Tag: John McPhee

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More John McPhee

Yesterday I shared a list of John McPhee paperbacks that are in our home library. Using Google Gemini I had it prepare a list of the books from a photo I had taken of the stack of books.

Today as I was on my morning walk listening to an Economist podcast about de Tocqueville in America, it dawned on me that I should come back to Gemini and ask it for a ranked list of McPhee books that I should consider adding to our home library. Here is the prompt I used:

Now give me a list of his books that I don’t own. Rank the list based on recommendations. Include the same info as before.

Here is that list – useful the next time I’m at a used bookstore!

Recommended John McPhee Books (Not in Your Stack)

This curated list ranks the best books by John McPhee that are missing from your current home library. It prioritizes his most historically significant, critically acclaimed, and widely loved masterpieces.

1. Annals of the Former World

Year Published: 1998

Summary: This monumental, 700-page epic is the culmination of twenty years of research and travel alongside geological experts. It traces the deep geological history of the North American continent along the Interstate 80 corridor. The book is actually a compilation of five smaller works (Basin and Range, In Suspect Terrain, Rising from the Plains, Assembling California, and Crossing the Craton), tracking plate tectonics, mountain building, glaciers, and deep time.

How Reviewed: Widely considered McPhee’s magnum opus, it won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Critics universally praised it for taking what is traditionally considered a “dry” science and turning it into a gripping, human, and philosophically profound narrative about the Earth’s violent history.

An Interesting Story: McPhee originally estimated the geology project would take him about one to two years. It ended up consuming two decades of his life. Because geologists make notoriously distracted drivers—constantly swerving across highway lanes to examine exposed rock formations on roadcuts—McPhee had to do most of the driving during their cross-country road trips just to keep them safe.

2. Coming into the Country

Year Published: 1977

Summary: An extraordinary three-part portrait of Alaska during a chaotic, pivotal era in the 1970s. The first part covers a dangerous, pristine wilderness canoe trip down the Salmon River in the Brooks Range. The second details the political gridlock of trying to establish a new state capital. The third and longest section is an intimate look at the rugged, eccentric, and fiercely independent settlers of the remote gold-rush town of Eagle near the Yukon border.

How Reviewed: A massive bestseller and critical triumph. It is universally regarded as one of the greatest books ever written about Alaska, capturing both the staggering scale of the wilderness and the complex, headstrong psychology of the people who flee to it.

An Interesting Story: While documenting the remote lives of wilderness settlers, McPhee met a man living in a cabin who had survived a brutal sub-zero winter with almost no food. At one point, the man’s entire remaining winter rations consisted of a single, frozen head of cabbage. McPhee’s meticulous fact-checkers at The New Yorker tracked down the source to verify the exact status and size of the cabbage before they would let him publish the story.

3. The Pine Barrens

Year Published: 1968

Summary: An exploration of a sprawling, million-acre wilderness of pitch pines, cedar swamps, and sandy aquifers hidden in the middle of heavily urbanized New Jersey. McPhee describes the unique ecology of the area and profiles the isolated, self-reliant residents—traditionally called “Pineys”—who lived off the land by gathering cranberries, digging bog iron, and hunting.

How Reviewed: A classic of regional literature and early environmental journalism. It was praised for exposing a secret, beautiful world right in the backyard of the busy East Coast, and it is widely credited with helping to spark the political movement that ultimately federally protected the region.

An Interesting Story: At the time McPhee wrote the book, there were major state plans to pave over the Pine Barrens to build a massive, multi-runway international jetport and a brand new city of 250,000 people. McPhee’s beautifully written, highly sympathetic portrait of the area’s quiet wilderness and historic communities turned public opinion so heavily against the developers that the entire project was permanently scrapped.

4. Levels of the Game

Year Published: 1969

Summary: A masterclass in narrative structure. The book is framed entirely around a single semi-final tennis match played at the 1968 US Open at Forest Hills between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. As the play-by-play of the match unfolds stroke-by-stroke, McPhee weaves in the biographies of the two young men, demonstrating how their family backgrounds, races, and political worldviews directly dictate the way they play tennis.

