Entrepreneurship is the science of selling change.

Change can arrive as a pair of scissors that cuts cloth faster, a gun that grants military advantage, or a computer that reimagines the economy. Change can be a service that cooks your food for you or does your taxes so you save thirty minutes of your day in perpetuity. Or change can be institutional.

Institutional changes reimagine the ideas that organize the way we live. Systems. Countries. Cultures. A new form of government. These twist the fabric of society. You barely notice them because they envelop your life like the water in which fish swim. Regardless of their impact, they don’t get a free pass over other types of change. Institutional changes need to follow the same lifecycle as products and services, going from idea to market.

All entrepreneurs start with an idea that they can pitch to their customers. This idea could be brilliant, but without a market, it’s dead on arrival. People buy an idea because it makes their life better. You sell your idea as a cure to an existing problem or a dream of a better future; It works best if it’s a bit of both.

Now there’s interest in your idea. You need to make it a reality. You find a team to execute this process, and you discover troubles you hadn’t bargained for. Your engineer is an opinionated hothead who doesn’t speak the language of laymen. Your salesmen promise things your builders cannot deliver. The most intelligent thinkers are the least vocal, and the vocal ones are persuasive while lacking reason. Despite the impossibility of the situation, you figure out ways to make this work. You grease the wheels and understand incentives, and get the machine running.

But the survival of a startup is no guarantee of its success. A startup is a fragile sapling that can be uprooted by the slightest gale or killed by the lightest frost. You struggle and canvass and raise funds to merely keep it alive. To see it make it to the next day. And another. And then another.

250 years later, after your name is a mere memory, the empire you created has taken a life of its own. But America, like any startup, began with an idea.

The sales pitch

Thirteen colonies of the British Empire operated out of the East Coast of the North American continent. They were founded in the 1600s and grew to maturity in the 1750s. Virginia was the wealthiest. Rhode Island was the smallest. Massachusetts valued its liberty the most. New York was the most cosmopolitan. These were distinct colonies with disparate cultures that rarely saw eye to eye on anything. But they were all united by two things:

1. The people considered themselves citizens of the British Empire. They did not have an American identity yet.

2. The colonies were essentially business enterprises.

The colonies produced agricultural goods that were exported to the mother country of Britain: sugar, tobacco, and cotton. Britain, in turn, had a new market to sell its own goods: tea, paper, and the latest in fashion. To an aging empire running out of space, this newly discovered continent was valuable real estate, leading to conflicts with the French and the Native Americans for control of the land. Britain dispatched its army to the colonies and fought the Seven Years’ War, ultimately winning it and establishing its American subjects’ rights through military force.

Ironically, Britain’s victory over outsiders was the starting point for resentment among its own citizens in the colonies.

The home country Britain had spent a lot of money on the war, and it needed money to maintain its massive army. On the other hand, the colonies prospered as a result of their newfound security. The obvious solution was to tax the colonies. There were taxes on pine wood, paper, playing cards, and even the tea that Americans drank. Scuffles and friction over these taxes were threatening to break into military skirmishes. On 16 December 1773, Bostonians boarded a British ship and dumped 300 crates of tea into the sea in “The Boston Tea Party.” The British government responded by encircling Boston with its navy, blocking commerce, and taking away its self-government. Such events disgruntled the colonial settlers.

Civil discontent might have dissipated with time, but the British government went further. They banned land speculation beyond the Appalachian mountain range and halted Westward expansion to maintain peace with the Natives. This decree annoyed some landowners who had invested big money in these lands: names like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson.

The elite had more to lose and more to gain. Apart from controlling trade, they had the funds to finance political opposition and were also esteemed political leaders. They transformed into the engine of a rebellious movement. But to build any serious momentum, they needed to persuade the masses, for whom political disturbance was more of a nuisance than an opportunity. The leaders needed a convincing story.

Hence the revolution began, as a purely economic idea sold by the elite to the masses. The substance of the complaint was economic, but you can’t write poetry and pamphlets about taxes alone, and hence the tone of the revolution turned toward the more universal ideas of liberty and self-governance.

The marketing department

At the heart of any successful movement is a simple contrarian belief. The simpler the idea, the catchier the slogan, the easier it is to forward by word of mouth.

The first message that spread this way was “Join or die,” the slogan of the Continental Congress. They urged the colonies to put up a united front and pressure the British government to concede to its demands. Their flag showed a snake cut into several pieces, each labeled with a colony’s initials: A picture that was a compelling and simple advertisement for the revolution. At this stage, there was still no call for separation. The colonists mainly wanted better representation and were considering a unified government that would stay under the King’s rule.

But while the message was still fuzzy, this phase set up the mechanisms of distribution. Benjamin Franklin was one of the most famous Americans alive at that point – an inventor, scientist, and a successful newspaper owner. Franklin had delighted the country with memorable slogans like “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Now, he turned his skill for catchy rhetoric toward persuading the populace to unite under the American cause.

The American Revolution was NOT a cause that the people rallied to unanimously. Turmoil and war disrupted the lives of ordinary working-class people, and it came at a cost. To join, they needed to be convinced that the cost of inaction was higher than the cost of rebellion. Part of the hesitation was from the inertia of having lived as British subjects for generations. The first colonists had arrived in America in the early 1600s, and the revolution started around the 1770s – barely a century and a half of independent existence. Compared to the religious awe that the royal crown inspired, drawing strength from a history that spanned thousands of years, the Continental Congress looked like a bunch of misguided upstarts.

But another reason for hesitation was also the lack of clarity in what the revolution actually stood for: Was it self-government, or fairer representation? Was it a unified government of the colonies, or a temporary alliance? Was it economic or just military? Even after military conflicts with the British, like the Boston Tea Party and the Lexington conflict, people didn’t know what they were fighting for.

You force a stand by creating a binary choice. Philosophy needs nuance, but propaganda needs simplicity. Enter Thomas Paine.

Thomas Paine was a failed businessman. His first wife and child died in childbirth, and his second marriage ended in separation. He was fired twice from his job as a tax collector. His life was a series of misadventures: He nearly died crossing over from Britain to America. When he was convicted by Britain of sedition, he escaped to France, where he was nevertheless imprisoned. Despite his sketchy track record, he did one thing that outweighed all his failures.

He wrote a pamphlet called Common Sense. Less than 48 pages in length, Common Sense laid out a clear argument:

• Monarchy is an illegitimate form of government.

• The authority to rule over the people has to be derived from the people through elections.

• There is no chance of reconciliation with Britain now that the first blow has been struck.

• The only solution is democracy. The way to act is together. The time is now.

Paine knew how to use language. He used poetic metaphors to inspire courage:

Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honor. The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.

And switched it up with bawdy images that people would share:

There are injuries which nature cannot forgive; she would cease to be nature if she did. As well can the lover forgive the ravisher of his mistress, as the continent forgive the murders of Britain.

Paine channeled the anger from the Boston Tea Party and the Lexington-Concord battle into a larger story that united all Americans. What Common Sense lacked in nuance, it made up for with persuasiveness. It was not a philosophical treatise, but a piece of cutting propaganda in the shape of a meme designed for virality. Its irrefutable logic appealed to statesmen. Its irreverent humor appealed to lay folk. It was read out in taverns across the country, it was passed from hand to hand, and people like George Washington began to refer to its “sound doctrine and unanswerable reasoning.” Common Sense was read by virtually every patriot in the colonies, selling more than 100,000 copies – the equivalent of about 15 million copies now – which would make it a wild bestseller. It was reprinted 25 times in 1776 alone.

Pamphlets like Common Sense and Alexander Hamilton’s Farmer Refuted were the revolution’s equivalent of blogs and newsletters. They were cheap to print and circulate. They were designed to build rapport and move people to action. But they also ended up creating a Schelling point – a vocabulary and brand – around what the American Revolution meant. They set the frame of the conversation by saying, “This is what’s happening, this is how it’s going to go, now do you want in or do you want out?” This forced people to take sides: being on the wrong side could prove an expensive mistake. You could join the revolution and become a Patriot, or you could stick with the old ways and be a Loyalist. There was no in-between, even if it meant splitting apart families: While Benjamin Franklin joined the Patriots, his son fought for the Loyalists until the end. Every conflict pushed more people toward Thomas Paine’s call to action and heralded the arrival of war.

The revolution was beginning in earnest. Now it needed an executive team to run it.

People skills

On paper, the revolution was a romantic idea. On the ground, it was a business venture.

It was a military operation that needed competent leadership to win battles. It was a logistics challenge that had to move people, artillery, cattle, food, medical supplies, and ships across vast areas. It needed leaders who would set an example and inspire people to fight. It needed a legal framework that the thirteen colonies could agree on and a diplomatic squad to seek help from abroad. It needed spies to gather information, and counter-intelligence personnel to sow discord. It needed postal systems, ammunition, and clothing. It needed money to pay for all of this.

The thirteen colonies had no shortage of people to solve these problems, and they sent their best men to the Continental Congress. But these were people of diverse natures who could hardly agree on anything.

The thirteen individual colonies were very different in their constitutions and governmental structures. They practiced different religions, and their economies were fundamentally different. Rich Southern states like Virginia and the Carolinas ran on plantations inextricably tied to slavery, while mercantile Northern states like New York were moving away from it. Massachusetts was itching for military action after being cordoned off by the British, while Pennsylvania, the headquarters of the Congress, was pacifist almost to the point of being a deadweight. Small states like Georgia and Delaware waited for the more powerful states to take the lead, so they could use their delayed position as a bargaining chip.

If the states had different philosophies, it only made sense that the Founding Fathers also had varied temperaments.

John Adams was eloquent, cerebral, and had an eye for talent. He picked Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence, and he nominated Washington to lead the Continental Army. But he was also abrasive and obnoxious: he misbehaved at the French court and almost ruined the American fundraising effort.

Benjamin Franklin was a polymath with a brilliant mind. But he was also painfully diplomatic, rarely spoke his mind, and spent most of his stint at the French court engaging in parlor games and small talk. It didn’t help that he was over 70 years old. Franklin’s relaxed approach drove Adams crazy, and yet Franklin succeeded in raising funds from France where Adams failed.

Thomas Jefferson was a walking contradiction. He wrote The Declaration of Independence, the most enduring political document of all time. But he was a painfully shy man who barely spoke three sentences together in Congress. He was young, rich, brilliant, and charming, but lived a personal life that was totally contrary to his ideals when it came to slavery. Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary, was the polar opposite of Jefferson. His brilliant mind laid the foundations for centralized credit and Wall Street. But as a person, Hamilton was acerbic, impatient, openly passionate for the cause, and shooting off at the mouth every chance he got.

At the center of all this was George Washington. A decorated military commander who showed up in uniform every day to Congress, he became the natural choice to lead the army based on his popularity rather than military talent. But in a battle of attrition like this one, that charisma mattered more than his strategies. His persona held people together through several hard years without payment or resources. Washington lost every battle he led except the last one, but that battle was the one that ultimately mattered. His sphinx-like gravitas inspired people and gave the movement legitimacy. He also did one other thing, but I’ll come to that later.

John Adams wanted decisive action and pushed people hard.
Franklin was relaxed, letting people take their own time.
Jefferson believed in the autonomy of states.
Hamilton argued for a strong central government with a President for life.
Washington listened, nodded, and intervened only when necessary.

How did a motley crew like this get anything done?

Because binding them together was a set of principles that went beyond their individual personalities, opinions, class, status, and ideas of government. Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, which started with “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal…” There was nothing self-evident about this truth. It was only by writing it down and speaking it aloud that it became so. The declaration was a vote for the kind of society they wanted to create, not one that already existed. To truly create a society where the laws reflected the principle of all men (and women) being created equal, it would take close to 200 years, but they did lay the groundwork for it.1

These men could work together despite their differences because they believed in this idea: that they could build a country where their children and children’s children could flourish. They believed in the American dream. On 4 July 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted unanimously in Congress, declaring the Thirteen Colonies as free and independent states no longer subject to British rule. The Founding Fathers committed to the idea by committing high treason, bound in honor for whatever followed.

A crash course in fundraising

Ideas don’t wish themselves into reality, and passion doesn’t pay bills.

To buy food, clothes, and ammunition, the Americans needed money. To go toe to toe against the most powerful navy in the world, they needed ships. They needed a powerful friend. That friend was France.

While France was enamored by the ideals of liberty and the heroic figure of George Washington, they could only fund a revolution at the risk of open war with Britain if they had something to gain from it. The American delegates who had recruited their own citizens for their business venture now needed to persuade angel investors about the merit of their idea. By trial and error, they discovered the right strategy. The casual and humorous Benjamin Franklin proved to be a better candidate to cozy up to the cultured French compared to the brusque and businesslike John Adams.

France also had an incentive to see Britain wounded, after losing the Seven Years’ War. Teaming up with a ragtag volunteer army that could break away from the dominant military superpower in the world would be the ultimate humiliation.

But when it comes to fundraising, timing is everything. Every startup raises funds after a visible victory. You release a new product, you get favorable coverage in the news, you close a business deal that locks in revenue, and when your company looks invincible, you close a round of funding. If you look like you don’t need the money, you get more of it. If you look like you desperately need it, you get nothing. The American revolutionaries did not have the luxury of time to play coy and promising, but they did need to show the French that this was a venture worth investing in.

When Benjamin Franklin approached France for help, the odds were heavily against the Americans. The Continental Army barely had 10,000 members in their ranks, many of whom were drifting away. Smallpox was sweeping the continent. The Americans did not have ships; they were informally trained, and they hadn’t won a single battle. Their commander George Washington’s reputation was mainly for retreating at the right time. Despite all of this, the French were still amused by the persistence of this fledgling country and their resistance to France’s arch-rival. All Benjamin Franklin needed was one victory to show that the Americans had a fighting chance.

Ships carried mail back and forth between America and France. Franklin waited months, hearing about Washington’s retreat at Brooklyn, dreading Britain’s imminent move on his hometown of Philadelphia. He hoped that Washington’s army could hold off the British from taking over the seat of Congress. One day, a courier rode in and announced to Franklin that Philadelphia had fallen. When Franklin turned away crestfallen, the courier added, “But sir, the Patriots have beaten the Loyalists at Saratoga.”

In October 1777, a tiny army led by Horatio Gates and Benedict Arnold had fought ferociously against the British at Saratoga. And they had won. It was one of the greatest upsets of the war, and it was all Franklin needed to evangelize the American cause. He pushed hard. Within months, France entered the war, and the balance started to shift in America’s favor. France did not send the decisive force under Rochambeau until 1780, but the gradual escalation in its military involvement forced Britain to slowly scale back and change its strategy from taking back the continent to focusing on the Southern states. Finally, in October 1781, French and American forces under General Washington’s leadership forced the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown. The war was done.2

Winning is easy, young man, governing is harder

Though the hostilities ended in 1781, peace had to be negotiated. A governmental structure had to be proposed and ratified by all the states through a constitution that preserved the Union without compromising states’ rights. It was only in 1789 that George Washington assumed office as the first President of the United States.

The Founding Team of a startup is important because it creates the ethos and culture that lasts after the team’s departure. A short-term project can be driven by the will of individuals, but a long-term institution must be a self-sustaining system that nurtures itself. America is exceptional in its longevity due to some choices made by the Founding Fathers.

First, they drafted a constitution that they knew was flawed. There was no clause protecting free speech. Slavery was a subject conveniently avoided, since many of the founding delegates were slave owners themselves. Voting was restricted to landowners. The vote for women was not even up for discussion. But they also embedded in the constitution the ability to amend itself. All of the above flaws were rectified through amendments, possible at a later point only because the Constitution allowed for it. By creating a flexible document, the founders acknowledged their fallibility as humans, and they granted future generations the possibility of making a better and more just society.

Second, the government was separated into institutions that checked each other’s power. None of the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches had unlimited power. The president was not a monarch or tyrant but simply one who presided over the working of a unified government. The laws had to come from the voice of the people.

Third, the government was founded on an unprecedented mythical action: George Washington had the option to wield absolute power, and he refused, not once or twice, but thrice.

1. After the victory over the British, when his popularity was at its peak, Washington marched to the capital and resigned his command.

2. When there was a conspiracy against the Congress and rumors abounded that Washington was to be elevated to kingly status, he made an impassioned plea to his soldiers to support the Congress. He wore glasses, saying, “I have not merely grown gray in the service of my country, but also blind”, driving his army to tears and dissolving their plans.

3. And finally, Washington voluntarily abdicated the presidency after two terms, though there was pressure on him to continue as President for life. By doing so, he legitimized a system that was based not on military might or the charisma of one person, but laws and authority derived from the people. These principles were enshrined in the Constitution, yes, but someone had to demonstrate them.

That singular decision is probably what elevated Washington to the level of a secular saint, with his name and likeness being imprinted on a hundred different things.

Civil war and the seeds of decay

And so America, the enterprise, went from idea to thriving reality.

However, despite all of that, America is a case study in how a startup atrophies into a sclerotic corporation given enough time. The seeds of the institution’s corrosion were planted into the structure of its government. By designing a centralized National bank that took on state debts, Alexander Hamilton gave the United States a competitive edge in the global market – but he also created a beating heart that gave the Federal government the power to affect states by throttling the economic arteries that connected them. Jefferson was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of states being beholden to a federal government, and yet there was little he could do to stop its accumulation of powers.

The federal government was an unemotional animal that used the word of law to grow in power every four years. Every President would arrive, try to do things, find their hands tied, and push for a change that gave the executive branch a little more power during their term. Then they would exit the presidency, leaving their successor even more capable of remodeling the shape of the government to their desire. The states could only watch the attrition of their autonomy in indignant helplessness, but there was nothing unlawful about this shift. It was inevitable.

In theory, the union was a way for the states to coordinate. Yet it also set up a hostile relationship between a federal government that represented the abstract concept of a “nation” and the state governments that represented the concrete polities that already existed. The states wanted out at one point. But the federal government derived its powers from the union, and a union designed to preserve itself would use any measure to protect itself against anarchy. Any measure, including military force.

The Civil War is remembered as Lincoln’s crusade against slavery, but the grounds on which it began were merely attempts to hold the Union together. The Southern States chose to leave the country voluntarily, and the President pronounced this unlawful. There were very good reasons for not letting the Union dissolve. A split union would lead to economic chaos, open military vulnerability to foreign powers, and set a precedent that would lead to further fragmentation of the states. But until the war, the Union had been a voluntary association of states. The war was a clear signal that this choice had expired, and that the Federal government would use its might to crush any suggestion to the contrary. The Civil War saw the first use of suspension of habeas corpus and civilian rights, under Lincoln’s war powers, and this set a precedent that unwittingly paved the way for presidential overreach in the future.

The war completed America’s transition from a loose federation of militarized states to an industrial military nation.

The US became a different beast after the war, a corporate entity that prioritized growth at all costs. It had already acquired almost all of the land that we recognize as America today. It now began to transform this land at a rapid pace, colonizing the continent in the same manner that companies buy out their competitors. It broke its own doctrines of neutrality and non-partisanship, engaging in military conquest and intervention abroad during the World Wars. After the establishment of International Law and with the advent of consumerism and mass media, America discovered that there were cheaper ways of wielding influence. It weaponized culture, technology, and art to dictate what people thought, felt, and spoke in a globalized pacifist world.

In 250 years, America built an empire to rival the one that it had broken away from.

Reinvent, or die

America is exceptional in its capacity to reinvent itself.

It’s easy to ascribe its success to capitalism, but even the economic principles behind this ideology were penned down by Adam Smith only in 1776, the year the American Revolution began. These untested ideas were persuasive, but they were of little help in formulating a practical financial policy.

Being a primarily agricultural society that dealt in tobacco and sugar, the idea that you could invent your way to the top was in no way obvious, especially for a new nation shattered by the Revolutionary War. America needed to exploit every edge it could find. Its founders, especially Federalists like Alexander Hamilton, understood the power of financial and technological innovation, espousing a ruthlessness that gave America a head start in the technological race. Ethics were secondary; the survival of the country was paramount. Hamilton turned this attitude into policy by explicitly encouraging people to smuggle secrets from England, which was then the industrial powerhouse of the world. People memorized the blueprints of textile looms and fled on ships to America, hoping to be rewarded for their technical espionage. This gamble paid off.

But America was not built on one lucky break. At every juncture – be it the dawn of the oil industry, the invention of automobiles, the inception of computing, the space race, and even now, with Artificial Intelligence – the country was and is willing to bet its entire identity on a new frontier. There was no sentimental attachment to a cultural legacy. Consider India, a smaller country with a massive population that lifted itself out of poverty by introducing innovation in agriculture. 60 years later, you’d expect that most agriculture would be automated in India. Except this isn’t the case. Farmers and farm-laborers are very reliable vote-banks in India, and shielding their livelihoods is a matter of political survival rather than benevolence. This might actually be a good thing for the millions of people employed in the agricultural sector in India.

But consider how America dealt with a similar dilemma in the Dust Bowl period of the 1930s. With increasing automation and mechanization, hundreds of tenant farmers were displaced and forced to move in search of other jobs, during the Great Depression. It was the beginning of a shift, from agriculture being a mostly manual to a fully automated profession. Despite the furore over this displacement, the mission was to find jobs for people in this new and transformed economy rather than safeguard the old order. Change was accepted as inevitable, and there was no attempt to turn back the clock.

This has happened over and over. Detroit used to be an auto-manufacturing hub, and now it’s part of the rust belt of ghost towns that have outsourced car manufacturing elsewhere. Computers and the internet disrupted a number of occupations, and Private Equity and its buyouts restructured organizations. With AI entering the picture, we are expecting another phase of disruption.

But despite every revolution, America has never protected a specific image of itself or an identity as to what its workforce is supposed to look like. There is dissent and protest, but eventually, change reinvents the national identity. This change is usually sold with frenzy as a matter of survival. Survival once meant military dominance, but in an era of international law, it turned into trade and financial dominance. If the goal is to survive at all costs, national policy will be prioritized to tackle the immediate risk. Survival matters more than prosperity when the two are at odds.3

The enshittification of the empire

How does this end? If the start-up is the nascent stage of a company’s life-cycle, then surely there are other stages in a company’s growth? A start-up matures into a machine that brings in revenue, grows into a stable company that grows profits, and turns into an incumbent that other start-ups then seek to disrupt.4

Every stage requires a different kind of leader. The birth of a company needs a visionary, like Steve Jobs, but to keep things going needs an operations expert like Tim Cook. The kind of person who takes a company from zero to one can be very different from the one who scales it. Every company ultimately has to resign itself to the fact that it is going to die. It can choose to die gracefully by returning its unused capital to its shareholders, which almost never happens, or it can choose to overpromise and underdeliver, leading to a flailing, throbbing death like the white whale in Moby Dick.

There’s a third option: Companies can extend their incumbent phase by continually reinventing themselves. They disrupt themselves before they are disrupted from outside. This is a difficult choice, because the company would have to cannibalize its own image and its successful product line to bet on something completely different. Betting your fate on a pivot can sometimes spell disaster, but companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Intel have managed to do it in the past. Others, like Nvidia, are doing it right now by taking the big bet on AI.

But while the idea of betting your identity on a new frontier applies to individual companies, what about the American identity itself? I’m no expert, and any speculation on where America will go from here will be a fairy tale at best. But if America started out as the world’s greatest start-up, and dominated the world as a corporate overlord, it is now the hegemon with creaking parts struggling to maintain its hold on the world, and maybe even to hold itself together. I don’t know what comes next.

The idea of America is something I find really inspiring. As a business, as an adventure, as a human endeavor, there’s so much romance in it. The inception of America was as an idealistic nation that stood up to an aging empire, a promise of a land where people were governed by accountable individuals. 250 years later, that dream is fading. Whether it can find the story, the team, the finances, and the timing to resuscitate itself remains to be seen.

