Jonas Heide Smiths notesblog

So Jonas, what is this “power of weakness” thing you keep going on about? you, the implied reader, ask.
And I want to thank you for taking the time, because that is a truly relevant inquiry.
The whole thing revolves around something which I find fascinating: That, in many diverse situations, we go out of our [...]

Image 1: Trond Giske, Norwegian minister of culture
Technically we’re off topic here (unless our topic is very broad indeed) but I just realized that the near-Danes of Norway have taken a drastic approach to the lure of gaming.
Distressed with the rise of gambling addiction, the Norwegian government last year chose to ban all privately owned [...]

Working the way I usually do – backed up powerfully by Wikipedia, Google; seriously revising drafts etc. – I sometimes wonder how on Earth pre-computer people were able to do any serious writing.
Of course, I also – paradoxically – sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be able to work faster, better and with far greater personal [...]

I’m immensely fascinated by the ways in which we, the alleged Homo Sapiens, set up our environments and construct our objects in order to make them difficult to navigate and use.
And I’m not being the least bit sarcastic here. We do, deliberately, and for excellent reasons, limit others and (even, more fascinatingly, ourselves) from [...]