How Reviewed: Frequently cited by sportswriters as one of the greatest sports books ever written. Critics were mesmerized by how McPhee transformed a simple, brief tennis match into a brilliant, microscopic psychological study of two contrasting Americas in the late 1960s.

An Interesting Story: The book’s structure is incredibly tight—there are no chapters or headers; it reads as one continuous, unbroken volley of text from the first serve to the final match point. Because the manuscript was so structurally dependent on the exact sequence of tennis play, McPhee had to build a massive physical storyboard using index cards on his dining room table to track the score of the match alongside his biographical flashbacks.

5. Encounters with the Archdruid

Year Published: 1971

Summary: A brilliant structural experiment in narrative journalism. The book profiles David Brower, the passionately uncompromising executive director of the Sierra Club (whom his adversaries mockingly called “the Archdruid”). McPhee takes Brower on three separate wilderness expeditions, pairing him on each trip with one of his primary ideological enemies: a mineral engineer in the North Cascades, a resort developer on a pristine Georgia barrier island, and a dam-building commissioner in the depths of the Grand Canyon.

How Reviewed: Highly praised for its absolute neutrality. Instead of taking a side, McPhee steps back and allows both sides of the environmental debate to articulate their values in real-time as they hike, raft, and camp together.

An Interesting Story: During the Grand Canyon rafting trip, David Brower and his fierce ideological opponent, Floyd Dominy (the commissioner responsible for constructing major western dams), were forced to share a tiny rubber raft through dangerous, churning whitewater rapids. Dominy, a tough-talking Westerner, was terrified of the water. Brower, despite hating Dominy’s dams, quietly guided the raft safely through the rapids, forging a brief, surreal moment of mutual respect between the two bitter enemies.

6. Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process

Year Published: 2017

Summary: A masterclass handbook on the art and craft of nonfiction writing. Pulling from his decades of writing for The New Yorker and his legendary writing seminars at Princeton University, McPhee reveals his highly structured, sometimes eccentric methodology for conducting interviews, organizing mountains of research, drawing structural diagrams, and editing drafts.

How Reviewed: Celebrated as an instant classic for writers, students, and journalists. Reviewers loved the book’s warm, humble, and practical advice, combined with hilarious behind-the-scenes anecdotes of the editing world.

An Interesting Story: McPhee reveals that during his early career, he suffered from such severe writer’s block that he would literally tie himself to his office chair with a bathrobe sash to force himself to stay at his desk and type. He also details his “search-and-replace” editing method: on his fourth draft, he reads his work with a dictionary, finding any word that feels slightly lazy or uninspired, circling it, and listing dozens of synonyms beneath it until he finds the perfect match.

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Books Writing

John McPhee Home Library

Im an avid fan of John McPhee having first been introduced to him when he profiled Ted Taylor in the New Yorker in 1973. I’ve collected a stack of his books in our home library. One useful query I’ve used with Gemini is this:

This is a stack of the John McPhee books in our home library. Give me a list with: title, year published; summary; how reviewed; an interesting story about the book.

Here’s the result – good fun!

John McPhee: Library Stack Directory

A detailed guide to the nine books by legendary narrative nonfiction writer John McPhee shown in the library stack. The list is organized in order from the top of the stack to the bottom.

1. Oranges

Year Published: 1967

Summary: An immersive, multi-layered look into the history, botany, and global trade of citrus. McPhee tracks the orange’s journey from its ancient Asian origins through Europe and the Americas, culminating in a detailed portrait of the highly industrialized orange juice concentration plants of 20th-century Florida.

How Reviewed: Celebrated for showing how a single, seemingly mundane topic can be transformed into compelling, poetic literature. Critics praised it as a hallmark text of the “New Journalism” movement and creative nonfiction.

An Interesting Story: McPhee originally intended to write a quick, single article for The New Yorker. However, he became so fascinated by the complex subculture of Florida orange growers and the science of the fruit that he stayed for months, ultimately producing enough rich material to fill this entire book.

