re-read the entire spark file. And it’s not an inconsequential document: it’s almost fifty pages of hunches at this point, the length of several book chapters. But what happens when I re-read the document that I end up seeing new connections that hadn’t occurred to me the first (or fifth) time around: the idea I had in 2008 that made almost no sense in 2008, but that turns out to be incredibly useful in 2012, because something has changed in the external world, or because some other idea has supplied the missing piece that turns the hunch into something actionable. Sure, I end up reading over many hunches that never went anywhere, but there are almost always little sparks that I’d forgotten that suddenly seem more promising. And it’s always encouraging to see the hunches that turned into fully-realized projects or even entire books.

I have a document similar to this in Simplenote where I write down quick ideas—design treatments, topics for this blog, a random thought that I don’t know what to do with, even just a theory for something that I don’t know is true. The key, as Johnson points out, is to frequently return to the list because any visit could reignite a forgotten idea.

Daring Fireball, John Gruber’s famous Apple-focused blog turns ten years old today. I think I’ve been reading Gruber for roughly five years and I would probably go as far to say it’s my favorite blog. Gruber consistently brings an authoritarian perspective to topics I care about and I always know what to expect when he posts.

The Atlantic has a nice feature honoring this momentous anniversary that perfectly captures why Daring Fireball is so consistently great:

Gruber’s best when he’s writing about perfection, excellence and what it takes to achieve either. He can describe eight iPhone Twitter clients, or the software limitations of the iPad, and evince a common sense of aesthetic. His voice can be muscular and rigorous. The man’s clearly animated by a hatred of everything he knows to be BS.

He writes through the context of Apple, but this is exactly right: the broader theme throughout everything he posts is about excellence. Excellence in your products, in your work, in your business, in your life.

And then, quoting Gruber himself:

There’s a certain pace and rhythm to what I’m going for [when I share links], a mix of the technical, the artful, the thoughtful, and the absurd. In the same way that I strive to achieve a certain voice in my prose, as a writer, I strive for a certain voice with regard to what I link to. No single item I post to the Linked List is all that important. It’s the mix, the gestalt of an entire day’s worth taken together, that matters to me.

Few bloggers — few writers — have achieved such a rhythm that overarches everything they do the way John Gruber has for the past ten years. That’s how you do great work.