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Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe or read past issues. Hello friends, It’s called The Vibes Project, and it’s a free, purely educational newsletter about human nature and popular culture. The project will begin soon and I'd love to have you along for the ride. What is it About?Human nature represents a difficult and fascinating explanation problem. Despite generations of academic research, much of our nature remains a mystery. I'm looking for new perspectives on an age-old question: Why are we the way we are? I'm interested in how we perceive and connect with one another. We all have unique personalities and presences that others feel. I call these "vibes," like vibrations, that help us navigate social situations and communicate who we are. I created The Vibes Project to research, understand, and share what I believe is a novel perspective on this experience. I've spent months researching psychology, history, culture, brain science, and social science. While this continues to be essential, I'm synthesizing a variety of ideas to explain experiences that virtually everyone knows and feels. An ExampleWe are all aware of the power of “coolness” in our culture. This is an example of a vibe. I want to know: When someone has a “cool” vibe… what’s happening? What is coolness? When and where did it originate? How has it impacted our culture? How does it influence us and our worldview? Another vibe with similar questions is nerdiness. These are questions that are rarely discussed but have real power. I want to change that. I want to understand and explain them so we can better understand one another. A Five-Part Series - You're InvitedThe project will soon start with a five-post series on the Roots of Cool. You'll receive one post per week for five weeks. By the end, we will have traced the idea of coolness across continents and centuries leading up to WWII. You’ll learn about fascinating people and ideas that were not taught in school.
That's what I have for now. Cheers!
Lee LeFever, Common Craft and Explainer Academy |
Learn about new Common Craft videos, useful resources, and the skill of explanation from Lee LeFever, author of The Art of Explanation.
Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe here Hello friends, A couple of weeks ago, I invited you to my free newsletter: The Science of Explanation. It was gratifying to see so many of you subscribe! Today, I'm writing to share a couple of recent posts. #1 What Happens in the Mind When We Explain? This shares a big idea from cognitive science that relates to the idea of sharing knowledge. Excerpts from the post: When a...
Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe here Hello friends, I'm writing to invite you to my free newsletter: The Science of Explanation. Here's why I think you'll find it fascinating: The biggest challenge of explanation is invisibility. We can’t see what’s happening in someone else’s mind or how they interpret what we say. For most of human history, that gap was unavoidable. Today, brain science is revealing the...
Welcome to the Common Craft newsletter, a free resource for educators, communicators, and explainers. Subscribe here Hello friends. We've hosted the Explainer Academy since 2015 and have seen nearly 1,000 professionals take the courses. I'm writing today because the Explainer Academy has moved to a new address that will serve as a platform for a new set of courses with a new perspective on explanation. More on that soon. The former domain, ExplainerAcademy.com, has transitioned to...