I’ve been thinking a lot about how I want to tackle my best articles of the year piece for 2019. On one hand, I feel like I’ve done a lot less reading over the last twelve months as I made a commitment to much more regular writing at Why is this interesting? But more than that, it being the end of the decade has made me think a lot about the impact of time on lists like this (and creative work generally). When it comes to books I’ve moved almost exclusively to reading stuff that wasn’t published this year with the idea that time is the best critic. But alas, I still read lots of amazing stuff this year and it felt like it was worth highlighting some of my favorites.

With that said, I’ve made an important change to the way I’m thinking about the list as compared to previous years. Whereas I was trying to catalog longform in the past, I’m much more interested in that which has stuck with me most over the last twelve months. A better description of this list, then, is my most memorable or interesting pieces of writing (I decided to leave podcasts out as I’ve put together a separate page for cataloging those). To that end, I’m calling this Favorite Reads of 2019 for simplicity’s sake.

I also have a few more caveats:

• If something’s missing it’s most likely that it’s because I didn’t read it. In years past I’ve made an effort to look at other lists and try to read all the consensus favorites, but I ran out of time and motivation this year. With that said, if there is something great you think I should check out, I would appreciate you sending it my way.
• Many of them are longform, but some of them aren’t. Per my comment above, I’m more interested in what stuck with me than length. If you’re looking for something that’s a little more focused on longform (and maybe more objective), I would suggest Longform’s Best of 2019. They do great work every year.
• You’ll notice a concentration of articles from the New York Times, New Yorker, and The Atlantic. That’s because I read more of those than anything else and these are my favorites.

Finally, if you get through this whole list and want more, here are my past versions:

• 2005
• 2006 Part 1 & 2006 Part 2
• 2011
• 2012
• 2015
• 2016
• 2017
• 2018

Alright. Let’s do this. I’ve broken things down into categories. Here’s a table of contents if you want to skip around (or go straight to the top picks list):

1. Business
2. Culture
3. Geopolitics/World
4. Health
5. Media/Entertainment
6. MeToo
7. Philosophy/Psychology
8. Politics
9. Race
10. Science
11. Sports
12. Technology
13. True Crime
14. Top Picks
15. Full List

Business

Three business stories stand out as most memorable for me this year, though none of thee three that stuck most in my brain are my favorite. The first was memorable because it was infuriating. The Wall Street Journal’s story on how colleges are buying SAT-takers’ names wouldn’t be so terrible if it weren’t for the kicker: They were advertising to students they knew didn’t have the SAT-scores needed in an effort to raise their rejection rate, and thus their ranking. Disgusting. 

The second was memorable because it sounds like it would make a great plot for a heist movie. “The Fate of the World’s Largest ETF Is Tied to 11 Random Millennials” explains how the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust, with $250 billion invested, is reliant on eleven kids born in the early-90s:

It all harks back to the arcane structure used to create SPY, the first U.S. ETF, in 1993. At the time, setting up the fund as a unit investment trust solved a practical problem. Not only was it an established legal structure, it allowed the issuer to create fund units that resembled a company’s shares. But as a consequence, it required a specified termination date. So like many trusts, the fund was initially structured to expire in 25 years — in January 2018. It was subsequently amended to peg the fund to the lives of individuals, which extended its own life. … SPY as we know it will cease to be on Jan. 22, 2118, or 20 years “after the death of the last survivor of the eleven persons” — whichever occurs first.

Finally, the New York Times piece “Personality Tests Are the Astrology of the Office” was memorable mostly because it said a bunch of stuff I had thought for a long time (mainly that office personality tests are bullshit). 

Personality assessments short-circuit the messiness of building what is now referred to as a “culture.” They deliver on all the complexities of interpersonal office dynamics, but without the intimate, and expensive, process of actually speaking with employees to determine their quirks and preferences. … They appeal also, perhaps, for the same reason astrology, numerology and other hocus-pocus systems do: because it’s fun to divide people into categories. 

While those three were fun and interesting, my favorite business article of the year was this long piece from The Correspondent on the sham that is much of digital advertising. (Rick Webb wrote a great WITI on it back in November.) It digs into lots of the shady stuff that exists around the digital advertising industry, but also explains that the problems are equally rooted inside the brands themselves. 

It might sound crazy, but companies are not equipped to assess whether their ad spending actually makes money. It is in the best interest of a firm like eBay to know whether its campaigns are profitable, but not so for eBay’s marketing department. Its own interest is in securing the largest possible budget, which is much easier if you can demonstrate that what you do actually works. Within the marketing department, TV, print and digital compete with each other to show who’s more important, a dynamic that hardly promotes honest reporting.

*** Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn. “The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising” The Correspondent. November 6, 2019. ***

Culture

Culture is a little bit of a hodge-podge category for stuff I wasn’t sure where else to put. There was an excellent JSTOR Daily piece on the real meaning of “carpe diem” (the phrase “is a horticultural metaphor that, particularly seen in the context of the poem, is more accurately translated as ‘plucking the day,’”) and a perfect email/post from Robin Sloan about the pastoral look of the new Fortnite season.

But topping the list easily was Jia Tolentino’s “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston”. Here’s what I said about it in WITI: “I don’t know if I’ve ever read a story quite like this in The New Yorker. It tells of Tolentino’s personal experience growing up in Houston, spending a lot of time at church, experimenting with drugs, and the linkages she sees between all of them. It’s an impressive piece and feels all the more amazing to sit in the pages of a magazine that otherwise doesn’t publish stories like this.” 

And here’s a taste of the piece:

Ecstasy’s magic is strongest at the beginning; it dissipates through repetition. I’ve become careful about using it—I’m afraid that the high will blunt my tilt toward unprovoked happiness, which might already be disappearing. I’m afraid that the low that sometimes comes after will leave a permanent trace. But, still, each time, it can feel like divinity. Your world realigns in a juddering oceanic shimmer. You understand that you can give the best of yourself to everyone you love without feeling depleted. This is what it feels like to be a child of Jesus, in a dark chapel, with stained-glass diamonds floating on the skin of all the people kneeling around you. This is what it feels like to be twenty-two, nearly naked, your hair blowing in the wind as the pink twilight expands into permanence, your body still holding the warmth of the day. You were made to be here. The nature of a revelation is that you don’t have to reëxperience it. In the seventies, researchers believed that MDMA treatment could be discrete and limited—that once you got the message, as they put it, you could hang up the phone. You would be better for having listened. You would be changed.

Until I was putting this list together I had completely forgotten that her book, Trick Mirror, came out over the summer. I’ll rectify that as soon as I finish the books I’m reading now.

*** Jia Tolentino. “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston” New Yorker. May 20, 2019. ***

Geopolitics/World

I don’t read enough about the rest of the world. It’s something I’d like to rectify in the coming year. With that said, there were two pieces about geopolitics/world events that stood out for me in 2019. One is set in India and the other in Turkey/Saudi Arabia. 

The India story is the unbelievable New York Times account of royal family of Oudh. The matriarch of the family took up residence/strike in a New Delhi train station in the early 1970s and demanded the government recognize her lineage and offer her housing deserving of a royal. “In 1984, her efforts paid off. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi accepted their claim, granting them use of a 14th century hunting lodge known as Malcha Mahal. They left the train station roughly a decade after they first appeared there. Wilayat never appeared in public again.” The article and arresting media (and accompanying three-part podcast) tell the story of the family through Cyrus, its only surviving member.

Because of the combination of Turkey and Saudi Arabia it’s surely no surprise that my top pick for this category is about the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The October Insider piece from Evan Ratliff is a step-by-step account of exactly went down in 2018 when “Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and never walked out.” The level of detail in the piece is amazing and harrowing. 

The morning of October 2, just an hour before Khashoggi himself passed through the airport, nine other Saudis from Riyadh with diplomatic clearance spilled out of a private plane. Among them was Mutreb, who would serve as the ground commander for the mission. Joining him were four Saudi security and intelligence officers, two of them previous members of MBS’s security team, and a brigadier general named Mustafa Mohammed al-Madani, who bore a passing resemblance to Khashoggi. The strangest figure among them was Salah Mohammed Tubaigy, a forensic doctor at the Ministry of the Interior. He was known for conducting rapid autopsies.

*** Evan Ratliff. “The story of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and how the world looked the other way” Insider. October 1, 2019. ***

Health

Two shorter pieces that made the list before I get into the longer stuff. “They Want It to Be Secret: How a Common Blood Test Can Cost $11 or Almost $1,000” comes from The Upshot and covers the massive range of prices something as simple as a blood test can cost. It’s hard to think of anything else that works this way:

If you’re a patient seeking a metabolic blood panel, good luck finding out what it will cost. Although hospitals are now required to publish a list of the prices they would like patients to pay for their services, the amounts that medical providers actually agree to accept from insurance companies tend to remain closely held secrets. Some insurance companies provide consumers with tools to help steer them away from the $450 test, but in many cases you won’t know the price your insurance company agreed to until you get the bill. 

Speaking of things we don’t understand very well, “Project Placenta A little-studied organ gets its scientific due.” outlines the latest attempts to better understand the placenta. 

The Human Placenta Project is working to change that. This $80 million research initiative at the National Institutes of Health is using MRI and other technologies to study how the placenta functions in real-time. The placenta is known for making life, for supplying a fetus with oxygen, water, nutrition, and a waste-removal system. It also acts like a gatekeeper, filtering out pathogens and other harmful substances to protect the fetus. But for all its wonders, the placenta can take life, even the mother’s, when it doesn’t perform as it should. It’s critically important to human health and yet the least understood and least studied of all human organs. 

My pick in this category is also about pregnancy. The Logic piece “What Not to Expect” from Hesper Desloovere Dixon walks through where a pregnant woman turns when a pregnancy doesn’t go according to plan. It’s a story about miscarriage, but also about the relationship between health and technology and the strange incentives that exist for the businesses who operate the places we turn when we need it most. Here’s an excerpt: 

When I reached out to one such site, The Bump, to find out more about its community, a representative was keen to steer me toward their social media content instead. She explained that while their forums “originally served our users by fostering a sense of community for new and expectant parents,” they have “taken note of the shift away from forums and towards social media” and shifted their own attention accordingly. I had a hard time squaring this supposed migration with the numbers: The Bump’s Facebook page has fewer than 300,000 followers, while over at the message boards, the “Trying To Get Pregnant” section alone has 223,500 discussions and nearly three million comments. A single thread titled “what does a positive pregnancy test really look like??” has over 500,000 views. 

Finally, this Atlantic piece felt like it said all the things I always kind of believed about dentistry. While it’s mostly about a particularly unethical dentist, it’s also about the whole profession:

The uneasy relationship between dentist and patient is further complicated by an unfortunate reality: Common dental procedures are not always as safe, effective, or durable as we are meant to believe. As a profession, dentistry has not yet applied the same level of self-scrutiny as medicine, or embraced as sweeping an emphasis on scientific evidence. “We are isolated from the larger health-care system. So when evidence-based policies are being made, dentistry is often left out of the equation,” says Jane Gillette, a dentist in Bozeman, Montana, who works closely with the American Dental Association’s Center for Evidence-Based Dentistry, which was established in 2007. “We’re kind of behind the times, but increasingly we are trying to move the needle forward.”

*** Hesper Desloovere Dixon. “What Not to Expect” Logic. August 3, 2019. ***

Media/Entertainment

I’m not sure it’s fair to the first two of these articles to combine media and entertainment, but this is my list and I’ll do with it what I want. First up is the recent Adam Sandler profile for the New York Times Magazine by Jamie Lauren Keiles. It’s light and easy and includes fascinating tidbits like this: 

Sandler is wildly popular in Latin America. In the early 2010s, as his gigantic run of hits came to an end, his new comedies, largely domestic flops, continued to rake in profits overseas. “Blended,” his third rom-com with Barrymore, did more than 60 percent of its ticket sales internationally, with major returns in Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela. “Jack and Jill,” a 2011 gender-swap flick with a 3 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, earned nearly a tenth of its overall gross in Brazilian theaters.

Next up is another New York Times piece. This one from Wesley Morris, who appeared on my 2016 list with “The Last Taboo.” In “Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?” he writes about Green Book, The Upside, Driving Miss Daisy, and Hollywood’s infatuation with interracial friendship movies. As Morris explains:

They symbolize a style of American storytelling in which the wheels of interracial friendship are greased by employment, in which prolonged exposure to the black half of the duo enhances the humanity of his white, frequently racist counterpart. All the optimism of racial progress — from desegregation to integration to equality to something like true companionship — is stipulated by terms of service. Thirty years separate “Driving Miss Daisy” from these two new films, but how much time has passed, really? The bond in all three is conditionally transactional, possible only if it’s mediated by money. “The Upside” has the rich, quadriplegic author Phillip Lacasse (Cranston) hire an ex-con named Dell Scott (Hart) to be his “life auxiliary.” “Green Book” reverses the races so that some white muscle (Mortensen) drives the black pianist Don Shirley (Ali) to gigs throughout the Deep South in the 1960s. It’s “The Upside Down.”

Finally, my pick for this category is a very different topic (hence my comment about it being a bit unfair). Jane Mayer’s absolutely amazing New Yorker piece on “The Making of the Fox News White House” is about politics, but it’s mostly about a media company. (As an aside, Mayer’s profile of Al Franken also made my long list in the politics category.) Here’s a nugget on Murdoch’s foresight:

Murdoch could not have foreseen that Trump would become President, but he was a visionary about the niche audience that became Trump’s base. In 1994, Murdoch laid out an audacious plan to Reed Hundt, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission under President Bill Clinton. Murdoch, who had been a U.S. citizen for less than a decade, invited Hundt to his Benedict Canyon estate for dinner. After the meal, Murdoch led him outside to take in the glittering view of the Los Angeles Basin, and confided that he planned to launch a radical new television network. Unlike the three established networks, which vied for the same centrist viewers, his creation would follow the unapologetically lowbrow model of the tabloids that he published in Australia and England, and appeal to a narrow audience that would be entirely his. His core viewers, he said, would be football fans; with this aim in mind, he had just bought the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games. Hundt told me, “What he was really saying was that he was going after a working-class audience. He was going to carve out a base—what would become the Trump base.”

*** Jane Mayer. “The Making of the Fox News White House” New Yorker. March 4, 2019. ***

MeToo

Although her story happened well before hashtags, it feels very appropriate to include this New York Times piece on Lorena Bobbitt by Amy Chozick in this category. The article is ostensibly about the four-part docuseries Lorena, but is mostly about how much different a story can look today than it did in the mid-90s. As the article explains:

Lorena is correct, of course, that most people forget that before she was tried for what she did, John was charged with marital sexual assault. (He was acquitted.) At the time, marital rape only recently had been made a crime in all 50 states and was nearly impossible to prove in Virginia. Many in the media, including Ladies’ Home Journal and Gay Talese on assignment for The New Yorker, questioned whether it was an oxymoron. (“Wife Rape? Who Really Gets Screwed?” an earlier column in Penthouse read.) Al Franken, as the character Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, implored Lorena to apologize to John’s penis. And, she is correct, that people forget that a jury found her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. We forget about the string of witnesses at her trial who testified that they had seen bruises on her arms and neck and that she had called 911 repeatedly and that John had bragged to friends about forcing his wife to have sex. In the years since the trial, he was arrested several times and served jail time for violence against two different women. (He denied the allegations.) “This is about a victim and a survivor and this is about what’s happening in our world today,” Lorena told me.

The next two stories are squarely in this era. The first is the long New York Times piece on the attempts by lawyers David Boies and John Stanley Pottinger to buy footage that had supposedly come from Jeffrey Epstein of “some of the world’s richest, most powerful men in compromising sexual situations — even in the act of rape.” It’s a story about Espstein and the rich men he spent time with, but also about how lawyers work to protect powerful people. 

Mr. Boies and Mr. Pottinger discussed a plan. They could use the supposed footage in litigation or to try to reach deals with men who appeared in it, with money flowing into a charitable foundation. In encrypted chats with Kessler, Mr. Pottinger referred to a roster of potential targets as the “hot list.” He described hypothetical plans in which the lawyers would pocket up to 40 percent of the settlements and could extract money from wealthy men by flipping from representing victims to representing their alleged abusers.

Finally, my pick in this category is the Guardian piece by Meghan Daum about how “older feminists” should feel about #MeToo. When I wrote about nuance for WITI earlier this year, Jay Owens pointed to the Daum piece in a fascinating thread. While the title is about nuance, the piece is more about the relationship between feminists of past (like her) and present. As Daum writes, “As I watched all of this whiz past me on my computer screen, sharpened by the reading glasses I’d lately been forced to wear, I wondered if my real problem with young feminists was how little they seemed to need us older ones. As far as I could see, they didn’t even want to know us.” 

*** Meghan Daum. “Team older feminist: am I allowed nuanced feelings about #MeToo?” The Guardian. October 16, 2019. ***

Philosophy/Psychology

One of my favorite new finds this year has been Agnes Callard, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Chicago who started a monthly column for The Point. I discovered it when she wrote a piece arguing against advice, something close to my heart. The issue, as she explains it:

It would be really nice if information that could transform someone’s values was able to be handed over as cheaply as driving instructions. In such a world, people could be of profound assistance to one another with little investment in one another’s lives. The myth of advice is the possibility that we can transform one another with the most glancing contact, and so it is not surprising that one finds so much advice exchanged on social media. When people are not fighting on Twitter, they are cheerfully and helpfully telling one another how to live. In that context, advice functions as a kind of small talk or social glue: it helps people feel they are getting along in a space not bound together by any kind of shared weather.

Then in November, she wrote this great piece asking what’s wrong with plagiarism? “But aren’t citations useful for the reader?” she asks. “Sometimes. But let’s not pretend that the reader’s needs play a substantial role in the mandate of the plagiarism police: outrage against plagiarists is about protecting idea-creators, not readers. If we were primarily worried about informing readers rather than protecting the pseudo-rights of writers, the reaction to a failure to cite would have a very different emotional valence.” The piece is a bit of a gimmick, but like much of Callard’s writing, it made me ask questions of beliefs that didn’t seem questionable. That’s notable and makes me want to read everything she writes.

Two other pieces I stuck in this category: Jessica Riskin’s scorching review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now. It’s nowhere near as good as last year’s review of the book by Alison Gopnik (which I called out in the 2018 edition of this list), but it was still interesting enough to bear mention (I wrote about the book/philosophy for Why is this interesting? in December). The other was this excellent Atlantic piece about how a famous scientific argument against free will turned out to be a bit of poor experimental design. In the end, though, it’s Callard’s arguments against advice that stuck with me the most.

