Permalink: For No Reason“And it means that sometimes a whole population of frogs, or worms, or people can die for no reason whatsoever, just because that is the way numbers work.”
Christopher Boone
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
By Mark Haddon
Permalink: The GadflyHe paused a moment, and went on again: …
“I think that perhaps I have misjudged you, and that there is in you something better than what you show outside. To that better self in you I appeal, and solemnly entreat you, on your conscience, to tell me truthfully — in my place, what would you do?”
A long silence followed; then the Gadfly looked up. …
“We atheists,” he went on fiercely, “understand that if a man has a thing to bear, he must bear it as best he can; and if he sinks under it — why, so much the worse for him. But a Christian comes whining to his God, or his Saints; or, if they won’t help him, to his enemies — he can always find a back to shift his burdens on to. … Go back to your Jesus … Consent, man, of course, and go home to your dinner…”
The Gadfly, p. 329
E. L. Voynich
Permalink: Nonbinary ChristI’m reading this book about new theories about transgender and nonbinary people and so forth. The previous book I’d read was about early Christianity. It struck me how similar these things are. So much of the debate about gender now, in a weird way it’s like these early Christians debating the nature of Christ and the trinity. Basically they were asking, was Christ a nonbinary person? Is Christ divine or human or both divine-human or neither divine and human? It resonates with many of the debates that we have now about the nature of humans and the person. Can we be both? Can we be only one? And if you don’t think like me, then you’re a heretic.
Yuval Noah Harari
This Simple Story Can Save the Planet
Kenopsia
Modern-Day Sports and Entertainment
My company, Mainline, organizes collegiate esports tournaments for all skill levels. When people ask what I do, my wife’s most common response is, “He works in computers.” It’s hard to sum it up in one sentence.
Recently, Nicole Lapointe Jameson, the CEO of Evil Geniuses, joined Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman on his podcast Deep Background to discuss “The Billion Dollar Industry of Esports.” She was staggeringly astute in her definition of esports:
If you’re coming from zero, esports is competitive gaming where we bridge industries that resemble a lot of traditional sports but also resemble modern-day entertainment. So the best way to think about my universe — I run an organization called Evil Geniuses — think of us like the University of Michigan, like U of M’s athletics department where they have basketball and football and soccer that have distinct players on distinct schedules and a very robust back office that bridges athletics to sponsorships to brand to health and wellness all to support the different players in their seasons.
Nicole Lapointe Jameson
She’s young, vibrant, articulate, effective, and definitive. Send this podcast to anyone who wants an Esports 101 crash course.
Permalink: The Modern StateNot a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics).
William Deresiewicz
“Human History Gets a Rewrite”
The two sides are engaged in an eternal jousting match. They attack each other with giant weights pushed from their chests, a metaphor for their relentless drive toward wealth while they were alive. These tormented souls are so busy with this activity that the poet and his underworld guide do not even bother attempting to speak with them.
Josh Brown
“The New Fear And Greed”
Josh Brown describes Twitter.
Permalink: Describing Twitter“You could make the computer both run and not run, at once, and that’s just a warm-up. You could, in fact, make it not run and nonetheless extract the answer to a computation. The computer will be sitting there waiting for someone to press ‘Run,’ yet will have produced a result. …
George Musser
“It works because, in the quantum realm, things that can happen, but don’t, can leave their mark on what does.”
Schrödinger’s Zombie: Adam Brown at the 6th FQXi Meeting
I live for this.
Permalink: Things That Happen Don’tTying The Knot Your Way
Insightful, subtle marketing from Amanda Goetz, something that took true knowledge of an audience (and guts to employ):
Something that has been core to my thesis when marketing to women — both across The Knot and now House of Wise — is that women are looking for ways to feel less guilt and shame about things that they’re experiencing in everyday life. With The Knot, for example, the guilt and shame came from wanting to do something for their weddings that was “not traditional,” or something that their families might not approve of, like not doing traditional vows, or not having her dad walk her down the aisle.
Amanda Goetz
When I went to The Knot, I realized that our brand positioning was not speaking to that woman, and that we needed to help her feel supported in her decisions. That involved removing all “dos and don’ts” across all of our content and editorial, and saying, “Here’s ten ways that you can walk down the aisle,” or, “Do X, Y, and Z instead of just one.”