Happy Birthday, America.

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References:

• The American Revolution, documentary series by Ken Burns

• Benjamin Franklin, documentary series by Ken Burns

• A short history of the United States by Robert Remini

• John Adams, miniseries based on the biography by David McCullough

• Common Sense by Thomas Paine

• Hamilton’s industrial espionage

• Offensive realism

Further reading and fun things to explore:

• The Presidents – a 4-part podcast by Shane Gillis, featuring Louis CK. Wildly historically inaccurate, and wildly entertaining. I fell in love with American history after listening to it.

• Hamilton, the musical. Probably my favorite history-related thing ever. Not very historically accurate, as I later learned.

• The Presidents, a huge and hugely funny article by Tim Urban at Wait but Why. It’s incomplete, and I hope the man finishes it for God’s sake.

• Lincoln, film by Steven Spielberg

Naveen and I have been friends for a long time, and one of the things we have in common is an interest in learning and discussing big ideas. Since Naveen started working in the US a few years back, those conversations have become less frequent. Naveen pitched an idea to me last month – “Let’s both read a book each, and catch up in a month to talk about it.” It sounded like a good idea.

I picked up “The Worldly Philosophers” by Robert Heilbroner. It’s a history of economics and the men who created the science. The book is told like a story of the eccentric characters and the historic times they lived through. From that lens, it’s easy to understand why they created their theories. Fascinating book.

Naveen picked up “The Beginning of Infinity” by David Deutsch. It’s an exploration of how humans learned to form models of the world they lived in, create explanations, and change their reality all through the power of critical thinking. It dives deep into topics in knowledge theory and epistemology.

After a month, when we decided to catch up, I thought of recording our conversation for our own reference. But the conversation turned out to be quite educational and entertaining, so I decided to publish it as a podcast. We might do more of this.

If you prefer to watch this on YouTube, here’s the link:

Fun fact: If you take a shot every time I say “and things like that” or “and all of that,” your liver will cry for help when the podcast is done.

If you do watch this, let me know what you thought and when you clicked away:

Leave a comment

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Banter
00:04:30 – The Worldly Philosophers Intro
00:09:00 – The origins of capitalism
00:19:54 – Adam Smith and others
00:24:05 – Karl Marx and the Russian Revolution
00:30:05 – Veblen on the rise of luxury
00:31:56 – Keynes, FDR, and the Great Depression
00:40:00 – What the Worldly Philosophers did and didn't do
00:42:18 – How to read critically
00:50:08 – How to internalize and use what you read
00:57:25 – Our college days
01:00:18 – The Beginning of Infinity Intro
01:02:42 – Conjectures and explanations
01:04:45 – The core principle of epistemology
01:05:45 – Rational Optimism
01:07:25 – Why read The Beginning of Infinity?
01:10:05 – Impact of the book on Naveen's life
01:15:45 – Why is the book named The Beginning of Infinity?
01:19:41 – TokCast
01:20:53 – How to use ChatGPT while reading
01:27:39 – How to ask better questions
01:35:54 – Vote of thanks
01:36:36 – Upcoming episodes (What books I'm reading now)
01:40:21 – How to read and retain more
01:46:08 – The problem with context-switching

Clarification: My explanations regarding Catholicism and Protestantism are not accurate (around the 10-15 minute mark). I realized this after the podcast was recorded. Catholicism reveres and venerates Mother Mary (not "worships", as I said). Ireland is predominantly a Catholic country, though I grouped it with England and Scotland as Protestant. I also said Martin Luther “King” started Protestantism in 1300-1400. It's actually Martin Luther, and the relevant time period was in the 1500s. I'm not clear on the exact theological reason for the Catholic-Protestant split, and you should look this up elsewhere if you're interested.

Cheers,
Adhithya

We walk past the Hongasandra metro station that’s been newly inaugurated by the Prime Minister. Hitting the road from the left is a canal from which wafts an unearthly stench, clogged with the filth of the city. Flanking the canal on one side is a medical college. On the other side across the road is the metro station. At times the canal regurgitates its garbage onto the pavement creating an unsightly mess that we sidestep. People walk to-and-fro, accepting this irrational juxtaposition as a completely natural part of their life.

Further ahead there are people setting up fruit stalls and selling tea. One woman has finished serving people lunch and is squatting on the sidewalk as she scrubs her dented pots and pans. She flings the dishwater on the sidewalk without bothering to see if it splatters on pedestrians like us who need to jump out of her range. Down the road is the ICICI bank. Next to the bank is a sawmill where trucks bring in tonnes of rosewood to be turned into wooden slabs. Apparently this high-scale operation isn’t profitable enough to pave the muddy front yard which looks like an ocean of yogurt after the afternoon’s rains.

We pass walls plastered with movie posters and advertisements that promise to make you pass any exam, from class 10 to degree courses. Next to them are hastily pasted flyers offering immediate cash on your credit cards, and job offers for pickers and packers who would be paid 14,500 a month ($163 as I write this) along with meals. The pavement has been dug up at one spot creating a gaping abyss, and there’s nobody around to explain why. We bypass the hole to reach our regular stall, order two teas, and wait with folded hands as the chetta makes tea for us. Mangy dogs trot past us, and I comment on the sudden uptick of rabies in the city. My friend (whose wife is a doctor) tells me what he recently learned: that the rabies vaccine doesn’t guarantee safety against rabies. Complete protection needs something called immunoglobulin injections which most hospitals don’t have, so they just inject the vaccine and hope for the best. Now I have one more cause of impending death to worry about (and if you live in India, so do you). A fat rat leaps out of the cracks in the sidewalk and scurries into the tea shop. After the initial shock at its appearance, we chuckle and revert to talking about the revenue projections of the business we’re running. The tea is served, we drink it from glass tumblers, pay a pittance, and walk back the same way as the metro passes overhead.

Back inside our brightly lit air-conditioned office with our Macbooks and Dell Monitors and carpeted floors and revolving chairs, we forget the chaotic world that exists outside, until it’s time to go back home. A fifteen minute tea-break outside our office is an adventure that takes us out of our comfort zone every day. Yet this is life for most Indians. Our glass-ensconced existence is the anomaly, and for most people in India, our luxurious workday is inaccessible though they can see it from the outside.

And yet, somehow, peace prevails. Despite living in one of the most visibly unequal regions in the world, there’s no revolt, no clamor, no blood on the streets, and such incidents when they do happen are usually just minor annoyances that interrupt the major annoyance that is living in India. For the most part, nobody minds. Why?

When they can see the riches around them, why do they tolerate it? Why don’t they crawl out from their catastrophes and finish us off? Why don’t little men emerge from manholes and attack the cars? Why don’t the maids who squat like frogs by kitchen sinks pull out the hair of their conscientious madams who never give them a day off or pay them as much as they pay at least the drivers? Why do the poor tolerate the rich?1

In other words, why isn’t a Parasite or White Tiger happening all the time? This is what Manu Joseph wants to find out in his book: “Why the poor don’t kill us.”

The short answer

When Manu asks why the poor don’t kill us, it’s tongue-in-cheek. The real question is how people are able to see wealth around them and resign themselves to living lives of utter penury. His question is specifically about people in extreme poverty, something he defines as “ancient people living in modern times.”

To illustrate this, he tells the story of Majhi, a man who loses his wife at a hospital in Orissa. When the hospital refuses to lend him a van, Majhi just picks up his wife’s corpse and starts walking home accompanied by his crying daughter. His home is 42 kilometers away. He stops occasionally, catches his breath, then picks up the body again, and keeps walking. This lasts for 12 kilometers until a good samaritan ends up giving him a lift. This is a story that could have happened 300 years ago. That it happened in the 21st century is what’s mystifying.

Yet there’s no dearth of stories like this: throughout the book, Manu packs ample anecdotes to convince us that scenes like this are commonplace, and having lived in India, his stories are amusing to me but not particularly surprising. The question persists: Why do the poor put up with this iniquity? How does this section of Indian society “accept its lot” and stomach this misery? Why is there no revolution?

The short answer is – revolutions don’t work the way you think. Revolutions aren’t initiated by the poor against the rich. They are crusades launched by the top 2% against the top 1%. When millionaires are dissatisfied with billionaires, when cultural elites are annoyed at being displaced by the nouveau rich, when the person in second place needs to regain relevance from the person in first place, that’s when they nominally take up the cause of the poor and agitate them into action. And this sometimes works and might even end up changing the world for the better. But reform is a collateral effect in a power struggle where the poor are just cannon fodder.

Society changes when the second rung of the social power takes on the most powerful. Usually, this second rung is the old elite. When they become the underclass in a new world, they try to restore the balance of power through a moral class, chiefly in the name of the poor. It works.

The long answer

If that was the entire story, the book would have been the length of a blog post. But along the way, Manu asks other seemingly unrelated questions that are interesting in their own right:

• Why are politicians so successful despite failing to create any social change?

• Why are moneylenders despised so much by their customers, and why do they dress austerely despite being billionaires?

• Why do the poor hate their neighbor who is slightly better off but admire Ambani’s multi-story house? (A Girardian idea)

• How was Aadhaar such a massively successful project and why did activists attack it despite its success?

• Why was education the last hope for the poor, and why is this hope receding?

• Why has right-wing politics become appealing over the last few decades?

By answering each of these questions with a stand-alone essay, he scaffolds his larger point – how we think the world works is very different from how it actually works. Each chapter starts with a compelling thesis and then takes you on a journey that combines personal anecdote with journalism. His decision to use stories over statistics is an intentional one. It works, because these are stories you would tell your friend over tea, who would probably have a heated argument with you, but now the idea at the heart of the story is in the mainstream and it’ll find its way into culture.

The ideas themselves are eccentric at times. Consider this idea for example: Indian cities are disgustingly ugly but this ugliness is what protects them from revolution. Mindless expansion and lack of planning has created living spaces that are eyesores. But what if this aesthetic degradation is an anesthetic that reassures the majority of Indians that they aren’t being left behind? Yes, they’re living miserable lives, but so is everyone else – what difference do your millions make if you have to wait in your BMW alongside a moped on a road with potholes waiting for the signal to turn green?

“Most nations try hard to look richer than they are; India, in plain sight, is a lot poorer than it is in reality. This municipal ugliness of India conveys to the poor that the nation belongs to them, that it has not left them behind.

India’s politicians and people have worked together to make Indian cities among the most unliveable and ugliest places on Earth. It is as though the poor have voted their politicians to power to ensure India is not so enjoyable to the rich.”

It’s a weird idea but that weirdness sticks, and you start seeing it everywhere when it starts to explain things you took for granted. For example, it explains why gated communities and societies are such an attractive idea to my generation. Fixing public infrastructure seems like a hopelessly daunting task for millennial and Gen-Z Indians. Instead they perceive the solution to be to create a microcosm their own by retreating into housing societies, pockets of beauty with access to amenities that shut out the unpleasant reality of a broken world outside.

The experience of being super-rich in India is one of the most overpriced things in the world. In the best areas of London or New York, you pay a premium for what the city offers, and what the city offers is available to everyone. In India, it is the opposite. The city is the problem, and you pay to shut it out, along with most Indians of your ilk.

If that’s the case, it explains why our air-conditioned office space and its haphazard surroundings can coexist with no contradiction. India is fragmenting into orthogonal worlds where each class lives blissfully inside its own mirage. The friction hasn’t gone away. It’s just hidden better now, and it’s always simmering under the surface.

What this book is and what is isn’t

For all it’s brilliance, the book’s ambitions are modest. It doesn’t intend to incite revolution or to solve the problem of poverty with an overarching thesis. The one solution it gives to create a more equitable society at the end of the book is so absurd that it’s almost laughable: Tip more. The idea is that tipping voluntarily will create a cascading effect that exchanges money and goodwill between the haves and the have-nots. Though it has changed my mind about tipping, I don’t see how that’ll fix our air quality or open potholes.

What the book does accomplish very well is to simulate the experience of living in India and articulate that experience without being judgmental about it. Manu brings his training as a journalist to bear on each story he tells: His coverage of the Gujarat earthquake is as grounded as the story of his lunch with one of Kerala’s richest gold barons. Early on he tells a story about the infiltration and invasion of housing societies by the working class, causing the homeowners to squirm in discomfort that their territory is being encroached. But then he flips it around in another story to show Gurgaon’s real-estate boom, told from the perspective of pastoral landowners who turned obscenely rich overnight.

His vignettes are the literary equivalent of RK Laxman’s Common Man taking a walk through a Mario Miranda cartoon. He’s a fly on the wall visiting commonplace scenes that compose the Indian experience and reporting on them through a lopsided lens.

The end result is an empathetic articulation of what it means to live in a country of contradictions. Whether you’re rich, poor, or somewhere in between, to live in India is to intuitively lane-switch between different worlds that all coexist seamlessly in perfect disorder (as writes here: “Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations”). To capture that paradox with language, sensitivity, and lived experience is a difficult task but this book manages to do that in a way that could make you feel seen. I don’t know if that was the intent with which the book was written, but that’s how it worked on me.

This is Manu Joseph’s first non-fiction book. Those familiar with his fiction might see echoes of themes from his novels. Take this excerpt for example, about the danger of stories and storytelling in politics, and why a good story will always win over the truth:

Why is it that a majority of the nation that lives in conditions worse than some animals in New Zealand, wastes its political energies on issues that [don’t matter]? Why don’t people riot for air-conditioned transport and water and electricity and free schools more often that they riot for useless abstractions? Some powerful forces are at play. The fundamental nature of stories and storytellers, too, are responsible.

A story is a very corrupt thing. A story is not an event; a story is an interesting event. And herein lie all our problems. What is interesting in a story is not essentially what is important in life. At times the two do meet but that is rare.

This is why politics is the way it is, and why democracy itself is doomed in the long run. Clarity is often inconvenient, while misunderstanding is a pleasurable massage of prejudice.

This monologue is essentially the condensed argument that holds together his novel “The Illicit Happiness of Other People” (which I loved a little more than the other one, Serious Men)2. To readers who enjoy his fiction, “Why the poor don’t kill us” is like a supplementary text that provides commentary on his fiction.

But one of the problems with this book is that it sometimes indulges in the power of a good story itself. Sometimes it asserts a thesis with such conviction that the reader wouldn’t pause to check if the truth could be different or if there are other alternatives. Manu recounts the time he interviewed Nandan Nilekani about the Aadhaar project – a massive technical and sociological achievement – and it’s clear that he’s deeply appreciative of the project. But while he recognizes the potential problems with Aadhaar, barely a few lines are dedicated to its criticisms, and they’re ultimately waved away dismissively. He says Nilekani was:

“not so sure about making Aadhaar mandatory for opening bank accounts or getting mobile phone service. [He said] ‘I’m not so hung up on that’.”

Except this is exactly what happened in reality! Aadhaar is slowly becoming mandatory for everything from Tatkal train bookings to LPG cylinder refills. There is no critical discussion of how good intentions can devolve into problematic structures. (I still think Aadhaar is a great idea, it’s the selective argument I had a problem with)

Similarly, Manu takes a contrarian stance that Facebook’s Free Basics program would have been a net positive to India. He claims that net neutrality was a lofty liberal ideal for a country where millions did not have access to any form of internet and asks: “A limited internet offered by one corporation, especially Facebook, was a corruption of the very idea of the internet. But wasn’t all this technicality subordinate to the fact that the poor have a right to some internet?“ But this “some internet” theory has a problem: In India’s neighboring country of Myanmar, Free Basics did roll out “some internet” to millions of poor people and the lack of guardrails in this free version supposedly played an important role in instigating the Rohingya massacre (as per journalists). Facebook’s lax handling of a basic product that only “poor people” used was one of Facebook whistleblower Sarah-Wynn Williams’ confessions in her memoir Careless People, which I had reviewed here:

Despite these flaws, the book isn’t politically biased. There is no clear stance between liberalism or conservatism or even idealism, but rather a dark hybrid of cynicism and pragmatism that forms the amoral “chalta hai” sensibility where anything goes. Consider wry observations like this for example:

The great actor Kamal Haasan told Tamils, if you accept bribes, ‘You will only get a thief as your leader.’ But the logic of Tamils has always been that they would get a thief anyway, so why not share a fraction of the booty.

There is no judgement in that observation, but there isn’t any hope either. It’s a shrug throwing hands in the air, as if to say, “That’s India, and I’ve seen it long enough to know not to hope for change.” Depending on how weathered you are by life, the book might come off as clever and amusing (as it did to me) or deeply offensive in its irreverence. Manu doesn’t pick a clear side in the political spectrum to root for – he takes shots at both the Left and the Right in equal measure – but what he tries to do is see why the world is the way it is, and explain why the pendulum swings from Left to Right in cyclical fashion.

Ultimately, that act of observation might be a more useful activity than taking a stance in itself. Because the task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.

If it isn’t apparent yet, I’m a fan of Manu Joseph’s writing. The first time I cracked open Serious Men, I was both awed and overjoyed that this kind of writing existed – prose that captured the poetry of Indian vernacular without devolving into cartoonish onomatopoeia. It gave me the confidence that I could write the way I talk and get away with it, though I had work to do to get there. I was convinced that I had discovered a subversive artist way before the market and expected everyone I knew to be talking about him soon.

It’s been eight years since then, and I know only one other guy who’s read Manu Joseph: my friend who introduced me to Serious Men in the first place. I haven’t revisited those novels because over the last 5-6 years, I’ve felt disillusioned returning to books I used to love and discovering that I didn’t like them any more. But after reading “Why the poor don’t kill us,” I feel like reading Serious Men again.

If you’ve never read anything by Manu Joseph before, this book is a great introduction to his bizarre universe of provocative ideas in bite-sized essays. If you’re already familiar with his writing through his novels and Mint columns, this book will be a fun ride. And if you’re offended after reading this book or have recommendations for other books that are similar to Manu’s writing, please let me know in the comments.

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Epilogue: Some quotes I liked

The book has some lines and paragraphs that really hit the spot. These were my top 15 favorites (some paraphrased and combined):

1. The poor in a rich country are like a bitter Reddit page trapped inside Instagram.

2. If there is anyone who wishes you well, wishes you quick and sustained prosperity, and a very long economic life, it is your moneylender. Because he expects the return of his principal. But then it is the nature of people to imagine friends as well-wishers and moneylenders as people who wish ruin. The fact, often, is the inverse.

3. Hours after the Indian government introduced its own tablet computer, as though in tribute, Steve Jobs died. There were no other omens.

4. Every four years, the world organizes a great festival to insult India. No other nation is more humiliated at the Summer Olympics than India… The very existence of Indian athletes of global calibre is not because of India, but in spite of India.

5. If you want to make Indians laugh, show them what Europeans call a ‘buffet.’ Even at a high-end hotel there, the spread is so small it would fit into a single Indian glance, which by nature is sweeping.

6. It is remarkable that Aadhaar and Al-Qaeda mean the same thing, which is ‘foundation,’ and it is even more remarkable that its neurotic foes have missed this tweetable fact.

7. The best measure of a nation’s wealth is the standard of living of its poor.

8. People dislike wisdom if they dislike the mouth it comes from. Many political ideas of ordinary men and women are shaped by their dislike for their spouses.

9. I enjoy reading the plans of the minister for road transport and highways – how very soon road travel from Chennai to Bengaluru would take only two hours. I did try to point out to him on Twitter that right now, Bengaluru to Bengaluru is two hours.

10. Most good people are just those who are afraid of being seen as bad.

11. If you are not in competition with a migrant, you are analysing the wrong migrant. Find the migrant who is your rival and you will suddenly realise you are not so noble any more.

12. All elites are like parents – conservative at home, where the stakes are high, and liberal elsewhere, an abstract place that is not as important as home.

13. Articulation of the conscience is a beautiful invention of the intellectual class. This expression is not chicanery; there is something deeply honest about it. Yet its primary function is to let words and confessions and good thoughts compensate for hard sacrifice.

14. Indians have always struggled to understand melancholy that does not have an earth-shaking reason. In their pursuit of grand reasons for their sorrow, India’s affluent often find the wrong grand reasons – like marriage, parents, capitalism, and caste. The fact is, many actual reasons for melancholy might not have any gravitas. Like insect bites, gut bacteria, bad food, sloth, boredom, and getting influenced by mad men philosophers.

15. The super-rich across the world face a general problem with capitalism, which does not serve its true masters well. There are no real products for them. They must shoot themselves to space or sink to ocean depths to see and feel something the rest of the world cannot. Overpriced bags, isolated giant silo-homes, and 100-metre-long yachts, too, might be just outlandish expressions of the fact that even though money can buy happiness, there is no kind of happiness in the market that only a lot of money buys.

“Ajja” means grandfather in Kannada. When I was born, he was 72. I could not imagine him young, handsome, with a head full of hair. The photos of his younger self hanging on his bedroom wall felt alien. I only knew the smiling, shriveled old man with translucent white skin who covered his head with a skullcap because the morning breeze gave him a cold at times.

Krishnajja taught me to play chess.

He didn’t teach me the rules. Neither did anyone at home. Chess was a mythical pastime my father whispered about in dreamy tones, as a way of remembering his father, who had passed when I was six years old. My father and his brother played chess at times, but I didn’t learn the basics from them. I don’t remember if I ever asked them. I tried and failed silently against the black-and-white Windows 95 system that would veto wrong moves without tsk-tsking in my face. Sometimes, I would watch the grown-ups play, but the activity seemed forbidding.

I must have been 9 or 10 years old when Krishnajja took me under his wing. His house in Rajajinagar, Bangalore, was an alcove of serenity – a small apartment next to a mayflower tree that bloomed bright red in the summer. I saw him play chess with a friend, probably, or he offered to teach me. The details are unclear. But one summer, when I had traveled from Ooty to Bangalore for the holidays, he made it his project to teach me chess, without explicitly telling me what he was doing. I was his experiment but also his joy.

Krishnajja’s house was a museum of small beautiful things – green glass paper-weights and snowglobes in a glass showcase, a bronze plate hanging on the wall depicting a dancing Nataraja from Thanjavur (where he’d taught at the Government Medical College), wicker chairs in the living room, a quaint old radio that he kept by his bed, and an adjustable back-scratcher he had made himself. He hacksawed the handles of ladles and spatulas in the kitchen, cutting them to the size of the surgical instruments he was used to handling. He cut little labels using white chart paper, which he then cellotaped to the sides of flat cuboidal boxes in which he stashed away knick-knacks and loose papers. He labeled them with a black marker – “Bank documents,” “Medical Reference books,” and my favorite, “Gajet matter,” in which he kept manuals for his TV remote and a couple of other electronic items. I corrected the spelling once, which he acknowledged but never changed.

One of those cardboard boxes contained his chess set – a chessboard that was aquamarine on the uncheckered side, a translucent plastic box, and a green polyester pouch. In the pouch was one set of chess pieces, solid and classy. The white king in this set had a broken crown. The other set in the plastic box was flimsy and cheap, with hollow pawns and razor-thin knights. I once broke one of these knights by sitting on it. He promptly fixed it with super glue, without uttering a word. His lack of annoyance annoyed me. It also annoyed me that he always preferred the cheap set when I pushed for the classy one. I needed a reason for his preference, but he never gave me one.

Endless summer afternoons were spent in the liminal space of Krishna ajja’s small apartment: nibbling on kulfis that my grandmother made, falling asleep on the cool stone of the grey mosaic floor, shooing away stray lizards that somehow entered the house despite Krishnajja’s vigil, eating mangoes with juice dripping down my forearm, watching all five days of test match cricket, drinking strong coffee that I can smell as I type, listening to the same songs over and over on his FM radio… and slow, slow games of chess. He moved slow and I moved even slower. Our games continued for hours, and we would leave them undisturbed to return to after lunch or dinner. Once, somebody upset a board that we had paused this way. That sound of clattering pieces was an audible tragedy.