*** Agnes Callard. “Against Advice” The Point. May 9, 2019. ***

Politics

I did my best to stay away from politics stories this year as a) I didn’t find they were making me any better at understanding what was happening and b) we specifically set a no domestic politics rule for Why is this interesting?. To that end, my picks here are a little more at the edges of politics. “The Fed’s bad predictions are hurting us” from Dylan Matthews, for instance, is more a collection of statements from the Fed with commentary than a piece in and of itself (as a reminder, the criteria for selection is that it had an impact on me, not that it was “best”). Another politics pick, “The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives” from Robert Caro is about a president and politics, but it’s mostly about research. What particularly stuck out for me in the piece was the way Caro described the feeling you get when you’re deep in a rabbit hole and the picture starts to come into view:

Going back over my notes, I put them in chronological order, and when I did it was easy to see that there had indeed been such a time: a single month, October, 1940. Before that month, Lyndon Johnson had been invariably, in his correspondence, the junior to the senior. After that month—and, it became clearer and clearer as I put more and more documents into order, after a single date, November 5, 1940, Election Day—the tone was frequently the opposite. And it wasn’t just with powerful congressmen. After that date, Johnson’s files also contained letters written to him by mid-level congressmen, and by other congressmen as junior as he, in a supplicating tone, whereas there had been no such letters—not a single one that I could find—before that date. Obviously, the change had had something to do with the election. But what?

I’ve had a few research moments like that in my life and the satisfaction is what drives me to keep finding things holes to dig around.

With all that said, my politics choice is squarely about our politics today. The anti-liberal moment by Zack Beauchamp for Vox is about the roots of liberalism and its current critics. It’s about what the word means, how neoliberalism was born, and why there’s so much pushback today. It doesn’t have answers, but it articulates a lot of what I think many of us have been feeling:

Many modern liberals, including some brilliant and well-regarded thinkers, do not seem up to the task of defending liberalism from its newest wave of critics. They lean on old arguments persuasive largely to other liberals, doing little to counteract the narrative of crisis from which the new illiberalism gets its force. It feels like the liberalism we have is musty, grown soft from its Cold War victory and unwilling to grapple with an opposition very different from what came before it.

***  Zack Beauchamp. “The anti-liberal moment” Vox. September 9, 2019. ***

Race

This is maybe the easiest choice of the whole list. Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project lead was unquestionably the best thing I read on race this year (as an aside Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote another of my absolute favorite reads of the year, 2016’s “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City”). Though it’s recently come under fire for some of its reporting, the piece did an extraordinary job framing the huge role slavery played in nearly every major moment in the country’s history. It reframes familiar moments with stories seldom told.

Many white Americans saw black men in the uniforms of America’s armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride. Hundreds of black veterans were beaten, maimed, shot and lynched. We like to call those who lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy abroad while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens. During the height of racial terror in this country, black Americans were not merely killed but castrated, burned alive and dismembered with their body parts displayed in storefronts. This violence was meant to terrify and control black people, but perhaps just as important, it served as a psychological balm for white supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way. The extremity of the violence was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country’s original sin. To answer the question of how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding.

Even more than many of these other pieces, pulling a paragraph doesn’t do it justice. Go read the whole thing.

*** Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.” New York Times Magazine. August 14, 2019. ***

Science

Ed Yong is easily one of my favorite science writers working today. His writing is excellent and the topics he uncovers, which mostly revolve around strange biology, are always fascinating (and usually a little gross). His piece on hagfish slime provided me weeks of conversational material. For those unfamiliar here’s a little taste of what Yong uncovers:

The proteins threads that give the slime cohesion are incredible in their own right. Each is one-100th the width of a human hair, but can stretch for four to six inches. And within the slime glands, each thread is coiled like a ball of yarn within its own tiny cell—a feat akin to stuffing a kilometer of Christmas lights into a shoebox without a single knot or tangle. No one knows how the hagfish achieves this miracle of packaging, but Fudge just got a grant to test one idea. He thinks that the thread cells use their nuclei—the DNA-containing structures at their core—like a spindle, turning them to wind the growing protein threads into a single continuous loop.

While that’s easily one of the most memorable pieces I read this year, my science pick is “The Day the Dinosaurs Died” by Douglas Preston. It tells the story of graduate student/archaeologist Robert DePalma and the site he discovered at the KT boundary, “the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period.” Almost nothing has been found in or around this area, which confounds scientists. “In a century and a half of assiduous searching,” Preston writes, “almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change.” Not only did DePalma find a site at the KT boundary, but he also seems to have found one that marks the exact moment of extinction:

Richards had previously estimated that the worldwide earthquake generated by the KT impact could have been a thousand times stronger than the biggest earthquake ever experienced in human history. Using that gauge, he calculated that potent seismic waves would have arrived at Tanis six minutes, ten minutes, and thirteen minutes after the impact. (Different types of seismic waves travel at different speeds.) The brutal shaking would have been enough to trigger a large seiche, and the first blobs of glass would have started to rain down seconds or minutes afterward. They would have continued to fall as the seiche waves rolled in and out, depositing layer upon layer of sediment and each time ­sealing the tektites in place. The Tanis site, in short, did not span the first day of the impact: it probably recorded the first hour or so. This fact, if true, renders the site even more fabulous than previously thought. It is almost beyond credibility that a precise geological transcript of the most important sixty minutes of Earth’s history could still exist millions of years later—a sort of high-speed, high-resolution video of the event recorded in fine layers of stone. DePalma said, “It’s like finding the Holy Grail clutched in the bony fingers of Jimmy Hoffa, sitting on top of the Lost Ark.” If Tanis had been closer to or farther from the impact point, this beautiful coincidence of timing could not have happened. “There’s nothing in the world that’s ever been seen like this,” Richards told me.

*** Douglas Preston. “The Day the Dinosaurs Died” New Yorker. March 29, 2019. ***

Sports

My first pick for this category is easily the most memorable sports story from ESPN this year. I must have been sent “The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving” by seven people who thought I’d enjoy it. And I did. It hits all the points: Take a group of people that you think you know something about—in this case, chess players—and explain how a) you don’t know anything about them, but b) now that you know about them you can’t believe it didn’t occur to you. As the title suggests, the piece is about the toll chess plays on the body.

Grandmasters in competition are subjected to a constant torrent of mental stress. That stress, in turn, causes their heart rates to increase, which, in turn, forces their bodies to produce more energy to, in turn, produce more oxygen. It is, according to Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and Philip Cryer, a metabolism expert at the school, a vicious, destructive cycle.

Meanwhile, players also eat less during tournaments, simply because they don’t have the time or the appetite. “The simple explanation is when they’re thinking about chess, they’re not thinking about food,” says Ewan C. McNay, assistant professor of psychology in the behavioral neuroscience program at the University of Albany.

With all that said, my favorite sports article of the year was Nick Paumgarten’s deep dive into Augusta National, the very strange home of The Masters golf tournament. I’m not really a golf fan, but pay enough attention to know that Augusta is unique. The reverence everyone has for it is impressive and they have unique rules like no cell phones on the course. With that said, I wasn’t really prepared for just how weird it was:

It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta National—called the National by its members and devotees, and Augusta by everyone else—is an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. Some of the components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is notoriously stingy with information about itself. It has been accepted as fact that recalcitrant patches of grass are painted green and that the ponds used to be dyed blue. Because the azaleas seem always to bloom right on time, skeptics have propagated the myth that the club’s horticulturists freeze the blossoms, in advance of the tournament, or swap out early bloomers for more coöperative specimens. Pine straw is imported. Pinecones are deported. There is a curious absence of fauna. One hardly ever sees a squirrel or a bird. I’d been told that birdsong—a lot of it, at any rate—is piped in through speakers hidden in the greenery. (In 2000, CBS got caught doing some overdubbing of its own, after a birder noticed that the trills and chirps on a golf broadcast belonged to non-indigenous species.)

And that’s just a start. It’s a perfect Paumgarten deep dive. He’s the only writer who made my list three times this year, all in the sports category. My other two favorites from him: “My Year of Concussions” (which maybe should have been health) and “The Wild Carnival at the Heart of Skiing’s Most Dangerous Race” about the Hahnenkamm downhill ski race.

*** Nick Paumgarten. “Inside the Cultish Dreamworld of Augusta National” New Yorker. June 24, 2019. ***

Technology

This was another very tight race for me that I ultimately decided on a technicality. Before I get into the finalists, two tech pieces that stood out: This conversation about YouTube from Charlie Warzel and Sarah Jeong was excellent and made me wish more journalists used this format and Raffi Khatchadourian’s deep dive into a cybersecurity firm who broke the law was a great tech/crime read. Also, although I’ve left podcasts out of this list (you can find my favorites on my new favorite podcasts page), many of my favorites this year were tech-related, so I figured I’d shout a few out: Reply All’s The Roman Mars Mazda Virus was an amazing tech-support episode, Postlight’s Track Changes episode on what happens when you open up inspect element is a fun look at how bloated the web has become, and, unexpectedly, Mark Zuckerberg’s conversation with Harvard Law Professor was a fascinating conversation about what we should do about data and social media.

But now for the two contenders. First is this excerpt from James Bridle’s book New Dark Age. It’s an amazing explanation for how culture is changing as a result of technology, weaving together a whole bunch of themes that we’re all grappling with today through the lens of turbulence:

Clear-air turbulence is so named because it comes literally out of the blue. It occurs when bodies of air moving at wildly different speeds meet: as the winds shear against each other, vortices and chaotic movements are produced. While much studied, particularly in the high troposphere where long-haul aircraft operate, it remains almost impossible to detect or to predict. For this reason, it is much more dangerous than the predictable forms of turbulence that occur on the edges of storms and large weather systems, because pilots are unable to prepare, or route around it. And incidences of clear-air turbulence are increasing every year.

But what really got me is this bit about hyperobjects, which comes near the end of the piece:

The philosopher Timothy Morton calls global warming a ‘hyperobject’: a thing that surrounds us, envelops and entangles us, but that is literally too big to see in its entirety. Mostly, we perceive hyperobjects through their influence on other things – a melting ice sheet, a dying sea, the buffeting of a transatlantic flight. Hyperobjects happen everywhere at once, but we can only experience them in the local environment. We may perceive hyperobjects as personal because they affect us directly, or imagine them as the products of scientific theory; in fact, they stand outside both our perception and our measurement. They exist without us. Because they are so close and yet so hard to see, they defy our ability to describe them rationally, and to master or overcome them in any traditional sense. Climate change is a hyperobject, but so is nuclear radiation, evolution, and the internet.

That seems like a concept worth filing away. 

With all that said, I decided to disqualify Bridle’s piece since officially it’s just a bit of his book. (For what it’s worth, I believe Tolentino’s is as well, but why make rules if not to break them?) I also can’t imagine anyone else would include this Politico piece about the botched rollout of Epic’s hospital management system in Denmark. I work in software, specifically building stuff for companies, and so I’ve seen this story play out from the inside. It’s seldom told, and certainly not on a scale like this. The gist is that Epic won a contract to replace all the hospital systems in Copenhagen and a surrounding region. They spent three years doing the implementation before they turned the switch …

The system was turned on first at Herlev Hospital, a 28-floor tower overlooking Copenhagen’s northern suburbs — and created what Galster called “indescribable, total chaos.” Many who were there are still traumatized by having seen battle-hardened doctors and nurses weeping openly for days.

“There were no pilots, no tests, just go-live,” said Galster. “I’ve worked on health IT for 20 years and never seen anything like it. This was worse than amateurish.”

“Doctors and nurses couldn’t document their work, they couldn’t understand what was going on. They were being exposed in real life to a system they hadn’t seen before.”

As I said, you just don’t get to see inside things like this very often, particularly when the stakes are this high. It also highlights some of the challenges with building and implementing systems like this on a global basis, where certain ideas can be hard-coded into the application without even thinking about it. “In Denmark, for example,” the article explains, “while the IT separated activities for doctors and nurses, it did not freeze one out of the other’s jurisdiction. A nurse could prescribe medicine in an emergency and explain later. In Epic, any attempt to take a forbidden role caused a ‘full stop.’”

*** Arthur Allen. “Lost in translation: Epic goes to Denmark” Politico. June 6, 2019. ***

True Crime

My true crime picks for this year were surprisingly light (maybe it’s because David Grann took the year off). But one article stood out for me here and it was Kera Bolonik’s amazing piece for The Cut on “The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge”. It’s the story of Harvard Law Professor Bruce Hay who teaches a class on “Judgment and Decision-Making” and yet managed to find himself deep in a fantastically bad situation. I don’t want to give much away on this one, since that’s the fun of reading true crime, but it’s gripping and bizarre.

*** Kera Bolonik. “The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge: A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn’t seem like an obvious mark, would he?” The CUT. July 23, 2019. ***

Top Picks

• Business: Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn. “The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising” The Correspondent. November 6, 2019.
• Culture: Jia Tolentino. “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston” New Yorker. May 20, 2019.
• Geopolitics/World: Evan Ratliff. “The story of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and how the world looked the other way” Insider. October 1, 2019.
• Health: Hesper Desloovere Dixon. “What Not to Expect” Logic. August 3, 2019.
• Media & Entertainment: Jane Mayer. “The Making of the Fox News White House” New Yorker. March 4, 2019.
• MeToo: Meghan Daum. “Team older feminist: am I allowed nuanced feelings about #MeToo?” The Guardian. October 16, 2019. 
• Philosophy & Psychology: Agnes Callard. “Against Advice” The Point. May 9, 2019.
• Politics: Zack Beauchamp. “The anti-liberal moment” Vox. September 9, 2019. 
• Race: Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.” New York Times Magazine. August 14, 2019.
• Science: Douglas Preston. “The Day the Dinosaurs Died” New Yorker. March 29, 2019.
• Sports: Nick Paumgarten. “Inside the Cultish Dreamworld of Augusta National” New Yorker. June 24, 2019. 
• Technology: Arthur Allen. “Lost in translation: Epic goes to Denmark” Politico. June 6, 2019.
• True Crime: Kera Bolonik. “The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge: A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn’t seem like an obvious mark, would he?” The CUT. July 23, 2019. 

Full List

1. Adam Sternbergh. “‘Watchmen’ Is Coming. (Actually, It Never Left.)” New York Times. October 21, 2019. 
2. Aishwarya Kumar. “The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving” ESPN. September 13, 2019.
3. Agnes Callard. “Against Advice” The Point. May 9, 2019.
4. Agnes Callard. “Is Plagiarism Wrong?” The Point. November 20, 2019. 
5. Amy Chozick. “You Know the Lorena Bobbitt Story. But Not All of It.” New York Times. January 30, 2019.
6. Andrea Long Chu. “Psycho Analysis: Bret Easton Ellis rages against the decline of American culture” Bookforum. April, 2019. 
7. Andrew Marantz. “The Dark Side of Techno-Utopianism” New Yorker. September 23, 2019. 
8. Arthur Allen. “Lost in translation: Epic goes to Denmark” Politico. June 6, 2019.
9. Bahar Gholipour. “A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked” The Atlantic. September 10, 2019.
10. Bethany McLean. “‘We Didn’t Cause The Crisis’: David Sackler Pleads His Case On The Opioid Epidemic” Vanity Fair. August, 2019.
11. Charlie Warzel and Sarah Jeong. “YouTube Is a Very Bad Judge and Jury” New York Times. June 8, 2019. 
12. Chi Luu. “How ‘Carpe Diem’ Got Lost in Translation” JSTOR Daily. August 7, 2019. 
13. Connie Bruck. “Alan Dershowitz, Devil’s Advocate” New Yorker. July 29, 2019.
14. Corey Kilgannon. “How a Band of Surfer Dudes Pulled Off the Biggest Jewel Heist in N.Y. History” New York Times. October 17, 2019. 
15. Daniela Blei. “Project Placenta A little-studied organ gets its scientific due.” The CUT. August 28, 2019.
16. David Epstein. “The Peculiar Blindness of Experts” The Atlantic. June, 2019. 
17. Douglas Belkin. “For Sale: SAT-Takers’ Names. Colleges Buy Student Data and Boost Exclusivity” Wall Street Journal. November 5, 2019.
18. Douglas Preston. “The Day the Dinosaurs Died” New Yorker. March 29, 2019.
19. Dylan Matthews. “The Fed’s bad predictions are hurting us” Future Perfect. May 24, 2019.
20. Ed Yong. “No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime” The Atlantic. January 23, 2019.
21. Ellen Barry. “The Jungle Prince of Delhi” New York Times. November 22, 2019. 
22. Emma Goldberg. “Personality Tests Are the Astrology of the Office” New York Times. September 17, 2019. 
23. Evan Ratliff. “The story of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder and how the world looked the other way” Insider. October 1, 2019.
24. Ferris Jabr. “The Truth About Dentistry” The Atlantic. May, 2019.
25. Garrett M. Graff. “America’s Decades-Old Obsession With Nuking Hurricanes (and More)” Wired. August 26, 2019. 
26. Hesper Desloovere Dixon. “What Not to Expect” Logic. August 3, 2019.
27. James Bridle. “The future will be bumpy” Verso. November 28, 2019. 
28. Jamie Lauren Keiles. “Adam Sandler’s Everlasting Shtick” New York Times Magazine. November 27, 2019.
29. Jane Mayer. “The Case of Al Franken” New Yorker. July 29, 2019. 
30. Jane Mayer. “The Making of the Fox News White House” New Yorker. March 4, 2019.
31. Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn. “The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising” The Correspondent. November 6, 2019. 
32. Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Emily Steel, Jacob Bernstein and David Enrich. “Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative ‘Hot List’” New York Times. November 30, 2019.
33. Jessica Riskin. “Pinker’s Pollyannish Philosophy and Its Perfidious Politics” Los Angeles Review of Books. December 15, 2019.
34. Jerry Useem. “At Work, Expertise Is Falling Out of Favor” The Atlantic. July, 2019. 
35. Jia Tolentino. “Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston” New Yorker. May 20, 2019.
36. Katya Cengal. “The Reality of Post-Chernobyl Life: Way More Complicated Than a TV Show” Literary Hub. September 20, 2019.
37. Kera Bolonik. “The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge: A Harvard Law professor who teaches a class on judgment wouldn’t seem like an obvious mark, would he?” The CUT. July 23, 2019. 
38. Malcolm Gladwell. “Is Marijuana as Safe as We Think?” New Yorker. January 7, 2019.
39. Margot Sanger-Katz. “They Want It to Be Secret: How a Common Blood Test Can Cost $11 or Almost $1,000” New York Times. April 30, 2019.
40. Meghan Daum. “Team older feminist: am I allowed nuanced feelings about #MeToo?” The Guardian. October 16, 2019. 
41. Nick Paumgarten. “Inside the Cultish Dreamworld of Augusta National” New Yorker. June 24, 2019. 
42. Nick Paumgarten. “My Year of Concussions” New Yorker. November 4, 2019.
43. Nick Paumgarten. “The Wild Carnival at the Heart of Skiing’s Most Dangerous Race” New Yorker. April 22, 2019.
44. Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true.” New York Times Magazine. August 14, 2019.
45. Philip Ball. “How I changed my mind about the biology of race” The Guardian. December 26, 2019.
46. Rachel Donadio. “A Journalist Was Killed in an EU Country. Why Has No One Been Caught?” The Atlantic. May 29, 2019. 
47. Rachel Evans, Vildana Hajric, and Tracy Alloway. “The Fate of the World’s Largest ETF Is Tied to 11 Random Millennials” Bloomberg. August 9, 2019. 
48. Raffi Khatchadourian. “A Cybersecurity Firm’s Sharp Rise and Stunning Collapse” New Yorker. October 28, 2019. 
49. Robert A. Caro. “The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson’s Archives” New Yorker. January 21, 2019.
50. Robin Sloan. “Fortnite pastoral” Year of the Meteor. October, 2019. 
51. Ross Tucker. “On Transgender athletes and performance advantages” The Science of Sport. March 24, 2019.
52. Sam Kestenbaum. “Keano Is N.Y.’s Most Famous and Mysterious Subway Psychic. I Found Her.” New York Times. November 8, 2019. 
53. Sam Knight. “How Football Leaks Is Exposing Corruption in European Soccer” New Yorker. May 27, 2019.
54. Tina Jordan. “When the World’s Most Famous Mystery Writer Vanished” New York Times. June 11, 2019. 
55. Wesley Morris. “Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?” New York Times. January 23, 2019.
56. Zack Beauchamp. “The anti-liberal moment” Vox. September 9, 2019. 