Quoted in The Morning Brew
Going to your boss at such a massive platform and telling them you’re going to remove popular content for the long-term benefit of the company is a hard ask. Knowing it’s the right thing to do and following through on a hard decision is a difference-maker. Don’t do what you’re told to do; don’t do what everyone else is doing. Speak to the truth of the matter and to your user’s actual needs.
Spin Zone
CNBC: “Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen said the country’s largest supermarket operator currently has about 20,000 job openings.”
“We’re aggressively hiring anywhere we can,” he said. “One of the biggest constraints we have right now is finding talented people.”
No. One of the biggest constraints you have right now is paying people what the job is worth.
The Taliban Was The Result Of A Successful A/B Test
“The Taliban were a strategic project of the Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI. It even conducted market surveys in the villages around Kandahar, to test the label and the messaging. ‘Taliban’ worked well. The image evoked was of the young students who apprenticed themselves to village religious leaders. They were known as sober, studious, and gentle.”
Sarah Chayes
“The Ides Of August”
A U.S. Chinook helicopter flies over the country’s embassy in Kabul on Sunday as diplomatic personnel were being ferried to the airport amid the Taliban’s rapid advance on the Afghan capital — Photo By Rahmat Gul/Associated Press
The Camera Chooses Sides
“The value of ride-sharing apps has been proven in the marketplace…”
The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
That’s the first sentence in this article: “How Uber and Lyft Can Save Lives.”
There are two implicit claims by this headline and introductory sentence alone:
- Uber is valuable as a business
- Uber saves lives
Except:
- Uber makes $0.38 for every $1.00 it takes in. It’s a sunk ship.
- The study1 referenced by The Editorial Board, “Uber and Traffic-Related Fatalities,” is not peer-reviewed and happens to be backed by Uber.2
“It’s unclear whether … the editorial board of the WSJ is willfully dishonest or is simply incapable of reading financial statements…”
Hubert Horan
“Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Twenty-Six: With No Hope of Real Profits, Uber and Lyft Double Down on Fake Profit Metrics”
1 “The authors had no interest in increasing anyone’s understanding about the causes of traffic fatalities or how they could be reduced.” — Horan
2 The data was provided by Uber directly to the two academics, which, while magically showing that Uber is somehow a savior, also happens to make the study impossible to replicate.
You Don’t Need A Harvard Degree
In this week’s 3 Minutes With series on Rest of World — a fantastic organization dedicated to news and media from non-Western culture — the group spoke with Andrés Barreto, the Managing Director of the Techstars Boulder Accelerator:
What are the biggest tech investment opportunities in Latin America that are being overlooked?
Andrés Barreto
We’ve seen a model that works in the United States being applied to Latin America. “Let’s get these blue chip founders that have all the right logos — the Stanfords, the HBSes.” There’s been a lot of money made there, and it’s still great. But what about the founders from a small town in Colombia creating robotics for food delivery? …
Those are not being evaluated right now, because if you’re doing machine learning or robotics, most of the VCs and even accelerators want to see a Carnegie Mellon grad or an ex-Google employee. But there’s talent beyond those geographies and those schools and companies creating global technology from the region.
3 minutes with Andrés Barreto
Full Interview on Rest of World
Barreto is right, and I want to get that out of the way first. The Cherry Pick The College Logo Model has been successful, but the heart of his words is that you don’t need Facebook on your resume to Validate Your Talent. You aren’t minted a “blue-chip founder” because you went to Stanford or Harvard Business School. There are billions of dollars in revenue created from founders and entrepreneurs who didn’t go to a blue-chipper, didn’t spend a cent on school, or dropped out — famously including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. His whole point is that things like coming from small towns, countries that aren’t regarded as superpowers, or socioeconomic status shouldn’t play into who is being evaluated by the majority of VCs. He goes so far to say that those that don’t check off the right boxes “are not being evaluated.”
Barreto means well in his answer, but, man, I hate that his above quote is even prefaced with the idea of the “working United States model,” that “a) you’re a founder, b) you’re a Stanford grad, c) here’s investment” is worthy. (He still calls that model “great.” [Gross.])
The real charge is to desperately chase innovation. Entrepreneurship should never be prejudiced by discriminately selecting companies with founders that have a diploma stamped with a specific name. I don’t even want to subtly encourage young people — specifically poor people — to think they need those University Logos to compete. You don’t. You alone are enough. You do not need to go into student debt thinking it’s going to make you successful.