I’ve played many people after Krishnajja. He wasn’t the best player I knew, but he did have a useful quality for a teacher – getting down to the level of his students without patronizing them. At first, he offered to play “handicap” matches by removing his queen from the board, but when my stubborn ego refused, he just played with more gentleness instead of crushing me like a fly. When you’re starting out playing chess, you’re like a child learning to walk. Sure, you know how to move your legs, but you don’t know the terrain of the board and you’re stumbling in the dark. It takes someone to pay attention to your every move and realize that what comes naturally to them is a foreign language of patterns you haven’t yet learnt to speak.

It needs somebody to care enough to waste time that way.

Krishnajja had taught surgery to medical students, and he would still explain the mechanics of the human body to anybody who had an aching stomach and an afternoon to kill. He would prescribe medicines to his younger brothers, who were all doctors themselves. The same didactic tone carried over to our games of chess. He would watch me make suicidal mistakes moving random pieces when the action was elsewhere, and he’d nudge me:

“Hold on a second. Take a look at all your pieces. What’s going on in every part of the board?” If I didn’t understand, he would ask, “If you do that, what do you think I’m going to do next?” If I still didn’t get it, he would make a clever move without rubbing in my mistake and act like it was his intention to teach me something new. “You see, when one piece is attacking two at the same time? That’s called a fork. You’ve got to watch out for the knight because if you don’t see it coming, you’re in trouble.” I think he never let me win a game out of pity. But he did lose sometimes to his brother-in-law, Mr. KK, who would visit on some afternoons. Watching these defeats gave me hope that beating him wasn’t an unimaginable feat.

Chess is all about the win, isn’t it? How fast, how brutally, how efficiently you can dispatch your opponent and bask in your superiority. That’s how I saw it when I was learning to play, and it was the wrong goal to have. But even wrong goals can serve as useful crutches en route to a better goal. I don’t remember how old I was… 15? 17? The first time I beat Krishnajja felt like graduation. But he was just getting started. After years of boxing with one arm tied behind his back, he could finally let go. Without the pressure of having to win, chess also became much more enjoyable for me. I started seeing personality in the way he moved his pieces, and I surprised myself with how I played.

There are people who commune with the chessboard. For them, the game is a sacred process. I am not one of those people. I was a reckless player then, and I’m a careless player now. I didn’t want to win as much as I wanted to see some action. I hated closed boards where I was suffocated for space, and victories earned in such games didn’t mean much to me. I didn’t want opponents to be stifled into submission – I wanted to silently coordinate an ambush in plain sight and then engineer one grand moment which would make Krishnajja say “Heegella Maadbedi ree…” (Don’t do like this and all, sir). I wanted to surprise him with a “Knight to H3” gambit like Ron Weasley, though he had never watched Harry Potter and never would.

His style of playing was stoic. He was engrossed with the board till he made his move, and then completely disinterested, watching whatever was on TV or staring at the ceiling fan till I prompted him for the next move. If I played impulsively, he countered it with patient, meditative maneuvering. “No unforced errors,” he would say, drawing a metaphor from the tennis match running in the background. Now that I had started beating him, he didn’t volunteer any more tips. He would rarely offer a draw. He wanted to either say the words “Checkmate” or hear them.

Sometimes, he would resign though.

Games where he resigned tasted flat, like a cold bowl of tomato soup. Making him resign was easy because he had a special rule. If my pawn reached the opposite end and got “promoted”, he would resign. It was “unbalanced” according to him, and he felt it was no fun to play on, even if he had a fighting chance. So when I played with him, I had to maneuver with that in mind.

I began playing with other opponents around 16. This time, it was back home at Ooty.

My P.T teacher had ignored me for the first 10 years of our shared existence except while thwacking my palms with a cane for being late to morning assembly. He became my best friend when he discovered I could play chess. He wanted me to play in the zonal competition, and I was somehow the de facto coach, despite not being the best player on the team. I spent a lot of time arbitrating matches that I could have spent playing instead, though I didn’t really mind because I enjoyed watching the drama. I saw snarky players who trash-talked constantly, bovine players who just didn’t care if they won or lost, silent killers who only smiled after they won, excitable ones who gave away their best moves by glancing nervously at the wrong parts of the board, pedants who were just waiting to yell “touch-piece!” and loafers who showed up at practice only to bunk class. I’m not judging them now, but I did back then.

Nobody at school was much fun to play with, but I had found a new opponent at home – my uncle, my dad’s elder brother. Playing with him had been pointless until then because I never stood a chance. But after beating Krishnajja, I thought maybe I did. Since I wasn’t getting to play much at school, playing against my uncle was also the best way to practice for the upcoming tournament. He was an undefeatable mystery. Losing wasn’t new to me, but losing in humiliating new ways without learning a single thing got on my nerves. It felt like I was on a sinking ship, trying to plug holes while new ones continuously emerged from nowhere. Chess infected my obsession-prone mind. Time at school lacked meaning. All I looked forward to was getting home, gulping down lunch, and trying to beat my uncle.

My uncle was an unusually silent chess player. He would squeeze his lower lip with his fingers, grimace, conduct an imaginary orchestra with his fingers, let them hover in mid-air, and then flick them before making some terrifying move that upended all my plans. Unlike Krishnajja, he was also reasonably fast. “You’re not going to have all the time in the world in the tournament, you have to move faster!” he’d say as a parting remark after the game ended. I kept searching for the magical pivot around which games with him turned. I didn’t find a thing. He just seemed to be a really good player.

I began to read books. I learned algebraic notation, as if naming the squares on the boards with alphabets and numbers would let me glimpse some inscrutable solution that I was missing. I tried memorizing openings with set sequences, and I blinked when he went off-script. My dad would sometimes stare at the board with his hands behind his back when we were playing, and then walk away, chuckling and shaking his head. Weeks passed and nothing changed at home.

But things did change at school. The more I lost to my uncle, the more people lost to me at school. The more I won at school, the more boring it got. It stayed that way until Sethuram showed up.

My P.T. teacher called me in early during recess one day (which was a terrible thing for me because I’m a slow eater and I’d just gotten started with lunch). “There’s a new kid at school, Sethuram. It seems he’s a national-level player. I want you to test him out,” he said. I was curious. I was in the 11th grade, and the kid was in the 5th. Half my size and bespectacled, he looked like Harry Potter from the first movie. “This is Adhithya, our best player. Do you think you can beat him?” asked my teacher. The kid looked up at me, smiled, and said, “Yes.” Huh, how about that. We walked to the sports room, set up the board, and started playing.

The game seemed alright at first. Predictable and rational. Within the tenth move, the kid exchanged queens. In a few more, he had exchanged a couple more pieces and was aggressively pushing his pawns forward. I could feel the tempo changing. He wasn’t even looking at me. It was like he was living among the pieces on the board and relaying instructions back to his physical body. I was growing desperate. I scrambled for an opening and saw some chance for an odd gamble that seemed too blatant to try. My only hope was that when I did something unorthodox, he would mistake the bizarre nature of my moves for incompetence and let his guard slip. I moved a couple of pieces and waited to see how he would react. He hadn’t caught on. I sighed and shook my head, pretending like I was carelessly giving away pieces. He was moving without a pause, thinking the game was over.

Now, I could pretend like I remember the exact move I made in my moment of glory, but I only remember it had something to do with the top right corner of the board. I have a terrible memory for chess positions. What I do remember is his face after I said “Checkmate.” He was an emoji with an open mouth, and with his eyebrows raised, it was the only time he looked his age during that whole game.

“How’s our player?” P.T.Sir asked him. “Good,” he muttered and left sullenly.

Every day after that, I played Sethuram. Every day, I lost. One game was all he needed to take my measure, and he moved fast. I sometimes lost to him outright and sometimes on time. I wasn’t used to playing with clocks because I complained that they “took the fun out of the game.” But he was trained on clocks before he learned to write, probably. He thought on my time, which is what chess players are supposed to do. He played to win, not to have fun, but I could see that he was having fun winning, and I was having no fun losing. Maybe the concept of fun was invented by losers as a compromise for not being able to win.

My friends watched with folded hands as I kept losing game after game. Then one day, a game came down to just three pawns apiece, and I felt like I had him. He offered a draw and I turned it down. I moved a pawn, and then he made a move which looked illegal, removing my pawn from the board and moving his pawn elsewhere. “En passant capture,” he said. I had read about this special move in books, but I had never seen it used before, and have never seen it since (which probably means I haven’t played enough chess).

He won that match too, seized it from the jaws of defeat something-something.

The day before the zonal tournament, I was excited. I thought I was going to show everyone. Show what exactly, I didn’t know. But I’d show them. Though our games had gotten longer and more drawn out, I still hadn’t been able to beat my uncle. But I had never come across anyone else on the level of either Sethuram or my uncle, so I was hoping things would go my way. I called up Krishnajja and told him I was going to a tournament. “Just have fun,” he said. “Play your natural game.” With eleven other students and a teacher, I went to the Kendriya Vidyalaya at the Aruvankadu Cordite factory, a gloomy and dark place in my memory, where hundreds of us were paired with each other and given dual clocks to punch. I won my first game and thought I was a God. I pitied my mortal friends who had lost. I lost my second game and realized I was a pitiable human too. Sethuram was in the junior division, and he won both games. The next day, I won 1, drew 1, and lost 1. Sethuram won 2 and drew 1. He advanced to the nationals and continued to the next level, SGFI. My story ended there.

After the tournament, there was no more practice at school. There was still the matter of beating my uncle, though.

One day, much after the tournament, with something running on the TV in the background on a sleepy evening, I realized my uncle was playing like he had missed a possibility. He wasn’t hovering his hand over the board like he was conducting a symphony, flicking his fingers, and making sharp moves. He had overlooked something. I sat up without making it obvious that I had found something. Looking like I was struggling to find a good move, I pushed pieces trying to create a decoy that would lure him away, and I hoped he would make the wrong move. He did. I moved the rook to the back rank and hesitated. “Check.” Surely, I hadn’t just won? There had to be some catch here. He seemed to be thinking the same. For what seemed like an eternity, we both sat frozen over the board with our chins resting on our palms. Then he extended his hand and said, “Good game.”

I was a bad loser. But I was an abysmal winner. I ran the length of the corridor in my house, screaming as if I’d just won the war, which in a way, I had. For the next two days, I told anyone who wanted to listen and everyone who didn’t how I had finally defeated my uncle. It meant nothing to anyone else, but it changed something in me. I was never in awe of any chess player after that. Everything felt like a beatable challenge.

I left my school a year later, and I entered the zonal tournament one more time, with similar results. In that time, I played Sethuram many, many times. I never drew a single match. I never beat him again. I don’t know where he is now because I didn’t see him on the news like I expected. We didn’t have Internet access back then, we couldn’t stay in touch, and I sometimes wonder what happened to the boy who looked like Harry Potter and played like Ron Weasley.

There were other places, other players, and lots of games. But we need to get back to Krishnajja’s story.

Around the time I got into college, Krishnajja turned 90. His birthday was the day before mine. I would wish him in the evening, and he would wish me the next morning. We were separated by just 71 years and 364 days. When he turned 90, there was speculation about whether he would “hit a century.” I don’t remember if I talked to him about it, but my cousins and I were fascinated by the possibility that somebody could live that long. Somebody we knew.

And it seemed like he could actually do it.

To me, he was a mystical figure like the Hindu god after whom he was named, a man who looked like he could never age, ensconced in his magical abode that always looked the same. He didn’t have children, no external markers of time, and every time I visited him, it felt like I was entering a time capsule that had remained the same while the rest of the world had changed. He watched the same TV programs, listened to the same singers on the radio, preferring female voices to male voices, ate mangoes, and played chess with me. After watching the Wimbledon match, he would call his brothers and discuss Federer’s performance. When I sang through my nose on purpose to annoy him, he would patiently hear me squealing and say “Apaswara” at the end with a poker-face. Cacophony.

A year later, he started to take breaks between games of chess. While I lay by his side, he would tell me stories. He would tell me about Shivaji’s guerrilla tactics against Aurangzeb. Or the time he and his brothers ran down a rat snake and touched the tired little reptile to their screaming sister’s hair because there was a myth that this would make her hair grow long (it apparently worked). He told me about the time some politician had asked his friend, “Why do all these people need religion? I’m doing fine without it, aren’t I?” and the friend had replied, “That’s like asking someone with a broken leg, why do you need a crutch, I can run without one, can’t I?” I couldn’t tell if Krishnajja needed religion or didn’t. He never told me what I should believe, and merely hinted that it was possible to accept people who went either way.

Some time around 93, he began to play only one game of chess a day, and he stopped winning. The stories became about his childhood. His brothers, his father, the village he grew up in.

My favorite story was about the time he almost drowned in a well when he was 9 years old, and I would muse that this 90-year saga could have been cut short in minutes. That’s a story for another day.

I can’t say I saw his death coming. I was still delusional about him hitting a 100. It feels a bit cheap to have wanted him to live that long because I wanted a good story to tell, but come on, he cheated death for decades, so why not a few more years? And maybe his presence calmed me, told me that while things would change, they wouldn’t change right away. That there was still time, that my childhood wasn’t over yet, even after I had graduated from college, because my life with Krishnajja was still the same. But one day, after I moved to Bangalore, when I visited him, I asked him, “Shall we play a game of chess?” He shook his head, turning me down for the first time, and my grandmother said in a low voice, “He doesn’t play anymore, even with Mr. KK. He gets tired.” I told myself it was a phase and that he’d eventually ask me for a game himself. Instead, he lost his hearing next. My off-key singing left him unperturbed. He began sleeping more, talking less… and faded away gracefully even before he died.

Nephews and nieces who loved him took care of him till the end, and neighbors kept dropping in. People cried over his death whom I’ve never seen cry – but when people spoke of him months later, it was with happiness that there existed a man like him in their life.

He was 97 years and 4 months old when he died. His body went to a medical college for research, as one last act of charity to the profession he loved.

Krishnajja was one of a handful of people who took my writing seriously when I was a kid. He read all of the stories I showed him, and he gave me criticism only if I asked for it. Once, when someone had called me a plagiarist and I spent an afternoon whining about it, he gave me some unsolicited advice.

“Do you know that you wrote this story by yourself?”
Yes.
“Then what does it matter what other people say?”

For years, I didn’t write anything about him.

A few months ago, my cousin A asked me to teach her to play chess. While we were sitting on the sofa and I was taking her through every move, telling her to watch out for what I would do next, and questioning her choices, I said, “You see, when one piece is attacking two at the same time? That’s called a fork. You’ve got to watch out for the knight because if you don’t see it coming, you’re in trouble.” As I was saying it, I heard Krishnajja’s voice.

And I was a boy of twelve again, back in Rajajinagar, listening to this man who had taught me so much I needed to know, through stories, through silence, through moving flimsy plastic pieces on a board of sixty-four squares.

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Sarah Wynn-Williams, born in New Zealand, surviving a shark attack as a teenager, working as a policy lawyer and a UN diplomat is obsessed with Facebook. She creates and pitches a job that doesn’t even exist, and when the top brass at Facebook see themselves as a tech company, she imagines it as the global superpower it could become some day. She flies across the world introducing world leaders to Mark Zuckerberg who comes to see her as a friend and writes her thank-you notes. Even while delivering her first child, Sarah is thinking about her job instead of her child (That child’s therapist is going to make bank some day).

And then, 11 years later, Sarah gives this statement at a hearing chaired by Senator Josh Hawley:

My name is Sarah Wynn–Williams and I served as the director of global public policy at Facebook, now Meta, for nearly seven years starting in 2011. Throughout those seven years I saw Meta executives repeatedly undermine US national security and betray American values. They did these things in secret to win favor with Beijing and build an$18 billion business in China.

After working at Facebook for seven years, Sarah throws Facebook under the bus, writing a memoir that portrays Facebook as an amoral machine run by careless people who only care about power and profits. Facebook retaliates by placing a gag order on her and threatening to make her pay $50,000 for each time she mentions Facebook in a “disparaging manner”. Despite all their attempts to suppress her from speaking, her book becomes a bestseller.

How Sarah went from Facebook’s darling to Facebook-enemy-number-one is what the book Careless People is about.

Facebook wanted profit, not power, but it got both

Meta – which now owns Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and a bunch of other companies – is one of the most powerful companies in the world, and even in the history of the world. If you’re young, you probably don’t remember a time when it was an exciting novelty that let you reconnect with old friends or chat up dates.

Sarah came from that world but she sensed where Facebook could go. She didn’t see it as a tech company restricted to America. Facebook proposed a mission of “connecting the people of the world” and Sarah trusted that they actually meant it. But even Sarah’s first meeting with Facebook shows a crack that lies at the root of this book – Sarah is interested in Facebook’s potential as a global force for good while Facebook’s leaders are interested in its ability to make money. To her credit, she isn’t naive. Sarah suggests that by appointing her as a director of global policy, Facebook will have an easier time expanding to other countries. The only reason she gets the job is by appealing to their profit-making motive, but she believes that once she’s inside, she’ll get to influence Facebook’s direction.

That seems like an honorable motive but it’s also the hardest thing to buy about the book. Sarah is shocked that these out-of-touch billionaires aren’t as relatable as she imagines them to be, and their duplicity bothers her. What we get in the bargain is juicy gossip and an inside view about how deals are done in the backrooms.

There’s a scene in the middle of the book where Sheryl Sandberg, the COO, is meeting the Irish Prime Minister at a time when the European Union is tightening its restrictions on tech companies, and they want some country to be a privacy watchdog. Facebook is at the highest risk, and Ireland is at risk if Facebook leaves because Facebook makes Ireland rich by using Irish shell-companies to avoid taxes. So they both need to do something about it. The Irish Prime Minister suggests something like this: “Pretend to the media like we are giving you a hard time about privacy and audits. If the European Union thinks we’re strict, they’ll give us the job of supervising you. Once we get the job, we’ll let you do whatever you like.” The two shake hands on it and don’t write it down.

But Sarah is in the room where it happens. There’s so much in the book that I can’t cover here or don’t want to cover because she tells the story so much better!

This fly-on-the-wall vantage point is what gives Sarah insight into underhand dealings in the upper echelons of the world. From Xi Jinping to Barack Obama, from riots in Indonesia to dealing with the junta in Myanmar, Sarah is Facebook’s touchpoint for dealing with political power. She writes in the prophetic tense of predicting that something would go South even as she’s in the middle of it, giving every encounter an ominous feeling: “I was happy about my deal in Myanmar, little did I know that…”

And when things begin to collapse, it isn’t that surprising. You’ve seen Facebook being smeared in the news for inciting riots or selling data to enemy countries or influencing Presidential elections. Facebook sees it all coming and chooses to do the wrong thing at every juncture. Mark Zuckerberg goes from being coder to CEO to celebrity to kingmaker, and he even imagines himself as President, restructuring the company so that he can take a break if he wants to campaign. World leaders want to take selfies with him and curry favor when they know that Facebook is an important tool to winning elections.

But since Sarah shares every dorkish detail about him, he looks like a petulant wannabe. I wonder whether Mark Zuckerberg can ever trust anyone again. Does he stay up at night wondering which employee is planning to betray him next? Does he imagine people laughing at him behind his back? Or is he going through their Whatsapp chats and planning the next move? All he wanted was to be liked, smh.

People on the inside, people on the outside

A running theme in the book is the difference between what people say and what they do. What they claim to stand for vs the decisions they take under pressure.

Sheryl Sandberg, the COO, is a high-performing leader and a champion of women’s rights in the workplace on the outside. But in private, she chews up her hairstylist, yells at subordinates, and suggests things that are borderline sexual harassment. She uses company resources to promote her book and treats Directors like her personal assistants. Yet nobody turns against her because they know that keeping her happy gets them personal favors.

Mark Zuckerberg is a different beast. You’ve seen Jesse Eisenberg play him in The Social Network, you’ve seen him become a meme, a podcast guest, and a social villain.1 This book’s version of Mark oscillates between ruthless sociopath and autistic goofball. From Sarah’s assessment, Mark is an unrelatable nerd who is desperate to be liked. He sings karaoke, plays Catan, reveres tyrannical Roman Emperors and wants to eat authentic bluefish Tuna while flying in private jets, renting out mansions, and living in prefabricated bubble houses when they travel abroad. He wants to dominate meetings with political leaders, but he can’t even wake up before noon for a meeting with the Colombian President.2

However, this insistence to make Mark look bad is one of the weak points of the book. Think about it – when I pick up a book named “Careless People”, I’m already expecting to be shocked, disgusted, and repelled by the people at the center of the book. Sarah plays into that schadenfreude by twisting every innocent thing that Mark does into something awkward, unrelatable, or heartless. Why is it wrong for a CEO to want to eat tuna or sing karaoke? She’s so obsessed with what Facebook could have been and why it isn’t going according to her vision that she doesn’t do enough credit to the fact that it’s incredible that something like Facebook does exist in the first place. That Mark built a technological empire and that he’s still growing it actively gets no mention. The trashing actually made me sympathize with the guy a little.

But there’s no denying that these people at the top are a little bit… mental.

For example, when they’re planning to go to South Korea, they all have arrest warrants in their name because they broke the Korean government’s laws. But they think the government is bluffing. How can they test the waters before landing in Korea? They decide to send a junior ahead to see if the government really has the guts to arrest someone. This scapegoat isn’t even addressed as a person. They just refer to them as “a body” for arrest. Luckily, he isn’t arrested.

But here’s the crazy thing – when this strategy works out, they even institutionalize it. In India, the Facebook office is being raided by the police so often that they appoint an ex-police captain to handle “arrest situations.” His job is to just get arrested and go to jail when there is a problem.

This dehumanization is a persistent theme in the book. When Sarah has a baby, she is expected to do the job of mothering invisibly without mentioning it at the office. When a contractor has an epileptic fit and is bleeding on the floor, the colleagues around her don’t even notice, saying “she’s not part of Facebook.” When China asks Facebook to hand over data and ban problematic people, Facebook’s concern isn’t about censorship – they happily comply with China – but about what it will say at the senate hearings. They practice mock questions, write answers, edit the answers because they reveal too much, and figure out how to lie just enough without getting caught.

By the time I’m following Facebook’s targeted advertising to teenage girls with body image issues, or how an unwillingness to translate Facebook’s website into Burmese is causing a genocide of hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar, I’m already sick to my stomach. For all her flaws with moralizing, Sarah is an incredible storyteller who puts you right in the middle of a scene, whether it’s a crisis control situation during a riot or a board meeting in Silicon Valley or an ICU where she’s bleeding out. The only humanity in this dehumanized environment flows through her.

Weaponizing memoirs

So here’s my problem with this book. I really, really enjoyed reading it.

Yet, at every turn, I knew that Sarah wasn’t saying the complete truth. She was saying just enough to shock me into disgust for the overlords of Facebook and trying very hard to portray herself as a saint.

It’s not hard to empathize with Sarah. She’s one of the few people who cared about Facebook retaining its moral core, as even her documented emails and letters show, and she’s a survivor and an outsider who fought her way through all of this by literally creating a job that didn’t exist and then making it one of the most important parts of Facebook. She somehow met a hectic schedule while dealing with pregnancy and motherhood and sexual harassment and sexism (five separate issues, all of which I’m unlikely to ever deal with. So good to be privileged).

Yet, the problems are as much with what she doesn’t reveal as what she does. All of Facebook’s leadership is up on display. Every decision of theirs that went wrong is scrutinized and dissected by Sarah, with her commentary on what should have been done differently. Yet I don’t know about a single major decision that Sarah herself took and messed up. There’s no real vulnerability here because she’s scared of the hit the story will take if her character is called into question.

