Hello from London and the end of June. The heat finally broke.

Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…

After 1937 the pictorial became a matter of merely secondary importance. He was taken up with regularity and mathematical structure, by continuity and infinity and by the conflict which is to be found in every picture, that of the representation of three dimensions in two. These themes haunted him. Now he was treading paths which no others had yet trodden and there was an infinity of discoveries to make.

– Bruno Ernst, The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher, 1976. The whole family went to Somerset House over the weekend to see the M. C. Escher show and when I came home I had to know more. Ernst and Escher were friends and so this prose, while grandiose, is sweet to me: Ernst was Escher’s believing mirror.

“Taste” is the ability to consistently make high-quality qualitative judgments where no objective metric exists. It’s the creation of something that feels right intuitively, with no real justifiable way to measure that. But when you do it, people feel it.

A person with “good taste” is someone who can do this repeatedly, consistently. The funny thing about taste is that it’s hard to create, but its result is very easy to copy. Once someone makes a tasteful decision, others can imitate it almost immediately. […]

Taste isn’t valuable because it’s impossible to copy. Taste is valuable exactly because it defines what everyone else chooses to copy. Taste has always existed! But now we value it more.

– Mitchell Hashimoto on X, June 27, 2026. Jumped out at me because of the post that packaged it up and delivered it to my feed: Jackson Dahl describing it as “a nice definition of a worn-out word.” Hard to create, easy to copy: the truest now it’s ever been.

There is a right way and a wrong way to ignore your children's annoying behaviors. If you are on your phone you will likely reward them for breaking through your focus and thereby reward them for being acutely annoying. If you are focused on your children you will be able to discern what behaviors are good and bad. You can always think about problems/ideas while you watch your children.

– Diana S. Fleischman on X, June 29, 2026. Tucked into a reply to a joke post, some of the most genuinely useful parenting advice I’ve read.

The first time I was in New York, we had a tiny office, and they were emailing across it. I said, “No way. Just get up and go to your neighbor and ask them one thing, in one split second, in person.” First of all, you look me in the eye. You smell me, my presence. Maybe I take the opportunity to ask you about your family. Don’t you feel better than if you get an email? Maybe I smile and you feel even better.

– Brunello Cucinelli in an interview with Om Malik, April 17, 2015. Shared by Jason Fried in honor of Om Malik’s life; he passed away on June 24. Maybe I smile and you feel even better.

I sometimes find AI super useful for researching ideas and gathering information.

But the idea of using it in any substantial way to do the actual writing feels like getting a friend to do your homework for you at school. You may get good good grades at the end of it but you’ll miss out on all the actual learning and growth that the exercise was designed to effect.

To me, even worse than the idea of living in a world saturated by vapid AI slop “content” is the idea of living in a world saturated by people whose minds and hearts have been atrophied by outsourcing their creative spirit to robots.

– Vacha on X, June 26, 2026. Echoes Hilary Gridley’s wise words on the risks of atrophy, too. I’ve been thinking about how strongly I feel about writing by hand, yet how joyful I feel about image gen and using AI for visual creation in general. (Gamma to a tee!) And then I remind myself that the way I feel about image gen is the way some people feel about AI writing. There is a glee and a satisfaction that comes from seeing your ideas reflected back even better than you could have hoped, and in the best case it can propel even more creative momentum. But how to set up the conditions that support that path?

Next time in Paris,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com