Clearly, as Barreto notes, this form of elitism still works. The best thing I can do is try to tell every future entrepreneur at every career day at every opportunity to chase the innovation regardless of where it takes you, to be the change so the ones behind you can follow a different model.
Elitism is a plague, and you don’t need a Harvard degree or Amazon on your LinkedIn profile to know you’re good enough.
Distilled to its core though, the draft is an immoral exercise where big league clubs distribute laborers with minimal consent, designed and structured in a manner to limit expenses. There’s no line of work outside of sports that allocates employees to specific businesses like this: The players who get drafted each year never agreed to this system and never would if they had a choice. The unfairness of it all becomes crystal clear under any kind of scrutiny. It would be ridiculous if Bob’s Plumbing in New York held the exclusive rights to my labor simply because they drafted me out of school and it’s no less absurd that the Mets have that kind of power over Rocker.
Brenden Gawlowski
Corollary Damage: Kumar Rocker, the MLB Draft, and a Better Way Forward
Kumar Rocker, drafted by the New York Mets as the 10th overall pick in the first round of the MLB Draft, wasn’t offered a deal to play with the New York Mets. The problem? The Mets still “own the rights to Rocker” and now he can’t sign with any team in baseball.
Permalink: Drafts Are ImmoralThe Most Dangerous Weapon
The first thing I do when I get a new phone is take it apart. I don’t do this to satisfy a tinkerer’s urge, or out of political principle, but simply because it is unsafe to operate. Fixing the hardware, which is to say surgically removing the two or three tiny microphones hidden inside, is only the first step of an arduous process, and yet even after days of these DIY security improvements, my smartphone will remain the most dangerous item I possess.
Edward Snowden
The Insecurity Industry
Vila 953 Branding
I’m obsessed with this ligature. The kerning issues putting a capital ‘L’ next to a capital ‘A’ is always a tricky proposition. The branding on Vila 953 from Kobu is one I wish I had in my portfolio.
Populating The Universe: A Visual
There’s a decent chance that we live at the very beginning of the tiny sliver of time during which the galaxy goes from nearly lifeless to largely populated. That out of a staggering number of persons who will ever exist, we’re among the first. And that out of hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, ours will produce the beings that fill it.
Holden Karnofsky
Illustration by Ludwig Schubert
Permalink: Know Your ValueI asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. You don’t have to use the solution. If you want options, go talk to other people.’
Steve Jobs on Paul Rand
If You Give A Lobster Enough THC, Will It Notice That It Is Boiling To Death?
One evening, Gill watched the lobsters cook, gazing over them clamoring over one another, trying to crawl out of the pot as the bubbling hellbroth slowly transformed each animal from darkly-hued spidery bottomfeeders into ruby-red dinnerplate centerpieces, their lives extinguished in the process.
Jackie Bryant
“I thought, just because they’re in their little shells and they don’t have vocal cords, that doesn’t mean there isn’t extreme suffering happening there,” Gill says. “It’s obvious. You can see it.”
THC: The High Crustaceans
A much more existential conundrum than it would appear to be.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Silence
I’m not an out-and-out Alfred Hitchcock stan — if we’re in the trust tree, I can’t say I’ve seen all his movies — but, for me, his legacy was his ability to redefine what a movie “was allowed” to do. Uncompromising, he executed the vision for his art, regardless of the convention of the day.
When Psycho was released in 1960, movies were exceptionally laissez-faire. People would come and go as they pleased, the plot not entirely central to the movie-going experience; rather, the movie was part of the evening’s broader panorama of entertainment. Whenever dinner wrapped up, you went to the theater and arrived when you arrived and if the movie had started 20 minutes ago… well, then the movie started 20 minutes ago and you just joined when you did. It was the habitual moviegoing culture of the era.
But for anyone who has seen Psycho — spoiler alert but seriously go see the movie already it’s incredible — you know that the famous Shower Scene™ happens early in the movie, roughly a third of the way in. This was brand new to cinema ethos. No one removed a top-billed star that early in a movie; a lot of the time, the audience wasn’t even entirely there yet. Because of this, Hitchcock refused to allow people to enter the showings after they had begun. He knew people would be upset if they arrived too late and didn’t get to see the famous actress, the one they were there to see. (In this case, it was Janet Leigh. Psycho would go on to be her most famous role even though she had performed in 34 other films before this one.)
