When you’ve wrapped back to the start
Five fragments for the week of June 16, 2025
Hello from middle of June, and welcome to all the new subscribers who found their way here thanks to the incomparable Hilary Gridley. This is definitely Hilary’s year, with interviews on How I AI and Lenny’s Podcast more or less back to back, and I love her writing to pieces. So I’m delighted to be one of her recommended reads, and strongly recommend her right back.
A bit about me and Diagonal for all the new readers: I’m Diana Kimball Berlin, a bookworm turned PM turned VC turned PM now (as of two weeks ago!) leading the core product team at Gamma. I started this weekly newsletter at the beginning of 2024 as a way of “paying attention to what I pay attention to”; it’s since become a beloved habit of mine, now 74 editions strong, each featuring five highlights from my reading and research over the previous week. I’ve come to think of it as “liner notes for life.”
As a sidenote, recommended reads on Substack really work and are the main way this newsletter grows…so if you’ve got a newsletter of your own and feel so moved, I’d love to be on your list.
And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
#11 — The palette picker is grouped into sections, and the pitch of the UI sound climbs as you tap through them. This detail actually comes from KidPix, and it gives you an intuitive sense for how far you are into the list and when you’ve wrapped back to the start.
– David Cole on Twitter, April 22, 2021 (it was Twitter back then! Gotta be historically accurate), in a thread on the TOP FIFTY design decisions in WarioWare DIY, each illustrated with a perfect little video or screenshot of the interaction. I have no idea how this showed up on my timeline (I thought it was brand-new until I went to copy and paste the date), but I’m so glad it did. Related: my post from 2022 wishing for a generative AI take on KidPix. At the end of the thread, David links to his 50min talk on the history of Nintendo’s creative tools, which I now can’t wait to watch. And yes, this is the same David Cole who wrote the Buster Keaton / Tom Cruise deep dive I highlighted a few weeks back.
The mythology of printmaking in the West has long flirted with the idea that reversal provides access to special forms of otherness and opposition. The ability to work and perceive in reverse evokes a seer-like divination of alternative dimensions and forms.
– Jennifer L. Roberts, Contact: Art and the Pull of Print, May 2024. Returning to this book on seeing Robin Sloan mention giving it a reread. “The ability to work and perceive in reverse” somehow brings to mind neural network interpretability.
[Ceramics is] such a sort of basic biblical way of doing things; it’s just clay which is shaped and baked in an oven, sometimes decorated, it doesn’t have to be. And to a sculptor that’s quite good, I mean I’ve gone back to clay or plaster being a very very basic material, and something that’s so basic in a way offers such a tremendous platform for the imagination really, it gives you a lot of room.
– Sir Eduardo Paolozzi in an oral history recorded in 1994. Brings me back to one of the truest observations in my life: the basic stuff is the advanced stuff. Found while looking for more on Paolozzi after finding the image up top while following the printmaking thread. See also: tools for imagination.
after 30, every brunch you go to is either someone telling you that they're pregnant or they've discovered a new diagnosis that explains everything about their life
– Nikhil Krishnan on X, June 15, 2025. Too real.
I would be like 20% as effective at work if I didn’t put weekly effort into memorizing things. this is is why I take notes by hand, drill myself on important numbers and on any scientific or technical concepts I don’t have a natural instinct for.
learning how my own memory works, esp as someone who struggles to remember things I hear vs things I read or write down, was possibly the most important skill I have ever learned.
you will occasionally meet people with insanely good judgment who can seemingly solve any complex problem just by asking a few questions and thinking for a couple minutes. from the outside it looks like they are “going with their gut” but that person is relying on a deep well of memorized information and their ability to mentally query it all instantaneously
– Hilary Gridley on X, June 15, 2025. Can’t end a Hilary appreciation post without a Hilary appreciation quote. Lots of talk on the timeline over the past few days about the value of memorization, seemingly all sparked by this post on X with its pairing of this piece about a new study on memorization and a passage about Linus Pauling’s insistence on the value of memorization. I have a new respect for memorization now after spending hours and hours over the past month attempting to get an 11-minute dialogue down cold for my acting class…I had to try so many different methods before I found one that stuck and worked! But now it’s really jammed into my brain, and even though we’ve moved on from the scene, the words float back to me in in-between moments. Eagerly awaiting a course / post / I’ll take a few paragraphs even from Hilary on The Art of Modern Memorization.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com