#93 Ken Woodward: Built to Reach, Not to Catch

"Nothing in us reports on an absence. No creature ever needed a sense for the path it did not walk." - Ken Woodward

More than sixty percent of Google searches now end without a single click. We type the question, read the summary, and leave. The trip is gone.

Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff argues that curiosity needs a gap to switch on, and that learning deepens while the question stays open. The answer closes the window.

But the reaching is not our failure. Wanting the missing piece is old equipment, and it worked well for a very long time, because you used to have to walk over the ridge to find out. What changed is the hit rate. We catch every time now, in three seconds, and the machinery on the other side never gets to run.

This week we look at which gaps are worth keeping open, why resistance is the mechanism rather than the toll, and what ten years of a daily question taught me about the limits of my own idea.

This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com.

Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions)

Keep questioning!

#87 Ken Woodward: The Anatomy of a Question

"The question was not broken. It was unfinished." - Ken Woodward

Buried in the introduction of the twentieth century's most famously unread book is the most precise dissection of a question ever written.

In this solo episode, we open Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and recover his anatomy of inquiry: every question has a subject, a source, and an intent, and most questions fail not from bad wording but from missing parts.

We test the anatomy against the streets of Washington, D.C., including a backyard in Marshall Heights where a five-hour-and-forty-five-minute conversation revealed what sixty-one years of an unasked question feels like.

Then the reckoning. The man who drew the map of questioning joined the Nazi Party, deleted his Jewish teacher's name from his own dedication page, and spent forty-three years refusing the one question that came addressed to him.

Knowing the anatomy is not the asking. This episode is about the difference, and the drive home.

This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com.

Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions)

Keep questioning!

#83 Ken Woodward: What You Know Changes What You Can Ask

"A good answer can close a loop. A good question opens one." - Ken Woodward

What if the quality of your questions has less to do with how curious you are and more to do with how much you know?

A recent study from the Technion in Israel tracked 68 students over a semester of Introduction to Psychology. Researchers measured not just what students learned, but how their question-asking changed. The findings are worth sitting with. Domain-specific questions got sharper, more original, more complex. General questions did not improve. In some cases, they declined.

Knowledge doesn't flatten curiosity. It sharpens it.

This episode traces that finding through 32 years of Navy acquisition, through 1,300 conversations on a 2,085-mile walk through Washington DC, and through a conversation with Seth Godin about tension, rubber bands, and the question that only becomes possible after the preparation is done.

The argument is simple. You don't become a better questioner by wanting to ask better questions. You become one by learning more about what you're walking into.

This Curated Questions episode can be found on all major platforms and at CuratedQuestions.com.

Be sure to subscribe to the weekly Curated Questions Dispatch newsletter for more fun with questions and curiosity! (https://substack.com/@curatedquestions)

Keep questioning!