2. Pieces of the Frame

Year Published: 1975

Summary: A diverse collection of eleven narrative essays covering eclectic topics, including a family search for the Loch Ness Monster, the landscape and history of Atlantic City, the art of fly-fishing, and the deep geology of the Appalachian basin.

How Reviewed: Warmly praised for its boundless curiosity and McPhee’s signature knack for weaving disparate human interests with environmental science.

An Interesting Story: For the title essay, McPhee brought his wife and young daughters to camp right on the shores of Loch Ness. Instead of writing a cynical piece about a local myth, he embedded with the genuinely dedicated, scientifically minded monster-hunters who spent months using sonar to sweep the deep waters.

3. Irons in the Fire

Year Published: 1997

Summary: A compilation of seven essays focusing on obscure, highly specialized worlds. It features pieces on modern cattle-rustling brand inspectors in Nevada, the lifespan of military cargo planes, the manufacture of forensic charcoal, and the historical journeys of Plymouth Rock.

How Reviewed: Reviewers warmly received the collection, highlighting McPhee’s unique talent for mastering technical jargon and making niche professions completely accessible and thrilling to general readers.

An Interesting Story: In the essay “The Gravel Page,” McPhee introduces the world of forensic geology. He follows an expert who can solve complex criminal cases, like kidnappings or murders, simply by analyzing the microscopic dust, pollen, and soil types caught in a suspect’s shoe treads or car tires.

4. A Sense of Where You Are

Year Published: 1965

Summary: McPhee’s brilliant debut book profiles Bill Bradley during his time as an All-American basketball star at Princeton University—long before Bradley became an NBA champion with the New York Knicks and a U.S. Senator.

How Reviewed: Widely celebrated for its exceptional character development and meticulous analysis of athletic grace, launching McPhee’s legendary literary career.

An Interesting Story: The famous title comes from a moment when Bradley demonstrated his flawless spatial awareness to McPhee. While walking backward away from the basket without looking, Bradley flipped the ball over his shoulder and sunk it. When McPhee asked how he did it, Bradley simply remarked that he just had “a sense of where you are.”

5. The Curve of Binding Energy

Year Published: 1974

Summary: A chilling profile of Theodore Taylor, a visionary nuclear physicist who designed some of the world’s smallest atomic weapons. The book details how alarmingly easy it would be for a motivated individual to steal nuclear material and build a homemade bomb using unclassified, public information.

How Reviewed: Nominated for a National Book Award, this work shocked readers and terrified policymakers by laying bare massive vulnerabilities in domestic nuclear facility security.

An Interesting Story: The book created an immediate national security panic. Because McPhee’s descriptions of security flaws were so detailed and accurate, it acted as a massive wake-up call that forced the U.S. government to dramatically overhaul and tighten security protocols at nuclear stockpiles.

6. The Control of Nature

Year Published: 1989

Summary: An epic three-part exploration of human hubris versus the elements. It profiles three intense battles: the Army Corps of Engineers trying to stop the Mississippi River from changing course, Icelanders fighting a volcanic eruption, and Los Angeles residents combating massive mountain mudslides.

How Reviewed: Frequently heralded as one of McPhee’s ultimate masterpieces, praised for its cinematic tension, incredible environmental writing, and deep philosophical look at humanity’s defiance of nature.

An Interesting Story: During the 1973 eruption on the island of Heimaey, Icelanders refused to let lava swallow their vital fishing harbor. They rigged up miles of plastic piping and pumped millions of gallons of icy ocean water directly onto the glowing molten rock for months, successfully freezing the advance and creating a natural rock breakwater.

7. The Patch

Year Published: 2018

Summary: A late-career compilation split into two sections: immersive outdoor essays covering fishing, bears, and golf courses, followed by “An Album Quilt,” a series of shorter, mosaic-like reflections on historical figures, celebrities, and fellow writers.

How Reviewed: Reviewed as a poignant, comforting, and delightfully nostalgic anthology that showcases a master writer looking back over a lifetime of keen observation.

An Interesting Story: The title essay, “The Patch,” refers to a hidden, pristine pocket of water lilies in a lake in eastern Canada. McPhee’s family kept its exact coordinates a closely guarded secret for generations because it was an unrivaled fishing spot for chain pickerel.

