HeyJaredTHE SCARLETT FILES
A serialized thriller about books, design, and murder, with lively commentary behind the scenes. Book 1: OCTAVO
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 13
- Latest publication
- Sep 30, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 15, 2026
Latest issues
Climbing the bridge (opens the original)
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One way to think about career learning is to conceive it as a bridge that’s built on a series of spreading columns. Each column represents a path that leads from a specific skill at the bottom up to more general skills at the top. The base of each column is craft knowledge, the entry level for your journey upward. From there you acquire disciplinary knowledge, the skillset that qualifies you as a competent professional. Higher up is domain knowledge, a broader understanding of the environment in
A theory of learning (opens the original)
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The talent of learning is a form of metacognition, or knowing about knowing. It’s the self-awareness that comes from observing what you think while you’re thinking it. It tells you when and how to use a particular strategy to solve a problem or address a challenge.We learn skills in a predictable sequence. We begin with the cognitive phase, in which we intellectualize the task and invent tactics to accomplish it with the fewest number of errors. Then we move to the associative phase, in which we
What’s the mission? (opens the original)
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Passion is powerful, yet not always strategic. We live in a society where competition often determines winners and losers in accordance with the Competitive Exclusion Principle. This is the Darwinian rule that says when two or more species compete for a limited resource, one of them will win, eventually squeezing the others out of the picture. It’s a cruel world. But it doesn’t have to be if you apply the opposite lever—the Strategic Differentiation Principle. This is the principle of dominating
A quick note (opens the original)
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You may have noticed that my weekly newsletter has a new masthead. It’s no longer THE SCARLETT FILES, but MARTY. I did it because my Substack has grown from a serialization of OCTAVO (starring Scarlett, whose files make up the novel) to a site for sharing multiple works, like the nonfiction book METASKILLS. When that wraps up in a couple of months, I’ll surprise you with another one.I’ve also tossed in a narrated version of my graphic design portfolio from the years 1975-2000, filed under MY BEA
The joy zone (opens the original)
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Erik Demaine became MIT’S youngest-ever professor at age 20. If you think this is an accomplishment, consider that he was homeschooled by his single-parent father, started college at 12, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science at 14. A few years later, after getting his PhD from the University of Waterloo, he was awarded a MacArthur “genius” fellowship, an honor that comes with a $500,000 grant to work on whatever strikes you as amusing. For Demaine, it was the mathematics of
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