It was a middle finger to convention. Hitchcock had killed off the movie’s famous actress before the true plot of it even began. “Furthermore, what would one imagine a picture to contain,” NY Times film critic Bosley Crowther wrote in August 1960, “when the customer is told to see it from the beginning and asked not to reveal how it ends?” The movie itself featured a pre-recorded message from Hitchcock himself pleading with the audience not to spoil what they were about to watch.
“Sensitive souls have been outraged by the candor of its stark morbidity, and agonized victims of its refrigerating process have howled for the protection of censorship. Psychiatrists have mumbled that it is liable to induce a state of shock (which is precisely what Mr. Hitchcock intended), and fearful parents have shuddered for their young.
Crowther
“On the other hand, thousands of people — maybe millions by now — have come away deliciously coated with goose-pimples and happily trailing their tattered nerves, satisfied that this time they have got a good solid boot out of a film.”
He didn’t just rest on his laurels, either; he didn’t just see a world beyond what wasn’t. He kept pushing the boundaries of conventions, compelled to not repeat himself. This was my favorite thing about him. The movie he released before Psycho was North by Northwest, famous in its own right, a romantic story filled with tons of action sequences — not quite the same genre as the follow-up. He wasn’t going to do the same movie again; instead, he made a “startling, ghouling” release that was “especially nefarious” (Crowther).
It wasn’t fun for him to do the same thing over again. That compulsion to switch things up ultimately led him to a very particular and historic silence, and it was this silence that rings the loudest for me.
The Impossible Task
You may not remember exactly how the shower scene in Psycho unfolds — Was she stabbed on screen? Do we ever see her naked? Do you ever see Mother’s face? — but you absolutely remember its soundtrack. If the scene itself is famous, that bit of music is legendary. It was composed by Hitchcock’s longtime co-conspirator and super-famous composer Bernard Herrmann whose savvy and twisted use of the romantic violin instead had it shriek in terror, heretofore unheard of, creating a violent noise germane to the scene. Herrmann, “Hitchcock’s Maestro,” had also done the music for Hitchcock’s previous film, North by Northwest, and had returned to him for Psycho; his execution of the soundtrack subsequently etched his name alongside one of the defining sounds of all time.
But those piercing shrills are a corollary to the thesis here. They’re infinitely recognizable. They are synonymous with terror in a manner that exists outside of cinema. And, while we have the benefit of the hindsight of history, even at the time, the scene itself combined with such an aggressive encroachment of your ears made the movie an immediate hit, the music the perfect companion. Truly, the soundtrack was the movie. Everyone in 1960 knew that soundtrack just like you and I know it today.
Herrmann knew it, too, and he would be the one faced with the task of following it up. Hitchcock had (smartly) tapped him to also do his next film, The Birds, and Herrmann had to figure out a way to not just leverage his craft to creep people out alongside an esoteric and niche plot wherein violent bird attacks plague a seaside town, but he also had to one-up his work on Psycho.
An impossible task.
After long and careful consideration, he arrived at his conclusion: He wouldn’t. He convinced Hitchcock to not use a soundtrack at all. And he didn’t. Go back and watch the movie; there is no music. There is no soundtrack. Herrmann isn’t credited as a composer on the film; he’s credited as a Sound Consultant, the only credit in his history that comes from the Sound Department and not the Music Department.
Hitchcock used this limitation as a way to instill fear and neurosis. He would go on to use naturally occurring sounds and sound effects to set the tone of the film, which turned out to be the perfect use case for a movie about ornithophobia. Until there was a real-life social experiment, no one could have predicted how common it was for people to expect music underneath a movie and how it would subconsciously affect them when it was absent. And, in a movie about birds where the sounds and noises in it became part of its lore, the sound design choice ended up being the ultimate example of addition by subtraction.
I can’t make the claim to have seen every Hitchcock film, but the man certainly had a knack for pulling off brilliant ideas alongside clever marketing stunts. He pushed the limits of creativity, and, in the biggest moments of his career with the biggest decisions on the line, he continually chose to push the limits of the status quo and to do things differently than he had before. That’s the road I want to take, and I want it to make the difference.