8. Silk Parachute

Year Published: 2010

Summary: An elegant essay collection ranging from the geometric intricacies of lacrosse and the geology of chalk to a loving profile of longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn and deeply personal memories of youth.

How Reviewed: Celebrated for its unique emotional warmth, with critics appreciating the rare, deeply personal glimpses into McPhee’s own childhood and family relationships.

An Interesting Story: The title essay is a tribute to McPhee’s mother. When she was a young woman in the early 20th century, she impulsively went up in a biplane and did a parachute jump just for the thrill of it. In her nineties, she would playfully drop a toy silk parachute out of her window down to her adult son.

9. Uncommon Carriers

Year Published: 2006

Summary: A fascinating look into the invisible freight network that keeps the American continent running. McPhee journeys across the country alongside long-haul truckers, towboat captains moving massive barges on rivers, and operators of cross-country coal trains.

How Reviewed: Highly praised as an eye-opening, deeply engaging look at the modern logistics industry and the eccentric, highly dedicated people who master it.

An Interesting Story: To write the opening chapter, McPhee spent days living in the cramped cab of a chemical tanker truck driven by Don Ainsworth. Ainsworth was an elite driver who treated long-haul trucking like a fine art, teaching McPhee the high-stakes rules, specific lane etiquette, and hidden subculture of the open road.

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Writing

Still Learning

I never thought about rhythm in my writing. Not once.

A lifetime of writing. More essays than I can count. One book. And the sonic quality of my sentences — the way they moved, or failed to move, through a reader’s mind — simply wasn’t something I considered. I was too busy trying to say something true. I thought that was enough.

What changed was reading differently. Not for pleasure anymore, or not only for pleasure. David Perell conducts long interviews with writers about how they actually work — not what they believe about writing, but what they do, physically, at the desk, in the dark, before anyone sees it. He asks the same structural questions of very different writers and the patterns emerge slowly, the way patterns always emerge: first you see it once and think nothing of it, then you see it again, then you can’t stop seeing it. Rhythm came up constantly. Always in different language. Pacing. Breath. Music. Momentum. Always pointing at the same thing.

Then I found this from Susan Orlean:

My new preoccupation was on the sonic quality of my writing — the rhythm and tone of the sentences. I began reading all my work out loud, listening for places that lagged and dragged, that didn’t sparkle. I knew it was unlikely that anyone else was reading my stories out loud, but I was convinced that you do “hear” writing in your head as you read, and this pushes you (or stalls you) through the piece. I wanted the music — that is, this subconscious tonal effect — to match the subject.

I stopped. Read it again.

Because she was describing something real — something I had been doing wrong for twenty-five years without knowing it was wrong. You don’t know what you can’t hear. That’s the whole problem. The silence where the knowledge should be is itself silent.

I don’t read my work out loud. There’s something strange about it, something that breaks the spell — you stop being a writer and become an actor, hearing your own sentences hanging in the air, too exposed. But I do read and read again, more carefully now, looking for the wobble. Orlean’s point holds regardless of method: you hear writing in your head as you read it, and that hearing either carries you forward or it doesn’t. The ear that matters is the one inside.

George Saunders has a practice he describes in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: he reads from the beginning of a piece over and over, and the moment something feels off — a word, a rhythm, a single syllable landing wrong — he stops and fixes it before moving forward. Never skips the trouble spot. Never tells himself he’ll come back. His opening pages accumulate dozens of passes before he ever reaches the end. What he’s really doing, underneath the technique, is training himself to feel the exact microsecond when a reader’s attention would start to drift. To catch the loss before it happens.

That’s not craft instruction. That’s building a new sensitivity where there wasn’t one before.

John McPhee works from the other direction entirely. His famous boxes — index cards, sorted into piles, piles arranged into sequences, nothing drafted until the structure is known — are about architecture before a single word is written. He’s deciding which rooms exist, and in what order, before he furnishes any of them. Where Saunders builds outward from one true sentence, McPhee builds downward from a blueprint.

