Leslie Berlin: Enlarged Heart, Better Documents, Ways of Seeing, Manifestos
Our curator this week is Leslie Berlin (@leslieberlin). Leslie is the preeminent historian of Silicon Valley. She is the founding executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive, chair of the advisory group for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford University, and author of three books: Make Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words; The Man Behind the Microchip, a biography of Intel co-founder Robert Noyce; and Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age. She also wrote the Prototype column for the Sunday Business section of the New York Times.
Please enjoy these words that have mattered to Leslie.
Leslie’s Picks
Luminous Writing
Jennifer Senior, “What Bobby McIlvaine Left Behind”
Probably the single best essay I’ve ever read.
Cynthia Zarin, “An Enlarged Heart”
An early-2000s sensibility for sure, but the immediacy and intimacy of the prose cannot be beat. I think the tone of my essay about my grandmother was an unconscious homage to Zarin’s piece.
Danusha Laméris, “Small Kindnesses”
My current favorite poem.
Work and Management Tips
Roger Martin, “A Plan is Not a Strategy”
Excellent. “Not knowing for sure isn’t bad management. It’s great leadership.”
Anil Dash on Making Better Documents
On the Craft of Writing
David Grann on craft wisdom and breaking into narrative nonfiction
The author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z tells you how to find stories and write them really well.
Two very different podcasts featuring great writers talking about writing:
Scriptnotes
Screenwriters Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Last of Us) and John August (The Nines, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) talk about “screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.”
Ursa Short Fiction Podcast
Authors Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) and Dawnie Walton (The Final Revival of Opal & Nev) select a short story that is read aloud one week, and the next week, they talk to the author.
On Ways of Seeing
Julia Skinner, “What it’s like to be a food writer when you can taste everything you see”
On synesthesia.
Theresa Vargas, “The unexpected star of NASA’s Webb images: the alt text descriptions”
A great look into the language behind the images.
How a Rare Portrait of an Enslaved Child Arrived at the Met
This 10-minute video is a fascinating art detective story.
What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed
This interactive re-creation of the Greenwood district of Tulsa before the Race Massacre is emotionally powerful and also has great research chops. I am a native Tulsan but never learned about this horror in school.
Nice Quick Hits
Mandy Brown, “A Unified Theory of F**ks”
Silly and thought-provoking at the same time.
A Manifesto By
So many good thoughts in here by various activists and creatives, from Ai Wei Wei to Chez Panisse. I like Sir John Hegarty’s.
Ram Dass on Self-Judgement
I return to the first paragraph on a regular basis.
Spotlight on Leslie’s Work
Leslie has produced three seminal books about the history of technology and Silicon Valley:
Make Something Wonderful — A curated collection of Steve Jobs’s speeches, interviews, and correspondence, in which Jobs shares his perspective on his childhood, on launching and being pushed out of Apple, on his time with Pixar and NeXT, and on his return to the company that started it all.
Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age — “A landmark event.” –Eric Schmidt
The Man Behind the Microchip — “Required reading for today’s entrepreneurs and executives.” –The Washington Post