I was struck reading this weekend’s New York Times Magazine by calls for more nuance in back-to-back articles. The first came in a piece from Dan Brooks about the narrative around the way violence is portrayed in the new Joker movie:

Legitimate movies are about complicated protagonists who combine good and bad qualities; superhero movies are about two guys, one good and one evil. By combining them into a single guy, won’t this movie cause dummies to think the Joker is good? To ask the question is to argue that nuance is dangerous. By fretting over Arthur Fleck’s sympathetic qualities, progressive-minded critics are demanding the same sort of bright line between good and evil that makes comic-book movies so boring.

The second came from a slightly-more-interesting-than-I-expected interview with Bill Maher. In response to a question about the controversy that surrounded Maher using the N-word in a joke on his show, he answered:

If we were living in a country that could handle nuance, I’d be happy to talk about it, but we’re no longer in that country. There’s no winning there. … We live in an era where I don’t think people’s main focus is the truth and/or sussing out something valuable or teachable. We live in a time in which people are more concerned with scalps and clicks.

Why is this interesting?

Most of the conversation around nuance quickly gets political, and we have a strict no domestic politics rule here at WITI, but I think there’s a broader question about both the word and idea that is worth exploring. Mainly, what do people mean when they talk about nuance? And do we need more nuance or less?

First off, true nuance does exist and we often miss it. This is the point of expertise researcher Philip Tetlock’s (by way of Isiah Berlin) distinction between foxes and hedgehogs (“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”). The fox offers more in the way of shading between black and white than hedgehogs, who have more simplified world views. As I covered in WITI 9/16 – The Foreign Policy Edition, Tetlock’s research also points to the media’s preference for hedgehogs, as their approach to interpreting the world makes them better talking heads. But his view is quantitative, not qualitative.  As a researcher, he is focused on how people make measurable and accurate predictions, not the narratives we build around them, and his preference for foxes comes out of the data.

When it comes to narrative, there’s another side to this story, and it’s much more related to Maher’s stance (a hedgehog if I ever saw one). Calling for nuance is an easy way to derail an argument. In my search to think this through I stumbled on a 2017 paper from the journal Sociological Theory titled, appropriately enough, “Fuck Nuance”. Written by Kieran Healy, an assistant professor at Duke, the paper tracks the rise of the word “nuance” in the discipline of sociology and the dangers that come with its overuse. (If you’re not up for reading the paper, there’s a good interview with the author from the Chronicle of Higher Education.) He offers up three “nuance traps”: The fine-grain trap (“a rejection of theory masquerading as increased accuracy”), the conceptual framework trap (“ an evasion of the demand that a theory be refutable”), and the connoisseur trap (“the insinuation that a sensitivity to nuance is a manifestation of one’s distinctive … ability to grasp and express the richness, texture, and flow of social reality itself”).

It’s a combination of fine-grained and sophistication arguments that we see most often. Calls for nuance are a kind of rhetorical trick: An easy way to derail a disagreement without actually offering any nuance yourself. In the Joker piece Brooks is calling out the media for overusing this technique, and then, just a few pages later, Maher attempts to do exactly that. In “Fuck Nuance” Healy writes, “there is a desire to equate calling for a more sophisticated approach to a theoretical problem with actually providing one, and to tie such calls to the alleged sophistication of the people making them.”

Where do I fall on all this? When it comes to Maher, his kind of reasoning was dispatched with by John Herrman in the same magazine a year ago:

Calling for nuance is an interesting admission: It allows that the person lacking nuance has a strong, if overstated, point. (We rarely request nuance from more powerful enemies; they’re seen as sinister and dishonest, not insufficiently unsubtle.) The nuance-askers tend to be facing people whose anger they cannot fully deny or dismiss. To respond that the issue is “actually a little more complicated than that” can sound an awful lot like saying “calm down,” and is received with according unsubtle fury.

More generally, my as un-nuanced take on all this is: I think you’re almost always better off overestimating rather than underestimating people, but I also like comic book movies, and I think there are plenty of spaces where simplified characters and narratives are perfectly fine. I think the world is more complex than can be accounted for in your average 4-minute cable news interview, but I don’t think it’s so complex that we should throw our hands up and stop trying at cries for more nuance. (NRB)

Second, my daily email, Why is this interesting?, is still going strong. We’re 100+ editions in and we’ve had a great string of guests to help take some of the load off. Not surprisingly, all my writing energy has gone there, so please subscribe and if you ever have an idea for a guest spot, please let us know.

I keep a backlog of email ideas to help stave off the feeling of despair that can arrive around 3pm when Colin and I haven’t figured out the next day’s edition yet. One of the items on the list for awhile has been “how I use Evernote.” It probably would have remained there if my friend Dave hadn’t messaged me yesterday morning asking to remind him of the name of the “thing I use to file all the articles away”. I told him Evernote and felt inspired enough to write it up as an email.

Why is this interesting?

Digital archiving is a core part of my life. I like to read and research (hence this email), and all those words have to go somewhere. I first became enamored with the idea after reading Steven Johnson write about his use of archiving software to keep track of his book research. From a piece he wrote for the New York Times in 2005:

… if the modern word processor has become a near-universal tool for today’s writers, its impact has been less revolutionary than you might think. Word processors let us create sentences without the unwieldy cross-outs and erasures of paper, and despite the occasional catastrophic failure, our hard drives are better suited for storing and retrieving documents than file cabinets. But writers don’t normally rely on the computer for the more subtle arts of inspiration and association. We use the computer to process words, but the ideas that animate those words originate somewhere else, away from the screen. The word processor has changed the way we write, but it hasn’t yet changed the way we think.

DEVONthink, Johnson’s tool of choice, was bridging that gap. “Having all this information available at my fingerprints does more than help me find my notes faster,” Johnson wrote. “Yes, when I’m trying to track down an article I wrote many years ago, it’s now much easier to retrieve. But the qualitative change lies elsewhere: in finding documents I’ve forgotten about altogether, documents that I didn’t know I was looking for.” Unfortunately, I (and many others) found DEVONthink was way too overwhelming to set up and use regularly.

Some of that was solved by cloud and syncing, but to be honest the space hasn’t developed as much as I thought it would in the last 14 years. I suspect there are two big reasons why. First, personal productivity software is a famously hard nut to crack. While there’s abundant energy to be more productive, motivation can quickly fade and declaring task bankruptcy is never more than a new app away. Second, especially in this realm of archiving, the audience is limited to writers, researchers, and super-nerds like myself. This presents a tough product and business problem, as companies try to find the line between being a personal and a professional system. Evernote’s growth and subsequent challenges are a good illustration of what can happen if you get stuck in the middle. Those challenges have left the space with very few players. Evernote is the leader who leaves much to be desired, OneNote is bundled with Office and seems fine if that’s your thing, and Notion is a new app that does a little of everything, including, they claim, replace Evernote. (I’ve purposely left off the pure note taking apps because I consider that a different category.)

Ultimately I’ve stuck with Evernote for a few reasons: It’s got the best browser extension by far (you can grab full text and add highlights to any article), it offers full text PDF search (I archive a lot of research papers), and the PDF highlighting with cover pages is better than any other I’ve seen (they pull all your highlights out to a cover page with just the good stuff). From there my usage is reasonably simple. Everything I find or read that’s interesting gets put into the system with some loose categorization (since the main purpose is search, I don’t worry too much about that). If I’m on my computer the browser extension does the trick and if it’s my phone, I use mobile Safari reader mode (the four little lines on the left side of the URL bar) and then email the full text to my secret Evernote email with an @ at the end of the subject that the system parses to put it in the right folder. Again, since it’s about finding things again I tend towards over-save, throwing anything that seems moderately interesting into the archive. I also use IFTTT to automate some saving, including pushing all my Tweets and YouTube likes directly into the system.

While it’s far from perfect, I use Evernote multiple times a day and it’s become my outboard brain, allowing me to recall articles I’ve read or papers I’ve discovered in an instant. It’s basically a personal search engine for me.

This weekend the Times ran an opinion piece about the dangers of backup cameras. It was about more than that, obviously, but the gist of the genre is that all this new tech is lulling us into a sense of security that leaves us susceptible to over-reliance, and even forgetting entirely how to do things on our own.

Why is this interesting?

Because this is something we’ve been worried about forever (literally). In Phaedrus, Plato worried about roughly the same thing as it related to writing: “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.”

The reality is that all technology affects culture in expected and unexpected ways. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” is one of my favorite aphorisms (misattributed to McLuhan). The irony, of course, is that the complaints in this article are perfectly expected. We come to rely on automation because it’s mostly better. In fact, the strangest part of the whole piece is the way the evidence of backup camera safety is presented. “Between 2008 and 2011,” the author writes, “the percentage of new cars sold with backup cameras doubled, but the backup fatality rate declined by less than a third while backup injuries dropped only 8 percent.” I think the implication is that those numbers aren’t all that impressive, but a 20 or 30 percent drop in backup fatalities seems pretty excellent to me.

Finally, the answers to articles like these almost always come back to the one rule of life: Things change. Technology hardly ever solves all the world’s problems or ruins society. Mostly what happens is it leaves us in a state of flux. We swing the pendulum one way and then we swing it the other. One properly attributed McLuhan-ism is the “Tetrad of Media Effects”. It lays out the four ways technology creates change:

The Times piece is effectively an explorations of McLuhan’s four effects. The backup camera enhances our senses by giving us eyes in the back of our heads, obsolescing the car’s mirrors, and retrieving a time when cars were smaller, but, as the article points out, when pushed to its extreme it reverses our own role as driver, giving control entirely over the tech. While the points are valid, we should be less surprised that this keeps happening and try to keep things in perspective.

I really liked this post from Richard Huntington aka Adliterate. It’s about the value of deep work, but the gist is captured in this mantra: “You are not paid to be on top of things, you are paid to get to the bottom of them.” (This was inspired by a quote from computer scientist Donald Knuth about email: “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.”)

Why is this interesting?

If you’ve spent any time working in the age of e-mail (nevermind Slack) you’ve encountered this challenge. One of the things I shared with everyone who started at Percolate for a long time was this post from Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham about the schedule a “maker” keeps vs a manager. The point is that the manager has their days broken into tiny bits, 30 minute or one hour meetings, while the maker needs long uninterrupted focus time to do their work. When the manager forces the maker into their schedule they are surprised that the work can’t get done.

One way to think about this divide is as something computer scientists call exploration vs exploitation. The manager is an explorer, looking at information across many different areas, while the maker is an exploiter, using that information to go deep in just one. It’s a little like the story from the Greek poet Archilochus about the fox and the hedgehog: “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (if you’re not familiar with the parable, here’s a good primer from NPR).

As Brian Christian points out in his book Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, there’s actually tons of interesting stuff that lives in this tension. Do you go to the restaurant you like or try the new one that just opened? Should you load up an old favorite on Spotify or see what they’ve chosen for you this week? The answer, as we have all figured out and computer science has proven, is it depends. To figure out the best approach you’ve also got to know the time limit. In simplified terms, if you have lots of time left, exploration makes sense, if you’re approaching deadline, exploitation is optimal. 

This also explains why people like Sports Gene author David Epstein are pushing to stop early specialization. Childhood is prime exploration time and no matter what Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours might state, the opportunity is to use the abundance of time to stay shallow (Gladwell actually agrees with this). “Childhood,” as developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik explains, “gives you a period in which you can just explore possibilities, and you don’t have to worry about payoffs because payoffs are being taken care of by the mamas and the papas and the grandmas and the babysitters.” For the rest of us, the struggle stays real.

Update: Most of my writing now happens on my daily newsletter Why is this interesting? If you enjoy this, every email includes lots of interesting stuff to read.

At the beginning of last year I decided I was going to spend more time reading books in 2018. I set myself a goal of 30 on Goodreads and blew past that by year end. While it felt good and something I’m looking to reproduce in 2019, it left me wondering whether I’d actually read enough articles to put together my favorite longform list.

As I was wondering this, a series of plagues befell my house and knocked me off my feet (and computer) for just about two full weeks (it was not fun). When I was finally feeling better this week I thought I’d at least see how many articles I favorited in Instapaper and try to figure out whether a list was feasible. Sixty-something links later I realized I read enough to put it together, so here it is. Some usual caveats apply:

• This is a list of my favorites. It’s not meant to be conclusive and I know I missed lots of great stuff (especially this year with my focus on books).
• You’ll notice a concentration of articles from The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine. That’s because I get both of those delivered. Again, this isn’t meant to be the definitive list of best articles of the year (if you want that I’d head over to longform.org).
• The way I put this together is first I just list out all the articles I favorited in Instapaper. You can find those at the bottom of this post and also follow them (and favorites from YouTube) at my @heyitsinstafavs automated Twitter account. After I list them all out I just look over the list again and pull out all the ones I specifically remember with the thought that those were the ones that had the biggest impact on me.
• Everything is categorized and my picks are in bold throughout. The full list of favorites is at the bottom.

Finally, if you get through this whole list and want more, here are my past versions:

• 2005
• 2006 Part 1 & 2006 Part 2
• 2011
• 2012
• 2015
• 2016
• 2017

Okay, onto the list:

David Grann

If you’ve ever read one of these lists before you’ll know that I love David Grann. Basically anything he writes automatically makes the cut. In 2012 that was his story about an American who fought in the Cuban revolution titled “The Yankee Comandante” and in 2011 it was “A Murder Foretold”. After a few years off to publish his excellent book Killers of the Flower Moon, he was back in the New Yorker in February with “White Darkness”, an amazing story of a solitary journey across Antarctica. (It’s also out as a book now, though I think it’s just the article with some more pictures.) What’s amazing about Grann’s writing obviously starts with the stories he finds, but as you read you realize it’s more about the characters that make up those stories. Somehow he always seems to discover people who both live amazing adventures and are also poets, or something close to it. (As an aside, if you haven’t read Grann’s book of essays The Devil and Sherlock Holmes do yourself a favor and get on that or at least pick a few from his New Yorker profile page.)

[“The White Darkness” – David Grann – New Yorker – February 12, 2018]

Geopolitics

This is another category where there was really only one entry for me. It comes from the New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi, who will show up again when we get to favorite podcasts. Callimachi’s work is pure effort and for her huge feature on the Isis she found and sifted through thousands of internal documents and receipts to piece together the story of how the terror organization actually governed in Iraq. The work in and of itself makes the piece worthy for this list, but what makes the article so memorable for me is how it exposed the banality of Isis’s approach in Iraq. “ISIS built a state of administrative efficiency that collected taxes and picked up the garbage,” she writes. “[T]he group at times offered better services and proved itself more capable than the government it had replaced.” If you had to sum the piece up in one sentence it would probably be this one: “The world knows the Islamic State for its brutality, but the militants did not rule by the sword alone. They wielded power through two complementary tools: brutality and bureaucracy.” (If you’re interested in learning more about how the documents were collected or what’s happening with them, there’s a Q&A on the Times’ site. You should also check out Callimachi on the longform podcast for an inside look on how she approaches her work.)

[“The Isis Files: When Terrorists Run City Hall” – Rukmini Callimachi – New York Times – April 4, 2018]

Health & Parenting

I’ve got three entrants for this one and they’re all pretty different.

The first is all about parenting. I would have sworn “The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry” came out last year, but apparently it was from the beginning of this one. It makes sense I wouldn’t have much sense of time, though, since it came out right around when my second daughter was born. The article plainly spells out how big of an industry parenting advice is and how much its foundation is built on bullshit. The bit I remember best is this aside about how statistically insignificant most baby advice really is:

“(Parenting experts who are childless, such as the “queen of routine” Gina Ford, author of the unavoidable Contented Little Baby series, attract a lot of sharp words for it, but this seems unfair. Where Ford has direct experience of parenting none of the 130 million babies born on Earth each year, most gurus only have direct experience of parenting two or three babies, which isn’t much better as a sample size. The assumption that whatever worked for you will probably work for everyone, which is endemic in the self-help world, reaches an extreme in the pages of baby books.)”

The other two are a lot more serious. First is an amazing piece from Guardian writer Hannah Jane Parkinson about her own struggle with mental illness (and specifically bipolar disorder). Parkinson is a very good writer and there’s something about reading an accomplished journalist using her work to explain why her work is so hard that’s particularly impactful. The article’s title “It’s nothing like a broken leg” comes from this passage:

In the last few years I have lost count of the times mental illness has been compared to a broken leg. Mental illness is nothing like a broken leg.