A story needs a vulnerable protagonist to succeed (this book is a story after all, even if it really happened), and she inserts “mistakes” to build that persona. But her mistakes are always of the foible variety – she types an email in the delivery room (“Am I a bad mother?”), she mistakenly stays in the wrong hotel and arrives late for a meeting (“I’m such a klutz”), she takes responsibility for a public event gone wrong (“I botched such a huge event”), and lectures Mark about strategy (“I’m so stupid that I gave advice to my boss”). But none of these was a conflict of values that went against what she stood for. She never falters in her agenda for a moment… and that’s a little hard to believe?

I’m a reasonably calm guy. Yet there are times where I’ve had meltdowns and done stupid things that hurt people. Those are the things I wanted to see from Sarah’s life.

There’s also the question of the timing of the book and the manner she left Facebook. Sarah realizes this herself. She knows that as the reader is flipping the pages, they’re also wondering, “If she knew Facebook was this bad, why didn’t she just leave?” Sarah brings this up herself whenever she faces a dilemma. The first time she thinks of leaving Facebook, she’s pregnant and needs stability. I can understand that. Then the baby is born, and two years pass. Nothing has changed and Facebook is still the same morally depraved company it was (why not leave?). The next time she feels like leaving, she says “I messed up something in my Visa application procedure. Now I’m reliant on Facebook and can’t leave.” (At this point, I’m like “Okay…?”) And before I know it, Sarah is stuck with workplace toxicity again and her reason for not leaving is “I was pregnant. Again.”

Finally, she doesn’t resign from Facebook. She’s fired.

It’s her life. She gets to choose or leave from a toxic workplace. But if I had to empathize with her reasons to not leave Facebook, it was hard to ignore that she did have a choice on many occasions and chose not to take it for whatever reason – stability, a need to maintain a standard of living, health. Since she’s making her moral superiority the basis of criticizing everyone else at Facebook, maybe she felt compelled to justify not leaving. But here’s the thing, if she had said, “Hey, I know I could have left Facebook at any point, and I chose not to because I valued my stability more than doing the right thing,” that might have worked better for me. Having to judge “who was right” at every point took me away from the more important point – that we live in a world where companies are entitled to demand the most absurd things from us and that there are employees who will choose to satisfy these demands in a circus of sycophancy. It’s the system that is broken.

I thought I was reading too much into it until I saw the Senate Hearing I mentioned at the top. Sarah truthfully repeats everything about Facebook’s collusion with China in the hearing and its targeted advertising to teenage girls. But a huge part of her book was criticizing Facebook for getting Donald Trump elected into office and what a bad result he was for the world. She conveniently omits even a passing mention of him to the Republican senator who is questioning her with his own agenda. She conceals some things to have the opportunity for other things to be heard, and I wonder if she did that with the book.

Does this take away from the point that this is a wild ride of a book? No.

It’s an incredible story and I admire her courage for speaking against one of the most powerful and ruthless entities on the planet. I’m not sure I could do anything remotely close and I highly recommend reading it. But if you do read the book, I’d suggest you read and watch the other side’s take too. Reading the book won’t change anything. Facebook will continue to sell our attention to the highest bidder and when I’m done writing this article, I will have the hard decision of choosing between Instagram or Whatsapp when I open my phone. But at least I know how exactly I’m being screwed over, and that gives me some satisfaction.

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You can check out all the earlier posts here.

Today’s post is about ideas that silently control the scripts we live by. I really enjoyed writing this one and I hope you like these stories:

1. The “good old days” syndrome

2. How advertisers manufactured desire

3. When betting on a person goes wrong

4. Eureka mythology

5. The cat that wrote research papers

This might be the last weekly issue of Five Slices for a while. I’ll share my plans for this Substack at the end of this post.

The good old days were never that good

I don’t know at what point people begin to yearn for the “good old days.” One day you’re going through college, and the next minute you find yourself complaining how they don’t make good movies any more or music just isn’t what it used to be, how the streets are too crowded and there isn’t enough spice in the Schezwan Fried Rice.

Everything in the past seems golden compared to the present. 70% of the music in the American market is old music. Studios are rehashing stories continuously – Harry Potter is getting a reboot, Tom Cruise did the eighth installment of the Mission Impossible Series 30 years after the first one (which itself was a reboot of a of a 1966 TV series), and 9 out of 10 of the highest grossing movies in 2024 were sequels. The 1 out of 10, Wicked, was an adaptation of a reimagining of The Wizard of Oz.

Did everything good that ever happened happen in the past? We’re not the first to feel this way and we won’t be the last either.

Here’s director Orson Welles talking about how there has always been an “Older England,” with even Shakespearean characters yearning for a simpler time when the weather was always spring-time and daffodils swayed in the breeze.

If even poets who lived 500 years ago were looking for a simpler past, maybe the problem isn’t with the present and rather with how people are wired. First, we have a tendency to remember childhood and adolescent memories vividly because they were formative times when we didn’t have to take personal responsibility. On top of that, we have a nostalgia bias which drives us to selectively remember the positive stuff in the past and highlight the negatives in the present.1

But even stranger is the feeling of anemoia, where people are nostalgic for a time of peace and beauty that might not have existed at all. At its most harmless, this nostalgia is exploited to sell cottagecore products and Polaroid cameras. At the other extreme, it can even turn elections. When people say “Make America Great Again,” very few are asking, “Wait, but was it ever that great in the first place? Compared to today?” If the voting population is 30 years old and you’re talking about a time that existed 60 years in the past, they might just buy the story without verifying it as long as it tastes sweet. But the reality might have been something like this:

The past isn’t always better. We’re just better at forgetting its flaws.

Source: Vox

The desire for desire

"We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man's desires must overshadow his needs."
— Paul Mazur, Lehman Brothers, 1927

People don’t just want things. They want to want things. We learn what to want and whom to be by looking at other people because our most fundamental quality might be imitating other people. The French philosopher Rene Girard calls this idea mimesis.2 Though we don’t realize it, this is how modern life is shaped.

Here’s a story: You probably know about Listerine, the mouthwash brand. Originally, it was a powerful antiseptic intended for cleaning floors and it did decently well. Then somebody had the bright idea of rebranding Listerine as a mouthwash to fight halitosis aka bad breath.

Except, there was a problem. Nobody knew or cared about halitosis. So a genius campaign was designed to remedy this.

This ad’s strategy was:

1. Tell people that halitosis (bad breath) makes you highly undesirable.

2. Tell them that it’s so hard to detect that most people don’t even know they have it.

3. Tell them that others won’t tell you that your breath stinks, but they’ll start avoiding you and you’ll end up alone.

4. When people are scared and depressed by all these facts, show them the solution: There’s only one way to fix this, and that’s by washing your mouth regularly with Listerine.

It worked. In the next seven years, the company’s revenues rose from $115,000 to more than $8 million. But it also ended up giving an entire generation insecurities about bad breath and whether they were “good enough.” First, the idea had to be sold that you weren’t good enough – and then the cure had to be suggested by showing the ideal person who was good enough because they used Listerine. You didn’t just want to solve your problem. You wanted to be this ideal person, according to Girard.

Every movie, story, song – or ad – is trying to give you a story where you can see yourself. You want to be the movie star driving the fast car, the dashing sportswoman who is crushing life, or the happy person vacationing on a beach with their family. And the way to be that person is by buying what the advertisers sell, be it cars, clothes, life insurance, or mutual funds. Like Don Draper said, “Advertising is based on one thing: Happiness.” That happiness isn’t an accident. It’s manufactured meticulously.3

Shout-out to ’s excellent article “marketing is the gangster and the doctor” that dives much deeper into this topic with more examples:

Gods & Goods

marketing is the gangster and the doctor

We all know marketing is manipulative, but do we understand just how deep it runs…

Read more

a year ago · 10 likes · 4 comments · Yukta Reddy

Now, here’s what I’m conflicted about. Knowing how people’s minds work and how to hijack them, I have two choices: To use what I learn to play the system and get where I want to go, or to keep yelling at the top of my voice to disturb people who are already comfortable to try and change the system.

If you had this choice, what would you do?

Bet on the person, not the idea

This is an idea from Paul Graham, an investor in Silicon Valley who launched YCombinator, an accelerator program for startups. Graham is a legend in the startup community, known for the actionable lessons that he publishes on his blog. One of his ideas is that when investors are investing in a company, they are betting on the founders and not the idea.

Case in point: The first people Paul Graham invested in were two students who caught a train to Harvard to hear him speak at a lecture. They pitched him a startup idea, an app to order fast food through your cellphone (when smartphones weren’t even a thing). While Graham didn’t like the idea, he did like the students – so he kept them around and eventually told them to build a website that he wanted to be “the front page of the internet.” With no clue and no plan, the founders launched and grew a website that is now known as Reddit, supporting over 500 million users. Investing in Reddit also launched YCombinator which has now invested $1 billion across 5,000 companies, 4% of which have turned into unicorns. ( did an analysis on this)

But sometimes, the idea of ‘betting on the founder’ can evolve into something stranger: investing in personalities over principles, and vibes over values. interviewed a tech founder who went from supporting Bernie Sanders (Left) to Trump (Right) because he liked Trump’s aesthetics and aura, even though he didn’t really like his policies. Now that the policies are kicking in, the founder is having second thoughts. It’s a candid look at what got Trump into office a second time.

Source: The Reddits

Eureka mythology – “Then, everything changed”

I’ll tell you a couple of stories, and your job is to figure out what connects them.

First, the story of how women started smoking in America, according to the documentary “The Century of the Self.” Before the 1920s, there was a taboo against women smoking in public. Tobacco companies had a problem with this – 50% of the population wouldn’t buy their product. So they hired Edward Bernays, a PR expert, to solve the problem. Bernays decided to change the perception of smoking women from being decadent to being free and independent. So he employed a team of young women to smoke on the street during the 1929 Easter Parade and tipped off the press saying women were rebelling against men by using the cigarettes as “torches of freedom.” The publicity from this event changed the perception around cigarettes, and sales to women improved dramatically.

Second story: Isaac Newton was wondering how the planets move around the sun. One day, he was walking around his garden when he saw an apple fall from a tree. Inspiration struck him and he figured out the theory of gravitation.

What connects these two stories?

What connects them is that it reminds me of something I hate about my writing. It’s a pattern that goes like this: “Once upon a time, things were all like this. Then event X happened. After that, everything changed.” I picked up this pattern watching and reading other stories. Here are a few examples:

• Steve Jobs and his friend were just a couple of ordinary guys. Then they made an incredible computer in their garage and started Apple. This changed the history of computing.

• Stephen King was a struggling teacher working multiple jobs. He wrote a novel in a burst of inspiration and threw it in the trash. His wife discovered it and got it published. Then Stephen King became rich and famous. (Insert any other writer, filmmaker, or musician here – it still works)

• Humans used to live happily. Some evil technology was invented (the printing press/computers/smartphones/social media/AI chatbots). Ever since then, humans have been miserable.

• “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” That’s how The Bible starts.

• Every Netflix documentary – be it about a scam, cult, or F1 racing, follows this pattern.

All these stories are so powerful because they follow what I call Eureka Mythology: “Before… Eureka!… After.” This structure locks into our perception of linear time and causality, making the idea easy to remember.

The problem is that they’re nowhere near the truth. Narratives are convenient to remember, but big events are the sum of many parts that add up over time:

• Cigarette Marketing towards women started in the early 1920s and continued till the late 90s. The Torches of Freedom campaign was influential, but it was just one event. Sales picked up not just because the taboo was lifted, but also because women entered the workforce and became financially independent.

• Newton had been working on Principia Mathematica for ages before he developed the mathematical tools to describe gravity. The apple story might not even have happened.

• Stephen King had been publishing short stories since he was a child.

• Jobs and his friend had tried numerous side hustles before starting Apple, and it wasn’t just their product but funding and networking and marketing genius that helped them launch at a time when tech companies were catching a break and people had money to spend.

Complex stories like this are hard to remember though, which is why books like “Sapiens” and “Guns, Germs, and Steel” sell so many copies, and why writers like me use this simple structure as a crutch. Maybe that isn’t such a crime.

But if you start to use this model to understand reality, it could be a problem. Say you’re a founder building a company. You might mistakenly think that all you need is the right product or one viral moment to take off based on what you’ve seen in movies, founder interviews, and blog posts. But that kind of breakthrough is extremely rare. Success usually takes incremental progress through audience-building, experimenting, and compounding over a long time. Going in with the wrong expectations could lead you to give up too soon, or worse, stick with the wrong idea for a very long time influenced by what you’ve seen in the movies and in blog posts.

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. But also, if the story sounds too good to be true, question it a bit.

Nine lives and a few research papers

F.D.C Willard was the author of a few physics papers. For his work, he was offered a professorship. His full name was Felis Domesticus Chester Willard.

He also happened to be a cat.

So here’s how a cat wrote a research paper. Jack Hetherington of Michigan State University wanted to publish a paper with his work on low-temperature physics. Before he submitted it, his friend noticed that Jack had used the word “we” while being the only author on the paper and thought that picky reviewers might ask for a correction from “we” to “I.” Instead of changing the paper, Jack just added one more author to the paper: his cat Chester. He added Felis Domesticus, the scientific name for the domestic cat, and Willard, his cat’s dad’s name to make it sound authentic.

The paper was accepted and for a long time, nobody knew that F.D.C. Willard was a cat. Willard even “wrote” a paper all by himself, published in a French Research Journal. Then, Jack sent some friends and colleagues some “signed” copies of his papers with Chester’s paw-prints, which ended the charade.

After that, Chester retired from academia. He couldn’t handle the fame.

Source: Wikipedia,

After writing 31 issues of Five Slices (and a few longer essays), I’ve realized a few things. I have fun writing these pieces. But sometimes I feel constrained by the format of stitching together five unrelated pieces and that makes the writing not-so-fun. When it’s not fun for me, I think you’ll start to feel it.

Sometimes I want to go deeper on just one idea and tell a bigger story. I also want to try different forms like essays, memoirs, reviews, and short stories. Through this process, I want to figure out a niche. But at times, I hold myself back second-guessing what you would like.

So I’m going to step back and experiment a bit. I’ll still be writing regularly, but there will be more variety and the pieces might take more time. Meanwhile, I’ll also be writing impromptu stuff on my “garbage blog” Cluttered Papers. Thanks for being part of the journey so far. I’m excited to see where this goes. If you have any feedback at any time, feel free to write to me.

Cheers,
Adhithya

You can check out all the earlier posts here.

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This week, I was watching a primer on Christopher Alexander’s work. He was an architect with a difference. When he designed buildings and spaces, he focused not just on how they looked or the purpose they served, but the possibilities they created — a building or a structure or anything that people interacted with wasn’t just an inanimate object, it was a living organism that shaped how people lived.

Look at these two buildings. The first one is a Soviet Era apartment, and the second one is a building designed by Christopher Alexander. Which one of these would you want to live in, and why?

If I’m guessing right, you would pick the second one. It just looks more inviting — it can be a community space or a place where you can sit by yourself, a place to play, to eat, to walk around… The function of the space adapts itself to your needs. The Soviet building guides your movements along a limited axis of functions, like factory items on a conveyor belt, but the second space gives you more degrees of freedom. More life.

Christopher Alexander’s principle was to look for fit between form (the thing being designed) and context (environment and constraints). This applies as much to architecture as to product design, communities, and a life that you enjoy.

If you want to watch the video, it’s here.

Today’s issue highlights examples of such human-friendly design in other areas of life. The other slices are:

1. The legendary inventor who obsessed over a vacuum cleaner

2. What Bell Labs and Pixar had in common

3. People who bring life to a boring party

4. Uber made waiting easier

The man who made 5,000 prototypes

This video has 1.6 million views. It’s an old man demoing a new kind of vacuum cleaner. What’s so cool about it?

The man is James Dyson, a legend in the product design space.

A common piece of advice to start-up founders is to solve your own problem. James Dyson took this maxim very seriously. He was frustrated with the vacuum cleaner at his house. He noticed that it lost suction power over repeated use, and taking it apart, he found that the fine dust particles were clogging the filters in the bag. Unless he made a “bagless” vacuum cleaner, the problem wouldn’t go away. But such a design didn’t exist in the market.

Dyson noticed that the sawmill near his house used a different method to clean out the dust particles called cyclonic separation. They rotated streams of air at high speed in spiral patterns. Heavy particles moved to the outer circles, hit the walls and fell into a removable collection bucket. Why not apply the same method to a vacuum cleaner? Dyson wanted to try this, but his company thought that a bigger company would already have done it if it was possible and that Dyson’s idea was crazy. They kicked him out of his own company.

Over the next 17 years, he tested over 5,000 prototypes to develop a perpetually high suction vacuum cleaner that didn’t need a bag. He took another 7 years to start his own manufacturing line — and he hasn’t stopped since. He went on to invent better hairdryers and bladeless fans. He’s worth $18 billion, and he’s still working on making a better vacuum cleaner. The latest demo video is for the lightest vacuum cleaner in the world weighing just 1.8kg and measuring 38 mm in diameter, and he’s added a new improvement to it so that hair doesn’t get stuck in the cleaner.

It’s really fun to watch him geek out on well-designed products like a pencil sharpener he bought in Japan that’s still working after 30 years. You can watch it here.

Pixar and Bell Labs

When the office for Pixar Animation Studio was being planned in 1999, the initial design was to have three separate buildings — for animators, for computer scientists, and for everyone else. Steve Jobs, who became CEO of Pixar around that time, thought this was a disastrous idea. He wanted people to have chance encounters and conversations. The space had to encourage people to get out of their office and mingle.

So the office was redesigned. At the center of the Pixar office is a large open space called The Atrium that everyone has to pass through. It has a reception, a cafe, foosball tables, a fitness center, and a theater. In Jobs’ original design, it also housed the campus’s only restrooms — this way, introverts were forced to talk to others at least when they were washing their hands. Looking at Pixar’s creative output since then, I’d say the plan worked.

Pixar wasn’t the first place to pull this off. Bell Labs in New Jersey was the breeding ground for so many inventions that shape our life today — transistors, cell phones, lasers, fiber optics, and some of the first programming languages — and it wasn’t accidental. Mervin Kelly, the chairman, designed the architecture of Bell Labs in a way that let researchers interact spontaneously. All scientists had to walk through a long corridor (that measured the length of two football fields) to get to the cafeteria, and it was inevitable that they would run into somebody and exchange ideas. They were also encouraged to work with their lab doors open so anybody could drop in at any time. That serendipity and collaboration created an idea factory that shaped the modern world with its inventions.

Source: Pixar office design, Bell Labs

The life of the party

How do you create a lively scene out of a bunch of bored people?

In Part 4, Chapter 9 of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the most boring party in the world is taking place. People of different ages and classes, who have nothing in common, are all sitting together silently, wondering what to do. Then the host Stepan Oblonsky walks in. Stepan is a man with a talent for putting people at ease. He sees the situation and immediately gets to work.

On entering the drawing-room Stepan apologized, explaining that he had been detained by that prince, who was always the scapegoat for all his absences and unpunctualities, and in one moment he had made all the guests acquainted with each other. Bringing together Alexey and Sergey, he started them on a discussion of the Russification of Poland, into which they immediately plunged with Pestsov. Slapping Turovtsin on the shoulder, he whispered something comic in his ear, and set him down by his wife and the old prince. Then he told Kitty she was looking very pretty that evening, and presented Shtcherbatsky to Karenin. In a moment he had so kneaded together the social dough that the drawing-room became lively, and there was a merry buzz of voices.1

This paragraph was so relatable to me because I’ve seen it happen so many times in life. A fragmented scene becomes a hive of activity because of one person, not because they put themselves in the spotlight, but because they are able to make other people feel like they belong and start self-sustaining conversations. I don’t do this very well, but my dad has this talent, maybe because he grew up in a world where real-world interaction was a necessity and not an option.

What makes this possible?

First, it’s the ability to spot each person’s energy level.
Second, it’s the knack to match that energy level and make people feel seen.
But most importantly, I think it’s a willingness and courage to look embarrassed, and to start with just one person.

Most “scenes” need one person to take the initiative and at least one person to follow that energy. Watch this video on how one guy dancing becomes a movement:

Most times in life, we’re not trying to start a movement; we’re just trying to have a conversation with one or two people, and there’s a trick to being welcoming there, too. has a great article called Good conversations have a lot of doorknobs and the principle is the same. It’s not about you being interesting, but giving the other person a “doorknob” to let them feel interesting. If they’re a good conversation partner, they’ll do the same and you’re off to the races.

has a good article on this too, if you want to dig deeper.

Waiting for an Uber

Uber didn’t reduce wait times. It just made the wait less frustrating.

Think about the last time you had to wait for a cab without using an app. You probably had to keep calling every 5 minutes to ask, “Are you there yet? Where are you?” Or it could be the other way around, maybe the cab arrived earlier than you expected, and he’s calling you repeatedly when you’re getting dressed or in the bathroom. How did Uber change this?

They gave a tracking mechanism that let riders know where the car was and how long it would take. It didn’t reduce the waiting time, but it reduced uncertainty and gave riders the feeling of control. A study highlighted that when people feel they have control over a situation, they feel less stress, even if there is no change in the outcome. That is what Uber did with “The Uber Map Effect.”2

So the next time somebody’s waiting for you, just letting them know you’re running late reduces the chances they’ll yell at you when you arrive.

Here’s another product idea: When you are driving a car, every minute of waiting time feels longer than moving time. This means that if a Google Maps route keeps you moving smoothly and even takes 10 minutes longer, it’ll feel much more peaceful than one that gets you there faster with more brakes and traffic stops. If someone makes a version of Google Maps that shows the smoother route compared to the faster route, I’ll buy it in a second.

Source: Rory Sutherland in his book Alchemy

Forward this to a friend who might enjoy it. Last week, I wrote about how ideas have a life of their own. You can find the complete list of posts here.

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Human beings are ultimately nothing but carriers - passageways - for genes. They ride us into the ground, like racehorses, from generation to generation.
– Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

From one angle, we are just vessels that pass on our genes. But there’s a parallel universe where we are carriers for thoughts, ideas, and culture that persist long after we are gone. Like genes that are carriers of life, these carriers of information are called “memes.” A meme could be as small as a song lyric or the habit of saying “God bless you” when somebody sneezes, or something as complex as the blueprint for democracy. Like viruses, bacteria, and our own genes, these memes have a life of their own – they live, they spread, and they conquer – lasting longer than we do. Or as Carl Jung said, “People do not have ideas, ideas have people.”

This week, I’ve been studying how these ideas are born, how they develop, and spread. In today’s issue:

1. Two ways of copying

2. People-shaped ideas

3. Genius and Scenius

4. Technology has no morality

5. Lizard vs killer snakes

Two ways of copying

This is an Origami model of a Chinese boat:

Imagine that 10 children are made to sit in line. The first child draws the boat by looking at the model. The second child copies the first, the third one copies the second, and so on. By the time we reach the tenth child, do you think the drawing would look anything like the model shown here? It’s very unlikely. Each child would add or miss out details that are missing in the original model, and the end result would have no resemblance to the original model.

But consider that the first child instead gets this instruction sheet on how to make a Chinese boat:

If the first child learns how to fold a sheet of paper into a boat, and every child teaches these instructions to the child next to him/her, the results will be very different from the first experiment. There might be a few variations in how the models look, but the imitation would be much more accurate than in the first case of copying a drawing. You might remember school crazes where someone figured out how to make a paper camera or a bird or a better design for a rocket plane, and within days, the entire school was savvy to the secret.

Why is this so? The first type of copying is learning by seeing, also called Lamarckian imitation. There are too many ways in which this copying can go wrong, and we tend to fill in the gaps with our imagination, with no real understanding of how things work.

