Wisereads Vol. 91 — Island of the Blue Foxes by Stephen R. Bown, Jony Ive's Stripe interview, and more

Last week, we featured an excerpt of Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon. This week, we're sharing a preview of the thrilling Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on the World's Greatest Scientific Expedition by Stephen R. Bown.

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Verified author Mike Caulfield ponders the sycophantic update that had ChatGPT calling a user’s plan to sell shit on a stick "not just smart—but genius." His advice: stop asking for opinions and start seeking context. "I would propose a simple rule: no answers from nowhere. This rule is less convenient, and that’s the point. The chatbot should be a conduit for the information of the world, not an arbiter of truth... rather than act like an opinionated friend, AI would produce a map of the landscape of human knowledge and opinions for you to navigate, one you can use to get somewhere a bit better."

Some students now see AI as a shortcut to dream grades—why bother with work that feels like just another hoop? In interviews with James Walsh, one Ivy Leaguer put it bluntly: "When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, 'It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.'"

In light of the revelations from the Epic Games v. Apple case, web developer and tech writer John Siracusa issues a plea for Apple to pursue product over profit under new leadership. "Don’t try to make money. Try to make great things, and the money will surely follow. It’s a strategy that’s simple to explain, but almost impossible for any company to follow. Folks in the C-suite will try to tell you that these two goals are perfectly aligned—that making great products is part of being a profitable company. But they mean it in the same way that Frosted Flakes is part of a complete breakfast."

Jony Ive, legendary for his design work at Apple, offers rare nuggets of wisdom in his interview with Stripe’s Patrick Collison on everything from creative legacy: "What we make stands testament to who we are. And what we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations," to the delicate life of ideas: "People are just desperate to speak and to be heard. And... what kills most ideas, I think, are people desperate to express an opinion. And let's be very clear: opinions aren't ideas."

On a recent podcast, Dr. John Kruse joined Andrew Huberman to discuss focus and ADHD. Andrew Hopper shares his key takeaways from the episode: "The ADHD brain struggles to create internal structure. Too little structure (working from home) = chaos. Too much structure (assembly line work) = stultifying."

A few weeks ago, we shared a tutorial on analytical reading based on Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book. Now hear from the master of active reading himself in this 1941 article from The Saturday Review of Literature. "Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading... In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you -- how many you can make your own. A few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances."

Commissioned for Russia’s Great Northern Expedition, the St. Peter was part of one of the most ambitious scientific voyages of the 18th century—spanning three continents and nearly a decade. But as Stephen R. Bown writes in Island of the Blue Foxes, the expedition’s high ideals unraveled into one of the Age of Sail’s darkest survival stories.

"Hordes of starving foxes swarmed about the makeshift camp, drawn from the barren hills by the scent of food. They stole clothing and blankets, dragged away tools and utensils, and became increasingly aggressive. Scratching at shallow graves, the foxes dragged away corpses and gnawed on them within sight of the enfeebled mariners. For the several dozen men who had scrambled ashore from the ship, things could not have seemed bleaker... As winter wore on, they endured relentless Arctic winds, waist-deep snow, the ravages of scurvy, and continuous assaults by the feral blue foxes."

Snag the full ebook for $3.99 wherever ebooks are sold in the US and Canada until the end of May.

Ashore co-founder Aled Maclean-Jones shares weekly think pieces on culture and history. We particularly enjoyed his latest, a compelling review of John and Paul that explores what makes great non-fiction in the era of AI, a question never far from our minds. From Small tales, generally of love: "This isn’t a book you could reduce to a summary or a Twitter thread, as you might with, say, Atomic Habits. To do so would miss the point entirely — like reading a synopsis of a novel and thinking you know what it feels like when a character you’ve rooted for over 600 pages drowns five pages before the end... The result is not only the kind of writing that belongs in a world where no reader is willing to sift through dense, impenetrable prose just to find one nugget of gold, but also a glimpse of where non-fiction might be headed: part biography; part criticism; and part story of two men who, for a time, shared one mind."