All of these insights have their deep and shallow versions.

1. Practical knowledge is impossible without knowing what information to discard.
2. Vapor in the atmosphere makes light visible.
3. Every cuisine is the triumph of centuries of vernacular chemistry.
4. The idea of the future is a lens that brings spaces closer together.
5. All of our neighborhoods hold familiar secrets, depths we’ve never plumbed.
6. Consider your arguments and carefully circumscribe your conclusion. Then exceed those limits by at least twenty percent.
7. Aesthetically, we respond to nuanced humanity and inhuman purity, the shaving mirror and the telescope, the contingency of a moment and the point of view of the eternal universe. Everything else rings false.
8. An unheralded virtue: vigilance against an urge for thrift, misplaced.
9. Any task of memory or thought benefits from an association (even an artificial one) with vision.
10. Maps fool us into believing that cities exist in two dimensions, when they actually persist in (at least) four.
11. Food, Books, Weather, Conversation — excellence in these four things is an apologia for an unhappy memory or an indifferent universe.

Thanks, Robin.