In fairness, I have never broken my leg. Maybe having a broken leg does cause you to lash out at friends, undergo a sudden, terrifying shift in politics and personality, or lead to time slipping away like a Dali clock. Maybe a broken leg makes you doubt what you see in the mirror, or makes you high enough to mistake car bonnets for stepping stones (difficult, with a broken leg) and a thousand other things.

I would also highly recommend this short piece from Parkinson published at the end of December about her riding buses around London in the middle of the night when things get particularly bad.

Finally, my pick for this category comes from a New York Times Magazine story titled “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis.” The article shocked and saddened me as it spelled out just how inadequate the care pregnant black mothers receive. Education and income, as the article explains, don’t explain it. “In fact, a black woman with an advanced degree is more likely to lose her baby than a white woman with less than an eighth-grade education.” Most shocking to me was this story about how the institutional racism embedded in the system manifests itself in obviously bad science amongst doctors:

In 2016, a study by researchers at the University of Virginia examined why African-American patients receive inadequate treatment for pain not only compared with white patients but also relative to World Health Organization guidelines. The study found that white medical students and residents often believed incorrect and sometimes “fantastical” biological fallacies about racial differences in patients. For example, many thought, falsely, that blacks have less-sensitive nerve endings than whites, that black people’s blood coagulates more quickly and that black skin is thicker than white. For these assumptions, researchers blamed not individual prejudice but deeply ingrained unconscious stereotypes about people of color, as well as physicians’ difficulty in empathizing with patients whose experiences differ from their own. In specific research regarding childbirth, the Listening to Mothers Survey III found that one in five black and Hispanic women reported poor treatment from hospital staff because of race, ethnicity, cultural background or language, compared with 8 percent of white mothers.

Go read the whole thing and when you’re done please donate to the Birthmark Doula Collective who are trying to help change the care black mothers receive.

[“Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis” – Linda Villarosa – New York Times Magazine – April 11, 2018]

Sports

As you may or may not know I’m a big NBA fan. The league is as good as its ever been and has been fundamentally transforming the way the game is played for the last ten years or so. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to explain this to friends and now, thanks to Kevin Arnovitz and Kevin Pelton, I can just send them the article “How the NBA got its groove back.” In the piece, the Kevins spell out how much faster the league got over the last decade, starting with the D’Antoni/Nash. In fact, as the article explains, those 2004-05 Suns wouldn’t even be considered a fast team by today’s standards. “Back then, Phoenix’s 98.6 pace was more than a possession per game faster than that of any other NBA team. In 2017-18, the average team had 99.6 possessions per 48 minutes, and the Suns’ 2004-05 pace would have ranked 19th in the league.” It’s a fun time to be an NBA fan. (Honorable mention sports story has to go to The Ringer’s insane “The Curious Case of Bryan Colangelo and the Secret Twitter Account”.)

[“How the NBA got its groove back” – Kevin Arnovitz and Kevin Pelton – ESPN – May 24, 2018]

Society

Society isn’t a perfect title for this category, but it gets at it. I’ve got two pieces here. The first comes from psychology professor Alison Gopnik (who shows up in the podcast list as well). Although not terribly wrong, I thought her review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now offered a really interesting rebuttal to the macro “everything is getting better” story. Gopnik opens the piece by stating her credentials: She’s a scientist, professor, and “card-carrying true believer in liberal Enlightenment values.” But she doesn’t think we can, or should, push aside local needs and values for the global:

The weakness of the book is that it doesn’t seriously consider the second part of the conversation—the human values that the young woman from the small town talks about. Our local, particular connections to just one specific family, community, place, or tradition can seem irrational. Why stay in one town instead of chasing better opportunities? Why feel compelled to sacrifice your own well-being to care for your profoundly disabled child or fragile, dying grandparent, when you would never do the same for a stranger? And yet, psychologically and philosophically, those attachments are as central to human life as the individualist, rationalist, universalist values of classic Enlightenment utilitarianism. If the case for reason, science, humanism, and progress is really going to be convincing—if it’s going to amount to more than preaching to the choir—it will have to speak to a wider spectrum of listeners, a more inclusive conception of flourishing, a broader palette of values.

In some ways there’s a similar theme in my pick for this category. “Pay the Homeless” is all about the local realities. It’s an argument against the idea that giving money to someone asking for it is somehow not good for the system as a whole or that individual specifically:

Yet on the whole, all the evidence, from the statistical to the spiritual, points in one direction: if you can give, you should give. It won’t solve the problems of mass homelessness or impoverishment. But it will improve someone’s life ever so slightly and briefly. “People are in dire straits and raising money for bare necessities,” Jerry Jones, policy director at the Inner City Law Center, told me. They might be trying to collect enough to pay for a room for the night. They might need bus fare or gas to get to an appointment.

[“Pay the Homeless” – Bryce Covert – Longreads – June, 2018]

Business

I try to read just about anything Tim Harford writes. His ability to take complicated topics and simplify them are impressive and inspiring. Last year’s piece on Arrow’s impossibility theorem is something I still think about and his BBC Pop-Up Ideas series was absolutely amazing, particularly this episode on the idea of feral cities. This year his FT feature “Why big companies squander brilliant ideas” introduced me to the idea of architectural innovation, which I wrote about in some length in my Framework of the Day piece on Conway’s Law. If you enjoy the piece I would also suggest checking out the reading list, which includes links to all the source material.

[“Why big companies squander brilliant ideas” – Tim Harford – Financial Times – September 8, 2018]

Politics

There aren’t that many pieces that stood out in the world of politics for me this year. I suspect that’s because I actively avoided them (as opposed to last year). With that said, one writer and two pieces stood out for me this year.

First, the writer. I don’t know of anyone I turned to more this year to get the pulse of the country than the Washington Post’s media columnist Margaret Sullivan. She doesn’t have a piece on the list because her writing is more ephemeral. In a world where the President is a TV star, it seems appropriate that the most important columnist is someone who has a deep understanding of how the media functions. A few of her pieces that stood out: “Publishing that anonymous New York Times article wasn’t ‘gutless.’ But writing it probably was.”, “It’s high time for media to enter the No Kellyanne Zone — and stay there”, “Don’t forget how the movement that changed Hollywood started: With great reporting”, and “Enough, already, with anything Steve Bannon has to say. We got it the first time.”. She’s who I turned to when I wanted to understand the importance of a moment.

Okay, back to the longform. First up is Jane Mayer’s masterful profile of Christopher Steele, the author of the infamous Trump Dossier. The piece didn’t necessarily break new ground (after all, Buzzfeed had already published the whole thing), but it did paint an interesting picture for the man who wrote it, his credibility, and the accuracy, or lack thereof, that his methods may have led to.

My pick for politics goes to Robert Draper’s New York Times Magazine profile of House leader Nancy Pelosi. We’re about to hear A LOT about Pelosi as she battles Trump and the Republicans over the next two years and, for me at least, my knowledge and understanding of her was surface at best. The profile is pretty unvarnished and paints Pelosi as a pure politician who knows how to operate as well or better than anyone out there. I suspect we’re going to see a lot of stereotypical framing of Pelosi because she’s a woman and this felt like a good foundation to build understanding. I thought this bit about how much of her perception, even amongst Democrats I’d argue, has been shaped by the Republicans was particularly interesting:

Still, Pelosi’s foremost liability is the effectiveness of the attacks against her. In 2010, Republicans spent $65 million attacking Pelosi in ads; the Republican National Committee hung a banner from its headquarters that read FIRE PELOSI. The attacks have often borne more than a tinge of sexism; in 2012, when Pelosi, as minority leader, wielded less power than the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Harry Reid, Republicans’ negative television ads were seven times as likely to mention Pelosi as Reid, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising. The 2010 onslaught took its toll on Pelosi’s public standing — her favorable rating dropped into the 20s — but otherwise did not faze her. She made clear to her caucus members that they should do whatever it took to win, even if it meant publicly distancing themselves from her. “I don’t know anyone in the world with thicker skin, or anyone about whom more callous things have been said, and she just truly doesn’t care,” a former Pelosi staff member told me. “There’s a small constituency she cares about: her members.”

[“Nancy Pelosi’s Last Battle” – Robert Draper – New York Times Magazine – November 19, 2018]

Podcast

I listened to fewer podcasts this year thanks to the introduction of audiobooks into my media diet. With that said, there were a few that stood out. Rather than specific episodes, though, this year my favorites felt more like shows in their entirety. This might be because I explored fewer new podcasts this year or just because there were a few exceptional short series that came out in 2018.

First off is Reply All. As far as week-after-week quality goes, it’s hard to beat these guys. Two (really three) episodes in particular stood our for me:

1. “Invcel”: “How a shy, queer Canadian woman accidentally invented one of the internet’s most toxic male communities.”
2. “The Crime Machine, Part 1” & “The Crime Machine, Part 2”: “New York City cops are in a fight against their own police department. They say it’s under the control of a broken computer system that punishes cops who refuse to engage in racist, corrupt policing. The story of their fight, and the story of the grouchy idealist who originally built the machine they’re fighting.”

Next up is American Fiasco, Roger Bennet’s ten-part series on the disaster that was America’s 1998 World Cup.

Finally, and my real pick, is Rukmini Callimachi’s ten-part series Caliphate. The podcast follows Callimachi as she reports on the Islamic State and the fall of Mosul. It’s an extraordinary piece of reporting with the kinds of twists and turns that we’ve come to expect in great podcasts these days. Again, I can’t say enough about Callimachi’s work this year between Caliphate and The Isis Files.

[Calpihate – April, 2018]

Not This Year

Finally, because I can’t resist, I read a bunch of longform that was amazing and didn’t come out this year. Although it doesn’t officially fit my rules, I’m going to include a few picks as a way to wrap things up.

I already talked about David Grann at length, so I won’t spend too much time introducing the amazing 2008 New Yorker story I reread titled “True Crime: A Postmodern Murder Mystery.” It’s insane. Go read it.

I think I read “Promthea Unbound” just after I put together last year’s list otherwise I have to assume it would have made the cut. It’s the extraordinary (sorry, I’m running out of superlatives) story of a child genius and her mom and how they got through life together.

Finally, my pick for “Not This Year” maybe shouldn’t officially even count as longform, but I’m making the rules and I say short stories are allowed. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a short story by Ursula Le Guin that feels as appropriate today (if not more) than it must have when it was published in 1973. It’s about the costs were willing to take on to live happily. I’ll leave it at that so you can enjoy.

[“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” – Ursula Le Guin – October, 1973]

The Picks

Alright, that’s it, thanks for reading. Here are the picks all wrapped up:

• David Grann: “The White Darkness” – David Grann – New Yorker – February 12, 2018
• Geopolitics: “The Isis Files: When Terrorists Run City Hall” – Rukmini Callimachi – New York Times – April 4, 2018
• Health/Parenting: “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis” – Linda Villarosa – New York Times Magazine – April 11, 2018
• Sports: “How the NBA got its groove back” – Kevin Arnovitz and Kevin Pelton – ESPN – May 24, 2018
• Society: “Pay the Homeless” – Bryce Covert – Longreads – June, 2018
• Business: “Why big companies squander brilliant ideas” – Tim Harford – Financial Times – September 8, 2018
• Politics: “Nancy Pelosi’s Last Battle” – Robert Draper – New York Times Magazine – November 19, 2018
• Podcast: Calpihate – April, 2018
• Not This Year: “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” – Ursula Le Guin – October, 1973

The Full Lists

Articles (in chronological order):

1. “Parking for Gold” – Geoff Manaugh – The Atlantic – January 2, 2018
2. “The Case for the Subway” – Jonathan Mahler – New York Times Magazine – January 3, 2018
3. “Making China Great Again” – Evan Osnos – New Yorker – January 8, 2018
4. “My Father’s Body, at Rest and in Motion” – Siddhartha Mukherjee – New Yorker – January 8, 2018
5. “The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed” – Alexis C. Madrigal – The Atlantic – January 10, 2018
6. “The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry” – Oliver Burkeman – The Guardian – January 16, 2018
7. “The Rising Pressure of the #MeToo Backlash” – Jia Tolentino – New Yorker – January 24, 2018
8. “To Be, or Not to Be” – Masha Gessen – New York Review of Books – Feburary 8, 2018
9. “Has Anyone Seen the President?” – Michael Lewis – Bloomberg – February 9, 2018
10. “Inside The Two Years That Shook Facebook—And The World” – Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein – Wired – February 12, 2018
11. “The White Darkness” – David Grann – New Yorker – February 12, 2018
12. “What has really been going on with Markelle Fultz?” – Kyle Neubeck – Philly Voice – February 12, 2018
13. “Jerry and Marge Go Large” – Jason Fagone – Highline – February 28, 2018
14. “I Got a Story to Tell” – Steve Francis – Player’s Tribune – March 8, 2018
15. “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier” – Jane Mayer – New Yorker – March 12, 2018
16. “A $1.6 Billion Spotify Lawsuit Is Based On A Law Made For Player Pianos” – Sarah Jeong – The Verge – March 14, 2018
17. “Why Earth’s History Appears So Miraculous” – Peter Brannan – The Atlantic – March 15, 2018
18. “Tragically Lost in Joshua Tree’s Wild Interior” – Geoff Manaugh – New York Times Magazine – March 22, 2018
19. “When Truth and Reason Are No Longer Enough” – Allison Gopnik – The Atlantic – April, 2018
20. “The Isis Files: When Terrorists Run City Hall” – Rukmini Callimachi – New York Times – April 4, 2018
21. “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis” – Linda Villarosa – New York Times Magazine – April 11, 2018
22. “The Young and the Reckless” – Brendan Koerner – Wired – April 17, 2018
23. “Whose Story (and Country) Is This?” – Rebecca Solnit – Literary Hub – April 18, 2018
24. “How American Racism Influenced Hitler” – Alex Ross – New Yorker – April 30, 2018
25. “Bad TV” – Andrea Long Chu – n+1 – Spring, 2018
26. “The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code” – Kit Chellel – Bloomberg Businessweek – May 3, 2018
27. “The Man Who Cracked the Lottery” – Reid Forgrave – New York Times Magazine – May 3, 2018
28. “I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye” – Ta-Nehesi Coates – May 7, 2018
29. “The Promise of Vaping and the Rise of Juul” – Jia Tolentino – New Yorker – May 14, 2018
30. “How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds” – Nick Paumgarten – New Yorker – May 21, 2018
31. “Trump vs. the ‘Deep State'” – Evan Osnos – New Yorker – May 21, 2018
32. “How the NBA got its groove back” – Kevin Arnovitz and Kevin Pelton – ESPN – May 24, 2018
33. “Maybe She Had So Much Money She Just Lost Track of It Somebody had to foot the bill for Anna Delvey’s fabulous new life. The city was full of marks.” – Jessica Pressler – New York Magazine – May 28, 2018
34. “The Curious Case of Bryan Colangelo and the Secret Twitter Account” – Ben Detrick – The Ringer – May 29, 2018
35. “The Ultimate Humiliation” – Sarah Nicole Prickett – n+1 – May 30, 2018
36. “Pay the Homeless” – Bryce Covert – Longreads – June, 2018
37. “Stephen A. Smith Won’t Stop Talking” – Vinson Cunningham – New Yorker – June 25, 2018
38. “‘It’s nothing like a broken leg’: why I’m done with the mental health conversation” – Hannah Jane Parkinson – The Guardian – June 30, 2018
39. “How a Notorious Gangster Was Exposed by His Own Sister” – Patrick Radden Keefe – New Yorker – August 6, 2018
40. “Why big companies squander brilliant ideas” – Tim Harford – Financial Times – September 8, 2018
41. “What Termites Can Teach Us” – Amia Srinivasan – New Yorker – September 17, 2018
42. “The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care” – Larissa MacFarquhar – New Yorker – October 8, 2018
43. “This Melissa McCarthy Story Just Might (Maybe? Possibly?) Cheer You Up” – Taffy Brodesser-Akner – New York Times Magazine – October 17, 2018
44. “What if the Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick?” – Gary Greenberg – New York Times Magazine – November 7, 2018
45. “Nancy Pelosi’s Last Battle” – Robert Draper – New York Times Magazine – November 19, 2018
46. “The Mystery of the Havana Syndrome” – Adam Entous and Jon Lee Anderson – New Yorker – November 19, 2018
47. “Carmelo Anthony is the last great American ball hog” – Kirk Goldsberry – ESPN – December 6, 2018

Podcasts (in chronological order):

1. “The Hollywood Edition” – Slate Money – March 31, 2018
2. Calpihate – April, 2018
3. “Jason Alexander” – WTF with Marc Maron – April 5, 2018
4. “Alison Gopnik on ‘The wrong way to think about parenting, plus the downsides of modernity'” – Rationally Speaking – April 29, 2018
5. “Invcel” – Reply All – May 10, 2018
6. “Data, Decisions, and Basketball with Sam Hinkie” – Invest Like the Best – May 22, 2018
7. American Fiasco – June, 2018
8. “Charles Oakley Talks MJ Stories, LeBron, and His Favorite Fights” – The Bill Simmons Podcast – June 8, 2018
9. “General Chapman’s Last Stand” – Revisionist History – June 13, 2018
10. “The Crime Machine, Part 1” & “The Crime Machine, Part 2” – Reply All – October 11, 2018
11. “Negative Mount Pleasant” – Reply All – December 6, 2018

Articles [Not 2018] (in chronological order):

1. “The Last Question” – Isaac Asimov – November, 1956
2. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” – Ursula Le Guin – October, 1973
3. “True Crime: A Postmodern Murder Mystery” – David Grann – New Yorker – February 11, 2008
4. “The Last Days of Stealhead Joe” – Ian Frazier – Outside – August 21, 2013
5. “After decades of defeat, Caltech finds formula for winning in conference” – Chris Ballard – Sports Illustrated – November 23, 2015
6. “The Falling Man: An Unforgettable Story” – Tom Junod – September 9, 2016
7. “Promethea Unbound” – Mike Mariani – Atavist Magaqzine – October 27, 2017
8. “Downward Spiral” – David Roth – The Baffler – December 4, 2017

That might not make so much sense (yet), but like any good note it captured enough of the concept that I remembered what I was thinking when I wrote it. I jotted it down as I was prepping for a webinar I did last week offering up some predictions for marketing in 2019. I was getting worked up (as I’m wont to do) about how much it bugs me when everyone in marketing talks about AI as if they have any idea what it really means or the implications.¹ Someone asked why it bothered me so much and my answer, which kind of just poured out, was that once everyone starts agreeing about something (and saying it endlessly) it becomes less and less meaningful. This is not just some soft definition of the word meaning, though, it literally has less information.

