2026-09-01 19:11:07
There are a number of children’s books that do this excellently (thank you, William Steig!), though, sadly, far fewer than there should be. This is a list of other, stranger methods.
This does, indeed, involve a list on the wall, which reminds me to use more advanced words in daily speech. (For example, “Helen, you are so industriously coloring in your coloring book!”) I switch out the list periodically.
I also hold a similar list while reading a children’s book aloud and try to replace simpler words as I read with these words.
I wish more illustrated books were written at a more advanced level. In the meantime, there’s always defacement.
I replace all of the words in a book with a poem, not something I could get away with now that my daughter is four. (And perhaps this one was always more for myself, really.)
I give my daughter the choice—poem or bedtime. She always picks the poem. I’ve memorized a number of them (see #4), so I don’t have to pull out my phone in the dark. Some favorites lately include “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” “The Tyger,” and “Drummer Hodge.”
Of course, this only works for a subset of words. My daughter likes to act out words like somber, sorrow, inquisitive, etc.
Sometimes I think all of this is too ridiculous, and then I remind myself that I am so grateful to be able to access complex literature. And that language is learned not only most effortlessly but perhaps best when one is young. As for whether my daughter will appreciate this or resent it—I will have to get back to you in twenty years.
Marlene writes about books and parenting, check out her blog!
2026-08-31 19:11:59
It's very hard to learn a language as an adult, but somehow kids manage to do it.
There's a theory (the Critical Period Hypothesis) claiming that this is due to innate differences between the child and adult brains; children have more plastic minds, they can still mold themselves while adults can't.
I can't pretend to have dived into the research on this even slightly, but I'm instinctively skeptical.
Kids don't have a choice about learning language; they're 100% immersed in a language-rich world, and they have to learn a language to be able to engage with it.
Also, kids are constantly trying and failing and trying again; they are taught and corrected and taught some more by existing language-knowers; they experience deliberate practice for years on end.
Adults – in my current circles, at least – are almost-never in such situations. They are rarely that desperate to speak a new language, they are rarely in situations where reality just forces them to learn a new language again, no matter how much work it takes or how much humiliation they face along the way.
In fact, a few times in my life, I've encountered adult migrants who (as best I could tell) had picked up entirely novel languages just by 1) moving to a place which they shared no languages with, 2) needing to speak to work to live.
Rightly or wrongly, I am basically convinced that this is true of almost-everything: that I could still learn big difficult things, again, if I tried. But I don't.
2026-08-28 19:11:12
Look: I write this blog mainly to 1) meet interesting people, 2) get ideas out of my head so they'll stop bothering me, 3) get better at writing and thinking.
I don't charge money for the blog, and would far rather get your feedback than your money. So if you've appreciated the blog this month (I didn't say enjoyed!), I would love to get your feedback here.
2026-08-27 19:11:28
There's this piece of advice that gets bandied around a lot about how "nobody is thinking about you half as much as you think they are."
Rough idea being: don't worry so much, you imagine everyone is obsessed with your mistakes and quirks, but actually they're too busy being obsessed with their own mistakes and quirks.
I'm sure this is mostly right, but there is a flipside I encounter occasionally: sometimes, people will remember a small stray comment you made 12 years ago. Sometimes they loved it, sometimes they hated it, sometimes they misinterpreted it, often you've forgotten it.
I'm not sure what the right synthesis of these two facts is.
2026-08-26 19:11:02
I find it really hard to keep track of the category of chore that you only need to do every 1 or 2 or 3 months: when did I last change the air filters? When did I last wash the washing machine? So I made a little tool to track these:
There are lots of apps out there that offer similar services, but I wanted something extremely simple, with local data storage, and where I could track long-gap recurring tasks rather than daily habits.
If you want to use this yourself, navigate to this website from your phone and save the icon on your home screen for easy access. Enter the names of tasks you want to keep track of and the frequency you want to do them, and then check back occasionally to see if you're overdue. That's it!
THIS IS NOT AN APP, IT IS A WEBPAGE THAT STORES DATA LOCALLY ON YOUR PHONE, which means that if you ever clear your browser cache it will delete all the data. You can export the data as a .csv file occasionally to make sure you don't lose it, and/or you can accept the impermanence of all things.
Hopefully this goes without saying, but: you should not use this or any other similarly scrappy tool for anything truly important to you, it is presented as-is with no guarantees of fitness, etc. With all that said, hope you enjoy it!
2026-08-25 19:11:41
The Wason Selection Task is a famous result in psychology. It goes like this:
You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a symbol on one side and a color on the other. The visible faces of the cards show an Atom, a Bit, orange and blue. You don't know what's on the other side of each of these cards. Which cards must you turn over in order to test whether the following rule is true: "if a card shows an atom on one face, then its opposite face is orange?"
The answer, counterintuitively, is that you have to turn over the atom card and the blue card (not the orange card).
Basically: if the Bit card is orange on the other side, that doesn't violate the rule; it may also be true that Atoms are orange, whether or not the Bits are.
Whatever is on the other side of the orange card, this card can't possibly violate the rule, for the same reason: our rule just said that atom implies orange, but Bits could be orange too.
You need to turn over the Atom and the Blue cards, because if the Atom is blue or if the blue is an Atom, the rule is violated.
I think about this when I see influencer videos telling the general public all the signs that you're ADHD, or that your parent was a narcissist, or that you're secretly a wizard, or whatever.
Do you sometimes feel lonely? That you're not like the other kids around you? That your life is lacking a little rightful magic?
I have no doubts that a wizard living in the mundane world would have such feelings. But I also believe that non-wizards in the mundane world often have these feelings. Having these feelings therefore doesn't rightly imply that you're a wizard.
I am certainly not in doubt about the existence of ADHD, or narcissism, or certain kinds of wizards. But I think that some advocates and activists for these conditions spend way too much time asserting that if you experience WXY then you're probably a Z, and I simply don't think that's good reasoning: if non-Zs also experience WXY, or if many people who experience WXY are non-Zs, the claim (in its strongest form) doesn't hold. We need to spend more time flipping over the other cards.