The second type of copying is learning by instruction, called Weismannian imitation. When you compress a procedure into a bunch of simple steps, you can teach it across time, across geographies, to a large number of people (the picture above doesn’t even need you to know Chinese, the language of images is universal). It’s a high-fidelity way of transmitting ideas. Food recipes, computer algorithms, and even games are all Weismannian. Think about it – you can play tic-tac-toe on the back of an envelope and soccer in a classroom, because what matters are the rules by which people coordinate.

Weismannian learning is very efficient and maybe you think that it’s always superior. But while efficient and clear processes can always be automated, the magic in peak performance is hard to explain": What sets apart Warren Buffett from other investors? What makes Hans Zimmer’s music so good, or Tarantino’s movies so fun? These secret ingredients cannot be put into a set of instructions for Weismannian copying. In the age of AI where clear instructions can be automated away, learning by seeing might be the technique that gives humans an age.

Source for the experiment: Richard Dawkins in the intro to “The Meme Machine.”

People-shaped ideas

Ideas are like viruses. They attach to hosts, they live inside them, and they spread by jumping from one host to another. Not all viruses are contagious, and not all ideas spread among people. What helps some ideas spread but not others?

Ideas spread when they are “people-shaped” i.e when there’s an easy way for people to interact with the idea, hold on to it, and pass it along. Good designers design objects so that you can use them without any explanation. When you see a chair, you sit. When you see a handle, you grasp. When you see a button, you push. These designs that let you interact are called affordances.

What’s the mental equivalent of an affordance?
Stories.
People are attracted to stories about people, to see ideas embodied as characters. Remembering a list of dinosaurs and their dietary habits is hard, but after you see Jurassic Park, it’s hard to forget a T-Rex chomping a guy on a toilet or Velociraptors chasing children through a kitchen. Most people in my generation might not remember who signed the Declaration of Independence, but they probably know all the Avengers or the names of Harry Potter’s father’s friends. That’s the power of a good story, because emotional resonance registers things in a way facts can’t.

It’s possible to take this one step further, by using stories as a bridge to deliver complex information. Many good speakers (like Lincoln, Reagan, Warren Buffett) insert jokes and parables into their speeches. Even if people forget the message, they remember the joke. Or take a look at this designer, who created human characters for the periodic table – much more memorable than a bunch of squares, don’t you think?

Source: on people-shaped ideas, on affordances.

Genius and Scenius

Although great new ideas are articulated by individuals, they’re nearly always generated by communities. Genius sits in the middle of scenius. Just as genius is the creative intelligence of the individual, scenius is the creative intelligence of the community.
— Brian Eno, Musician

You’ve probably heard of Vincent Van Gogh. He’s the one who painted the vibrant picture of the Starry Night and the bright Sunflowers. He developed a unique style, with swirling shapes and coarse strokes and bold colors that wasn’t recognized enough in his lifetime. Surely, a rare intelligence handed by the Gods… Or was it?

This is what Van Gogh’s paintings looked like when he started painting. If I didn’t tell you, would you even know that the same painter favored these gloomy colors?

These pictures are just six years apart. What happened in that time?

When Van Gogh started out, his style was influenced by his cousin Anton Mauve who favored a realist style of painting. He had no other exposure or peer group. But when Van Gogh went to study painting in Belgium, he was dazzled by the expressive colors of Ruben. Later, when he moved to Paris, he hung out with Impressionist painters like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Alphonse Monticelli, whose style he liked. Van Gogh was also influenced by the bold style of Japanese woodblock prints (ukiyo-e) and he even tried imitating them.

There was no instruction set for the style Van Gogh developed. Drawing on today’s first story, Van Gogh was following a “learn by seeing” style that was a sum of all the people he admired, who nurtured his talent. But the end result was something truly original because nobody combined these elements quite like him.

The story of Vincent's evolution is the story of how profoundly we’re all shaped by what we consume and the people we spend time with – life-altering moments surround us. Something to ponder in the choices we make every day...

— in this Twitter Thread which tells this story with way more details and pictures

Further reading: Kevin Kelly on Scenius, on Scenius and myth of lone genius, “Kafka’s precursors”: An essay by Borges on how Kafka developed his style.

Technology has no morality

Every time new technology enters the picture, there are signs on the street screaming that the end is nigh. That we are losing the “real art” of the greats.

Let me tell you a story about one of those greats. When Beethoven was born in 1770, the piano was a young instrument, barely 70 years old. As he grew up, the piano grew up with him – wooden frames turned to iron, the range of the piano expanded, and the hammers and strings grew stronger so that more versatile music could be played. But Beethoven always wanted louder and larger pianos. The innovative music he composed was like the death metal of his day. In fact, some of his compositions like the Hammerklavier sonata demanded a range that existing instruments could barely support. Piano makers had to evolve quickly to keep up.

Van Gogh in the earlier story was no exception. He lived at a time where synthetic chemicals birthed colors like chrome yellow and ultramarine. If he had just stuck to “natural pigments,” we would have neither the Sunflowers nor Starry Night. Both these artists didn’t protest against evolving technology. They actively embraced it and made it their own.

People worried that photography would destroy the art of painting. Socrates feared that if people put their trust in writing, it would induce forgetfulness of the soul. Yet here you are, reading this on a screen in the age of the internet. Can you imagine a life where you don’t write anything down?

No, AI is NOT destroying art. The Substack app on which I spend so much time is the church of anti-AI. Just this week, I came across three articles talking about why the trillions of dollars being spent on AI are a waste and that we are losing touch with the real mud and clay that artists massage into meaningful work. But technology has no morality of its own. I admit that some of this stuff scares me too, but the possibilities seem way more exciting than the fears.

Further reading: Photography and art on Noema, “Good artists copy, AI artists ___” by

Lizard vs killer snakes

This last one has nothing to do with ideas or innovation. It’s the best nature video I’ve watched and it’s two minutes long. Enjoy:

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I’m an outsider to the world of publishing. I don’t know how this world works. At first, I just wanted to figure out how authors get book deals so that I could get one. When I started to dig into it however, I found more than I was looking for. Some of these are to-dos and helpful information on how money is made online – and how online and indie publishing are changing the game. But there are a couple of bizarre stories here which just happened to take place in the publishing industry. In this issue:

1. How to buy your way onto a bestseller list

2. Can you make a living as a writer?

3. Writing a novel on Substack

4. The bookstore that made a comeback

5. The last letter

Meme for the day: Dumbledore calling up one of his buddies

How to buy your way onto a bestseller list

In 2017, a Young Adult novel called “Handbook for Mortals” by debut author Lani Sarem took the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list – a big achievement for a newcomer. There was a catch though. Nobody in the YA community had even heard of this book; yet it had displaced a much more popular book. Journalists started digging into it and tweeting about it, and a shady story turned up… It turned out that Lani Sarem might have gamed the system by buying her way onto the list. To understand how she did this, let’s go step-by-step.

Why do bestseller lists exist?

Most people don’t have time to explore and track new authors, and they trust social proof – if “everybody is buying a book,” then it’s tempting to check it out, at least for the sake of having an opinion on it. The Matthew effect works in favor of bestsellers: The books that sell become bestsellers, and the bestsellers sell even more. So every author hopes to get on these lists to boost their sales because their next book deal depends on it.

The New York Times Bestseller list is the most popular one. It can boost the sales of debut authors by 57% and any author by 14% on average. As an added benefit, you get to call yourself a “New York Times Bestselling author” for life. But there’s a problem with how the list is put together: The NYT team members explicitly state that they don’t read the books that make the list, and only rely on sales data. While other listmakers use industry standards like Bookscan, NYT gets sales data from retailers across the country while making their list. Usually a book has to sell 5,000 to 10,000 copies a week to qualify. The issue is that people can bulk order copies of their own book to boost the numbers. This isn’t illegal, but the NYT is aware of this possibility, and marks such cases with a †.

Lani Sarem was accused of buying her own books. She didn’t get a † because she bought just enough books from each store to not be marked as a bulk sale – so it looked like her book was an organic success that readers loved… and she made the list. But after journalists complained, the NYT took another look at the data and removed her book from the list. Lani claims that she did nothing wrong, and that she was just punished for thinking outside the box. I guess we’ll never know, unless there are any die-hard Lani Sarem fans among my readers.

Read more: How the NYT and others compile bestseller lists, Vulture Magazine’s story on the whole fiasco, and other attempts to hack the list

Can you make a living as a writer?

No. Most writers are dead, didn’t you know?
They’re writing to you from their graves after starving to death.

Brushing aside that terrible joke, this is something I’ve been desperately trying to find an answer to – is it possible and practical to sustain a career as a writer in this era? And how? I don’t have answers, but I have some clues. There’s this article in Esquire: “Has it ever been harder to make a living as an author?” The premise of the article is simple – writing is a capricious career, and it doesn’t pay as a job. If you want to do it full-time, you’re risking a lot. Some people wrote successful books and still chose not to quit their day job. Others quit successful jobs to write a book with a fixed deadline in mind. The gist is this:

The publishing industry needs to sell books. To sell books, the author has to bring something to the table apart from their book like a social media following, marketing skills, etc. If you don’t sell enough books the first time around, you won’t get a second chance. So most writers support themselves with a second job.

But this is a bleak perspective that only speaks for traditional publishing. Self-publishing and indie publishing offer alternatives that seem to work for a lot of authors, with the median income being about $12,000 a year. That’s unsustainable in the US but great money for someone in a developing country. The tradeoff is that while traditional publishing does the hard work of distribution and marketing, indie publishing pushes you to build your own audience via social media or a newsletter or by selling books on Church street.1

If you want to learn more about the numbers, you can check these links: Indie author income survey, comparison of different publishing routes, the state of indie authorship. Readers from India, check out this Reddit answer from a senior editor.

Writing a novel on Substack

Most of you get this newsletter as an email. But if you click here, you can read it on Substack, the platform where I host it. Substack is a place where any writer can build a direct connection with their readers and even get paid for their work.

I write Five Slices for free, but there are hundreds of paid newsletters here which are supported by readers. There are more than 50 newsletters earning $500,000 a year on Substack and the highest paid one nets $4 million a year. (Source) The topics on which people write about are diverse: Investing, politics, science and tech, art, maps, music, psychology, culture, relationships… anything you can think of.2 But even if you don’t want the money (you don’t?), and you just want the pleasure of having four people read your work, Substack is great.

The New Yorker recently published an article called “Is the next Great American Novel being published on Substack?” The piece is about a novella by who writes a Substack on The Great Books. She’s gone the traditional publishing route before, but she chose to publish a 15,000 word novella called Money Matters for free on Substack, and it got a very favorable review in The New Yorker article. I read the story. It’s a fun read and I loved it. (But it’s also very edgy, transgressive stuff, so tread with care if you are easily offended or disturbed. I mean, I’ve at least warned you).

More importantly, the novella has started a discussion about alternatives to traditional publishing. Naomi has written a lot about this herself: Why she chose to publish her novella on Substack, why talent isn’t the only thing that matters in publishing, and her reaction to the New Yorker article (which also announces a contest for fiction writers).

If you’ve ever considered writing online – for art, connecting with people, money, whatever – this is all stuff worth digging into.

The bookstore that made a comeback

I usually like decisions that make my life better. What I don’t like is having those decisions forced on me without warning – whether it’s the way Gmail looks, the square images being converted to rectangles on Instagram… or waking up to this email from Amazon in the morning:

Now I had to pay extra to not have ads on Prime Video. Before I know it, I’ll be watching ads on my Kindle when I’m reading books. It’s moments like these that remind me how much power these Big Tech companies have. Not just over customers like us, but over competitors too.

Barnes and Noble, a bookstore chain that’s 139 years old, was struggling to keep up with eBooks and competition from Amazon. They tried competing by launching their own eReader called Nook, which saw sales drop by 90% from 2012 to 2019. With sales dropping and stores shutting down, it looked like the chain was going out of business.

Then James Daunt took over as CEO of Barnes and Noble in 2019. He started operating from a strange philosophy not often seen in corporates, that instead of looking at the numbers, he wanted to make the bookstores a fun environment where people would love to shop. He made these decisions:

• No more deals with publishers to promote specific books and authors

• The bookstore employees had to select the books on the shelves based on their taste and customer feedback.

• There would be no top-down instruction from the head-office. Each store could make its own selection, and each store was different.

• Hiring and promoting staff from within.

By prioritizing customers and employees over publishers and distributors, Barnes and Noble got down book returns from 30% in 2019 to 7% in 2024. From 2023 to 2025, the chain is now on track to open 147 new stores.

I find this story optimistic, because it shows there are always alternatives to the current way of doing things, and no matter how inevitable digital tech or AI or monopolies seem… There always seem to be a niche for a business run with soul.

Sources: The Honest Broker, Modern Retail

The last letter

Nobody expects they’re going to die. It’s too terrifying a thing to contemplate. Death is something that happens to other people, some other day, some other time. For us, tomorrow will be like today, and the day after will be more of the same. That is, until we’re confronted by the moment and forced to compress an entire life into a few words.

French soldiers, activists, and political hostages during the time of World War II were sometimes executed by Nazi firing squads for little reason. Before dying, they were given a chance to write a last letter to someone. A professor spent some time reading these letters, published as a book, to understand how people bargain with themselves during their last moments and wrote an article about it. Here are some excerpts:

‘Be courageous, ma chérie. It is no doubt the last time that I write you. Today, I will have lived.’ — A high school teacher, to his lover

‘I do not feel the need to sleep, not out of fear, but to remember my life, because to sleep, bah! won’t I have time [to do so] very soon?’ — Leader of a miners’ strike, to his brother

‘This evening, I think of your sweetness, your kindness, of our sweet moments, those from long ago and those of yesterday, know well, my darling, one could not love you more than I did. And I will fall asleep with your sweet image in my eyes and the taste of our last kisses that are not that distant, my sweet friend, my gentle little Lienne. Be sensible … Be reasonable. Love me, for a long time yet.’ — A lawyer who fought for the unjustly imprisoned, to his wife

‘I dreamt a great deal, this last while, about the wonderful meals we would have when I was freed. You will have them without me, with family, but not in sadness.’ — Distributor of an underground resistance magazine, to his parents

‘I still have the time to talk to you ma petite, as if you were still here close to me, on the other side of the wire mesh. For this last day you were beautiful like you had never been before and oh what grief is now yours. I would like to be in this moment still.’ — Leader of the counter-espionage wing, to his newly-wed bride

Sometimes, publishing goes beyond commerce or art or beauty – it manages to freeze true moments like these in crystal so that almost a century later, it makes me think… There was a war in my part of the world too. Did the people there get to write a last letter? And if I had to write a last letter, who would I write it to, what would I say, what am I holding back today thinking life will go on as it always has?

Source: The last letters of the condemned in Aeon magazine

I’m still trying to learn more about how the publishing industry works, especially in India. If you know anything about the industry or have written and self-published a book, I’d love to hear your experience. Write to me or drop a comment.

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The greatest footballer who never played football

Carlos Roposo alias “Kaiser” was one of the most popular footballers in Brazil for 20 years. He played for four clubs, attended every practice session, and hung out with his teammates. His entertaining stories kept the team’s morale up and he was a charming guy. But in all his time as a footballer, he never played a single match. If he had, the truth would have been revealed – that Kaiser wasn’t a real player.

Kaiser had a knack for finding journalists at parties and feeding them stories about his glorious past as a footballer. Then he would use their published articles to tell more elaborate stories to important people, and get signed on by clubs. After signing up, he always had an excuse to not play. During every training session, Kaiser would mysteriously get a “training injury” and back out of the next match – but he’d ensure his popularity by paying supporters to cheer his name from the stands. His teammates knew he was a joke, but they didn’t mind having him around because he was a jolly fellow. Team owners were more frustrated. They once even called in a witch doctor to try and break his streak of injuries, but Kaiser rejected him saying even black magic couldn’t solve his injuries.

Kaiser came very close to trouble when a gangster named Castro bought him for his team, and insisted he be sent in when the team was losing 2-0. Kaiser would fail whether he played or not – instead, he started a brawl in the crowd claiming someone had insulted him, and escaped in the commotion. It was open secret that Kaiser was a 171 (a fraud in Brazilian law). But nobody cared, because he was good at what he did and never got in anybody’s way.

Source: This is the original story in The Guardian1. wrote an article about why people fake such elaborate stories in his article “The status cheats.” Great read, I recommend you check it out.

Mules

My friend and I were once standing outside a workshop waiting for a punctured tire to be repaired when a beggar approached us asking for alms. “No cash,” I muttered. “No problem, we have UPI!”2 they said whipping out a QR code which we scanned grudgingly. The payment was rejected due to “too many transactions” on the account. We were held hostage until we got some cash after which they vanished saying “Thank you for the consideration!” Something was shady about that bank account though. I wondered: How are these beggary networks structured? Who operates these bank accounts? How did they avoid taxation?

I think I might have solved the puzzle. The money was probably being moved through “mules.” Hawala networks were earlier used to move around unaccounted money. With payment systems moving online, “Mule-as-a-Service” (MaaS) networks are replacing hawala networks. Mules are middlemen between illicit businesses and their bank accounts. They operate through pyramid-shaped networks with levels:

• At the top is the L3 “boss” who receives the money from illicit businesses, like illegal gambling sites offshore or phishing scams.

• The L3 boss passes it on to multiple L2 “managers.”

• The L2 managers recruit low-level L1 “employees” and distribute money to them. These L1 members either deposit it to a final account or withdraw the money.

The people at each stage get a cut (5-10%). The L1 and L2 folks are usually unwitting accomplices who want to earn part-time income. They are lured in with the promise of easy money (if people have sent you unsolicited texts on Telegram promising you money for very little work, you were probably being recruited as a mule). The regulators catch on eventually and block the accounts. By then, the ship has sailed.

Source: This story by The Ken (unfortunately paywalled)

Why is it easier to start a scam than stop it?

“This one simple trick will let you live for a zillion years.”
”If you miss out on this cryptocurrency, you’re not gonna make it.”
”Millionaires don’t want you to know this.”

Tall claims like this on the internet aren’t very hard to spot. There’s a more insidious variety of this though – People with credentials, who look like somebody you can trust, whom you’ve followed for a very long time on YouTube or other social media, begin to promote questionable products, courses, or schemes.

It’s hard to resist the allure of these claims. We all want to get rich, healthy, popular, or happy. We secretly hope it’s true this time because this guy is more trustworthy than the previous one. And because it’s so hard to verify what’s going on, loss usually leads to self-blame. Journalists like Coffeezilla, Mike Winnet, and have made it their project to dig deep into these stories and share the truth with the public. But this research comes at personal cost to the journalists.

Scott calls this Carney’s law: Sharing misinformation on the internet is much more lucrative than fighting it, because of the algorithms and institutions involved. The platforms have more to gain from the growth of entrepreneurial creators than from investigative journalists. The system is designed with that in mind.

Source: Scott Carney’s substack

The Salad Oil Scandal

In November 1963, two important things happened in America: John F Kennedy was assassinated. And Tino D’Angelis was caught. You need to know what Tino did, because it made somebody else a lot of money.

Tino started a company called Allied Crude Vegetable Oil through which he speculated on oil futures using soybean oil as collateral. However, Tino always claimed to have more oil than he actually did – most of the tanks in his warehouse were filled with water, and there was only a bit of oil floating on top. When inspectors would check the tanks, he would even shuttle the oil between tanks using an elaborate system of pipes (If Tino actually had the stocks he claimed to have, his warehouse would have had more oil than the entire stock available in the US). In 1963, he got caught and spent the next 9 years in jail.

This wasn’t Tino’s first caper. He had earlier sold US schools 2 million pounds of uninspected meat through a government program. He didn’t stop there. Three years after he was released from prison, he swindled livestock dealers out of $7 million worth of hogs, and was sent back to prison for another 7 years. After he was released in 1982, Tino again swindled $1 million (who’s letting this guy do business?), and went to prison in 1993 at the age of 77. He died at the age of 93 in 2009.

But something else happened in 1963: Tino’s oil stocks had received warehouse receipts from a subsidiary of American Express. When he was caught, Amex was on the hook for the loans they had made, and its share price collapsed. A well-known investor bought 20% of American Express for cheap, and it ended up becoming his best performing investment for a long time. That investor was Warren Buffett.

Source: The Salad Oil Scandal

The psychology of white-collar crime

Tino De Angelis is in the hall of fame of a long line of operators who were hailed as bold risk-takers or geniuses until they were caught doing something unethical, and then lost it all in a single day. Some other examples are:

• Harshad Mehta, the trader who was worth thousands of crores until he was convicted of using forged Bank Receipts and market manipulation in the Indian financial market’s biggest scam to date.

• Rajat Gupta, the managing director of McKinsey who was convicted and imprisoned for insider trading in the US.3

• Bernie Madoff, a stock broker and market maker who ran a Ponzi scheme which lost thousands of people billions of dollars.

• The Wolf of Wall Street, i.e Jordan Belfort, who pleaded guilty to market manipulation and to selling people worthless penny stocks.

These crimes are disturbing, yes, but what baffles me is why they did it. None of them actually needed the money. They had perfectly legitimate ways of earning income (Madoff was earning $550,000 per day). They were already worth billions, with a circle of people who respected them. So why did they risk it all on a side hustle?

A paper called “Doing a Madoff: The psychology of white-collar criminals” suggests a concept called the fraud triangle – the three factors of peer pressure (“everyone else is doing it”), opportunity (“maximize profit at all costs”), and rationalization (“no one’s getting hurt, and besides, the rules are different for me”4). When you inhabit a bubble in which your actions are far removed from your victims, you don’t feel the weight of your decisions as viscerally.

There might be a simpler explanation as well. As Morgan Housel writes in When Rich People Do Stupid Things, maybe these folks figured out everything in life except what “enough” means:

Kurt Vonnegut and novelist Joseph Heller are enjoying a party hosted by a billionaire hedge fund manager. Vonnegut points out that their wealthy host had made more money in one day than Heller ever made from his novel Catch-22. Heller responds: "Yes, but I have something he will never have: enough."

Share this with a friend who might enjoy it. Last week, I wrote about fantastic buildings and where to find them. You can find the complete list of posts here.

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Creating the thing that destroys you

The coolest thing I found this week was a story by Scott Alexander called “Sort by controversial.” He posted it on Halloween, and it is a horror story in some sense: An advertising company wants to drive more clicks to its ads (meaning more money). Controversial topics get the most clicks – so the engineering team builds a program to create a list of controversial ideas. The program works great. So great in fact, that it creates controversy within the company, people start fighting with each other, and it soon escalates to a different level. The monster they create turns agains them.

This theme seemed familiar to me: Humans have an idea, humans create a cool thing, and the cool thing becomes the new problem. It’s happened in:

• Jurassic Park (dinosaurs going out of control)

• Terminator (a security system turning into the enemy)

• Star Wars (A pupil turning against the master)

• Kung Fu Panda (The favorite student and adopted son turning evil)

• Frankenstein (the monster turns against its maker).

• Lucifer rebelling against God and being banished to hell, which Milton covered in Paradise Lost.

“Sort by Controversial” is different because the monster isn’t an entity – it’s an idea. Just letting the idea loose in the world changes the shape of reality and threatens the creator. You think this is just a thought experiment? How about this: Russia’s implementation of the Communist ideology was shaped in the hands of Lenin and Trotsky, who built the Red Army. The ideology was used to overthrow the existing bureaucracy. After Lenin’s death, the new bureaucracy concentrated power even more effectively, so much that Trotsky himself was exiled and executed.1

Poets’ poets and reinvention

If you are an artist, who is your audience?

