🎨 Creativity, Curiosity & the Courage Not to Pick One

TCP010 | ⏰~6min read

Welcome to The Contemporary Polymath Newsletter, where you broaden your horizons, feed your curiosity, and spark new ideas on Thursdays by Naya Moss

📧 In This Issue

  • 🎨 Virgil Abloh’s quiet disruption
  • 🥜 Carver’s true legacy in soil & sound
  • 🌊 Ashanti Johnson on science & equity
  • 🐬 Google’s AI decodes dolphin speech

👋🏾 Hey there, friend!

Issue #10 felt like the perfect moment to pause and return to why I started this newsletter in the first place.

Growing up in NYC, I didn’t realize how rare it was to have so much inspiration at my fingertips. One week I’d be reading art, coding, and psychology books at the public library; the next, I’d stumble into a tap dance class, a piano lesson, or a weekend coding workshop. Museums were a ~20min walk away. Ideas were everywhere. It felt natural to flow between worlds—science, music, philosophy, design.

Now I understand that what I was doing had a name: polymathy.

I’ve always lived at the intersections—between tech and art, science and design, curiosity and craft. I dove into everything that was accessible, then zoomed in on the areas that sparked the most joy. 

I’d spend after-school hours deep in self-study—like the time I obsessed over the hidden history of Manhattan, learning about Seneca Village, memorizing the city’s fault lines, and tracing which neighborhoods were built on landfill.

That’s the essence of being a polymath. It’s about exploring widely, connecting ideas deeply.

In the early days of The Contemporary Polymath, I used NotebookLM to help me synthesize research and write a YouTube series on polymathy—covering everything from its role in ancient civilizations to what it means in a world obsessed with specialization. That was just the beginning. This newsletter became the next evolution of that idea: a place to explore, synthesize, and share insights from every corner of my mind.

Being a polymath is how I make sense of the world. It’s what allows me to ask better questions, blend perspectives, and resist the pressure to “pick one thing.” Each issue is a snapshot of how I think and what I’m learning—not just as an observer, but as someone actively shaping meaning across multiple fields.

That mindset—fueled by neurodivergence, shaped by environment, and rooted in relentless curiosity—is what built this newsletter. This isn’t just content its my publix codex, digitial garden, pkm base, and my version of a Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. 

p.s. If you’re based in NYC, as the weather gets warmer, I’ll be organizing some small local gatherings—and I’ll also be organizing some online knowledge-sharing meets, keep an eye on our Luma Page.

p.p.s. If you’re enjoying this newsletter and find it a knowledgeable breath of fresh air, I’d love if you’d share it on your socials. Right now, we’re just getting started—but I’d love your help turning this into a wide-reaching hub for polymaths, contextual thinkers, and curious minds around the world.

🌍This Week’s Explorations

Written by Us

Art

🎨 He was trained as an engineer. He became a DJ. Then he reshaped luxury fashion without ever fully “fitting in.” Virgil Abloh didn’t chase disruption—he made quiet shifts that changed everything. This one’s about creativity, curiosity, and what it means to build beyond boundaries.

History

🥜 Most people remember him for peanuts, but that barely scratches the surface. He sketched plants like portraits, played piano at dusk, and built a mobile classroom to reach farmers who couldn’t reach him. George Washington Carver’s real legacy? Teaching freedom through soil, not speeches.

Science

👩🏽‍🔬 What if the path to changing science started with listening to what water remembers? One woman traced radioactive clues through oceans—then flipped the script in academia, mentorship, and STEM access. Dr. Ashanti Johnson didn’t just study systems. She rebuilt them.

🌿 He built radios before Marconi, measured pain in plants, and refused to patent his inventions out of principle. Long before “interdisciplinary” was a buzzword, Jagadish Chandra Bose was blending physics, botany, and imagination to show the world that curiosity doesn’t come with categories.

🔍 Intriguing Finds

A curated selection of news and discoveries

📖 Books We Are Reading

Book rec for this week

🔑 Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

What if your lack of “focus” was actually your greatest strength? Range shows how wandering across fields builds deeper insight—and why the world’s most successful people are often generalists.​

🧠 Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter
A deep, dazzling braid of art, music, and logic—this book explores how intelligence might emerge from self-referencing systems. It’s a mind-bending ride through Bach’s fugues, Escher’s illusions, and Gödel’s theorems that just might rewire how you think about thinking.

💡 Lateral Thinking: A Textbook of Creativity by Edward de Bono

To think like a polymath, you need to break the mold. De Bono’s classic introduces techniques for shifting perspective, rethinking problems, and building mental flexibility on demand.

👥 Readers Corner

We are looking to interview some polymaths to feature in our newsletter, if that interest you, hit the button below:

📚 Join the Polymath Corner →

💭 How Inquisitive

🔙 Answer to last week’s question

👩🏼‍🦰 Why do we instantly trust certain faces/people without a thought?

Our brains are wired to make rapid judgments based on facial symmetry, expressions, racial and or ethnic background, subtle cues like pupil dilation or micro-expressions, and most interestingly, our natural bias toward people we like (aka liking bias). These unconscious signals often override logic, which helps explain why someone can feel trustworthy even when they aren’t.

⏭️Question for next week

🧠 What do you call these shapes?

🇹🇷 Kendine iyi bak. Nazik ol. Nerede olursan ol, harika bir gün, akşam veya gece geçir!

🇺🇸 Take care. Have a wonderful day, evening, or night wherever you are. Be kind!

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If you enjoyed this newsletter, a cup of matcha 🍵 serves as fuel! 

Best,

Naya