Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh i... See more

Milner, after keeping a diary and trying to pinpoint what experiences truly make her feel alive, realizes that she seems to pay two kinds of attention: “narrow attention” and “wide attention.” She describes them in a chapter called “Two Ways of Looking”:

(1) Narrow attention. – This first way of perceiving seemed to be the automatic one, the kind of... See more