Dana Gioia wrote an essay called “Can Poetry Matter?” At its heart is the idea that poetry, which used to be an artform for the masses and common people, something that people memorized and shared and sung, has now become an intellectual activity for a restricted few:

A “famous” poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, “only poets read poetry” was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.2

Every popular field creates a subculture that breeds an audience of aspirants. There are popular comedians like Bill Burr and Dave Chappelle, and there are comedians’ comedians like Norm Macdonald whom they like. Some writers are only read by other writers. Some coding gurus just teach coders to crack interviews, and business gurus run YouTube channels about business strategy.

Maybe even Substack and the blogosphere is becoming like this – a lot of bloggers sound insightful and intelligent to me, because I want to get better at blogging. But when a friend recently asked me for recommendations, I couldn’t suggest any of these. My favorites are all Substackers’ Substackers, and maybe there are so many aspiring bloggers now that you can just make a living off of this closed bubble.

There’s nothing wrong with this. But if you want to stay in touch with the man (or woman) on the street, maybe you could reinvent yourself every once in a while by pushing yourself out of your comfort zone. Do something you’re not used to doing. Invent new personas to force yourself to try a new style, like David Bowie. Share your work with people outside your circle and absorb their confused expressions when they have no clue what you’re talking about, because a little disappointment in the short term saves you from delusion in the long term.

Also watch: You don’t want to start a business – but it’s important to think you do

Programming a new government

In software development, there’s a concept called “forking.” You take someone else’s code, modify it, and if it works, you have something new. What if you could do the same thing with a government?

The g0v and vTaiwan experiment in Taiwan pulled this off. In 2014, Taiwanese citizens rioted when they felt like the government wasn’t hearing their voice. A new government came to power claiming they would be transparent and listen to the people. Coordinated by Audrey Tang, a talented coder, there were now two programs working on this – 

• g0v which let the public track government budgets, gather data, and make information accessible.

• vTaiwan, which let the public discuss an idea before implementing it.

The discussion wasn’t a simple “Yes” or “No” referendum like how Brexit split the UK. It was done through a site called Pol.is. Every user on this site could anonymously submit an idea and vote on other people’s ideas, but could not comment. Because of this, you could participate and discuss, but couldn’t argue with others. The website would create graphs showing how people saw things differently – but also which opinions were common. For example, people were divided about Uber being a good or bad thing…

but eventually there were a handful of things that everyone agreed on which were drafted into policy, instead of picking one side over the other:

(I only have a rough idea of how exactly this works. You can read more here)

vTaiwan is a hopeful experiment in what is called deliberative democracy. It would be amazing to try something like this for larger democracies and even tech platforms that affect us like Instagram and Twitter – but where would we start?

Source: I discovered this through ’s article on Taiwan. Her journalism is both interesting and informative, and I recommend you check it out.

Luck, skill, and the decisions that affect you

“As a hiring manager, when I get a stack of resumes I throw half of them out.
I don't employ unlucky people.”
– David Brent, The Office

If algorithms decide everything, whom can you hold accountable?

Institutions and algorithms have improved the efficiency of processes. But they have also removed accountability. Your social media post is removed? Your loan application is rejected? Your Uber account is deactivated? Every time you try to reach a human to solve this, you hear a bunch of automated voices asking you to punch a sequence of buttons that make you want to fling your phone in frustration. You have no clue who decides your fate and what factors go into these decisions.

Some societies recognize this and have a Right to Explanation in place to solve this. If you’re affected by a decision, you can ask how the decision was taken. This gets more complicated when automated algorithms are involved. But now with AI entering the picture, explainability is way harder. Algorithms used until now at least had a logic flow you could trace. But AI algorithms work on probabilities – even the people who programmed them can’t trace why a decision is being made. They can neither fix it nor be held accountable.

Explainable AI explores this problem but I don’t know how far they’ve got. For example, OpenAI is infamous for evading any question about training data… and the difficulty of the problem might be turned into an excuse for sloppiness in ethics.

But even if every decision has an explanation, a lot of it still comes down to luck. That might be distasteful to hear in a world where you’ve been told if you work really hard you can get whatever you want. But it doesn’t necessarily work that way. 18,300 people applied to be a NASA astronaut, for just 11 vacancies. How many do you think will be selected based on merit and how many because they were luckier than the competition? Watch this video from 3:30 to 5:00 to find out:

Fantastic buildings and where to find them

Sometimes I see a picture of a building and I can’t help wondering: Who built this? How? What’s the story behind this building?

Especially if the building is old. A thousand years ago when we didn’t have cranes and modern equipment, we were still building cathedrals. People worked on buildings that took lifetimes to complete, because of belief in a divine cause that would secure them a seat in heaven.3 One of these cathedrals, The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, is still under construction after 140 years. Decked with grotesque imagery and walls that look like they’re melting, the cathedral was the vision of one man, Antoni Gaudi. When he died, the building was only 15% done.

Then there are follies. A folly is a mistake – a mistake of extravagance that cost the builder too much, but turned into something grand and beautiful. For example, there’s this literal cliffhanger called “The Swallow’s Nest” on a seaside cliff in Crimea:

Or this mountaintop monastery in Meteora, Greece where the view must be crazy:

Or Fonthill’s Abbey, a tall building built in haste with such poor planning that the tower kept collapsing continuously till the building was demolished in 1825…

Or this cute building in Scotland called the Dunmore Pineapple:

Apparently the pineapple that we get in supermarkets today was once a prized rarity that bred pineapple mania. Even St. Paul’s Cathedral has a golden pineapple on top. Tell me If you know of any other offbeat buildings, and I’ll add them to my bucket list.

Reading recommendation for this week: Dogs have a special move to shake water off their fur that humans don’t – the wet dog shake. An elephant and an octopus are worlds apart, but their trunk and tentacle move in surprisingly similar ways. Every time you reach for a cup of coffee, your muscles enter a theater of biological drama…

My friend wrote a piece called Immense world of action that explores how different animals move and interact with the world – with pictures, gifs, the whole shebang. I love the sense of wonder I felt when I read it, and it’s also a really good bit of writing, so check it out.

Share this with a friend who might enjoy it. Last week, I wrote about my garbage blog. You can find the complete list of posts here.

It’s like the un-sober younger brother of this blog, to borrow a phrase from my friend. Think of it as all the stuff I’d tell a friend if I called them up at 12 at night and talked till 3. So I’m just going to drop some of those articles here, which you can check out.

If you like this kind of stuff and want me to sign you up for that blog, reply “Yes” to this e-mail or drop a yes in the comments.

Here’s my top 5 articles on that blog in increasing order of favorite-ness:

1. Crying for a Broken Tolstoy: Leo Tolstoy underwent a spiritual transformation after writing his best novels, and he became a better man, but a worse writer. Some thoughts on why.

2. Akira Kurosawa and Single Sitting Disease: I don’t complete writing anything unless I finish it in a single sitting. This is Akira Kurosawa (Famous Japanese Director who made the Seven Samurai)’s advice on how to get over it.

3. A richer life needs more context: I’m finding more satisfaction in bigger books and deeper relationships. Some thoughts on why that’s the case.

4. Sacred dreams are scary to touch: Just re-read The Great Gatsby which I loved. It gave me some ideas about why I keep postponing doing the things that matter to me the most, love vs limerence, etc.

5. Who is the real me? It feels like there’s always a tug-of-war in me between two selves who have completely different priorities and natures. This is probably my favorite piece because it’s completely unhinged, lacks any structure, and has way more jokes.

Oh, I also translated a short story I like from Tamil to English. If you like “A hunger artist” by Kafka, you might like this translation: Tiger Artist by Ashokamitran.

I’ll see you next week, eager to know which one of these you liked the most.

Bye bye.

From: Me
To: You

I used to write letters as a kid. Mostly to my grandfather. He passed away around the time I got my first smartphone, and I don't think I've handwritten one since. But letters are great. They let me express myself in a way that fragmented chats just can't. And considering that this is a news-letter, why don’t I just make it a letter about letters, addressed to you? (Read till the end… Or at least scroll if you get impatient)

The dead letter detective

In the book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there’s a planet where all lost ball-point pens go. I don’t know if any such planet exists. But here on earth, something similar happens to letters. Sometimes, letters can’t reach the address on the envelope and they get orphaned. There’s a place where these lost messages go to die – the dead letter office. Almost every country has one. The one in America has been operating since 1877 and in 2006 alone, approximately 90 million letters ended up there.

What happens next is part routine and part detective novel. Undeliverable letters, called “nixies” are sorted and then passed to clerks who deals with these anomalies. One of them, Patti Lyle Collins was considered the queen of the dead letter office, handling 1000 letters a day.

Another clerk named Tom Doherty did this job for more than 29 years. Each nixie was a personal challenge to him. Sometimes pranksters wrote cryptic, unsolvable addresses to see if Tom could crack the code and forward them to the right address. Sometimes love hung in the balance – A guy from France sent a postcard with only a girl’s name and phone number, with no address. Delving through a bookcase full of telephone directories, Tom found the girl’s address and forwarded the postcard to her.

The most extreme case? A letter that had the name of a Polish man with the address “Massachusetts.” No name, no street. Just a photograph on the back, of a man standing in front of a house with the number 232. Tom scanned the Boston street directory and found a man with that name on 232 West Fourth Street. He forwarded the letter there. Since it was never returned, he thinks it probably got there.

But these cases are one in a thousand. Most dead letters never find a home. Sometimes, they’re opened. Occasionally, they are auctioned to collectors. Mostly, they are just destroyed. Imagine a letter where you say everything, and it just disappears. That’s the ache of the unread.

The modern version of the dead letter office is a subreddit called Unsent Letters, where people post all the letters they didn't have courage to send. Scroll through if you want to feel the pain, or maybe the relief of not being alone in it.

Sources: Dead letters that computers can’t sort, the queen of dead letters, Tom Doherty’s adventures

The 2000 year old letter

I told you a while ago about the eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius and how it buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. We know about that day not from archaeology – but from a letter. A Roman official named Pliny the Younger wrote to his historian friend Tacitus, describing what he saw:

It was not clear at that distance from which mountain the cloud was rising (it was afterwards known to be Vesuvius; its general appearance can best be expressed as being like a pine-tree, for it rose to a great height on a sort of trunk and then split off into branches, I imagine because it was thrust upwards by the first blast and then left unsupported as the pressure subsided, or else it was borne down by its own weight so that it spread out and gradually dispersed. Sometimes it looked white, sometimes blotched and dirty, according to the amount of soil and ashes it carried with it.

The letter was written in 79 AD, and somehow, 2000 years later, we’re still able to read it. How? First, Pliny never wrote the letter as private correspondence – it was half-performance. He curated nine books of letters to friends and public figures. He hoped to publish it and even mentioned in volume 1: “I hope that these letters will not be unworthy of being read.”

His scribes made copies of these books, and those copies spread. Later, Christian monks in Italy, France, and Switzerland found value in his Latin style and moral instruction, and transcribed the letters again. In the 8th and 9th centuries, Charlemagne’s educational reforms triggered a mini-renaissance of learning and replication. Later, Renaissance humanists like Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini hunted down lost manuscripts, and revived Pliny. The printing press did the rest.

It’s staggering. One man’s letter survived fires, war, and centuries of change, when entire libraries were lost in the same period. His letters lasted because people wanted to read them. If you write something good enough to preserve, it lives on.

Also read: The world's oldest customer complaint letter, which is quite emo for someone from 1750 BC.

Sources: Pliny’s account of Vesuvius’ Explosion

The post-box of Europe

Letters were the Internet of the medieval era. If you were a scientist or a thinker looking to share your ideas with the world, you didn’t have Twitter or Substack. You needed to know someone who could pass it along. Marin Mersenne was one of those people. They called him the “Post-box of Europe.” He was a laborer’s son who became a Christian monk, taught himself science and math, and sent thousands of letters connecting thinkers who might never have exchanged ideas otherwise.

Take Rene Descartes, for example – the man behind "I think, therefore I am". Mersenne introduced Descartes’ work to the world. After Mersenne died, they found 146 letters from Descartes to him. 146, imagine that. Mersenne also connected Blaise Pascal and Pierre Fermat, setting the foundation for probability theory. He provoked debates between Thomas Hobbes and Descartes. And he popularized the works of Torricelli (the barometer guy), Huygens (the optics guy), and Galileo (the guy).

When Galileo was placed under house arrest for defying the church with his scientific claims, his letters still reached Mersenne, who supported him by publishing his ideas. Otherwise we might have never heard of Galileo. Small world networks and social media thrive today because there are “honest brokers” like Mersenne who don’t seek fame but build bridges quietly. Mersenne wasn’t just a letter-writer. He was a mathematician himself and did some work on music theory. But his biggest contribution was the invisible architecture he built to let people's ideas flow.

Sources: This is everything you need to know about Mersenne. wrote a cool thread about “honest brokers” who connect people and collect favors.

“You are not nameless”

Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics. He wasn’t just brilliant — he was a showman, a safe-cracking prankster, and one of the most recognizable scientists of his time. He worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project (yes, he was in Nolan’s movie), investigated the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and gave a lecture that might have launched nanotechnology. He did all this while also playing bongo drums in forests, sketching women in bars, and taking mental math bets against abacus salesmen.

But Feynman’s favorite identity may have been as a teacher. His lectures are as accessible and fun as they are insightful. One day, an old student of Feynman, Koichi Mano, wrote to congratulate him. But the letter had a hint of self-pity in it. Mano called himself a “nameless man” working on a “humble and down-to-earth problem.”

Feynman was disappointed. He wrote a letter replying to Mano, gently explaining to him that it’s not about picking a great problem, but about finding one that you find interesting and useful. He even admitted:

“I made a mistake, I gave you the problem instead of letting you find your own; and left you with a wrong idea of what is interesting or pleasant or important to work on.”

The whole letter is interesting to read, but the ending stayed with me:

No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it. You say you are a nameless man. You are not to your wife and to your child. You will not long remain so to your immediate colleagues if you can answer their simple questions when they come into your office. You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself – it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.

Nothing is trivial. Like in Schindler's list, “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”

Links: This is Feynman’s letter to his student, these are his sketches of women in bars, and there are more stories of him being playful in the book “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman.” Feynman played pranks on his buddies even while working on the Manhattan project. This letter that he wrote to his wife is also really moving and if you have some time, check it out.

Oh also, my friend is the one who told me about Feynman’s letter. He writes fun articles about science on his blog, and you should totally subscribe to him.

Kafka’s letter to his father

Franz Kafka’s bizarre stories are like no one else’s. In Metamorphosis, the main character wakes up one morning and finds that he’s become a giant cockroach (okay, he just says insect, but I always imagine a cockroach because it’s way more disgusting). The rest of the book is the (somewhat depressing) story of what happens next. In The Trial, the hero is arrested and prosecuted – but he never learns what crime he’s accused of. His worlds are surreal and strange.

Kafka is one of my favorite writers.
But he's also one of the people I’d least want to become.

The man had a job but he was unhappy with it, he was handsome and smart but tormented by the belief that people found him physically and mentally repulsive, and created genius stories but was so doubtful of his own writing that he didn't publish most of what he wrote. He burned 90% of his works. Much of the remainder was lost as well. He even requested his friend Max Brod to destroy everything else after his death. But (luckily? unluckily?) Brod ignored his request – which is why we know about Kafka today. I can only imagine what the missing work was like.

Kafka also wrote letters. A lot of them. His letters to Milena, his fiancée whom he never married, were compiled into a book. Kafka also wrote a painfully intense letter to his father, 45 pages long. Reading it is like watching a family argue at a bus-stop while waiting for your ride: uncomfortable, but impossible to look away. It starts like this:

This is the full letter. (Handle with care)

Kafka had a difficult relationship with his dad, and the letter was his final attempt to explain himself. He gave the letter to his mother to deliver. She quietly returned it because she didn’t want trouble. But now 106 years after he wrote it, the entire world can read the personal tirade of a man who wanted all of his writing to be destroyed. Kafka must be rolling in his grave.

A couple more things you might like to read

• Kafka admired the philosopher Kierkegaard, another writer of haunting existentialism. Kierkegaard also wrote letters to his fiancee, and also never married her. I discovered their strange mirror-image story through a note by . This is their story:

• Henry Matisse’s beautiful handwritten notes that I’d have loved to get in the mail:

You know what’s great about this letter? You don’t need to keep it a secret. You can forward it to your friends, you can share it with your boss, you can show it to your dog. And if they like it, I’ll write letters to them too. All they need to do is:

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Anyway, hope this letter made you smile. See ya.

Yours,
Adhithya

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My friend Anjan told me something I think about whenever people give me advice.

Anjan’s a jovial chap, always the center of attention, cracking jokes and making everybody laugh. Most of his jokes were focused on himself: he was a bit overweight and he made it his comedian’s prop. When he started losing weight, he even worried that he would lose his powers of humor like Chandler in Friends. Anyway, one day in office, Anjan was unusually silent. He put on a poker face, didn’t talk much, and went a whole day without cracking any jokes. He seemed perfectly healthy otherwise – it’s not like he was coming down with a fever.

At first, his friends were fidgety. They thought he was preoccupied with something. Then they asked him if everything was alright. By the end of the day, the questions were turning outright hostile – they seemed angry and annoyed that “for no good reason,” Anjan was pulling a prank on them and they insisted that he was suppressing some terrible tragedy that was deeply bothering him. I remember that day. I was one of those people who was trying to cheer him up.

Anjan later told me that it was an experiment to shake things up a bit. He knew that people cared about him, but he was trying to figure out what actually bothered them. He realized that people were more concerned with the fact that their life experience had been disrupted than that something was off with him. When he resumed talking and joking the next day, nobody investigated what had happened and pretty soon they forgot about the sudden solar eclipse of momentary moroseness.

Most advice is like this. It comes from a place of people’s discomfort with their own status quo being disrupted. This isn’t throwing shade at your friends – but it’s something you need to remember when asking for advice: The advice you get says much more about the person giving advice than it does about you.

Advice comes from a personal place

Imagine you go to your dad with the news that you’re quitting a job that seems “perfectly fine” to him on the outside. He is privy only to your interactions with him when you get home, and that you’re generally a functional human being. He might not know about your endless nights of existential wakefulness wondering whether your twenties are being invested into a vacuum, or the internal friction you feel while dealing with office politics. So his advice will come from the perspective of – “How is this going to change our life? Why rock a boat that is sailing so smoothly?” Not because he doesn’t care about your experience, but because that’s all he sees.

In the same way, when you ask your friends for relationship advice and tell them about how it’s going with that new girl (or boy) you just met, they’re going to interpret it through the lens of their own experience first: “What would I do in this situation? Based on what happened to me in the past, does this feel healthy? From what I know about my friend, does this feel like a healthy relationship?” This is the stuff that will get verbalized, so you at least have a chance to talk about it. The more subtle stuff that won’t get discussed is your friend thinking, “How will this relationship affect my dynamic with my friend? Does this sound like the sort of person who will fit into our group? Will this person change aspects of my friend that I really enjoy?”

writes about the danger of talking about relationships prematurely in his post “Looking for Alice”:

When you talk about people you like, or rather when you talk about that thing that happens between you—you have to transform a highly complex impression into a string of words. Some relationships can easily be compressed into a compelling string of words. This is usually because they conform to some sort of trope of how romance should look. In my experience, great relationships are harder to compress into a sensible string of words.

And the problem is this: we are social creatures. If people look at you with a confused, or even worried, expression when you tell them about your lover, you will likely feel bad. If they start giggling and act all excited about your luck, on the other hand, you will feel a surge of affection toward your date.

Maybe your friend isn’t even aware of all this. But those dynamics are surely at play. I know because I’ve asked friends for such advice, and I’ve been that friend who gives advice as well. Admitting that my motives aren’t purely altruistic is a little hard to accept because it clashes with the way I see myself – as someone who just wants the best for his friends – while there might be more selfish motives underneath. Sometimes your core values don’t match with your friends. And sometimes you’re trying to change your values or what you aspire for (read: This excellent post on Aspiration by ) – at such times, your friends are going to be skeptical of your views even when there’s no right answer.

On some level, this is fine. Your friends and family have probably known you for long enough to be attuned to what really matters to you and the ways you trip yourself up. They might be able to save you from real danger. However, we live in a time where the dangers of taking risks are overrated compared to the risks of missing opportunities by playing it safe. Your capacity to bounce back from grief is probably much higher than you imagine, but the regret of an unexplored possibility persists much longer, like white noise in the background.

Life lessons from a gangster

Here’s a really goofy example of this if you’re a movie buff. At the end of Pulp Fiction, two gangsters are sitting in a cafe discussing their future. The gangster Jules played by Samuel L Jackson says that he’s going to quit his gangster job and “walk the Earth like Caine from Kung Fu.” A cold-blooded killer is literally basing his future on a TV show that vibes with what he’s feeling at the moment. His friend Vincent (John Travolta) isn’t just amused or annoyed; he thinks Jules has lost his mind and he almost takes it as a personal insult. Which is understandable. It’s like walking into your software job on Monday to hear your office friend say he’s going to start selling teddy bears on the highway.

But Vincent’s values are so misaligned with Jules that the advice isn’t just coming from a place of concern, but also self-preservation: Vincent doesn’t want to admit the possibility that something so surreal could happen in his life. It shatters the illusion and role that he’s constructed for himself. He had certain expectations of what gangsters could and could not do, which are being challenged by Jules. Suddenly, he finds himself on wet marshland when he thought he was on firm ground.

Sometimes seemingly “good advice” can also come from a selfish place. This is what happens in Good Will Hunting, a movie about Will, a working class genius who isn’t interested in using his talents as a mathematician and instead wants to stick with his friends who do construction jobs. Will (Matt Damon) is telling Chuckie (Ben Affleck) that he’s not ashamed of having a construction job:

Will: [both leaning on a pick up truck while drinking beers and smoking cigarettes on a construction site] What do I want a way outta here for? I'm gonna live here the rest of my fuckin' life. We'll be neighbors, have little kids, take 'em to Little League up at Foley Field.

Chuckie: Look, you're my best friend, so don't take this the wrong way but, in 20 years if you're still livin' here, comin' over to my house, watchin' the Patriots games, workin' construction, I'll fuckin' kill ya. That's not a threat, that's a fact, I'll fuckin' kill ya.

This is rare. Sometimes you have friends who realize that what’s best for you isn’t what’s best for the group. Chuckie knows his friend well enough to sense that his contrarian attitude might just be the fear of losing his friends – and he’s trying to make sure that Will doesn’t cave to that fear.

But what if Will really wanted to work construction?

Is Chuckie’s advice coming from a place of wanting Will to do what’s best for him? Or does he want Will to reach heights which he and his other friends could never reach by living vicariously through Will, which also makes it about preserving his own perception and social reality? (“You don’t owe it to yourself, you owe it to me,” Chuckie tells Will).

It’s rarely a simple answer: It isn’t about whether Will needs to blindly follow Chuckie or reject his advice – it’s about whether he’s aware of these dynamics in the first place.

Un-emotional advice

When I first began telling people I was trying therapy, I expected to be criticized and judged for it. While I did get such responses, there was also unexpected curiosity: “Does it help? What do they actually do? They just sit and talk, is it?” Because I hadn’t expected these questions, I didn’t have an answer ready at that time, but I’ve been thinking about it since.

Yes, therapy is mostly just talking, answering questions, and sitting in silence with uncomfortable emotions if possible. The major difference is that your therapist doesn’t have a stake in how your life turns out. They aren’t a part of your social groups, they don’t have a stake in your career progress, and your major life decisions aren’t directly going to affect them. All they care about is whether you are able to achieve the goals that you want to work on, and because they don’t have a stake in your life, their advice is less likely to come from an emotional place while making sure you’re able to function as a healthy individual.