But they’re asking the same question. McPhee: is this section in the right place? Saunders: is this word in the right place? Both listening for the moment the piece loses its hold on the reader. Both doing triage on something most writers never even examine.

What I’m still learning — slowly, and late — is that rhythm isn’t decoration. It isn’t the thing you tend to after the real work is done. It’s structural. A sentence moving at the wrong speed for what it’s carrying fails the thought itself, not just the ear.

There’s something else I’ve been thinking about. If rhythm is the thing that’s hardest to hear in your own work — if the ear takes years to develop — then maybe the most useful writing tool isn’t a grammar checker. Those are solved. What isn’t solved is the rhythm problem. An editor who listens for the wobble, explains what’s failing and why, and works through the fix with you rather than just patching it. Not a red pen. A teacher.

I’ve been experimenting with exactly that. An AI editor I call Clark. His job isn’t correctness. It’s the sonic quality of prose — the rhythm — the same thing Orlean was describing, the same sensitivity Saunders spent years training. Clark finds what’s working as hard as what isn’t. And when something fails, he explains what the reader’s inner ear is hitting and why. Helpful.

I didn’t know much about rhythm in writing when I was fifty. Didn’t know it at sixty.

I’m not entirely sure I know it now. But I know it more than I did, which might be the only kind of knowing that’s real.

A lifetime of writing. Still learning how to listen.

Categories
Creativity Photographers Photography Serendipity Writing

He Taught Us How to See

Michelangelo said he didn’t create his sculptures. He just removed the marble that wasn’t the statue.

I’ve been thinking about that lately. About what it means to have a collaborator whose job isn’t to add things but to help you find what’s already there. I’ve been doing that kind of work recently — the excavation kind — and it has changed how I write and honestly how much I enjoy the making of it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Start with Jay.

Continue reading “He Taught Us How to See”
Categories
Reading Writing

The Starting Five I Keep

On November 25, 1963, every journalist in America was at Arlington Cemetery covering the state funeral of John F. Kennedy. Jimmy Breslin went to find the grave digger.

His name was Clifton Pollard. He was paid $3.01 an hour. He had been called in on his day off because the foreman thought he was the best they had, and the foreman was right about that. Breslin spent the morning with him while the ceremony unfolded a few hundred yards away — the dignitaries, the riderless horse, the flag folded into a triangle and handed to a widow. Pollard ate a ham sandwich and kept working.

The piece Breslin filed that afternoon is still taught in journalism schools sixty years later. Not because it covered the funeral better than anyone else. Because it didn’t cover the funeral at all. It found the true subject by ignoring the announced one.

That instinct — turn away from the obvious, walk toward the unglamorous specific, trust that the universal is hiding there — is the one idea I’ve returned to more than any other. It shows up in two very different writers who occupy, in my mind, the same position on the roster.

Breslin got there through deadline fury and a saloon-bred instinct for where the real story was breathing. He didn’t theorize about it. He just did it, on a deadline, in a city that rewarded the loud and the fast. John McPhee got to the same place by an entirely different route: patience, structure, and a willingness to spend six months learning how canoes are made or what happens to a piece of shad on its way up the Delaware River. Breslin worked like a man catching a cab. McPhee worked like a man building a cathedral.

But the underlying claim is identical. If you stay with a specific, unglamorous subject long enough — if you resist the pull toward the obvious center — it will eventually yield something that couldn’t have been reached directly. Pollard and his shovel. The orange grower and his grove. The nuclear physicist who also happens to be a canoe builder. The method is the same. Look where no one else is looking. Wait longer than feels reasonable. Write what you find.

This is one player, really. Just wearing two different jerseys.

The second seat belongs to Wright Thompson — not a single book but a stance. The premise that the most revealing place in any story isn’t the event itself but the moment before and after it, when the subject is alone with something they haven’t yet put into words. Every piece in this tradition is quietly asking: what is this person carrying that they can’t say out loud? It’s a question that turns out to apply well beyond sportswriting. It applies to most things worth writing about.