Literally how?

A few months ago I wrote about Claude Shannon and information theory. Shannon wrote a seminal paper in 1948 called “A Mathematical Theory of Communication“. In it he defined the measure of information as, effectively, its unexpectedness (he called it entropy). The more random, the more information. This is precisely what bits measure (you can think of it as the number of yes/no questions it would take to get to the answer). What happens when you compress a photo? You take away the randomness. That’s why otherwise complex surfaces like sky or skin might come to look a bit pixelated: The compression algorithm is constraining the number of hues available in order to bring down the entropy (and therefore the file size) of the whole photo.

What does that mean for marketing buzzwords?

Well, as everyone starts to say the same thing and continue to offer little behind it, it becomes more and more expected and, therefore, starts to carry less and less information. When people layer on top of those buzzwords with real examples or alternative ideas, they return some randomness (and therefore information) to the concept. At their best, marketing contrarians are attempting to breathe some life into words and ideas that have otherwise lost their information content.

I don’t really like to think of myself as a contrarian because I think that often carries with it some notion of being different for the sake of being different (and trolling). Rather, I think if everyone is following one strategy or idea, the value of being the next person to jump on board is incrementally less (especially when that idea is poorly defined/understood). In a way it’s like an anti-network effect.

What can contrarians teach us?

That guy with the sad face is former Philadelphia 76ers General Manager Sam Hinkie. He is a contrarian. For the uninitiated, the brief history here is that Hinkie carried out one of the most radical transformation experiments in recent sports history.² He put aside any notion that his team was trying to win and traded everything away for more ping pong balls in the NBA’s rookie lottery. In basketball, where only five guys from a team are on the floor at any one time, a superstar can have a massive impact on a team’s success. In a 2016 episode of his podcast Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell called basketball a “strong link” sport because a team’s success is best predicted by the quality of its best player (as opposed to soccer where it’s based on the worst player on the field he explains). Hinkie figured this out. He also figured out the best way to get one of those superstars was to draft them and to do that you had to have an early first round pick. In the end, he took a lot of heat for his strategy (even though he was following all the rules) and was eventually pushed out by the league office (and replaced by someone whose wife kept secret Twitter accounts where she posted lots of critical comments about players on the Sixers as well as some private medical information … whoops).

Back to Hinkie’s letter. It was leaked and provided an amazing view into the psyche of someone who was willing to be a pariah. In it he paints an interesting picture of the connection between contrarianism and traditionalism.

Here he is on contrarianism:

To develop truly contrarian views will require a never-ending thirst for better, more diverse inputs. What player do you think is most undervalued? Get him for your team. What basketball axiom is most likely to be untrue? Take it on and do the opposite. What is the biggest, least valuable time sink for the organization? Stop doing it. Otherwise, it’s a big game of pitty pat, and you’re stuck just hoping for good things to happen, rather than developing a strategy for how to make them happen.

And on traditionalism:

While contrarian views are absolutely necessary to truly deliver, conventional wisdom is still wise. It is generally accepted as the conventional view because it is considered the best we have. Get back on defense. Share the ball. Box out. Run the lanes. Contest a shot. These things are real and have been measured, precisely or not, by thousands of men over decades of trial and error. Hank Iba. Dean Smith. Red Auerbach. Gregg Popovich. The single best place to start is often wherever they left off.

Let’s bring it back to buzzwords.

So basically Hinkie’s argument is that the most appropriate way to be a contrarian is to also be a traditionalist: To be a respectful student of the underlying principles while also constantly probing and questioning whether they still make sense. One of the things that surprises me about the marketing industry is how often people miss this tradeoff. In an attempt to play the contrarian they shun traditional wisdom, but at the same time they repeat empty phrases and approaches at every conference that will let them on stage.

I actually think one of the reasons Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow has picked up as much steam as it has is because it strikes a good balance between these things. It’s a contrarian take (loyalty shouldn’t be a goal because it’s an outcome) but at the same time it’s deeply rooted in some traditional marketing ideas (marketshare, reach, and creativity to name three). This is a tough balance to strike, but when someone hits the spot is has the opportunity to really resonate.

Unfortunately, most of the time the industry misses the market by a lot. What we end up with a bunch  of anti-historical/anti-intellectual slogans that get repeated ad-infinitum. It’s lots of words and  little information.

Footnotes:

1. Here’s the notes I had for the question: “Let me start by saying that I predict in 2019 marketers will continue to talk about AI and ML interchangeably with no idea what the words mean. (I’m particularly salty about this.) I would broadly see we will continue to see ML become more available as different kinds of wrappers are made available that enables folks to use it in more of their everyday work. This seems to be some of what Microsoft and Google are doing with smart integrations into their work suites. In general, my take on AI/ML is it’s a classic case of Amara’s law, “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” In the short term, these things aren’t going to be writing copy and, anyway, that’s not that big a deal. In the long term, the promise of ML is data modeling and coding written by computers, not people. That’s definitely not a 2019 prediction, but it’s the road we’re going down.”↑
2. I recognize that the word/idea transformation belongs in the buzzword bucket, but if you read about Hinkie and what he did I think it’s a fair use of the word with real meaning. He was a heretic who questioned the most fundamental law of professional sports (“you play every game to win”) and rewrote the path to building a championship contender.↑

At the beginning of the year I decided I was going to try to read more books this year. I don’t remember it was a resolution or what, but I set a goal of thirty and set on my way, tracking everything on Goodreads (which has legitimately become one of my favorite networks over the last eleven months). This post isn’t about my book list, though (I’ll wrap that up at the end of the year), but rather about the library. Most of the books I’ve read this year have been borrowed using Libby, the app offered by Overdrive which manages e-book borrowing for most libraries (including the New York Public and Brooklyn Public, where I belong).

When I’ve told people about my library habits I’ve gotten two reactions: There’s a group who is amazed that you can borrow Kindle books and promises to immediately go out and get themselves a card and there’s another who tells me they tried it, but the borrowing just didn’t work for them. They can never find books they want, they explain, and when they do finally find a good ebook to borrow, they are always on hold. I can’t say much about not finding books you want except that I’ve managed to find lots books this year that were both well worth reading and immediately available. But that’s not the point of this post. I want to talk about book holds and how they’re better thought of as a feature of the library, not a bug. Let me explain.

Back in 2006 I vividly remember reading about behavioral economics for the first time. I had somehow run across an article about it from Harvard Magazine and there was one bit in particular, about how pre-committing to something can help us work against our instinct to take the easy way out, that fascinated me at the time and still rattles around in my brain to this day. The basic idea, now commonly understood with the rising prominence of behavioral economics, is that humans do a very bad job of the value of things in the future. As a result, we are constantly doing things that give us pleasure in the short term and not the long term. In other words, we promise tomorrow’s self it will read that important book, watch that critically acclaimed film, or finally hit the gym while today’s self enjoys that trashy novel, watches another dumb sitcom episode, and drinks a few beers with friends instead of exercising.

But there’s a trick to dealing with our irrationality and it’s called pre-committing. The article offered up an analogy by way of Homer:

The goddess Circe informs Odysseus that his ship will pass the island of the Sirens, whose irresistible singing can lure sailors to steer toward them and onto rocks. The Sirens are a marvelous metaphor for human appetite, both in its seductions and its pitfalls. Circe advises Odysseus to prepare for temptations to come: he must order his crew to stopper their ears with wax, so they cannot hear the Sirens’ songs, but he may hear the Sirens’ beautiful voices without risk if he has his sailors lash him to a mast, and commands them to ignore his pleas for release until they have passed beyond danger. “Odysseus pre-commits himself by doing this,” Laibson explains.

Sometimes, as the analogy goes, we’ve got to bind ourselves to the mast of what’s good for us to actually make it happen. Back in 2006 my favorite example of pre-commitment was Netflix. If you can remember back to its days before life as a streaming service, you put a DVD at the bottom of your queue as you chose it and it slowly moved up the list as you watched and returned movies. The beauty of the system was that it disconnected what you wanted to watch from what you actually watched by splitting them up as two different functions (largely the result of needing to mail out DVDs). What it meant for me was that I watched a bunch of great films I’d always wanted to see because they showed up in my mailbox and I didn’t have another good choice. Instead of just watching another mindless procedural crime drama (not that there’s anything wrong with that), I finally got around to watching films from Alfred Hitchcock, Woody Allen, Orson Welles, and a bunch of other filmmakers that had been permanently relegated to deep depths of my mental movie queue.

So back to the library. If you haven’t borrowed an e-book before it works just like borrowing a physical one: The library has a set number of digital copies and if they’re all out at the moment then you get put on a waitlist. The longest you can borrow a book is 21 days and there are no renewals. That means holds often come through at inopportune times. Sometimes that means skipping the book altogether, but more often I’ve found it was just the push I needed to read something I wanted to read in the past but wouldn’t have necessarily made time for in the present.

In other words, in case you needed a reason to appreciate the public library outside the amazing civic resource it is (one branch of the New York Public Library announced they were lending ties, briefcases, and handbags to people who needed them for job interviews earlier this year), the borrowing mechanism can actually help you fight some of your more irrational tendencies.

Finally, because I can’t resist, if you appreciate the library it’s worth giving a donation if you can afford it. If you think of all the money you spend on Netflix and the like, it’s hopefully not too much of a hardship to offer your local library a few dollars a month. They’d surely appreciate it.

Let’s start with some books. Here’s what I’ve read in the last three months (in order of when they were read):

• Judas: How a Sister’s Testimony Brought Down a Criminal Mastermind (Astrid Holleeder): Inspired by the New Yorker story by Patrick Radden Keefe about a Dutch woman who eventually testified about her mobster brother, I decided to dig into the English translation. It was a lot more difficult to read than I expected. The New Yorker story, because of length, isn’t able to go into the extensive psychological abuse Holleeder’s brother put his family through. I found it emotionally exhausting about two-thirds into the book.
• Countdown to Zero Day (Kim Zetter): As far as I know this is the definitive book on Stuxnet, the digital weapon that targeted the Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz.
• Complexity: A Guided Tour (Melanie Mitchell): Easily one of my favorite books of the year. I’ve read lots about complexity theory, but nothing that pulled all the various strings together so well. (This also helped send me down a deep physics rabbit hole that I’ve yet to emerge from.)
• My Holiday in North Korea: The Funniest/Worst Place on Earth (Wendy Simmons): I really loved the graphic novel Pyongyang and thought I’d give this travelogue a try when I saw it sitting on a shelf at the bookstore. It was a fine book to read alongside some of the heavier stuff I’ve been reading lately.
• Remote: Office Not Required (Jason Fried): This book sucked, but at least the Audible narration was slow enough that I could crank it up to 2x speed.
• Einstein 1905: The Standard of Genius (John S. Rigden): Like I said, I’ve been falling deeper into a physics rabbit hole, and as part of that I’ve been watching a bunch of physics and math lectures on YouTube. One of the ones I watched was Douglas Hofstadter essentially trying to recreate a talk he once saw the John Rigden, the author of this book, give in 2005. The book, and the talk, are about the ideas behind Einstein’s five papers of 1905 (four of which are considered foundational in physics).
• The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds (Michael Lewis): I am almost embarrassed to admit I still haven’t read Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow (it’s on the list, I swear), so Michael Lewis on the relationship between Kahneman and Taversky is the next best thing. Related: Malcolm Gladwell interviewing Lewis about the book.
• Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century (Masha Gessen): Masha Gessen’s biography (I guess you could call it that) of Grigori Perelman, the eccentric mathematician who solved the Poincare Conjecture (one of the seven Millenium Problems from the Clay Institute) and then disappeared.
• Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (Jorge Luis Borges): A long and fascinating conversation with Borges.
• Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone (Satya Nadella): Like just about everyone, I’m super impressed with everything Microsoft has done since promoting Nadella to CEO. Although this book promises to be about how it’s all happening, it’s about 75% a commercial for Microsoft’s vision for the future (which although it could be right, is not particularly interesting or original).
• Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs (John Doerr): A mostly interesting read about the OKR (objectives and key results) goal setting system.
• A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking): If you find yourself in a physics rabbit hole, this seems like something worth reading …
• Dreamtigers (Jorge Luis Borges): I read about this in the Borges interview book. He basically explained that his publisher asked for a book and so he collected a bunch of poems and stories that were sitting around his house and hadn’t been published and stuck it together.

Okay, onto some other reading, etc. …

This Wired piece about the possibility of a coming “AI cold war” has two particularly interesting strings in it: One is a fundamental question about the nature of technology and its relationship with democracy (put simply: is the internet better structured to support or defeat democratic ideals) and the other is about how China (and the US) will use 5G as a power play (“If you are a poor country that lacks the capacity to build your own data network, you’re going to feel loyalty to whoever helps lay the pipes at low cost. It will all seem uncomfortably close to the arms and security pacts that defined the Cold War.”)

I’ve been fascinated by the mysterious attacks against Americans in Cuba since I read about them (probably over a year ago now). I was excited to see the New Yorker finally dig in.

We’ve been having lots of trouble convincing our three-year-old to wear a coat in the cold. Turns out its pretty normal.

The Chronicle of Higher Education asked a bunch of academics for their most influential academic book of the last twenty years. Lots of interesting things to read here.

This is from earlier in the year, but it’s worth re-reading Bruce Schneier’s piece on securing elections. More recently he had a good one on mobile phone security.

TILs:

• Benoît Mandelbrot (of fractal fame) is apparently responsible (at least in part) for the introduction of passwords at IBM. From When Einstein Walked with Gödel (which I’m reading now), “When his son’s high school teacher sought help for a computer class, Mandelbrot obliged, only to find that soon students all over Westchester County were tapping into IBM’s computers by using his name. ‘At that point, the computing center staff had to assign passwords,’ he says. ‘So I can boast-if that’s the right term-of having been at the origin of the police intrusion that this change represented.'”
• Also from the same book, the low numerals are meant to be representative of the number of things they are. Since that makes no sense, here’s the quote from the book: “Even Arabic numerals follow this logic: 1 is a single vertical bar; 2 and 3 began as two and three horizontal bars tied together for ease of writing.”
• When you get helium super cold very strange stuff starts happening.
• A Rochester garbage plate “is your choice of cheeseburger, hamburger, Italian sausages, steak, chicken, white or red hots*, served on top of any combination of home fries, french fries, baked beans, and/or macaroni salad.”
• There’s a taxonomy of parking garage design (image below).

Barkley Marathons sound awful.

This hit close to home:

It took 200 years for them to start making brown point shoes for non-white ballet dancers …

There’s apparently a big conversation going on in the machine learning community about whether ML is alchemy:

Rahimi believes contemporary machine learning models’ successes — which are mostly based on empirical methods — are plagued with the same issues as alchemy. The inner mechanisms of machine learning models are so complex and opaque that researchers often don’t understand why a machine learning model can output a particular response from a set of data inputs, aka the black box problem. Rahimi believes the lack of theoretical understanding or technical interpretability of machine learning models is cause for concern, especially if AI takes responsibility for critical decision-making.

This is a park covered in spiderwebs:

Tangentially related, here’s how corporate America contributes to politics by industry:

The Article Group email list is worth subscribing to. Back issues here.

I loved this quote from philosopher Daniel Dennet’s talk on what he calls intelligent design (don’t worry, it’s not the same):

Stochastic terrorism is one of those ideas you read once and think about from then on …

I don’t know where I fall on this, but I found Douglas Rushkoff’s argument that universal basic income is a scam being put forward by technology companies fascinating:

Uber’s business plan, like that of so many other digital unicorns, is based on extracting all the value from the markets it enters. This ultimately means squeezing employees, customers, and suppliers alike in the name of continued growth. When people eventually become too poor to continue working as drivers or paying for rides, UBI supplies the required cash infusion for the business to keep operating.

Adam Davidson had a good Twitter thread about “both-sidism” in political reporting.

Wired on “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”.

The changing landscape of business expenses:

It seems like one out of 100 Player’s Tribune articles are amazing. This one from former Clipper Darius Miles fits the bill.

I’ve been really enjoying John Horgan’s Scientific American blog “Cross-Check”.

David Grann, who is probably my favorite author, snuck a book out without me knowing. Called White Darkness, it appears to be an expanded version of his New Yorker article about Antarctic explorers from earlier this year (one of my favorites).

Alright, I’m going to cut this here … I’m only caught up to late October, so look out for a part two. Thanks for reading.

The vast majority of the models I’ve written about were ones that I discovered at one time or another and have adopted for my own knowledge portfolio. The Variance Spectrum, on the other hand, I came up with. Its origin was in trying to answer a question about why there wasn’t a centralized “system of record” for marketing in the same way you would find one in finance (ERP) or sales (CRM). My best answer was that the output of marketing made it particularly difficult to design a system that could satisfy the needs of all its users. Specifically, I felt as though the variance of marketing’s output, the fact that each campaign and piece of content is meant to be different than the one that came before it, made for an environment that at first seemed opposed to the basics of systemization that the rest of a company had come to accept.

To illustrate the idea I plotted a spectrum. The left side represented zero variance, the realm of manufacturing and Six Sigma, and the right was 100 percent variance, where R&D and innovation reign supreme.

While the poles of the spectrum help explain it, it’s what you place in the middle that makes it powerful. For example, we could plot the rest of the departments in a company by the average variance of their output (finance is particularly low since so much of the department’s output is “governed” — quite literally the government sets GAAP accounting standards and mandates specific tax forms). Sales is somewhere in the middle: A pretty good mix of process and methodology plus the “art of the deal”. Marketing, meanwhile, sits off to the right, just behind R&D.

But that’s just the first layer. Like so many parts of an organization (and as described in my essays on both The Parable of Two Watchmakers and Conway’s Law), companies are hierarchical and at any point in the spectrum you can drill in and find a whole new spectrum of activities that range from low variance to high variance. That is, while finance may be “low variance” on average thanks to government standards, forecasting and modeling is most certainly a high variance function: Something that must be imagined in original ways depending on a number of variables include the company, and its products and markets (to name a few). Zooming in on marketing we find a whole new set of processes that can themselves be plotted based on the variance of their output, with governance far to the low variance side and creative development clearly on the other pole. Another way to articulate these differences is that the low variance side represents the routine processes and the right the creative.