“Un-emotional” advice isn’t superior. It’s just different. Therapy might give you access to a perspective that you don’t get from other people who are invested in your life, which might help you see things differently. It might, not will. I don’t recommend therapy as a magic pill to people I know because I’m not sure it does work for everybody, and I don’t know what “work” means – the pace and effectiveness with which people expect results from therapy varies.

Like any other worthwhile activity, the results I got from therapy depended on the work I was willing to put in and the risks I was willing to take (emotionally). I noticed that therapy isn’t a great way to get answers, but it did help me ask better questions. My questions got more specific and tailored to my curiosity, and I was able to listen to advice from others while also staying grounded in what I valued.

Ideas for giving and taking advice

Taking advice better comes down to giving better context and asking better questions.
Giving advice better comes down to discovering context and asking better questions.

Here are some notes I found helpful on taking advice:

• Explain your situation in as much detail as possible as long as the other person is curious and willing to listen. Pay attention to cues.

• Ask them whether they understand your situation. If they can explain your situation and the problem you’re facing, you get to see the gaps in their understanding and fill them better. Advice that comes from incomplete understanding is useless.

• Don’t ask what you should do. Ask how they would go about the situation if they were in your shoes, and try to understand why they’re making the choices they make. This gives you clarity on their values which can help you separate their personal preferences from facts, and to ask more useful questions.

  • e.g. “If you disagreed with your team on how to do something, how would you go about it? Oh, you wouldn’t say anything and just get the job done? Why? Because you don’t like breaking the peace. Oh, makes sense.”

• Give them time to process the situation and come back to it later. Usually the best ideas take a while to pop up. Whatever advice is given on the spot is probably an honest response, but not the most well thought-out advice (When we were working on stories, my friend Guna would always chuck the first idea we discussed and ask for the “second-best idea.” Something like that).

• Try writing down the advice you are planning to ask. Writing things gives shape to your assumptions, and sometimes you realize you don’t even need to ask for advice because you already know what you are supposed to do.

As much as I love the sound of my own voice, I hate giving advice. I absolutely hate it. It puts me in a position of authority when what I want to do is connect with people instead. But I do recognize that people find my thought process helpful at times, so here’s what I do when I’m asked for advice:

• I ask questions. I let the other person talk as much as possible, and pay attention to body language. If their eyes are shifting around or shoulders stiffen or they sigh or talk really fast and skip over some portion, there’s probably some emotionally important information there, which is always way more useful than objective facts. So I pay attention to those and dig deeper.

• I try to talk about my personal experiences instead of giving general rules. e.g If someone’s talking about feeling anxiety in a group, I’ll talk about how I felt like I was performing or acting when I was in a group and the spotlight was on me, and ask, “Does that sound familiar?” If it does, great. If not, great. I can ask more to find how their experience is different.

• If I have a contradictory idea or think they are wrong, I find it more useful to ask “What makes you think that?” or “Have you thought about this?” or “Have you tried that?” instead of saying “Here’s what you should do.” I just try to be the sounding board for the other person to unravel their thoughts. (Tricks I learned from therapy :p)

• Sometimes I don’t say anything and stay silent (“Hmmmmmm…” is what my friends here from me a lot of the time). People tend to discover what they really want to say in that silence, more than I expect.

• I tell them I don’t know, and that I’ll think about the problem and get back to them later. There’s nothing worse than pretending I have the answer when I don’t.

I still think that most of the time, people have all the information that they need to decide the next step, and giving and taking advice is more about alignment and encouragement, rather than sharing information. But if possible, please don’t be Mr. Circlehead here:

If you have any thoughts on giving and taking advice, I’d love to hear them in the comments. If you enjoyed reading this, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks!

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From blues music to bullets

What I miss most about college is the music. Fresh music pervaded the air, in the canteens, empty classrooms, the hallways of our hostels. Sometimes people would drop into strangers’ rooms playing music they liked, becoming friends by the end of the hour. My range in music was limited, but my friend Narayan had the most original taste in music of anyone I ever knew. We had become roommates accidentally, one of the best accidents of all time. Every week he would recommend a band wildly different from the last week’s suggestion – Simon and Garfunkel, El Condor Pasa on pan pipes, Sufi music, Carnatic fusion rock, Hang drums, ballads… And I looked forward to what he would find next.

One such find was the desert blues band Tinariwen from Mali/Algeria in Africa. In their song Iswegh Attay (which means “I drank some tea”), they sing a calming tune as tea simmers over glowing coals. We loved this song. We didn’t understand a single lyric but it would run in the background and we would hum along.

Last week I discovered a bizarre story: Tinariwen’s lyricist Iyad ag Ghali had left the band to make a career switch. He became an Al Qaeda warlord, banning music in Mali, ambushing his own band members, abducting his guitarist friend, and eventually commanding an army of 6,000 extremists that led to tens of thousands of deaths. How does a man move from music to mass murder?

Ag Ghali was one of the founding members of Tinariwen and saw his music as political activism. But somewhere along the way, he started diverging from the band – While Tinariwen moved to larger stages, playing with Led Zeppelin and Bono, and even winning a Grammy, Ag Ghali grew interested in Al Qaeda’s ideology. He was finding it hard to balance both roles – as a military activist and a rock star – and he eventually ambushed his own bandmates. At 70, he is now a fearsome leader and a wanted man in Africa.

This ambush happened in 2013. It was in 2014 that Narayan and I were humming along to this song in our hostel rooms, blissfully unaware of the chaos in Africa. It’s a disturbing story, but there’s a small ray of hope: Tinariwen is still together, and they continue to play music, despite all the trauma and terror.

Source: The Honest Broker, WSJ

Note: If I use personal stories or conversations, I always clear it with the people concerned before I publish. Conversations with me are confidential, don’t worry about what you tell me.

The Hemingway Effect

I’ve been reading some short stories by Ernest Hemingway after discovering a series of essays on his craft. If you like reading or writing, check out Part 2 and Part 3. (Part 1 is good but it’s mostly hero-worship of Hemingway). Part 3 is about Hemingway’s influences: Writers, poets, explorers, and painters – for example, he learned to describe scenery by studying Cezanne’s paintings. Writer Russell Banks describes this as “the logic of the eye.”

Look at the physical description, how he moves from background to foreground. It’s the logic of the eye. It’s not the logic of the paragraph. And it’s not the logic of exposition. It’s the logic of the eye.

When I reread the “The short happy life of Francis Macomber,” I saw this in action everywhere. Here’s a sentence where a scenery unfolds:

So they sat there in the shade where the camp was pitched under some wide-topped acacia trees with a boulder-strewn cliff behind them, and a stretch of grass that ran to the bank of a boulder-filled stream in front with forest beyond it, and drank their just-cool lime drinks and avoided one another's eyes while the boys set the table for lunch.

And here’s another where he completes an entire scene in a single sentence:

In the orchard bush they found a herd of impala, and leaving the car they stalked one old ram with long, wide-spread horns and Macomber killed it with a very creditable shot that knocked the buck down at a good two hundred yards and sent the herd off bounding wildly and leaping over one another's backs in long, leg-drawn-up leaps as unbelievable and as floating as those one makes sometimes in dreams.

Hemingway’s rival Faulkner criticized him for “never using a word that will make a reader reach for a dictionary,” that his words were too simple and he never took a risk. But his simplicity is deceptive – his clean sentences have a cinematic logic to them, easy to read but very hard to imitate. (I’ve tried and failed. It’s easier to ramble).

The same Faulkner respected Hemingway for his absolute commitment to his craft. Hemingway wrote every day, and he did this by making it easy on himself. He set a low bar of 200-500 words, never pushing himself too hard. But his special trick was to stop when the going was good. He would write for a set amount of time, and stop at the most exciting part when he knew what would happen next. For the next 24 hours, his mind kept mulling on the story in the background – in the shower, on his walks, when he was drinking – and he never had to return to every writer’s nightmare of starting from a blank page. He just had to pick up from where he left off.

This “Hemingway effect” has been studied by researchers, and it doesn’t apply just to writing. Stopping a task midway when you know what you need to do next lets you process it in your subconscious mind, and the chances are that you’ll return to the task with higher motivation. In contrast, if you exhaust yourself by pushing yourself to the brink of your energy, the task will seem like an unpleasant chore.

Also see: The Zeigarnik effect, Paul Thomas Anderson on not starting from a blank page

The anonymous guy who saved the stock market

While I’m writing bizarre stories here on my newsletter, our main newsletter Market Sentiment is seeing a spike in interest: because the US stock market is in turmoil. President Trump declared large-scale tariffs on a number of countries. Ironically, US businesses are the worst affected by this. So much of their production and supply chains are outsourced to other countries. In just 16 minutes, the US stock market fell by 4% and lost $2 Trillion in market cap. Over the next few days, the dip in the US market was equal to the size of the Indian stock market.

But yesterday, the US market went up by 4% – more than $4 Trillion – in just a few minutes, and nobody knew why. The news on the streets was that tariffs were being paused for 90 days for negotiations. Markets were celebrating. But after a while, markets dropped again.

Here’s what happened: An anonymous guy named Walter Bloomberg read a news article from Reuters and tweeted that tariffs were being paused. His account is pretty big. So other news outlets like CNBC started reporting that tariffs were being paused, based on Walter’s tweet. Meanwhile, Reuters retracted the original article because they later found it was incorrect. After a while, the White House came back and made an official statement saying they have no clue what news outlets are talking about. Markets collapsed again.

An anonymous guy with a Twitter account just lifted up the stock market for a few glorious minutes. Memes be meming. We now live in the theater of the absurd.

Source: TechCrunch

De-extinct wolves and distorted claims

The dire wolf was a species of large wolf that roamed North America more than 10,000 years ago before it went extinct. These beasts were the inspiration for the Direwolves in the series “Game of Thrones”:

Yesterday, this headline popped up in my feed: “Scientists say they have resurrected the dire wolf.” The article covered Colossal, a biotech company working to resurrect extinct animals like the Woolly Mammoth. The headline got me thinking: What’s next? Jurassic Park?

My friends who work in research have taught me to be a little skeptical. So I went to the only credible news source – Reddit – and read what other researchers had to say. The “resurrection” claims weren’t exactly false, but it looks like some details were intentionally distorted. The scientists had edited the genes of gray wolves to create a new species that resembled what they thought a dire wolf would have looked like. But of course, that isn’t as catchy a headline.

This is a recurring pattern:

• Tech gurus claimed that crypto was the next financial revolution. 17 years in, I still don’t use any crypto products.

• AI was touted as life-changing. While it’s definitely incredible as a tool, it hasn’t cured cancer or solved millennium problems or unlocked creativity as claimed.

• Microsoft unveiled a chip called Majorana–1 which they claimed was a leap forward in quantum computing. A month later, the data they revealed in a conference was received with muted excitement. The promises seem much bigger than the substance.

Why does this happen? The problem is at three levels: Companies are jumping the gun and making tall claims (if they were that close to revolution, why not wait for revolution and let the results speak for themselves?). The media isn’t checking facts. Consumers aren’t being skeptical enough. In the worst case, this leads to scandals like Elizabeth Holmes’ Theranos. Here’s why this happens:

1. Companies have FOMO. They need to raise funds and attract the brightest talent. If their marketing is based on incremental advances, they might not be desirable enough for the next generation of brilliant scientists to join. (But if your scientists can’t even figure out that your claims are false, are they that brilliant?)

2. The media wants a viral story. In most cases, they’re working on tight deadlines and are under pressure to be fast, not rigorous. Like Reuters in the previous article, they can retract in the worst case. But by then the damage is already done.

3. Consumers are a bit different. When you find someone making false claims in the newspaper about a topic you know (your city, your industry, etc.) you immediately recognize that the journalist is clueless or dishonest. But then you turn the page to read a story called “Cancer will be cured by next month” and you believe it, forgetting that the previous page was false just a second ago. You might even forward it on Whatsapp. This is called the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

The incentive system is so broken that there’s no quick fix for this. But at a personal level at least, you can be a little more aware of what you believe and pass on.

Night of Fire

On the Gulf of Naples in Italy lies Vesuvius. Not all volcanoes are active, and even the active ones aren’t always destructive. Vesuvius is both. In the last 2000 years, it has erupted at least 43 times. But the worst one happened in 79 AD. Vesuvius exploded violently releasing gases, ash, and molten rock into the sky, releasing 100,000 times the thermal energy of the atomic bombings of WWII. It buried the tourist towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum under 6 meters of ash, killing thousands of people.

We know about the horror of what happened that night through the letters of Pliny the Younger, a roman statesman who recorded what happened that night from a distance. His uncle and guardian, Pliny the Elder perished from the toxic gases spewed by the volcano. Pliny the Younger’s record inspired artists who followed him, and they all imagined the night Vesuvius erupted in their own colors:

Pierre-Jacques Volaire alone has 22 paintings of the Vesuvius eruption, and they are incredible.

Source: Via this post from . The title of this post, “I see fire” is a reference to this masterpiece of a song from Ed Sheeran.

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I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Last week, I wrote about the lore behind your favorite songs. You can find the complete list of posts here.

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The Beatles song that Paul dreamed up

Yesterday
Is two days before tomorrow
The day after two days ago

That’s how Kitaru, the narrator’s friend sings the Beatles song in Haruki Murakami’s story “Yesterday.” Kitaru is singing aloud in the bathroom. The narrator is sitting on a stool outside, mildly annoyed that his friend is butchering such a sad and beautiful song. But years later, he regrets not remembering what Kitaru sang.1

With over 2,200 cover versions, Yesterday is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music. It’s also my favorite Beatles song. It’s different from their other songs because it was their first one2 that used a string quartet (2 violins, a viola, and a cello). The strings give the song a melancholy vibe.

Apparently, Paul McCartney got the idea for the song in a dream. He woke up with the melody for Yesterday fully formed in his head when he was staying at his then girlfriend Jane Asher’s place, and he played it on the piano to not forget it. He was worried that this was a tune he had heard before and was plagiarizing:

“For about a month I went round to people in the music business and asked them whether they had ever heard it before. Eventually it became like handing something in to the police. I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks then I could have it.”

Like in the Murakami story, Paul initially wrote nonsense lyrics to remember the melody: “Scrambled eggs… Oh, my baby, how I love your legs” till he settled on the final lyrics lamenting his lost love. The rest of the band considered the song a joke at first, and vetoed its release in the UK because it was so different from their other work; but after its wild popularity, they changed their mind.

In Danny Boyle’s film “Yesterday,” a musician practicing his guitar for the first time after an accident plays Yesterday and his friends are mindblown. He then realizes that he’s woken up in a parallel universe where the Beatles never existed. Unlike Paul who imagined it, he did actually hear the song somewhere. The rest of the film is about him becoming a musical idol using the songs of The Beatles while wrestling with his conscience about the ethics of ripping off his favorite band.

Suffering from success

Sometimes people make things that they regret later. It could be movie lines that end up being memes, jokes that get them canceled, or songs which end up being the only thing they’re remembered for.

Creep was that albatross around the neck for the band Radiohead.

The lead singer Thom Yorke wrote the song after he had an awkward experience with a girl he liked. He was smitten by her and couldn’t really express what he was feeling, struggling to behave with sensitivity while also coming across as masculine. He turned that feeling inward and wrote the lines:

“I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here…”

The song was part of their debut album. It tapped into something in the zeitgeist and became wildly popular.

Radiohead played their signature song at every venue for the next two years before they eventually tired of it. They felt they were being judged narrowly based on a single song, and one member said: “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying.” The band got hostile when audiences requested the song and refused to play it for a number of years, before recovering and finally being okay with its fame.

As an aside, comedian Patrice O’Neill analyzed why the song Creep is incredibly important to understanding the “soul of white people.” It’s hilarious:

Beethoven’s proposals

Für Elise is one of the most recognizable tunes in the world: From ringtones and garbage trucks in Taiwan, to children’s toys and a music box that my friend got for me from Prague, the song is literally everywhere. You need to hear only the first few seconds to recognize it even if you don’t know its name:

Beethoven composed this tune. We don’t know if he ever got to hear it – not just because he lost his hearing towards the end of his life, but because this music wasn’t published or performed in his lifetime. 40 years after his death, a scholar named Ludwig Nohl discovered the piece among Beethoven’s letters and published it. There are disputes about whether he transcribed the piece correctly. Some say that Nohl’s original manuscript doesn’t exist at all.

The piece’s name, translates to “For Elise” and nobody knows who Elise is. One theory is that Beethoven actually dedicated it to Therese Malfetti, a friend of his to whom he proposed marriage and was turned down by, or Countess Thérèse von Brunsvik, a patron to whom he had dedicated another composition. Beethoven’s handwriting was sloppy, and Therese might have been interpreted as Elise. Elise could have also been a nickname for an opera singer named Elisabeth Röckel whom Beethoven was friends with for a long time, and might have proposed to. She married his friend Johann Hummel.

Für Elise didn’t yield any more answers, but I discovered that my favorite, the Moonlight Sonata, was dedicated to Julie Guicciardi, an Austrian countess and student of his who turned down his marriage proposal because she had to marry someone of noble birth (her picture was discovered in his belongings). Beethoven’s romances might not have lasted, but his music sure did.

Open a book to a random page

Serj Tankian of the Armenian-American band System of a Down was working on a song, when he was stuck at one point. The lyrics went like this:

I don’t think you trust, in my self-righteous su1c1de
I cry when angels deserve to die

He didn’t know what to write for the bridge that connected to the next verse. Their producer Rick Rubin suggested Serj go over to his bookshelf, pick any book, open it to any page, and read the first line that showed up. Serj chose a book, which turned out to be The Bible, and the lines he read out were:

Father into your hands, I commend my spirit
Father into your hands… why have you forsaken me?
In your eyes, forsaken me?
In your thoughts, forsaken me?
In your heart, forsaken me?

It’s what Jesus Christ said when he was crucified and it fits perfectly with the previous line (“I cry when angels deserve to die”). It’s spooky how that played out. Rick Rubin used it as an example of synchronicity:

My experience is, when you’re open and looking for these clues in the world, they’re happening all the time and they’re happening right when you need them.

(The relevant part starts at 2:18)

The song itself is a dark one that has nothing to do with the dish Chop Suey. It was originally titled “Su1c1de” and describes the thought process of someone who is planning to unalive themselves. The title is just the first half of the original title – Sui. Because it’s cut in half, it became “Chop” Suey. If you play the original version on Spotify, you can hear a voice say, “Rolling, su1c1de” before the music kicks in.

Lost time

Miki Matsubara recorded the song Stay with me (Mayonaka na door) in 1979. The song is about a woman trying to persuade her love to stay. The song did well, reaching number 28 on the billboards and selling around 400,000 copies before fading away. But 41 years later, the song made a comeback in 2020, along with other songs of the “City Pop” genre, like Plastic Love.

Part of this revival was because of nostalgia for the Showa Era that lasted from 1926 to 1989. By 2017, three-fourths of the Japanese population were people born in the Showa Era and longed for “the good old days.” But also, people from the Millennial and Gen-Z generations were digging around retro music shops and exploring niche music on platforms like YouTube, experiencing anemoia: A nostalgia for a time they had never known. It might have been a drastic response against information overload by turning to simpler times. Miki herself never got to see the revival.

She had started pursuing music right out of high school, opting not to pursue college, and becoming a successful singer like she had planned. But in 2000, she sent a message to her friends and colleagues:

"Actually, I can no longer continue with my music for a certain reason. I am cancelling my phone, cell phone, and email. So please do not reply. Please live your life without regrets."

She disappeared from the music scene, and burned her music collection. It was later revealed that she had been diagnosed with uterine cancer and had very little time to live – she regretted devoting her life to music at the expense of other life experiences she would never get to have. Miki died in 2004 at the age of 44.

Gibberish

Bonus slice today because this is too good to pass up. Italian singer Adriano Celentano was inspired by the story of the Tower of Babel to explore communication barriers between different languages. He was heavily inspired by American pop culture, so he made a song that sounded like American English – but the lyrics were actually nonsense that didn’t mean anything.

The song was titled Prisencolinensinainciusol. Despite not meaning anything, it sounds uncannily like an American Elvis Presley song. The song was a big hit in 1970s Italy and Adriano is the second best-selling Italian artist of all time.

Thanks to for the suggestion.

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The internet is flooded with Studio Ghibli images

Studio Ghibli is a Japanese studio known for making iconic animated films for children, like My neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Ponyo, and Kiki’s delivery service. They have a distinctive visual style:

Sometime yesterday, some strange images started showing up in my social media feed. People on the internet were turning movie stills, personal photographs, and prompts into Studio Ghibli style images. They were using a new capability released by OpenAI – image generation – which OpenAI had advertised using a Studio Ghibli style image.

Soon, everyone was in on it. I won’t lie, I tried it out too. It felt exciting. This could be a tool that lets anyone draw pictures of any style with just a vision in their head. Comic books, animated movies, visual art – the possibilities are endless.

But it was also sad because Hayao Miyazaki, the man who founded Ghibli, is known to be strongly against AI. In a viral video from 2016, a few researchers show him a software for AI-generated animation, and he responds with this: “This is an insult to life itself. We are near the end of times. Humans are losing confidence in themselves.” Ironically, AI is now being used to create Ghibli versions of his frustrated portrait.

I was puzzled how this was possible: Wouldn’t Studio Ghibli sue OpenAI for violating copyright? It’s hard. It turns out that Japan is the only country which has openly allowed the use of copyrighted material for training AI. European countries are a little more restrictive, allowing it only for research purposes, and US law is still undecided.

After outrage from creators and consumers, OpenAI has suspended these features – for now. But it’ll be back. Once people have seen what’s possible, it’s only a matter of time before this becomes commonplace. I don’t know how I feel about this myself. Artists do have a say in who uses their creations and how. When it’s other people imitating their work, they at least have a chance of outpacing them. When you’re up against an AI, matching its output is way harder. This technology will itself become a tool for artists to create and experiment at a much faster pace. I just feel a bit iffy that this change is being forced on all artists, rather than it being adopted by choice.

The incentives that control artists

Last week, I wrote a post titled “How to get a promotion without doing the work.” I think it’s one of the sloppiest pieces of writing I’ve ever done. I wanted to write about power dynamics and the importance of advocating for yourself when it comes to office politics. But the language I used and the half-baked references I made to other articles made it seem like I was on a cynical rant against those in power. It wasn’t too harsh, but it wasn’t as useful as it could be. I felt brilliant while writing it and about 12 hours after hitting publish, I felt disgusted with myself. I had cut down the piece to half its original length to make it punchy and provocative.

There was another piece in the same post about a man who had pretended to be a woman and tricked a French diplomat into a relationship for twenty years. I found the story bizarre and intriguing – there were details in the story that suggested that this was possibly a relationship that didn’t conform to gender norms. But I played it off like a joke, for laughs. It was an insensitive thing to do.

One of the Internet’s best bloggers, Scott Alexander, wrote a post called “Why do I suck.” In that post, he explained the concept of tropisms: unconscious tendencies to grow towards a reward signal without your awareness.

What he means is that if you share your work in public, you’ll get a lot of subconscious feedback you aren’t even aware of. Friends will appreciate some articles more than others. Some joke will get more laughs. A nuanced article might be ignored (though people really enjoyed it and never told you). Somebody will tell you they love your writing. Ten people will unsubscribe without telling you the reason. All of this subtly messes with your mind, and you might start doing some things more than others without even realizing it. These “tropisms” are what actually control your habits. Unless you’re aware of them, they’re going to control what you do and you’ll forget why you started in the first place.

I have a tendency to be over-critical of myself and the last thing I want to do is to be paralyzed by a single mistake and stop writing altogether. But I owe it to myself and you to try to do a better job. I’ve made edits to last week’s post, and from now, I’ll give each piece the space it deserves.

