Amor Towles is one of the most articulate and interesting writers working. I loved this conversation from EconTalk. The discussion on constraints and the meaning hidden in “inconveniences” was great.
I love what Eliot Peper does with Substack as a sort of behind-the-scenes look at his writing process. I wish more authors and content creators spent the time to show their workflow. It’s incredibly insightful to see the messy process of creativity.
Earlier this year I read Reap3r, an excellent technothriller. I just ordered a copy of Foundry.
This is a phenomenal interview with Richard Rhodes, author of the legendary The Making of the Atomic Bomb, an expansive history of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons technology.
Dwarkesh Shah’s show The Lunar Society is generally excellent and highly recommended. Just listen to how long he lets Rhodes answer and expound on questions without interruption. These are my favorite types of long-form interviews.
Historian David McCullough died last week at age 89. If you’ve never read his work, it’s some of the best, most readable and engaging history you can find. I’ve read a few of his books over the years, like The Great Bridge (about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge), 1776 (the Revolutionary War), and his biography John Adams. Looking back on his bibliography, all of his others are on my reading list.
It’s always unfortunate to lose such a critical voice in American culture, but at least his books will stand the test of time and be read by generations.
Here’s a quote from John Adams, pulled from McCullough’s biography, with which he clearly resonated:
“The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.”
I think I probably read three different pieces this week alone that reference James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. It presents an argument about the desire for “legibility” that overthrows and reorders bottom-up, emergent systems that develop naturally.
In this piece, Venkatesh Rao dives into what legibility means and what happens when the pursuit of order and “governability” ignores locally-discovered motivations that could be at work informing why a system works the way that it does.
Boca Raton, planner's paradise
In classic “high modernist” architecture, design, urban planning — really it’s an ideology that can drive decisions in many areas — a belief that we can design our way to any idealized solution pushes toward this idea of legibility. The ability to clearly understand a system does not always (or maybe even ever) correlate strongly with improvement to the system at a local level:
Complex realities turn this logic on its head; it is easier to comprehend the whole by walking among the trees, absorbing the gestalt, and becoming a holographic/fractal part of the forest, than by hovering above it.
This imposed simplification, in service of legibility to the state’s eye, makes the rich reality brittle, and failure follows. The imagined improvements are not realized. The metaphors of killing the golden goose, and the Procrustean bed come to mind.
Another choice excerpt, confusing legibility and success:
High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.” The deep failure in thinking lies is the mistaken assumption that thriving, successful and functional realities must necessarily be legible.
I need to bump this book up the reading queue. I know it’s partially that it triggers all my bottom-up, Hayekian priors, but it’s referenced so frequently it must contain some great first principles insight. A lot of Chesterton fence-type references could be made around this principle of legibility. Looking forward to reading the book.
Rao’s The Gervais Principle covers similar ground in the context of businesses and the corporate world (highly recommended; I plan on writing more about it soon)
I enjoyed this interview with author Ted Chiang. It covers his recent short story collection Exhalation: Stories with nice context and background on the ideas behind each one. I just finished the book last week, and would have to say that The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling was my favorite. A story about the fallibility of memory and what it would be like if our memories were recorded with perfect accuracy.
Analysis from Bloomberg on the state of renewables versus fossil fuels, with nice map graphics demonstrating the distribution of energy facilities by type in the US. The trends look positive in the United States, but the outlook in developing markets is still challenging, as one would expect:
In developing parts of the world, coal still dominates. China is home to the largest capacity of hydro, wind and solar power—and it remains the world’s biggest consumer of coal. Pakistan’s dream of generating 60% of its power from clean energy sources is still decades away. In Indonesia, coal plants are so cheap to run that the Southeast Asian nation is projected to nearly double its coal generation in the next 25 years.
The growing divide underscores a global dilemma: Wealthy nations can afford to turn their backs on coal, but it remains an easy fallback in countries where electricity is scarce, unreliable, or unaffordable.
I don’t think you can last by meeting the contemporary public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don’t think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don’t know many works of art that last that are condescending. I don’t know many works of art that last that are deliberately stupid. You may be a geek, you may have geek written all over you; you should aim to be one geek they’ll never forget. Don’t aim to be civilized. Don’t hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them; they put you here. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird and don’t do it halfway, put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it.
Don’t stick to tradition, and don’t go halfway.
I Instapaper’d this over a year ago and ran across it while reading some old stuff.