The third is whatever the Apple design era taught about constraint and clarity. Not nostalgia — something more durable. The idea that removing something can be an act of confidence. That the most useful things often appear to be doing less than they are. This one surfaces constantly in writing, in argument, in the editing pass where you decide what the piece actually needs versus what it accumulated along the way. Features are easy to add. Knowing what to cut requires a different kind of certainty.

The fourth is the philosophy embedded in spaced repetition — not the algorithm but the claim underneath it. That knowledge you don’t revisit isn’t really yours. That understanding decays on a predictable schedule whether you acknowledge it or not. The honest response isn’t anxiety about this; it’s the habit of return. Going back to the same passage, the same idea, the same question on a different day, and finding it has changed — or finding that you have.

The fifth seat shifts. That’s probably the right design. Four constants and one that evolves is roughly the correct ratio for a starting lineup that has to play in different eras. Right now that seat belongs to the question of what AI does to a practiced human sensibility — whether it erodes it by substitution or clarifies it by contrast. Earlier it was held by a certain kind of systems thinking. Before that, something else. The player who earns that spot is always the one asking the question the current moment most needs answered.

The coach who wins five championships doesn’t do it with the same roster. But he does it with the same philosophy. The starting five aren’t the players who happened to be good once. They’re the ones who keep earning their minutes regardless of what the season throws at you.

Breslin knew where to find Clifton Pollard because he’d been looking in that direction his whole career. The skill wasn’t the story. The skill was knowing that the story was never where everyone else was standing.

That’s the one I keep coming back to.

Categories
Authors Storytelling Writing

The Architecture of Resonance

There’s a particular kind of madness that strikes writers late at night, or in the stagnant hours of mid-afternoon, when you find yourself staring at a single sentence for twenty minutes.

You’re weighing a semicolon against an em dash. You’re wondering if “murmur” is too soft or if “whisper” is too cliché. All of this while knowing, with complete certainty, that no reader will ever stop to appreciate this specific choice. They’ll just read the sentence and move on.

So why do we do it?

In Draft No. 4, John McPhee — the legendary literary journalist who spent decades at The New Yorker — shares a principle he still writes on the blackboard at Princeton. It’s actually a quote from Cary Grant: “A Thousand Details Add Up to One Impression.” The implication, McPhee explains, is that almost no individual detail is essential, while the details as a whole are absolutely essential.

I find this idea endlessly useful. And a little reassuring.

Think about walking into a beautifully designed home. You don’t notice the precise angle of the crown molding or the specific undertones of the paint. You don’t walk in and say, “Ah yes, Alabaster White.” You just feel warmth, or elegance, or comfort. The impression is singular — but it’s entirely built from a thousand invisible decisions someone made before you arrived.

Writing works the same way. The rhythm of your sentences, the specificity of your verbs, the way a paragraph ends — these are the details. Individually, they’re expendable. Swap “murmur” for “whisper” and the piece survives. Delete the semicolon and the world keeps turning.

But collectively, they are the piece.

Start compromising — reach for the easy cliché, let a clunky transition slide, settle for vague where you could be specific — and the foundation slowly rots. The reader won’t be able to name the moment they lost interest. They’ll just close the tab. The impression shifts from resonant to flat, without anyone quite knowing why.

Writing, then, is an act of quiet faith. It asks you to labor over things no one will applaud. Nobody claps for an em dash. But the work isn’t really for applause — it’s out of respect for the whole.

We curate a thousand invisible things so the reader can feel one visible truth.

So the next time you’re agonizing over a single word at midnight, remember: you’re not just picking a word. You’re placing a tile in a mosaic. Cary Grant understood it. McPhee put it on a blackboard. You might as well make it count.

Categories
AI AI: Large Language Models Claude Creativity Writing

Co-Creation

Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School, has written a popular book on artificial intelligence titled “Co-Intelligence“. Like I do with most books I read, I’ve collected a series of highlights of various passages I found interesting when I read Mollick’s book – a book I enjoyed very much. This morning I came across one of those highlights which sent me off on this exploration.