While I haven’t seen anyone else plot things quite this way, this idea, that there are fundamentally different kinds of tasks within a company, is not new. Organizational theorists Richard Cyert, Herbert Simon, and Donald Trow, also noted this duality in paper from 1956 called “Observation of a Business Decision“:¹

At one extreme we have repetitive, well-defined problems (e.g., quality control or production lot-size problems) involving tangible considerations, to which the economic models that call for finding the best among a set of pre-established alternatives can be applied rather literally. In contrast to these highly programmed and usually rather detailed decisions are problems of a non-repetitive sort, often involving basic long-range questions about the whole strategy of the firm or some part of it, arising initially in a highly unstructured form and requiring a great deal of the kinds of search processes listed above. In this whole continuum, from great specificity and repetition to extreme vagueness and uniqueness, we will call decisions that lie toward the former extreme programmed, and those lying toward the latter end non-programmed. This simple dichotomy is just a shorthand for the range of possibilities we have indicated.

This also introduces an interesting additional way to think about the spectrum: The left side is representative of those ideas where you have the most clarity about the final goal (in manufacturing you know exactly what you want the output to look like when it’s done) and the right the most ambiguity (the goal of R&D is to make something new). For that reason, high variance tasks should also fail far more often than their low variance counterparts: Nine out of ten new product ideas might be a good batting average, but if you are throwing away 90 percent of your manufactured output you’ve massively failed.

Even though it may be tempting, that’s not a reason to focus purely on the well-structured, low-variance problems, as Richard Cyert laid out in a 1994 paper titled “Positioning the Organization“:

It is difficult to deal with the uncertainty of the future, as one must to relate an organization to others in the industry and to events in the economy that may affect it. One must look ahead to determine what forces are at work and to examine the ways in which they will affect the organization. These activities are less structured and more ambiguous than dealing with concrete problems and, therefore, the CEO may have trouble focusing on them. Many experiments show that structured activity drives out unstructured. For example, it is much easier to answer one’s mail than to develop a plan to change the culture of the organization. The implications of change are uncertain and the planning is unstructured. One tends to avoid uncertainty and to concentrate on structured problems for which one can correctly predict the solutions and implications.²

Going a level deeper, another way to cut the left and right sides of the spectrum is based on the most appropriate way to solve the problem. For the routine tasks you want to have a single way of doing things in an attempt to push down the variance of the output while on the high variance side you have much more freedom to try different approaches. In software terms this can be expressed as automation and collaboration respectively.

While this is primarily a framework for thinking about process, there’s a more personal way to think about the variance spectrum as it relates to giving feedback to others. It’s a common occurrence that employees over-or-misinterpret the feedback of more senior members of the team. I experienced this many times myself in my role as CEO. Because words are often taken literally from the leader of a company, an aside about something like color choice in a design comp can be easily misconstrued as an order to change when it wasn’t meant that way. The variance spectrum in that context can be used to make explicit where the feedback falls: Is it a low variance order you expect to be acted on or a high variance comment that is simply your two cents? I found this could help avoid ambiguity and also make it more clear I respected their expertise.

Footnotes:

1. This paper is kind of amazing to read. It feels revolutionary to actually look at how specific decisions come to be made within a company.↑
2. There’s a whole other really interesting area to explore here that I’m mostly skipping over about using the variance spectrum to help decide types of problems and the mix of work. Although I don’t have a specific model (hence why this is a footnote), the idea that you should decide on your portfolio of activities based on having a good diversity of work across the spectrum is fascinating and seems like a good idea. It’s also in line with a point Herbert Simon makes at the very beginning of his book Administrative Behavior: “Although any practical activity involves both ‘deciding’ and ‘doing,’ it has not commonly been recognized that a theory of administration should be concerned with the processes of decision as well as with the processes of action. This neglect perhaps stems from the notion that decision-making is confined to the formulation of over-all policy. On the contrary, the process of decision does not come to an end when the general purpose of an organization has been determined. The task of ‘deciding’ pervades the entire administrative organization quite as much as does the task of ‘doing’- indeed, it is integrally tied up with the latter. A general theory of administration must include principles of organization that will insure correct decision-making, just as it must include principles that will insure effective action.”↑

Bibliography

• Cyert, R. M., Simon, H. A., & Trow, D. B. (1956). Observation of a business decision. The Journal of Business, 29(4), 237-248.
• Cyert, R. M. (1994). Positioning the organization. Interfaces, 24(2), 101-104.
• Dong, J., March, J. G., & Workiewicz, M. (2017). On organizing: an interview with James G. March. Journal of Organization Design, 6(1), 14.
• March, J. G. (2010). The ambiguities of experience. Cornell University Press.
• Simon, H. A. (2013). Administrative behavior. Simon and Schuster.
• Stene, E. O. (1940). An approach to a science of administration. American Political Science Review, 34(6), 1124-1137.

Framework of the Day posts:

• Conway’s Law
• Known Unknowns
• Pace Layers
• Parable of Two Watchmakers
• Pareto Principle (aka 80/20 Rule)
• Variance Spectrum

Credit: Organizational Charts by Manu CornetI first ran into Conway’s Law while helping a brand redesign their website. The client, a large consumer electronics company, was insistent that the navigation must offer three options: Shop, Learn, and Support. I valiantly tried to convince them that nobody shopping on the web, or anywhere else, thought about the distinction between shopping and learning, but they remained steadfast in their insistence. What I eventually came to understand is that their stance wasn’t born out of customer need or insight, but rather their own organizational chart, which shockingly included a sales department, a marketing department, and a support department.

“Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” That’s the way computer scientist and software engineer Melvin Conway put it in a 1968 paper titled “How Do Committees Invent?” His point was that the choices we make before start designing any system most often fundamentally shapes the final output.¹ Or, as he put it, “the very act of organizing a design team means that certain design decisions have already been made.”

Why does this happen, where does it happen, and what can we do about it? That’s the goal of this essay, but before I get there we’ve got to take a short sojourn into the history of the concept. As I mentioned, the idea in its current form came from Melvin Conway in May of 1968. In the article he cited a few key sources as inspiration including economist John Kenneth Galbraith and historian C. Northcote Parkinson, who’s 1957 book Parkinson’s Law and Other Studies in Administration was particularly influential in spelling out the ever-increasing complexity that any bureaucratic organization will create.² Finally, judging by the focus on modularity in Conway’s writing, it seems clear he was also inspired by Herbert Simon’s work, in particular his “Architecture of Complexity” paper and the Parable of Two Watchmakers (which I wrote about earlier).

Parkinson aside (who did so mostly in jest), very few have the chutzpah to actually name a law after themselves and Conway wasn’t responsible for the law’s coining. That came a few months after the “Committees” article was published from a fan and fellow computer scientist George Mealy. In his paper for the July 1968 National Symposium on Modular Programming (which I seem to be one of the very few people to have actually tracked down), Mealy examined four bits of “conventional wisdom” that surrounded the development of software systems at the time. Number four came directly from Conway: “Systems resemble the organizations that produced them.” The naming comes 3 pages in:

Our third aphorism-“if one programmer can do it in one year, two programmers can do it in two years”-is merely a reflection of the great difficulty of communication in a large organization. The crux of the problem of giganticism [sic] and system fiasco really lies in the fourth dogma. This — “systems resemble the organizations that produced them” — has been noticed by some of us previously, but it appears not to have received public expression prior to the appearance of Dr. Melvin E. Conway’s penetrating article in the April 1968 issue of Datamation. The article was entitled “How Do Committees Invent?”. I propose to call my preceding paraphrase of the gist of Conway’s paper “Conway’s Law”.

While most, including Conway on his own website, credit Fred Brooks’ 1975 Mythical Man Month with naming the law, it seems that Mealy deserves the credit (though Brooks’ book is surely the reason so many know about Conway’s important concept).³Back to the questions at hand: Why does this happen, where does it happen, and what can we do about it?

Let’s start with the why. This seems like it should be easy to answer, but it’s actually not. The answer starts with some basics of hierarchy and modularity that Herbert Simon offered up in his Parable of Two Watchmakers: Mainly, breaking a system down into sets of modular subsystems seems to be the most efficient design approach in both nature and organizations. For that reason we tend to see companies made up of teams which are then made up of more teams and so-on. But that still doesn’t answer the question of why they tend to design systems in their image. To answer that we turn to some of the more recent research around the “mirroring hypothesis,” which (in simplified terms) is an attempt to prove out Conway’s Law. Carliss Baldwin, a professor at Harvard Business School, seems to be spearheading much of this work and has been an author on two of the key papers on the subject. Most recently, “The mirroring hypothesis: theory, evidence, and exceptions” is a treasure trove of information and citations. Her theory as to why mirroring occurs is essentially that it makes life easier for everyone who works at the company:

The mirroring of technical dependencies and organizational ties can be explained as an approach to organizational problem-solving that conserves scarce cognitive resources. People charged with implementing complex projects or processes are inevitably faced with interdependencies that create technical problems and conflicts in real time. They must arrive at solutions that take account of the technical constraints; hence, they must communicate with one another and cooperate to solve their problems. Communication channels, collocation, and employment relations are organizational ties that support communication and cooperation between individuals, and thus, we should expect to see a very close relationship—technically a homomorphism—between a network graph of technical dependencies within a complex system and network graphs of organizational ties showing communication channels, collocation, and employment relations.

It’s all still a bit circular, but the argument that in most cases a mirrored product is both reasonably optimal from a design perspective (since organizations are structured with hierarchy and modularity) and also cuts down the cognitive load by making it easy for everyone to understand (because it works like an org they already understand) seems like a reasonable one.⁴ The paper then goes on to survey the research to understand what kind of industries mirroring is most likely to occur and the answer seems to be everywhere. They found evidence from across expected places like software and semiconductors, but also automotive, defense, sports, and even banking and construction. For what it’s worth, I’ve also seen it across industries in marketing projects throughout my own career.

That’s the why and the where, which only leaves us with the question of what an organization can do about it. Here there seem to be a few different approaches. The first one is to do nothing. After all, it may well be the best way to design a system for that organization/problem. The second is to find an appropriate balance. If you buy the idea that some part of mirroring/Conway’s Law is simply about making it easier to understand and maintain systems, than its probably good to keep some mirroring. But it doesn’t need to be all or nothing. In the aforementioned paper, Baldwin and her co-authors have a nice little framework for thinking about different approaches to mirroring depending on the kind of business:

As you see at the bottom of the framework you have option three: “Strategic mirror-breaking.” This is also sometimes called an “inverse Conway maneuver” in software engineering circles: An approach where you actually adjust your organizational model in order to change the way your systems are architected.⁵ Basically you attempt to outline the type of system design you want (most of the time it’s about more modularity) and you back into an org structure that looks like that.

In case it seems like all this might be academic, the architecture of organizations has been shown to have a fundamental on the company’s ability to innovate. Tim Harford recently wrote a piece for the Financial Times that heavily quotes a 1990 paper by an economist named Rebecca Henderson titled “Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms.” The paper outlines how the organizational structure of companies can prevent them from innovating in specific ways. Most specifically the paper describes the kind of innovation that keeps the shape of the previous generation’s product, but completely rewires it: Think film cameras to digital or the Walkman to MP3 players. Here’s Harford describing the idea:

Dominant organisations are prone to stumble when the new technology requires a new organisational structure. An innovation might be radical but, if it fits the structure that already existed, an incumbent firm has a good chance of carrying its lead from the old world to the new.

A case study co-authored by Henderson describes the PC division as “smothered by support from the parent company”. Eventually, the IBM PC business was sold off to a Chinese company, Lenovo. What had flummoxed IBM was not the pace of technological change — it had long coped with that — but the fact that its old organisational structures had ceased to be an advantage. Rather than talk of radical or disruptive innovations, Henderson and Clark used the term “architectural innovation”.

Like I said before, it’s all quite circular. It’s a bit like the famous quote “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.” Companies organize themselves and in turn design systems that mirror those organizations which in turn further solidify the organizational structure that was first put in place. Conway’s Law is more guiding principle than physical property, but it’s a good model to keep in your head as you’re designing organizations or systems (or trying to disentangle them).

Footnotes:

1. He was writing mostly about software systems, but as you’ll see it’s much more broadly applicable.↑
2. Here’s how Conway explains Parkinson’s complexity concept: “As each new brand is created it justifies itself by challenging the established order. Thus, after a while, the organization is fully occupied in internal political warfare.”↑
3. As an aside, it’s hard not to think that Mealy’s third point about what one programmer can do versus two sounds a lot like Fred Brooks’ “mythical man month” concept. Mealy worked with Brooks on OS/360 and in the book Computer Pioneers by J.A.N. Lee it’s mentioned that Mealy’s Law was also named at the 1968 symposium: “There is an incremental programmer who, when added to a project, consumes more resources than are made available.” Sounds pretty similar to me.↑
4. There’s a very interesting point about the role of “information hiding” in pushing companies into Conway’s Law. Essentially the idea is that companies naturally hide information within teams or departments for the sake of simplicity across the rest of the company. It would only make things more complicated, for instance, if the finance team exposed the detailed rules of GAAP accounting instead of just distributing a monthly GAAP accounting report. “Information hiding as a means of controlling complexity is a fundamental principle underlying the mirroring hypothesis. With information hiding, each module in a technical system is informationally isolated from other modules within a framework of system design rules. This means that independent individuals, teams, or firms can work separately on different modules, yet the modules will work together as a whole (Baldwin and Clark, 2000).”↑
5. If you’re interested in the idea you should check out the episode of Software Engineering Radio with engineering leader Kevin Goldsmith.↑

Bibliography:

• Arrow, K. J. (1985). Informational structure of the firm. The American Economic Review, 75(2), 303-307.
• Brunton-spall, Michael (2 Nov. 2015.). The Inverse Conway Manoeuvre and Security – Michael Brunton-Spall – Medium. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@bruntonspall/the-inverse-conway-manoeuvre-and-security-55ee11e8c3a9
• Colfer, L. J., & Baldwin, C. Y. (2016). The mirroring hypothesis: theory, evidence, and exceptions. Industrial and Corporate Change, 25(5), 709-738.
• Conway, Melvin E. “How do committees invent.” Datamation 14.4 (1968): 28-31.
• Conway, Melvin E. “The Tower of Babel and the Fighter Plane.” Retrieved from http://melconway.com/keynote/Presentation.pdf
• Evans, Benedict (31 Aug. 2018.). Tesla, software and disruption. Benedict Evans. Retrieved from https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2018/8/29/tesla-software-and-disruption
• Galbraith, J. K. (2001). The essential galbraith. HMH.
• Harford, Tim. (6 Sept. 2018.). Why big companies squander good ideas. Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/3c1ab748-b09b-11e8-8d14-6f049d06439c
• Henderson, R. M., & Clark, K. B. (1990). Architectural innovation: The reconfiguration of existing product technologies and the failure of established firms. Administrative science quarterly, 9-30.
• Hvatum, L. B., & Kelly, A. (2005). What do I think about Conway’s Law now?. In EuroPLoP (pp. 735-750).
• Lee, J. A. (1995). International biographical dictionary of computer pioneers. Taylor & Francis.
• MacCormack, A., Baldwin, C., & Rusnak, J. (2012). Exploring the duality between product and organizational architectures: A test of the “mirroring” hypothesis. Research Policy, 41(8), 1309-1324.
• MacDuffie, J. P. (2013). Modularity‐as‐property, modularization‐as‐process, and ‘modularity’‐as‐frame: Lessons from product architecture initiatives in the global automotive industry. Global Strategy Journal, 3(1), 8-40.
• Mealy, George, “How to Design Modular (Software) Systems,” Proc. Nat’l. Symp. Modular Programming, Information & Systems Institute, July 1968.
• Newman, Sam. (30 Jun. 2014.). Demystifying Conway’s Law. ThoughtWorks. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/demystifying-conways-law
• Parnas, D. L. (1972). On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules. Communications of the ACM, 15(12), 1053-1058.
• Software Engineering Radio. Kevin Goldsmith on Architecture and Organizational Design : Software Engineering Radio. Se-radio.net. Retrieved from http://www.se-radio.net/2018/07/se-radio-episode-331-kevin-goldsmith-on-architecture-and-organizational-design/
• Van Dusen, Matthew (19 May 2016.). A principle called “Conway’s Law” reveals a glaring, biased flaw in our technology. Quartz. Retrieved from https://qz.com/687457/a-principle-called-conways-law-reveals-a-glaring-biased-flaw-in-our-technology/

Framework of the Day posts:

• Conway’s Law
• Known Unknowns
• Pace Layers
• Parable of Two Watchmakers
• Pareto Principle (aka 80/20 Rule)
• Variance Spectrum

Most people know the Pareto principle by it’s more common name, “the 80/20 rule.” It’s story starts in the late-1800s with the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. Responsible for a number of economic breakthroughs, Pareto became particularly interested in the distribution of income. After collecting wealth and tax data from a variety of countries, he noticed a consistent pattern in the distribution. Originally outlined in his first major work, Cours d’Économie Politique¹, Pareto had discovered that across countries 20 percent of the population seemed to control around 80 percent of the income.

Source: “The Curve of the Distribution of Wealth.” History of Economic Ideas 17.1 (Translation: 2009)

Although he had uncovered the phenomena, Pareto wasn’t sure why it existed:²

It is not easy to understand a priori how and why this should happen. As I said in my Cours, it seems to me probable that the income curve is in some way dependent on the law of the distribution of the mental and physiological qualities of a certain number of individuals. If such is really the case, we can catch a glimpse of the reason why approximately the same law is to be found in the most varied manifestations of human activity. But, instead of seeing those phenomena only in dim outlines, we would like to perceive them clearly and precisely, and up till now I have not succeeded in doing so.

The specifics of 80 and 20 aren’t critical, the point is that a small portion of a specific population tends to account for a large portion of some other resource. As time has gone on we’ve found evidence for Pareto’s discovery in more and more systems: Just a few scientific papers grab most of the citations, a small portion of a company’s customers tend be responsible for large percent of its profits, a tiny number of users tends to make up the vast majority of the customer service requests, and a “vital few” factory defects account for the bulk of the production issues.

It’s that last one about factories that we have to thank for the popularity of the Pareto principle. Quality control pioneer (and catchy name-coiner) Joseph Juran explains:

It was during the late 1940s, when I was preparing the manuscript for Quality Control Handbook, First Edition, that I was faced squarely with the need for giving a short name to the universal. In the resulting write-up under the heading “Maldistribution of Quality Losses,” I listed numerous instances of such maldistribution as a basis for generalization. I also noted that Pareto had found wealth to be maldistributed. In addition, I showed examples of the now familiar cumulative curves, one for maldistribution of wealth and the other for maldistribution of quality losses. The caption under these curves reads “Pareto’s principle of unequal distribution applied to distribution of wealth and to distribution of quality losses.”

Juran went on to become an important management thinker and the Pareto principle spread through industry and the broader world.³ At this point the 80/20 rule has become a basic and helpful mental model that many managers understand.

