What if getting it wrong is how we get anywhere? Nobody gets it right first time, and the people worth learning from know it. This week, #TheEdit is for the rough drafts: the testing, the unlearning, and the slow work of finding a way forward. Here’s to celebrating the wobbly first attempts, not just the outcomes.

• What happens when AI designs a chair? Artist and technologist James Bridle builds furniture to instructions from ChatGPT, Mistral, Claude and Grok. Each attempt shows what a machine that has read everything about chairs, but never sat in one, can’t know – Emergence Magazine
• Wikipedia started as a failure. Its first version managed one publishable article in five months. A new history of the site shows how a messy, practical instinct to keep trying built one of the last great places on the internet – The Baffler
• Are pioneers better at learning or unlearning? When does “tried and tested” fall short? More on unlearning, and how to know when to pivot and when to persist – The Green Room Podcast
• Family matters: The secret history behind why Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear. He thought he’d painted the stars in The Starry Night too big. Meet Jo van Gogh-Bonger, the sister-in-law who spent 30 years persuading the world to see what nobody wanted – TIME
• CRISPR is capable of more than we initially expected. The Nobel laureate who co-invented CRISPR has spent the years since watching it go further than anyone expected: a cure for sickle cell disease, work on cutting methane from cattle and rice, and an ethical reckoning she says the AI race could learn from – Big Think  
• Do You Have ‘Purpose Anxiety’? If you feel anxious about finding your purpose, psychologists say it can be modest, it can change over a lifetime, and you can have more than one. You find it by experimenting: trying things, noticing what makes you feel alive, and reflecting on why – The New York Times
• Error and trial: What really makes the humanitarian system change. After 20 years studying the humanitarian system, Ben Ramalingam finds it learns backwards: it reacts to what breaks, then drifts back to old habits. He and Nadine Saba on what real reform would take – The Beautiful Truth