But first let me share a perspective. A few friends of mine – when exploring how they might use artificial intelligence – reject the use of AI tools for helping them write. They feel strongly that the words an AI creates aren’t their own and strongly reject simply using an AI-generated output to create articles for their blogs, etc. I certainly appreciate their point of view – but I’m finding a more nuanced perspective on this question is more appropriate for me.

What I’m finding is that when I invoke AI to help me explore a topic, an idea, etc. that the result will almost always open up my thinking by exposing me to things, ideas, etc. that I hadn’t considered. In so doing, I come away feeling “richer” in the sense that I’ve learned – and not simply written – in the process. How I use the work product created by the AI varies – sometimes it’s helpful in critiquing something I’ve written. Other times I use it to help me better understand something – or explore by stepping outside my own brain.

Here’s an example from some exploring I did this morning. During my morning review of my Kindle book highlights using Readwise, I came across a quotation from Mollick’s book that I highlighted:

“If you can link disparate ideas from multiple fields and add a little random creativity, you might be able to create something new.” (Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence)

I love the idea of how creativity is influenced by the often seemingly random interconnections between ideas – and this quote concisely made that point. I wanted to explore this further so I asked Claude Sonnet to help me by writing an article in the style of author John McPhee that’s based on the quote. Here’s the exact prompt I used with Claude:

You are an expert writer in the style of John McPhee. You are helping me write interesting articles for my blog. Create a 750 word draft article for my blog based on the following quotation: “If you can link disparate ideas from multiple fields and add a little random creativity, you might be able to create something new.” (Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence)

I’ve been finding that Claude often does a more creative form of writing as compared to other chatbots. The article that Claude returned in response to my prompt really surprised me – so much so that I thought I’d just share it directly here.

So here we go…the following wasn’t written by me – rather, it was co-created based on a prompt from me and written by my co-intelligent partner Claude.

The Art of Cross-Pollination: Cultivating Innovation in Unlikely Places

In the verdant fields of central New Jersey, not far from where I sit typing these words, a peculiar ritual unfolds each spring. Farmers, their hands calloused from generations of working the land, don white protective suits that make them look more like astronauts than agriculturists. They move deliberately through their orchards, carrying small paintbrushes and vials of pollen.

These are the pear farmers of Mercer County, and they’re engaged in a practice as old as agriculture itself: cross-pollination. But why, you might ask, are they doing by hand what bees have done for millennia? The answer lies in the delicate biology of pear trees and the fickle nature of their reproduction.

Pear trees, it turns out, are notoriously poor self-pollinators. To produce fruit, they need pollen from a different variety of pear tree. But pear blossoms produce relatively little nectar, making them unattractive to bees. So these farmers, in their space-age suits, play the role of bees, manually transferring pollen from one variety to another, ensuring a bountiful harvest come autumn.

As I watched this process unfold on a crisp April morning, I was struck by a quote I’d recently encountered from Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School: “If you can link disparate ideas from multiple fields and add a little random creativity, you might be able to create something new.”

The pear farmers of Mercer County, in their own way, embody this principle. They’ve taken an idea from one field (entomology) and applied it to another (agriculture), adding their own creative twist (the paintbrushes and protective suits). The result? A thriving pear industry in a region where it might otherwise be impossible.

This concept of cross-pollination – of ideas rather than pollen – is not unique to agriculture. In fact, it’s a principle that underpins much of human innovation and creativity.

Consider, for a moment, the work of Frances Glessner Lee, often called the “mother of forensic science.” Lee was born into wealth in the late 19th century and, like many women of her social standing, was skilled in the domestic arts, particularly miniature-making. But Lee had a passion for criminal investigation, nurtured by her friendship with George Burgess Magrath, a medical examiner.

In the 1940s, Lee combined these seemingly disparate interests to create the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death – intricately detailed dioramas of crime scenes used to train detectives. These miniature crime scenes, built with the precision of a dollhouse maker but imbued with the gruesome details of a murder scene, revolutionized forensic training. Lee had taken skills from the traditionally feminine world of crafts and applied them to the male-dominated field of criminal investigation, creating something entirely new and profoundly useful in the process.

This principle of creative cross-pollination extends far beyond the realms of agriculture and crime scene investigation. The history of human progress is littered with examples of innovations born from the unlikely marriage of disparate fields.