But we still haven’t answered Pareto’s original question: What it is about human nature that causes this massive imbalance to continually emerge in such a variety of systems? To answer that we turn to Albert-László Barabási and his study of networks. As the web was emerging, Barabási and his colleagues were busy analyzing the new and rich datasets it generated. Every time they dug in, the same odd pattern emerged.

In one of their studies, the team set up a crawler to look at how different web pages linked to each other. Expecting to see a bell curve, they instead spotted something very different: “the network our robot brought back from its journey had many nodes with a few links only, and a few hubs with an extraordinarily large number of links.” Barabási continues, “The biggest surprise came when we tried to fit the histogram of the node connectivity on a so-called log-log plot. The fit told us that the distribution of links on various Webpages precisely follows a mathematical expression called a power law.”

What made this discovery so important was that power laws are a signal that you’re not working with random data. If you chart random (or more precisely disconnected) data points, like the heights of people in your town or the scores of students on a test, you see a bell curve distribution. However, if you chart non-random interdependent data points you get the power curve that Barabási kept seeing:

Power laws rarely emerge in systems completely dominated by a roll of the dice. Physicists have learned that most often they signal a transition from disorder to order. Thus the power laws we spotted on the Web indicated, for the first time in precise mathematical terms, that real networks are far from random. Complex networks finally started to speak to us in a language that scientists trained in self-organization and complexity could finally understand. They spoke of order and emerging behavior. We just needed to listen carefully.

So we come full-circle back to Pareto, who once explained that, “The molecules in the social system are interdependent in space and in time. Their interdependence in space becomes apparent in the mutual relations that subsist between social phenomena.” The 80/20 rule is present in systems where there are self-organizing interdependent parts and its subject to the same cumulative advantage mechanics we saw with popular music. That’s why the pattern emerges so often in companies and markets: It means a huge number of forces are pushing and, critically, reacting to each other at the same time.

As should be reasonably obvious, the 80/20 rule has a number of important effects and implications for everyday business and life (many of which will come up in other models). First, understanding when you’re working in a system susceptible to the Pareto principle is critical. Once understood, being able to accurately isolate the 20 percent and find ways to make it less interdependent can fundamentally alter the balance of the equation. One of the simplest conclusions to be drawn from the 80/20 rule is that sometimes you need to fire a customer or an employee who is responsible for eating up the majority of your resources, as painful as that choice may be.

Footnotes

1. I had a shockingly difficult time finding translations of Pareto’s work. This seems to have to do with a few different things. One (and this is purely speculation), I wonder if his decision to focus more attention on sociology hurt his economics credentials. Second, and this seems much more established, the fact that he was recognized by the Italian fascists before he died seems to have sullied his reputation and potentially slowed down the translation of his work.↑
2. As an aside, this seems to be a big part of why he went into sociology. As he discovered the 80/20 rule he wondered what it was about human nature that makes this happen. His work in sociology seems like, at least from the reading I did, trying to answer that question in one way or another. Now I’m definitely no Pareto expert and this might be a vast overread.↑
3. Interestingly, Juran also recognized that the Pareto principle wasn’t well named: “Although the accompanying text makes clear that Pareto’s contributions specialized in the study of wealth, the caption implies that he had generalized the principle of unequal distribution into a universal. This implication is erroneous. The Pareto principle as a universal was not original with Pareto.”↑

Bibliography

• Alexander, James. “Vilfredo Pareto: Sociologist and Philosopher.” Ihr.org. n.d. Web. 17 Dec. 2017. <http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n5p10_Alexander.html>
• Aspers, Patrik. “Crossing the boundary of economics and sociology: The case of Vilfredo Pareto.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 60.2 (2001): 519-545.
• Bunkley, Nick. “Joseph Juran, 103, Pioneer in Quality Control, Dies.” Nytimes.com. 3 Mar. 2008. Web. 17 Dec. 2017. <https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/business/03juran.html>
• Chipman, John S. “Pareto: manuel of political economy.” English translation, available at http://www.econ.umn.edu/~jchipman/DALLOZ5.pdf, of ‘Pareto: Manuel di d’Économie Politique’ in Dictionnaire des grandes oeuvres d’économise, X Greffe, j. Lallemant and M De Vroey (eds), Paris: Dalloz (2002): 424-433.
• Cirillo, Renato. “Was Vilfredo Pareto Really a ‘Precursor’ of Fascism.?.” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 42.2 (1983): 235-246.
• Crawford, Walt. “Exceptional institutions: libraries and the Pareto principle.” American Libraries 32.6 (2001): 72-74.
• Edgeworth, F. Y., and Vilfredo Pareto. “Controversy Between Pareto and Edgeworth.” Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia 67.3 (2008): 425-440.
• Hazlitt, Henry. “Pareto’s Picture of Society: His Monumental Work Covers an Enormous Field of Knowledge.” New York Times (May 26, 1935).
• Juran, Joseph M. “Pareto, lorenz, cournot, bernoulli, juran and others.” (1950).
• Juran, Joseph, and A. Blanton Godfrey. “Quality handbook.” Republished McGraw-Hill (1999).
• Juran, Joseph M. “The non-Pareto principle; mea culpa.” Quality Progress 8.5 (1975): 8-9.
• Juran, Joseph M. “Universals in management planning and controlling.” Management Review 43.11 (1954): 748-761.
• Koch, Richard. The 80/20 principle: the secret to achieving more with less. Crown Business, 2011.
• Lopreato, Joseph. “Notes on the work of Vilfredo Pareto.” Social Science Quarterly (1973): 451-468.
• Mandelbrot, Benoit, and Richard L. Hudson. The Misbehavior of Markets: A fractal view of financial turbulence. Basic books, 2007.
• Moore, H. L. “Cours d’Économie Politique. By VILFREDO PARETO, Professeur à l’Université de Lausanne. Vol. I. Pp. 430. I896. Vol. II. Pp. 426. I897. Lausanne: F. Rouge.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 9.3 (1897): 128-131.
• Pareto, Vilfredo. “Supplement to the Study of the Income Curve.” Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia 67.3 (2008): 441-451.
• Pareto, Vilfredo. “The Curve of the Distribution of Wealth.” History of Economic Ideas 17.1 (2009): 132-143.
• Pareto, Vilfredo. The mind and society: Trattato di sociologia generale. AMS Press, 1935.
• Tarascio, Vincent J. “The Pareto law of income distribution.” Social Science Quarterly (1973): 525-533.

Framework of the Day posts:

• Conway’s Law
• Known Unknowns
• Pace Layers
• Parable of Two Watchmakers
• Pareto Principle (aka 80/20 Rule)
• Variance Spectrum

This framework is a little different than the ones before as it doesn’t come with a nice diagram or four box. Rather, the Parable of Two Watchmakers is just that: A story about two people putting together complicated mechanical objects. The parable comes from a paper called “The Architecture of Complexity” written by Nobel-prize winning economist Herbert Simon (you might remember Simon from the theory of satisficing). Beyond being a brilliant economist, Simon was also a major thinker in the worlds of political science, psychology, systems, complexity, and artificial intelligence (in doing this research he climbed up the ranks of my intellectual heroes).

In his 1962 he laid out an argument for how complexity emerges, which is largely focused on the central role of hierarchy in complex systems. To start, let’s define hierarchy so we’re all on the same page. Here’s Simon:

Etymologically, the word “hierarchy” has had a narrower meaning than I am giving it here. The term has generally been used to refer to a complex system in which each of the subsystems is subordinated by an authority relation to the system it belongs to. More exactly, in a hierarchic formal organization, each system consists of a “boss” and a set of subordinate subsystems. Each of the subsystems has a “boss” who is the immediate subordinate of the boss of the system. We shall want to consider systems in which the relations among subsystems are more complex than in the formal organizational hierarchy just described. We shall want to include systems in which there is no relation of subordination among subsystems. (In fact, even in human organizations, the formal hierarchy exists only on paper; the real flesh-and-blood organization has many inter-part relations other than the lines of formal authority.) For lack of a better term, I shall use hierarchy in the broader sense introduced in the previous paragraphs, to refer to all complex systems analyzable into successive sets of subsystems, and speak of “formal hierarchy” when I want to refer to the more specialized concept.

So it’s more or less the way we think of it, except he is drawing a distinction to the formal hierarchy we see in an org chart where each subordinate has just one boss and the informal hierarchy that actually exists inside organizations, where subordinates interact in a variety of ways. And he points out the many complex systems we find hierarchy, including biological systems, “The hierarchical structure of biological systems is a familiar fact. Taking the cell as the building block, we find cells organized into tissues, tissues into organs, organs into systems. Moving downward from the cell, well-defined subsystems — for example, nucleus, cell membrane, microsomes, mitochondria, and so on — have been identified in animal cells.”

The question is why did all these systems come to be arranged this way and what can we learn from them? Here Simon turns to story:

By all accounts Donald Rumsfeld was a man who didn’t suffer from a shortage of self-confidence. Whether it was Meet the Press, Errol Morris’s documentary Unknown Known (it’s also worth reading the four-part series Morris wrote on Rumsfeld/the documentary for the New York Times), or a grilling from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, he always seemed supremely satisfied with his own certainty. Which must have made the public response to what’s become his most famous comment all the more vexing. At a Department of Defense briefing in February, 2002, then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was asked about evidence to support claims of Iraq helping to supply terrorist organizations with weapons of mass destruction. “Because,” the questioner explained, “there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.”

Rumsfeld famously replied:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

While it’s a mouthful and the context shouldn’t be lost, there’s a useful framework buried in Rumsfeld’s dodge. It looks something like this:

(Give the whole article from the Project Management Institute on how to apply known unknowns to project management a read.)

Rumsfeld went on to title his memoir Known and Unknown, and explained his perspective on its meaning early in the book:

At first glance, the logic may seem obscure. But behind the enigmatic language is a simple truth about knowledge: There are many things of which we are completely unaware—in fact, there are things of which we are so unaware, we don’t even know we are unaware of them. Known knowns are facts, rules, and laws that we know with certainty. We know, for example, that gravity is what makes an object fall to the ground. Known unknowns are gaps in our knowledge, but they are gaps that we know exist. We know, for example, that we don’t know the exact extent of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If we ask the right questions we can potentially fill this gap in our knowledge, eventually making it a known known. The category of unknown unknowns is the most difficult to grasp. They are gaps in our knowledge, but gaps that we don’t know exist. Genuine surprises tend to arise out of this category. Nineteen hijackers using commercial airliners as guided missiles to incinerate three thousand men, women, and children was perhaps the most horrific single unknown unknown America has experienced.

Rumsfeld was obsessed with Pearl Harbor. In his memoir he quotes a foreword written by game theorist/nuclear strategist Thomas Schelling that introduced a book about the attack by Roberta Wohlstetter. Schelling wrote (emphasis mine):

If we think of the entire U.S. government and its far-flung military and diplomatic establishment, it is not true that we were caught napping at the time of Pearl Harbor. Rarely has a government been more expectant. We just expected wrong. And it was not our warning that was most at fault, but our strategic analysis. We were so busy thinking through some “obvious” Japanese moves that we neglected to hedge against the choice that they actually made.

And it was an “improbable” choice; had we escaped surprise, we might still have been mildly astonished. (Had we not provided the target, though, the attack would have been called off.) But it was not all that improbable. If Pearl Harbor was a long shot for the Japanese, so was war with the United States; assuming the decision on war, the attack hardly appears reckless. There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously.

In other words, unknown unknowns.

Outside of politics, the framework is a useful way to categorize risk/uncertainty in life or business. I got interested and dug around a bit to find the historical context for the idea, which led me in a few different directions.

Rumsfeld credits William R. Graham at NASA with first introducing him to the concept in the late-90s, though it turns out to go back a lot further than that. The oldest reference I could find comes from a 1968 issue of the Armed Forces Journal International. In the article “The ‘Known Unknowns’ And The ‘Unknown Unknowns'” about the procurement of new weapons. The article opens like this:

Cheyenne was the first major Army weapon to be developed under DoD’s sometimes controversial contract definition procedures. General Bunker put the process in perspective by pointing out that no procedural system can entirely eliminate “surprises” from happening during development of a complex weapons system, and that contract definition wasn’t expected to. “But,” he pointed out, “there are two kinds of technical problems: there are the known unknowns, and the unknown unknowns. Contract definition has helped eliminate the known unknowns. It cannot eliminate completely potential cost overruns, because these are due largely to the unknown unknowns.”

The term pops up throughout the 70s in relation to military procurement. Sometime in there some folks also start using the term “unk-unks” to refer to the most dangerous of the four boxes. Here it is in context from a 1982 New Yorker piece on the airplane industry:

Pace Layers

This one comes from Stewart Brand and is a way to explain the different speed various layers of society moves. The outer layer, fashion, is the quickest, while the innermost layer, nature, moves most slowly. Each layer interacts with one another as inventions and ideas get digested. As Brand explains:

The job of fashion and art is to be froth—quick, irrelevant, engaging, self-preoccupied, and cruel.  Try this!  No, no, try this!  It is culture cut free to experiment as creatively and irresponsibly as the society can bear.  From all that variety comes driving energy for commerce (the annual model change in automobiles) and the occasional good idea or practice that sifts down to improve deeper levels, such as governance becoming responsive to opinion polls, or culture gradually accepting “multiculturalism” as structure instead of just entertainment.

Brand’s inspiration for the framework came from an architect named Frank Duffy who encouraged builders not to think of a building as a single entity, but as a set of layers operating at different timescales. Duffy included four timescales: Shell, services, scenery, and sets (represented below).

Brand picked up on Duffy’s work and adapted it to a kind of proto-pace layer framework in his 1994 book How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built, expanding it to six S’s and including this handy diagram:

Brand eventually adapted that into the pace layer framework at the top in his 2008 book The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (the chapter on pace layers was edited and republished last year in MIT’s Journal of Design and Science). If you want more, here’s a great writeup from Eric Nehrlich on a conversation about pace layers between Brand and Paul Saffo. Nehrlich calls out this slide from the presentation, which is quite helpful for understanding how the layers work:

(The whole talk is posted at the Long Now Blog if you’re so inclined.)

The framework has been picked up and adapted by many, but one of the more notable versions for me comes from Gartner as a way to think about your enterprise software strategy. They break enterprise software into three “layers”:

– Systems of Record — Established packaged applications or legacy homegrown systems that support core transaction processing and manage the organization’s critical master data. The rate of change is low, because the processes are well-established and common to most organizations, and often are subject to regulatory requirements.
– Systems of Differentiation — Applications that enable unique company processes or industry-specific capabilities. They have a medium life cycle (one to three years), but need to be reconfigured frequently to accommodate changing business practices or customer requirements.
– Systems of Innovation — New applications that are built on an ad hoc basis to address new business requirements or opportunities. These are typically short life cycle projects (zero to 12 months) using departmental or outside resources and consumer-grade technologies.

Each layer has it’s own pace of change, lifetime, planning horizon, governance model, and many other unique differentiators:

All in all, the overarching shearing/pace layers framework (many layers which interact with each other and operate at different speeds) is something I’ve found useful in various spheres in addition to the society, architecture, and enterprise software examples above. Inside a company, for instance, you conduct various activities that exist in a similar set of layers ranging from long-term planning and brand building to quarterly goals or roadmaps to two week sprints to weekly exec meetings and then the daily work. It’s a useful way to spot where you’re overloaded with meetings (too many weekly check-ins, not enough monthly lookbacks) or understand where you’re falling down (not doing a good enough job translating the medium term to the long term).

Alright, let’s start with books. Since last time I’ve read:

• China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know (Arthur Kroeber): Long and probably way more detail than I needed, but offered an interesting glimpse into how China became the country it is. Definitely start with this podcast before you decide to read the book.
• Free-Range Chickens (Simon Rich): Simon Rich is funny and I needed a break after the China book. This is an hour or two of reading. You can also just start by checking out his humor writing in the New Yorker (go with Sell Out first).
• Jennifer Government & Lexicon (Max Barry): Two sci-fi(ish) novels by Max Barry. Jennifer Government is about warring loyalty programs and Lexicon is about mind-controlling words. The latter is better. Fun and easy.
• Men Explain Things to Me (Rebecca Solnit): Given everything that’s happened with #MeToo over the last year, it’s fascinating to go back and read this as it foretells a lot of what we’ve seen. Also, Rebecca Solnit has become a must-read for me and I’m looking forward to digging through more of her work.
• Born Standing Up (Steve Martin): Steve Martin talking about his life as a comedian (I did the audiobook for this one, which he narrates).
• E=mc2: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation (David Bodanis): This was probably my favorite of the bunch. Sounds dry, but it’s a fascinating account of an equation I didn’t really understand. Takes you through in a step-by-step manner (it literally starts with “e” and then “=” and so on).
• Thinking in Systems (Donella Meadows): I’ve read most of this once before, but I thought I could use a refresher. This is a foundational text in systems thinking and is actually easier to read than it first seems.
• Bad Blood (John Carreyrou): The story of Theranos. Couldn’t put this down once I started.

Now onto the links.

Speaking of Donella Meadows and systems thinking, you can find lots of her work at the Academy for Systems Change site. Check out her writing on leverage points especially. Also, here’s her iceberg model:

This New Yorker story by Patrick Radden Keefe on a Dutch woman who testified against her mobster brother is amazing. Her book, which was a bestseller in the Netherlands, just came out in English this week (I thought it was coming out later this month … guess I know what I’m reading next).

Despite it’s $120+ billion market cap, Adobe is mentioned shockingly infrequently amongst the top software companies in the world. This piece by Blair Reeves does a lot to tell the story of how the company has achieved what it has.

For a few years now I’ve had a personal policy to try to give people on the street asking for money something if I’ve got it. This article makes a good case that it’s worth doing:

Much more research exists on giving cash to the poor in developing countries. Jeremy Shapiro examines the effects of giving money to people in need through his work as a co-founder of GiveDirectly and as a researcher with the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics. At GiveDirectly—a nonprofit that, as its name suggests, offers cash with no strings attached—he worked on a study in Kenya; between 2011 and 2013, the researchers determined, the program improved people’s food security, allowed them to buy other crucial goods (from soap to school supplies), and was beneficial to their psychological well being. Counter to my childhood lesson, recipients didn’t spend any more than they had in the past on so-called temptation goods like alcohol and tobacco. “The takeaway is surprisingly unsurprising—when you give money to poor people good things happen,” Shapiro said. “People eat more, they invest in businesses; you see people reporting being happier and less stressed out.”