One painting, a hundred proverbs

A picture is worth a thousand words, but this one takes it a bit literally. Pieter Bruegel the Elder created a painting with a lot of weird characters doing bizarre things. There’s somebody shearing a pig next to a sheep, and there’s a knight in armor tying a bell to a cat while grasping a knife with his teeth. A lady is tying up the devil, and a woman is crying over spilt porridge. The painting is packed with oddities.

But here’s the kicker: Every little thing in the picture represents a proverb. Some scenes even combine two or three proverbs at the same time. In total, the picture has more than 120 different proverbs. Wikipedia has a complete list of all the proverbs used here. It’s a lot of fun to spot each proverb, like a game of Where’s Waldo.

Weapons are becoming cool again

One of the running themes in Chip War by Chris Miller is how Silicon Valley and the Pentagon have a love-hate relationship that keeps changing. The Pentagon invested in Silicon Valley to get companies like Intel off the ground – but then when Intel became a self-sustaining giant, they hated the interference from the government. But when Japanese chip makers started stealing IP and competing with US companies, Silicon Valley wanted the government to curb them citing national security. The US won the Cold War mainly because of Silicon Valley’s precision weapons, which they demonstrated in the 1990 Gulf War. But things slowed down since then.

The US government has always wanted a technological edge in war. Their question is whether the investment is worth it. Right now, it looks like the answer is leaning again, towards “YES.”

wrote an article about how Stanford students now prefer to work in the defense industry rather than Google or Meta (It’s a great read). The gist is this:

• There’s a lot of Government money pouring into defense companies.

• The tech problems in defense are more challenging and exciting to work on.

• Many college students are seeing war as an inevitability that the US needs to prepare for and an existential risk, rather than a moral problem. “If war is going to happen anyway, hey, why should I stay out of it?”

• Some find National Defense a more meaningful cause than consumer industry.

But when defense companies start growing more important, there’s also the concern that they’ll benefit from stoking war: If you sell bullets, you’re going to start a lot of gunfights. But morality is just one problem. People who’ve worked in defense and exited say that their conscience wasn’t hurt – it’s just that the glamor of the job doesn’t live up to the hype. Contracts take a lot of time to get signed off on, everything needs to be approved by multiple departments, and the wait can be frustrating. Either way, with AI and advanced tech, the future of war could look very different.

A poem I like

Since the other pieces this week were a bit heavy, I’m ending with a poem that gives me a bit of comfort.

“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Here’s Helena Bonham Carter reading it out.

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The invisible work of getting promoted

I like solving problems for the people in my life. There’s one problem I’ve been trying to solve for years: To get people promoted. I have objectively brilliant friends who are the first people I hit up when I need help. Other friends are the smartest fish in their pond, and yet, years have passed with nobody recognizing their hard work. I have no doubt that they deserve to get promoted – I’ve seen them burn their liver fixing critical issues at 3 am in the night, and I know so much about their office politics at this point that it’s like watching a real life version of The Office. So why are they stuck?

The problem isn’t that they don’t know what to do. The problem is that promotion needs self-promotion, and there’s a certain kind of personality that doesn’t want to be seen unless others lift them up. wrote in “The Gervais Principle” that there are three kinds of employees:1

1. Simple – Those who just want a stable job and don’t aspire for more. They just see the job as a job.

2. Dedicated – The people who actually keep the company together by going beyond what is required based on “loyalty” and belief in the company’s mission.

3. Strategic – The ones who understand that personal progress has nothing to do with the growth of the company, and it requires visibility and self-advocacy.

The terms here aren’t a judgement of their character. The Simple are actually quite competent and actually find happiness because they seek it outside their job. The Strategic ones aren’t evil – they understand incentives and align themselves with the right people to wield influence. The ones who have it hardest are the Dedicated who work out of a misplaced sense of loyalty and a revulsion for self-promotion.

But what do the Strategic players actually do to get promoted? I found this excellent (but cynical) article which gave a play-by-play breakdown of what it takes to move up the corporate jungle. To paraphrase the article:

Understand that today’s work will only have an impact three months from now. So start as many new initiatives as you can. Hire as many people as you can. Make a lot of noise. If it succeeds, stay on and take credit for it. If you get the sense that it’s stalling, jump to a new team. The upper management has no time to check who is accountable for each project. The blame will fall on the guy who replaces you. By then, you’ll be busy in your new team.

Never blame anyone directly. Say vague things like “we need to work toward paying off the technical debt.” And make sure that nothing critical breaks.

Now, all this sounds cathartic if you’re on the receiving end because it’s written by a Dedicated employee. But if he could see things in such high resolution, why couldn’t he adopt Strategic practices himself? The fact is that it’s a spectrum: These divisions are imaginary. Nobody’s purely Dedicated and you can’t rise as a Strategic player without doing any work. The Strategic players are the ones who do the admin and social tasks that the Dedicated ones don’t want to waste their time on: Who’s going to bargain with the management for an increased budget? Who’s going to attend fundraisers? Who’s going to decide whom to fire? If the Dedicated had the time and inclination to handle these hard decisions, they would be spending more time on it.

I don’t blame them, because seeing power dynamics is one thing, but mastering it is a full-time job. After all, the word for shrewd scheming, Machiavellian, comes from the Italian politician Niccolo Machiavelli who wrote The Prince, teaching dictators how to grab and maintain power. And despite his insights, he never gained power himself.

This isn’t a cynical rant against the system: But if your contributions to the company are important and you want to rise up the ladder, it’s a wake-up call to advocate for yourself because visibility and strategy are as important as the work itself.

I continued this conversation with ChatGPT here if you’re interested.

Edit: I have modified this piece a lot to soften it. The original version felt very callous and sloppily written to me, so I rewrote it to make it practical and not critical. It also turns out that in my chat with ChatGPT, the LLM goes way off-script by hallucinating stuff. Heads-up.

Weak and strong link problems

There are problems in your life where you can’t afford to be careless. It doesn’t matter if your legal documents are 99.9% thorough, because the one loophole you miss can land you in trouble. One faulty part can get your car in an accident, and one rotten food item can get you sick. You need to catch all weak-links.

But a lot of problems are strong-link problems. VC funds invest in 10 companies, out of which 9 can fail. If the 10th company does really well, the failures don’t matter. Three really good friends trump a 100 acquaintances. One good product is all a business needs, and all the failed experiments don’t matter. The strongest link carries the day.

Most fields are a combination of strong and weak links. For example, while investing your money, you want to defend against market crashes (weak links) but you also want to invest in a few high-risk bets that can make you rich (strong links).2 You need a great goalkeeper and defence (weak links) but you also need someone to score the goals (strong links). When you’re dealing with a problem the next time, think about how much you need to defend and how much you can explore.

Source: Experimental history. Thanks to for sharing this.

Spy switcheroo

Imagine living with a woman for twenty years, having a kid with her, and one day, discovering that she’s a man. That’s what happened to Bernard Boursicot.

Bernard worked at the French Embassy in Beijing and befriended Shi Pei Pu, an opera singer. They started seeing each other. After a while, Shi disappeared for a few years and came back with a four year old boy whom she insisted was Bernard’s son.

When Bernard returned to France, he took Shi and the boy with him. Years later, it was discovered that Shi had been leaking secret documents from Bernard to the Chinese government. Shi, it turned out, was a government spy—a man who had constructed an elaborate persona as part of his mission. I found it puzzling – how did Bernard not discover this in a twenty year relationship?

It’s possible Bernard knew all along—and that their relationship was queer or gender-nonconforming in ways the world wasn’t ready to see. Bernard was ridiculed widely for falling for the ruse. Though he was traumatized, Shi Pei Pu said “he still loved Bernard” before dying at the age of 70. What really happened between them, we’ll probably never know.

Edit: I had earlier played this off as a joke too, and I edited it because there was more to the story that I hadn’t explored.

When you hit that high note, walk off

Seinfeld is one of my favorite shows. It was one of the highest rated shows ever, but the real achievement was that it sustained this rating throughout its lifetime. Most TV shows start out great and get progressively worse if they run too long.

Seinfeld was one of the few who managed to followed his own advice: “Showmanship, George. When you hit that high note, say good night and walk off.”

But why do so many TV shows die a slow death (or fall off a cliff like Game of Thrones)? Incentives, incentives, incentives. Nobody wants to kill the goose that’s laying the golden egg and studios try to milk the show for all its worth before it dies. Jerry Seinfeld said no when they offered him $5 million per episode to extend the show. It’s hard to walk away from that kind of money.

But it’s getting even worse now, with online streaming. After Severance’s second season had mixed reviews, wrote an article analyzing why online streaming is betting heavy on cliffhangers and generic slop. It’s a good read.

Read less, talk more

It took me a month to read Chip Wars. Great book. But I was looking for an answer to “Why doesn’t India have a semiconductor industry?” and the book had zero mentions of India till the end. I often read books cover to cover with a misplaced sense of hope and get terribly annoyed when I reach the end. Doomscrolling is easy to identify and trash but Doomreading is bit more pernicious.

Here’s how I plan to deal with it: By using ChatGPT. To prepare today’s post, I asked ChatGPT, “Do you know about the Gervais principle?” I didn’t want to reread the original article (which is like 40 pages long) and it saved me hours. I know friends who are reading dense books and research papers this way, and you can even explore books that are way too difficult for you by asking AI to explain every page.

Here’s a good article on how you can try this yourself.

It’s different with fiction, where you’re looking for an experience and not information. But with non-fiction, it helps to categorize books into:

• Narrative books, like biographies or journalism

• Tree books, that introduce frameworks, like Thinking, Fast and Slow

• Branch books, that go deep into just one idea, like Atomic Habits

Tree books are worth reading fully to expand your thinking. It’s better to explore the other two types by having a conversation with AI before you dive in. There’s the risk that this might turn you lazy, but I prefer laziness to being driven by an indiscriminate sense of duty. I’ve had my fair share of that already.

One thing to keep in mind: ChatGPT has a limited context window.

• When you ask it about a book, it might pull out relevant points—but it’ll just as easily invent the rest if it can’t find the information.

• If you have a long chat, it forgets what you said in the beginning – and if you refer to something from the start, it’ll make stuff up.

So don’t rely on ChatGPT to be factually accurate. You can use it to find information fast, but you need to challenge and check it every once in a while by asking for sources and excerpts.

Edit: Slightly expanded to add a warning at the end.

If you enjoyed reading today’s post, drop a like and let me know what you liked in the comments. Also share with a friend who needs to see the part about office politics:

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Last week I wrote about AI poetry that is more human than human poetry. You can check out the complete list of posts here.

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More human than human

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

This tweet by Joanna Maciejewska went viral last year with a lot of people being quick to condemn AI intervention in the arts. The thing is, AI already does your laundry – through washing machines. AI also stores thousands of your documents, handles your communication, lets you type using your voice, and do a hundred other things. You don’t think of these as AI because they aren’t marketed that way.

AI isn’t going to take away your jobs by making cheap content that nobody wants. Instead, it’s going to give tools that widen the gap between people who learn fast and those who don’t. Ultimately, it’s the results that matter: people don’t care if a good show comes from a single writer or a writers’ room. But what about AI?

On the surface, it looks like people hate AI-generated content: Yesterday, Sam Altman shared a story written by a “Literary LLM.” Some loved it, some hated it (including me). But in this case, people were already biased that it was AI-written. What about a blind test? When scientists asked people to select their favorite poetry from a collection of human and AI-generated poetry, most non-experts weren’t able to tell the difference. People consistently preferred the AI-generated poetry. This is partly because AI-generated poetry is simple and has more mass appeal.

But there’s more: Another part of the test contained samples created by human poets with the help of AI. It turned out that these poems were more popular than the ones that written without the help of AI. So there’s an edge in using AI as a tool, much the same way that you would use Microsoft Word or programming languages.

Writing researcher David Perell interviewed polymath Tyler Cowen about what type of content and writing will last in an AI-dominated age. Here are some takeaways:

1. AI is generic when you ask general questions. If you ask more specific, detailed, and unique questions, you get interesting insights. This works better when you combine questions and concepts from multiple fields.

2. It is better to ask a question and follow up 10 times than type one long paragraph with 10 questions.

3. What AI can’t replicate (yet) is personal details – biographies, memoirs, personal essays and stories still have a moat because people are interested in other people.

4. AI trains on data. Humans have an edge over AI in areas where the data is still in their heads. A lot of expertise and “secrets” are stored in the minds of experts. Social networks and mentor-mentee relationships will become more important.

Source: David Perell and Tyler Cowen podcast. It’s quite boring, I don’t recommend it unless you’re really into AI and writing. A much better use of your time is David Perell’s podcast with Ward Farnsworth about writing powerful sentences that last through the ages. I discovered the AI poetry research through .

AI gets voice and a body

In August 2023, my friends and AI found this hilarious video which shows a girl in the future bringing an AI boyfriend home to meet her grandfather:

It’s a new spin on an old concept. In the movie Her, an introvert falls in love with his AI operating system. Blade Runner is set in a world where renegade robots are hunted down because humans see them as pieces of property.

Which makes me wonder: As robots get more and more lifelike, when will people start fighting for robot rights? Google even fired an engineer in 2022 for claiming its AI is conscious when all we had were text-based systems, but now…

1. Sesame AI has released voice agents that sound eerily like humans, and can learn not just the words and phrases you use, but also your intonations and rhythms.

2. Clone Robotics introduced the Protoclone android. It has a muscular and skeletal structure similar to humans, and moves like humans do.

3. General purpose agents like Manus can now do a combination of simple tasks like a research intern. It’s still at a basic stage, but it’s going to get better.

We might eventually get systems combining all of these parts to have AI systems walking among us in human bodies. When? Your guess is as good as mine.

You can watch this video by Fireship to learn more.

Buffalo sentence

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

This is a perfectly valid sentence. What?!

The trick is to understand that buffalo is used in three ways here:

• buffalo the animal

• buffalo the verb, as in “harass”

• Buffalo, a place in New York

The above sentence can be rewritten as:

Buffalo from New York which are harassed by Buffalo from New York themselves harass other Buffalo from New York.

But hey, where’s the fun in writing it that way? (More on this here. I didn’t get it the first time either)

Orphan crushing machine

You’ve probably come across heartwarming news like this:

Then you think about it again. Wait, what? Why is the homeless population of an entire city relying on the random kindness of a kid with bone-marrow cancer? Why isn’t the city taking care of its own? Some more examples:

• Insurance executives provide funds for widow who was denied pension. (Why was she denied pension?!)

• Lady donates $8,000 to settle lunch debt that was preventing high school seniors from graduating (You don’t let kids graduate until they settle lunch debt?)

• Kenny Waters was finally free after being wrongfully imprisoned for 18 years for a murder he didn’t commit, after his sister went to law school and fought his case. (How sweet)

You see the pattern here? It’s admirable that people are doing what they can. But it’s like reading a headline saying “Good man pays $100,000 to save 100 orphans from orphan crushing machine.” Everybody praises the good man, but nobody asks “Why is there an orphan crushing machine?! And why do you need to pay money to save children from being crushed?”

There’s an entire subreddit for this topic if you want to ruin your day.

Eldritch horror

I reread “The call of Cthulhu” by H.P. Lovecraft recently. This is how the story begins:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

The call of Cthulhu defined a genre called Eldritch horror. It’s different from other horror because you don’t get scared by gore, shock, or scary monsters. Instead, the storyteller gives you a glimpse of a vast horror that you can never fully understand which will haunt you because of its immensity.

Think of life from the perspective of an ant which finds a circuit board:

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness. Madness comes when the ant, for a moment can see as a human does.

It understands those markings as words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then… It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters. This is madness.

Eldritch horror is about learning something terrible and living alone with that knowledge because nobody will ever believe you. It’s about never feeling safe again because you realize that you were never safe before. Even death and madness are no longer escapes.

– Source: Tumblr

I love this genre of storytelling. Lovecraft was the pioneer of the genre but there are other great examples:

• Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, about a town where spirals start appearing everywhere and driving its population mad.

• Annihilation, about a team of scientists stumbling across an alien lifeform that doesn’t even operate on the same instincts as humans.

• Flatland, an “autobiographical” novel written by a square in a world of 2D shapes. The square loses its mind when it meets a 3D sphere. When it tries to explain to other shapes what it experienced, they throw it into an asylum.

The best example is this: If a person from 500 years ago time-traveled to today and saw electricity, cars, trains, aeroplanes, self-landing rockets, the Internet, smartphones, video-calls, X-rays, surgery, microscopes, and Mars landings… just the shock would drive him mad and kill him. Probably.

If you know of any good Eldritch horror stories I might enjoy, let me know.1

We take a lot of magical things for granted because we’re used to them – like the fact that we see the world in high-definition and HD color. My friend wrote a beautiful article on how neuroscientists figured out the science of color vision. You can check it out here (and subscribe to his Substack!)

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Last week, I shared five of my favorite Substacks that are worth your time. You can check out the complete list of Five Slices posts here.

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If you read my newsletter only as an email (which is totally fine!), you might not know that it’s hosted on . There are a lot of interesting writers on this platform and I spend a lot of time reading their work, not just writing. So today, I’m recommending five writers whose work I really enjoy. I kept some conditions in mind while picking this list:

1. I’ve read at least 3 essays by each writer

2. They have a lot of their work available for free

3. They write regularly

I’ve also tried to keep a good mix of topics here, so you’ll find something that appeals to you. Hopefully.

1. Escaping Flatland by Henrik Karlsson

Theme: ????

How do you design a life that makes you happy?

One way to do it is to tick things off some arbitrary list and hope for the best. has another suggestion: Identify the few constraints that really matter to you and let that context shape your life. Your life might turn out in a way you’ve never imagined, but uniquely fitted to you. Henrik discusses how he applied this to his writing, relationship, and raising his children in “Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process” (a lot of his essays have really long titles. That’s partly what got my attention).

Henrik’s writing is special because it’s really hard to classify. He writes at the curious intersection between lived experience, introspection, and extensive reading that I really enjoy. In Looking for Alice, he wrote about how he met his wife. The series talks about finding, building, and nurturing a relationship and it’s a moving read:

Escaping Flatland

Looking for Alice

Alice B. Toklas…

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4 years ago · 1680 likes · 84 comments · Henrik Karlsson

His essays are great places to find new ideas. How to think in writing introduced me to Imre Lakatos, Looking for Alice introduced me to Werner Herzog’s interviews, and Rationality is an underrated way to be authentic introduced me to John Stuart Mill. Henrik has built a universe of ideas that he keeps returning to, so the more time you spend here, the more rewarding it gets.

2. Personal Canon by Celine Nguyen

Theme: Books, writing, and personal experience

’s work is fascinating to me, mostly because her writing is so good but also because she’s managed to craft her own road into the world of literature starting from a STEM background (she works as a product designer, and it shows in her beautifully designed newsletter). Celine writes about books, writing, and her personal experiences.

Everybody should read her essay about Agnes Callard’s book “Aspirations”:

personal canon

how to change your life, part 2: agnes callard's aspiration

On Monday I woke up at 5am, wrote from 6–7am, and then headed into work. This isn’t the first time in my life I’ve tried to have a writing schedule like this. Indeed, it often feels as if the last decade of my life was a long, ineffectual struggle between wanting to write and wanting to be peaceful, lazy, leisurely, still. Was it all laziness? Part of i…

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2 years ago · 491 likes · 33 comments · Celine Nguyen

Why? Because it talks about something we’re all trying to do – becoming. We’re trying to become an original artist or a better parent or a perceptive lover or an aspiring leader or maybe all of this at once. And as humans, we learn to do so by imitation. We look at other models and try to not just imitate what they do, but we to also be the kind of person they are (e.g you don’t just write novels, you become the kind of person who writes novels). The essay describes every aspect of this journey through Celine’s personal experience, from the feeling of being an imposter to easing into the daily practice of becoming what you want to.

She has a lot of other great essays, but I’d highlight two other favorites: mere description, which talks about the surprisingly tricky task of describing your experience and how that’s at the core of art, and How to Begin, a great guide for writers learning to write like by intelligently copying the people you admire.

3. The Honest Broker by Ted Gioia

Theme: Culture and Business Models

“Google is now the East India Company of the Internet” is such a killer title. I clicked on the article and couldn’t stop reading till I reached the end. It’s an essay with a clear, scathing idea: Google once innovated its way to the top of the Internet food chain, but has now become a bloated parasite leeching off the value that millions of creators are producing without actually making anything new.

The Honest Broker

Google Is Now the East India Company of the Internet

Can you imagine a company so powerful that it controls half of the world’s trade…

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2 years ago · 1353 likes · 176 comments · Ted Gioia

The article got me fired up. But what’s great about ’s blog is that he didn’t write just one sensational piece and stop – he’s been chipping away at this idea for a long time through other articles like “If AT&T had managed the phone business like Google” or “The world’s largest search doesn’t want you to search.” Each article takes a single idea and goes deep into it with persuasive, imaginative writing, but they all connect to create a larger point.

Ted’s main body of work isn’t even about business/tech – he’s a writer and a musician, and he considers himself a “broker” for books and music. But I really like his insights into the human side of business.

4. The Prism by Gurwinder

Theme: Sociology and Media Studies

recently shot to fame for an essay describing a conversation he had with Luigi Mangione before he (allegedly) killed the United Healthcare CEO. But slotting his writing to just that one article is doing it as disservice. His newsletter, The Prism, dives deep into how fragile human psychology is and how we are being shaped by the information we consume and the system we live in, in ways we aren’t even aware of. My favorite is “Why Everything is Becoming a Game.”

The Prism

Why Everything is Becoming a Game

“I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man's…

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2 years ago · 4265 likes · 274 comments · Gurwinder

The essay is divided into three parts:

1. B.F. Skinner’s experiments on psychological conditioning

2. Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber)’s philosophy

3. What we can do to beat the system

If you think a lot about why things are the way they are or feel powerless about your inability to get a grip on things, it’s a gripping read with some hope at the end.

5. Experimental History by Adam Mastroianni

Theme: Practical Psychology

Turn on the TV and you’ll see psychologists: In Treatment, Lie to Me, Criminal Minds, Mindhunter, The Sopranos. Go on the internet and you’ll see psychologists: of the top 25 most-viewed TED talks of all time, five are by psychologists (seven if you count psychiatrists and neuroscientists). Talk to humans and you’ll hear words psychologists made up: cognitive dissonance, emotional intelligence, grit, growth mindset. Visit Google, Apple, Amazon, or Facebook and you’ll find psychologists tinkering with the tools that govern our lives.

Psychology is successful because people are naturally more interested in what’s going on in their minds than what’s going on in their small intestines. We fall in love with humans, give birth to them, work for them, vote for them, buy things from them, and sometimes get killed by them, so understanding them a little better seems like a good use of time. Yet most people don’t really understand what psychologists do.

So goes Adam’s About page. has a PhD in psychology from Harvard, he’s gotten second place in a British cooking show, does improv comedy on the side, and also writes about psychology… which has been published in The New York Times and The Atlantic. What’s special about his writing? Adam combines his interest in research with practical insights. I found Adam through his viral essay Good conversations have lots of doorknobs. No matter who you are, being able to have better conversations will make your life better in every way. So if you feel like you’re the one who’s always talking or always listening in any conversation, check this out:

Experimental History

Good conversations have lots of doorknobs

Photo cred: my dad…

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5 years ago · 2401 likes · 73 comments · Adam Mastroianni

You might also like the post “Your favorite newsletter’s favorite newsletters” by . Let me know if there are any other Substackers whose writing you enjoy or bloggers whose work I should check out.

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In the last issue, I wrote about India seen through the eyes of outsiders. You can find the complete list of issues here.