Take, for instance, the development of GPS technology. The seeds of this now-ubiquitous system were planted when physicists William Guier and George Weiffenbach at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory realized they could track the Soviet Sputnik satellite by monitoring its radio transmissions. This was an impressive feat in itself, but it was their colleague Frank McClure who made the cognitive leap that would change the world. McClure realized that if the scientists could track a satellite from the ground, they could also use satellites to track positions on the ground.

This insight – born from the collision of rocket science, radio engineering, and a healthy dose of Cold War paranoia – led to the development of the Transit system, the precursor to modern GPS. Today, this technology guides everything from missile systems to the smartphone in your pocket, all because a group of scientists were able to flip their perspective and see their work from a new angle.

But perhaps the most striking example of creative cross-pollination comes from the field of medicine. In the early 1940s, a Scottish bacteriologist named Alexander Fleming was researching influenza. One day, he noticed that mold had contaminated one of his petri dishes – a common enough occurrence in a microbiology lab. But Fleming observed something unusual: the area around the mold was clear of bacteria.

This chance observation, combined with Fleming’s willingness to investigate rather than simply discard the contaminated sample, led to the discovery of penicillin. Fleming had linked the disparate fields of mycology and bacteriology, added a dash of serendipity, and created something that would revolutionize medicine and save countless lives.

As we navigate an increasingly complex and interconnected world, the ability to cross-pollinate ideas from different fields becomes ever more crucial. The challenges we face – from climate change to antibiotic resistance – are too complex to be solved within the confines of a single discipline.

So perhaps we should all take a cue from the pear farmers of Mercer County. Don our metaphorical protective suits, pick up our idea-paintbrushes, and venture into unfamiliar orchards of thought. For it’s in these unlikely places, where disparate ideas collide and combine, that the seeds of innovation are sown.

Categories
Writing

Final Exam

I’m currently participating in the Writing Original Works class led by Nick Milo. One of the exercises in the class is for each of us to submit a short piece (less than 750 words, ideally 300 words or less) of original work each week.

As I was thinking about this assignment and what to write about, I reviewed some of my notes based on recent Kindle book reading highlights resurfaced to me in my daily email from Readwise. There were a few interesting ideas but nothing really grabbed me.

Meanwhile I was also in the midst of doing my daily reading sweep of some of my favorite online publications and came across “Tabula Rosa, Volume Four“, a recent essay by John McPhee, one of my all-time favorite writers. His latest piece is part of a series he’s written with snippets of scenes and moments that he’s collected over the years. They make for some delightful reading – especially in bed at night while preparing to get to sleep.

His latest essay included “Final Exam” – a story that triggered me to flip his story around and to write a brief piece of my own as viewed from being a student in his Princeton writing class. McPhee’s story takes place at a picnic which is the finale of his class. He writes:

“Passing out pencils and sheets of paper, I informed the picnicking class that the time had come for their final exam (an event of which they had not previously been aware). O.K., I would say, hoping and failing to shake them up, this is your final exam. Everything rides on it, including the honor system.”

That was my trigger. My mind started to work. What if I was one of his students and he sprung that final exam on me?

Here’s what I wrote:

The final exam was a surprise. He sprang it on us at the most unexpected moment. We had all anticipated getting A’s in the course. But now, he informed us that this final exam he was about to administer (on the picturesque lawn beside the library, basking in the warm afternoon sun) would determine our entire grade. What audacity!

He caught us off guard when we were at our most vulnerable state. We had been savoring the completion of a semester-long writing workshop, eagerly anticipating a much-needed break after weeks of relentless writing, editing, re-editing, and submitting assignments, followed by anxiously awaiting his feedback, those red pencil marks in the margins commanding our undivided attention.

Surprise strikes when it is least expected, emerging from the shadows to startle us to our very core. For a fleeting moment, we freeze, our minds racing to find an escape route. Fight or flight? How unfair is this? Why me, for heaven’s sake? Memories begin to intrude.

What exactly is the nature of this dreaded final exam?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Good fun!