Ray Lewis got inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame this week. 18 years ago he had some involvement in a murder. How he’s avoided talking about it and come to be revered is a story in and of itself.

TIL:

• The origin of inches and centimeters from E=mc2: “The conversion factors seem arbitrary, but that’s because they link measurement systems that evolved separately. Inches, for example, began in medieval England, and were based on the size of the human thumb. Thumbs are excellent portable measuring tools, since even the poorest individuals could count on regularly carrying them along to market. Centimeters, however, were popularized centuries later, during the French Revolution, and are defined as one billionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, passing by Paris. It’s no wonder the two systems don’t fit together smoothly.”
• Surfers in cold water can develop a condition called surfer’s ear, a condition where additional bone grows in the ear canal, blocking hearing and making them more susceptible to ear infections.
• The cells that helped with finding a polio vaccine (amongst many other things) were taken from an African-American woman in 1951 and the family is only now getting some control over the widespread use of their genomic data.
• Phantom Kangaroo is a report of kangaroos or wallabies in places where there are none.

This is a good visualization of roster turnover in this year’s NBA offseason:

Really amazing piece by Guardian writer Hannah Jane Parkinson on her struggle with bipolar disorder.

Podcasts:

• Reply All on QAnon
• All the episodes of Caliphate
• And then Rukmini Callimachi on Longform
• This episode of the Acquired podcast on Tesla is a fascinating deep dive
• American Fiasco is a short series on the disaster that was the 1998 US World Cup
• If you’re a total basketball nerd you probably already listened to the Dunc’d On Mock Offseason (part 1 and part 2). If you’re not, listener beware: It is like D&D meets fantasy basketball for nearly 5 hours.

This story about a fungi that drugs host insects with psilocybin has everything. This bit is my favorite:

And at some point during this work, it dawned on Kasson that he was working with illicit substances. Psilocybin, in particular, is a Schedule I drug, and researchers who study it need a permit from the Drug Enforcement Administration. “I thought: Oh, crap,” he says. “Then I thought: OH CRAP. The DEA is going to come in here, tase me, and confiscate my flying saltshakers.”

The article that eventually ended up with Elon Musk calling one of the Thai cave rescuers a pedo is worth reading. It makes a case for specialization that’s interesting:

The Silicon Valley model for doing things is a mix of can-do optimism, a faith that expertise in one domain can be transferred seamlessly to another and a preference for rapid, flashy, high-profile action. But what got the kids and their coach out of the cave was a different model: a slower, more methodical, more narrowly specialized approach to problems, one that has turned many risky enterprises into safe endeavors — commercial airline travel, for example, or rock climbing, both of which have extensive protocols and safety procedures that have taken years to develop.

I love these pieces by the artist 1010. Here’s one:

Last, but not least, who doesn’t want to read a profile of sports-mouth(???) Stephen A. Smith? Also, if you haven’t already , go and read The Awl on Stephen A., which includes the canonical Stephen A. Smith parody tweet (for those that haven’t heard him before, he has an uncanny ability to get himself into a frenzy about anything and a willingness to always take the other side):

Thanks for reading. Please let me know if I missed anything, feel free to share with others, and subscribe to the email if you haven’t already. Thanks!

Source: Your Politics Are Indicative Of Which Sports You Like, Business Insider

On July 1, 2016 DeMar DeRozan signed a 5-year contract with the NBA’s Toronto Raptors for somewhere in the range of $145 million. Last week he was traded for Kawhi Leonard, the NBA’s best perimeter defender and one of the five best players in the league when he’s healthy (which he wasn’t all of last year).

DeRozan was pretty upset about it. He may or may not have been told he wouldn’t be traded and, either way, it seems clear he wanted to stay in Toronto. They drafted him when he was 20 years old and he had hopes of retiring with the team, ideally becoming the greatest Raptor in franchise history (a feat made easier by the fact that nearly every great Raptor has escaped Toronto at the first opportunity).

So far this is all just NBA news you either don’t care about or already know. So why write about it? Because I can’t deal with the “this guy shouldn’t complain, he is making almost $30 million a year” conversation. Of course there were variations, but the gist is that because you’re an athlete and you (deservedly) get paid lots of money you a) shouldn’t have, or b) shouldn’t voice, regular human feelings (this is, in case you haven’t noticed, a stance also shared by our president).

Since I read Alan Jacob’s book How to Think, I’ve had his answer to this question (or a version of it at least) rattling around in my head:

But that’s because Gladwell [in his Revisionist History podcast episode asking why Wilt Chamberlain didn’t shoot underhand free throws], like many of us, seems to have unwittingly internalized the idea that when professional athletes do the thing they’re paid to do, they’re not acting according to the workaday necessity (like the rest of us) but rather are expressing with grace and energy their inmost competitive instincts, and doing so in a way that gives them delight. We need to believe that because much of our delight in watching them derives from our belief in their delight. (In much the same way we enjoy watching the flight of birds, especially big birds of prey, associating such flying with freedom even though birds actually fly from necessity: they need to eat. And yet we have no interest in watching members of our own species drive to McDonald’s.)

That’s nearly perfectly expressed. We need to believe in their delight because of our delight and we can’t stand to think we care more about winning or losing than they do. Or, as my friend Jeff at DaBearsBlog put it, “fans think it should be honor to play pro sports because they all wish they could.” The thing here is it’s still just a job. If we zoom ourselves out for a minute and replace athlete with employee and professional sports league with desk job, we start to see things more clearly. If you hold a senior role at a company there are many in the organization who feel the same way about you as you feel about athletes: That you have it easy and if they could just be in your position everything would be right in the world. Of course you don’t and it wouldn’t.

What’s more, while some of us may have found a way to practice our passion at work (I feel pretty lucky in that regard much of the time), it’s only natural to have moments where we don’t feel like doing the things required of us or can’t find the excitement we know is there somewhere. It’s a normal part of doing the same thing everyday, which is what it means to be a professional at anything. (An interesting analog is the surprising number of startup founders I’ve met who are completely clinical about the industry in which they start their companies. They don’t need to care about the space as long as it offers the right market conditions.)

Getting back to the start, there are two main things people say about professional athletes that get under my skin: They’re rich so they should get over it and they should have known when they signed a contract. Let’s take these one at a time.

They’re rich so they should get over. While it’s true they make an unbelievable amount of money, that can create a whole new set of things to deal with that many of us can’t imagine. There’s lots of documentation that suggests after a certain point money stops making you happier. What’s more, they surely will eventually get over it, but sometimes that takes some time (try to remember back to how effective it was when someone told you “you’d get over it” after what felt like a momentous breakup). DeMarcus Cousins, a superstar NBA player who has earned around $80 million in his career but was forced to take a low-money short-term contract this season after getting hurt put this perfectly recently. When asked whether he was nervous through the free agency process, Cousins answered, “Have you ever been unemployed? Were you nervous then? Alright, that answers the question.”

They should have known when then they signed a contract. Here, again, it’s easy to turn back to all of our regular job experience. Most of us in America are at-will employees, meaning we can be fired at any time for essentially any reason. Despite the fact that we all sign an at-will employment agreement, people are frequently shocked when they’re fired, whether there is good reason or not. Do we wonder why they’re so surprised? Of course not. Sure DeRozan wasn’t fired, but he can still be surprised and sad and frustrated that it happened.

Last, but not least, there’s a much bigger story here about professional sports, money, power, and race. The NBA is a very progressive league, but even there you can’t get away from fan loyalty sitting with teams instead of players. And I’m not advocating it should, that’s the fun of watching sports: You live and die with your squad (there’s a famous Seinfeld joke about rooting for laundry). However, we can enjoy the game and our teams while not questioning the humanity of the athletes who make the whole thing possible. The NBA has made huge strides in becoming a player-centric league, but fan conversations are still lagging behind.

My talk from Percolate’s Transition Conference in SF is online now. It’s all about applying the theory of constraints from the book The Goal to marketing’s bottlenecks. We’re putting on Transition London in two weeks. If you’re interested in joining us there, please get in touch.

One more thing from me: I was interviewed on Paul McEnany’s excellent Real Famous podcast (iTunes, PocketCasts, Stitcher). I can’t listen to my own voice for that long, but people have told me they enjoy it.

It was a great week for longform. Here are my four favorite pieces:

• The Cut had this totally crazy story of an NYC socialite grifter who went by the name Anna Delvey. “Anna looked at the soul of New York and recognized that if you distract people with shiny objects, with large wads of cash, with the indicia of wealth, if you show them the money, they will be virtually unable to see anything else. And the thing was: It was so easy.”
• The craziest story in sports this week was easily this Ringer piece about Bryan Colangelo, President of Basketball Operations for NBA Philadelphia 76ers, being connected to a set of strange anonymous Twitter accounts. The handles tweeted inside info from the team and bad-mouthed Joel Embiid, the 24-year-old center they just paid $150 million. I legitimately can’t think of another story like this in sports. The Sixers are “investigating” and most expect Colangelo to be fired, although internet sleuths have zeroed in on his wife as the likely culprit, not him. (As an aside, the Sixers were also at the center of what may be the second strangest story of this NBA season: How Markelle Fultz, the number one pick in the 2017 draft, managed to forget how to shoot.)
• Speaking of the the NBA, I’ve been waiting for someone to write a definitive story of how the NBA came to be a “pace-and-space” league full of threes, layups, and free throws. ESPN’s Kevin’s Arnovitz and Pelton are the men for the job: “Through much of the ’90s, a basketball possession was commandeered by a coach on the sideline who shouted the set to the point guard, who transmitted that play call to the other four players on the floor. But today’s fast-paced NBA teams have tossed away most of the playbook in favor of a series of basic principles and patterns that empower the guys on the floor to make decisions based on feel. Gentry, whose teams were ranked in the bottom half of the league in pace five times in his six seasons as a head coach before his arrival in Phoenix to join D’Antoni’s staff, is himself a convert.”
• The New Yorker profile of John Feeley, ex-Ambassador to Panama, is yet another story of a smart and capable person who has left government because of a combination of incompetence and purposefully harmful policies from the Trump administration.

You know Maslow’s Pyramid? Of course you do. Well, it turns out that the pyramid didn’t come from him at all and, in fact, it disagrees with a lot of what his theory had to say. This comes from a new paper “Who Built Maslow’s Pyramid? A History of the Creation of Management Studies’ Most Famous Symbol and Its Implications for Management Education” which Ed Batista highlighted on Twitter. Here’s quote from the paper:

We identity three specific negative effects in this regard: that the pyramid is a poor representation of Maslow’s [hierarchy of needs]; that the preoccupation with the pyramid obscures the context within which the theory was created and that by focusing exclusively on the pyramid, we miss the other contributions that Maslow’s thinking can make to management studies.

The paper’s authors even put together this handy video explainer.

Steve Kerr is back in the NBA Finals coaching the Golden State Warriors. Last week he had some strong comments about the NFL’s anthem decision. If you’re curious, the Times had a good profile of Kerr last year that tells the story of the assassination of his father in Beirut in the 1980s.

The iconic Ali/Liston photo turned 53 last week.

Favorite podcast episodes:

• a16z episode with Brian Arthur: Arthur is a Sante Fe institute guy and the author of the excellent The Nature of Technology, which offers a non-Darwinian evolutionary theory for all tech. It also turns out he’s the guy who introduced the idea of lock-in in his 1989 paper “Competing technologies, increasing returns, and lock-in by historical events.” The episode is pretty wide-ranging and covers a lot of Arthur’s work (he’s also done a lot around what he calls complexity economics).
• Another interview of Adam Davidson in my favorites this week. This time it’s talking about Trump’s financial corruption specifically, and money laundering generally, on The Josh Marshall Podcast.

I ordered a copy of the Toyota Production System, which includes this great inside cover timeline:

Speaking of books, here’s every book Bill Gates has recommended over the last six years.

Twitter pointed out this photo of Rocket’s star James Harden looks like a scene from a renaissance painting and, of course, there’s a subreddit called AccidentalRenaissance.

The New York Times had a good op-ed on how segregation worked in the North. And here’s Jelani Cobb on “Starbucks and the Issue of White Space“.

Would you go to a republican doctor?

Some good stuff in this New Yorker book review of The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies (the author, Ben Fritz, was also on an excellent episode of Slate Money a few weeks ago), a book about the history and current state of the movie industry. This bit about the size of the rental market really surprised me:

Suddenly, there were video stores all over America that needed to purchase at least one copy of every major new Hollywood movie. In “Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency” (Custom House), an oral history compiled by James Andrew Miller, Tom Hanks recalls the effect that this had on Hollywood in the eighties. “The industry used to be so flush with free money that it was almost impossible to do wrong even with a crappy movie, because here’s why: home video,” he says. By 1986, video sales and rentals were taking in more than four billion dollars. Income from home viewing had surpassed that of theatrical release.

TILs from this week:

• We bleed horseshoe crabs to test for bacteria in medication and Eli Lilly has announced they’re going to start using a synthetic for instead, reducing their need for crab blood by 90%.
• There’s a wasp that checks incapacitates a spider, checks to see if someone else has laid eggs inside it, removes if necessary, and lays its own eggs. (Strange wasps seems to be a thing I’m running into a lot. The Rebecca Solnit piece about Trump that I mentioned last week also included a bit about a parasitic wasp that was so diabolical it was named Set, after the Egyptian god of evil and chaos.)
• A “magic eye” poster is called an autostereogram: “An autostereogram is a single-image stereogram (SIS), designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional (3D) scene from a two-dimensional image. In order to perceive 3D shapes in these autostereograms, one must overcome the normally automatic coordination between accommodation (focus) and horizontal vergence (angle of one’s eyes). The illusion is one of depth perception and involves stereopsis: depth perception arising from the different perspective each eye has of a three-dimensional scene, called binocular parallax.”

My friend Tim Hwang launched the Trade Journal Cooperative, wherein you pay $60 a year to get random niche trade journals sent to you. I couldn’t be more in.

I was reminded of this great piece about Suck.com and its unique style of hyperlinking.

Mary Meeker presented her yearly state of the internet with lots of data.

From the China book I’m reading, thought this was an interesting nugget:

There were a few really amazing pieces I read this week:

• The New York Times Sunday had a long piece on the very shady conviction of Kevin Cooper for the murder of a family in California 35 years ago. He’s currently on death row and the state has refused to follow up the case with additional DNA testing despite a number of pleas.
• Another very strong piece from Rebecca Solnit on Lithub about Trump. Here’s a snippet: “The Trump family aspires to mafia status, a thuggocracy, but they are manipulable and bumbling where Putin and company are disciplined and Machiavellian. They hire fools and egomaniacs and compromised figures—Scaramucci, Giuliani, Bannon, Flynn, Nunberg, the wifebeating Rob Porter—and then fire them, with a soap opera’s worth of drama; the competent ones quit, as have many lawyers hired to help Trump navigate his scandals. The Trumps don’t hide things well or keep their mouths shut or manage the plunder they grab successfully, and they keep committing crimes in public.”
• Nick Paumgarten on the phenomena that is Fornite (I have to admit I hadn’t even heard of it before the article).
• Masha Gessen is as must read as they come these days. Here she is on embracing the idea of “ordinary” terrorists:
  “In another respect, the drive to identify reasons for committing extreme violence runs opposite to the very logic of terrorism. I am using the term ‘terrorism’ in its broadest possible meaning, to denote acts of violence intended primarily to terrify. This works only when the violence is unpredictable—when it’s senseless. This is as true of state terror and political terrorism as it is of a school shooting—especially one perpetrated by the shy kid who never seemed to say a word about girls. It is so frightening precisely because most of these shy, unpopular kids who are ignored and spurned by others will never hurt a fly. Nor will most other people, including most of those who claim to want to blow up the world, whether because they are not getting enough sex or because they want to live in a caliphate.”

This is from a few weeks ago, but I can’t resist a good piece about some gamblers who cracked horse racing in Hong Kong.

This episode of the podcast 80,000 Hours with computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg is really fun (if you’re into talking about stuff like the Fermi Paradox). I particularly liked Sandberg’s “Aestivation Hypothesis”. Aestivation is the opposite of hibernation (sleeping during the summer instead of the winter) and the gist of the hypothesis is that maybe the reason we haven’t heard from the aliens is because they’re waiting for the stars to die out so it gets cold enough that they can efficiently run massively complex calculations that would otherwise take tons of power to cool:

So if you imagine the real advanced civilization that has seen a lot of galaxy expanded long distances, once you’ve seen a hundred elliptical galaxies and a hundred spiral galaxies, how many surprises are we going to be there? Now most of the interesting stuff your civilization is doing is going to be culture, science, philosophy, and all the other internal stuff. The external universe is nice scenery, but you’ve seen much of it. So this leads to this possibility that maybe advanced civilization is actually an estimate. They slow down, they freeze themselves, and wait until a much later era because we get so much more. It turns out that you can calculate how much more they can get. So the background radiation of the universe is declining exponentially.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned here, David Grann is my favorite writer around. If you haven’t read his stuff it’s all amazing. Anyway, someone recommended I read his story about a “postmodern murder” which I didn’t remember ever seeing before and it’s absolutely amazing. I won’t give anything away, but go give it a read. (Despite how amazing it is, I must have read it in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, which I highly recommend. No idea how I forgot this one …)

I was reminded of this really interesting framework for thinking about organizational change:

Good piece from FiveThirtyEight about how a junk statistical measure called “magnitude-based inference” came to rule sports science. This is about as snarky as I would imagine a statistician gets: “It’s basically a math trick that bears no relationship to the real world.” BURN.

Like everyone else I enjoyed the Jordan Peterson takedown profile from the New York Times. Lobster Twitter was not happy with Mr. Peterson’s adoption of their favorite crustacean:

A TILs:

• Gambler’s Ruin is a statistical phenomenon that proves a bettor with limited funds playing against a bettor with unlimited funds (like the house), will eventually go broke, even in a perfectly fair game.
• The Tiffany Problem is a term used for things that lots of people believe aren’t true but actually are. It’s named Tiffany because despite everyone’s belief, Tiffany, short for Theophania, was a popular name in medieval England.

I ran into The Pudding’s NBA draft analysis visualization again. It’s very cool.

This is the coolest bubble video you’ll watch this week. (Unless you watch this one.)

Sad news: Eric McLuhan, Marshall’s son and a serious media scholar in his own right, passed away this week.

This GDPR/WHOIS situation sounds like a big mess. (But is it a snafu, a shitshow, or a clusterfuck?)

As promised, here’s an interesting snippet from the book I’m reading, How to Think on how we don’t actually “think for ourselves”: