Wandering Wandering Star

So many people tell me, ‘I don’t know what you do,’” Kumra says. It’s an admission echoed by many in Generation Flux, but it doesn’t bother her at all. “I’m a collection of many things. I’m not one thing.

I’m skill hoarding. Every time I update my resume, I see the path that I didn’t know would be. You keep throwing things into your backpack, and eventually you’ll have everything in your tool kit.

“Why do we assume that simple is good?

Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you.

Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity.

To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something, you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex.

The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it’s manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.”

Lapham’s Quarterly doesn’t work the way a typical magazine works.

I’m not referring to its ability to generate ad revenue (since there aren’t any ads) or even necessarily to its ability to inform its readers the way a news magazine might.

No, the magazine works on a deeper level. It slowly builds understanding in its readers, working up to a complete concept.

Unlike an issue of National Geographic or the byline-less Economist, Lapham’s Quarterly doesn’t seek to provoke thought via disparate stories or polemics; instead, it works to deepen thought and comprehension by laying down a basis for understanding a segment of our world.

The reader’s reward is not only more knowledge, but a new gut instinct.

Instead of having, say, a slice of insight into life in modern Ulaanbaatar, we’re given the tools to excavate the root of an idea. We’re made ready to understand.