Sam Radford

I finished the chapter in John Philip Newell’s The Great Search on Rabindranath Tagore this morning. Tagore was an Indian writer, thinker, and artist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. I thought this was particularly profound:

It was the nationalism of Britain that had humiliated India, he said. This would not be resolved by yet another nationalism trying to counteract it. Tagore called this “the idolatry of Geography”, an absolutizing of boundaries that breeds suspicion and disrespect for those on the other side of the barriers we have artificially created.

Sadly, it feels like we’re entering a period of history where the idolatry of geography is reasserting itself.

There’s an article in this week’s FT Weekend on the “seven intellectual habits of the best thinkers”. All seven habits are sensible, but number six was the most powerful reminder: Always assume you might be wrong. The author of the article, Simon Kuper, adds:

Mediocre thinkers prefer to confirm their initial assumptions. This “confirmation bias” stops them reaching new or deeper insights. By contrast, Darwin was always composing arguments against his own theories.

How different would the world be—in particular, the world of social media debate—if we were all practicing this habit?

As of today, we are the parents of not one but two teenagers. And, hard as it is to believe, our youngest daughter is now a teenager. Imogen’s thirteen years have tumbled past like a stream. I am so proud of her—who she is already, and who she is still becoming.

There is plenty of angst, as you’d expect, but there is also an abundance of love and laughter. I feel incredibly grateful to get to be her father. I don’t feel old enough to have 13- and 16-year-old daughters. I probably look it, though!

My friend Ryan Offutt shared a compelling article with me today—a review by Erik J. Larson of a new book, Superbloom, by Nicholas Carr. The book explores how so-called “technologies of connection” erode what is poetic and profoundly human. Two quotes stood out. First:

The real world, with its quiet repetitions and constraints, offers something the digital cannot: room for contemplation. The possibility of meaning. Familiarity, unlike novelty, is the ground from which philosophy grows. It is where depth takes root.

And then:

The real world, with its resistances and repetitions, is not less because it is boring. It is more because it endures. That, he seems to say, is where attention belongs now: not in the stream, but in the pause between scrolls. Not in the feed, but in the place where nothing updates.

The whole review is both insightful and disquieting—and well worth reading in full for anyone wrestling with how digital life reshapes what it means to be human.

I read a thought-provoking article by Joan Westenberg this morning. She makes the case that many of the ways technology brings convenience to our lives come at the cost of our curiosity. If we don’t have to work as hard to get something, will we value it as much? And what do we miss out on by not having to go down blind alleys—the false starts and tangents that curiosity thrives on?

Here are two segments that especially stood out:

…in the real world, knowledge is earned through movement. Friction. Ambiguity. The old experience of falling into a stack of books at the library wasn’t efficient, but that was hardly the point. You’d go in looking for one answer and come out with five better questions. That’s how curiosity thrives: in the space between expected and unexpected, between map and territory.

And then:

We don’t need more information. We have oceans of it. What we need are tools that reintroduce friction in thoughtful ways. Interfaces that don’t just answer us, but provoke us. Not to make things harder for the sake of it—to remind us that adult curiosity is not a default state. It must be cultivated. And right now, the culture of convenience is starving it.

There’s a fascinating article in The Economist this week on how golden ages start and end. It’s inspired by a new book called Peak Human by Johan Norberg, a Swedish historian. The author argues that there is one thing the most successful societies had in common:

…the polities that outshone their peers did so because they were more open: to trade, to strangers and to ideas that discomfited the mighty. When they closed up again, they lost their shine.

The book was written before Donald Trump’s election and the current tariff and trade wars. Even so, the book’s point holds without needing to mention him explicitly.

Caitlin Moran’s column in The Times this morning is a thought-provoking take on the reality show Stacey & Joe. Seeing beyond the lightness of the show, she observes that what the show should really be called is Mental Load – the Movie as it highlights the discrepancies in what men and women do—or don’t do—around the house. She concludes:

…I’ve started to see Stacey & Joe not as a joyful piece of primetime relaxation - but an important social document… in every episode, the disparity. There are two high-profile showbiz adults, with big careers, in the house — but only one knows how to use the washing machine, or thinks to pick their clothes off the floor. And only one is finding time for fishing trips with the lads.

This is definitely something I worry about with my girls.

🔗 My patients used to have back pain at 40. Now they’re in their 20s

Musculoskeletal problems of all kinds are increasing among children and teenagers — with NHS referrals among those aged 18 and under up 50 per cent since 2019. The recent wave of younger patients comprises the first people who had a mobile phone at secondary school and a smartphone in their early twenties. They gamed through their teens and went to university with a laptop. They fully embraced the idea of taking your laptop with you everywhere and working anywhere. They have sat leaning over their laptop and mobile phones in that curved C-shaped desk “office posture” for ten years before they got anywhere near an office. The effects of all this are incredibly stark.

The older I get, the more it feels like I must forgive almost everything for not being perfect, or as I first wanted or needed it to be.

—Richard Rohr, The Tears of Things

This from John Philip Newell in The Great Search, reflecting on the wisdom of Thomas Berry, offers a striking insight:

It is not just our lungs and bodies that are damaged by particle and light pollution in the cities. It is “soul-deprivation”, says [Thomas] Berry. To not be able to see the stars is a deprivation of our inner world, a loss of wonder, and thus a diminishing of our imagination and the ability to remember our origins in the heavens and to dream our way forward into new beginnings on Earth.