Category: Books

Highlights from The Untold History of Ramen

I just finished reading about half of The Untold History of Ramen by George Solt [Amazon]. I skipped most of the middle, where he explains ramen’s evolution in Japan through the 19th and 20th centuries, and focused instead on the bookends, where he talks about how ramen was brought to Japan by Chinese laborers, and how ramen eventually migrated to America and became a global phenomenon.

I love ramen. Anyway.

Below are some highlights from the book. Because author George Solt is foremost an academic and not a chef, the book is about far more than just the noodles and broth. A recipe book it is not. Nor food porn. More like nerd porn: You get a light brush across history, culture, economics, and in particular, international perceptions of Japan, and how Japan itself understands and interprets these perceptions. You can tell from his writing that he’s annoyed by the simplified and often sensational Western portrayals of Japan. Or maybe he’s just tired of it.

Highlights:

The overall transformation of eating into a form of entertainment with fetishistic undertones, known as the gourmet boom

while ramen tours, documentaries, and books all tended to move the still-forming noodle narrative in the direction of a nationalistic tale of improving Chinese foods, Tamamura instead viewed the new reverence for the dish as a sign of “the emptiness of Japanese affluence” in the post-high-growth era.

Third, and most crucial, Nakae contends, was the cramped living conditions of the urban tenement housing in which most Japanese families lived, which made dining at family restaurants “basically an escape from everyday life.”

Satomi claims that for him the value of the dish derives from its very status as a pedestrian, or “B-class,” food in contrast to the more rarified realm of soba noodles.

Like Menya Musashi, most new shops that opened after the late 1990s no longer used the term ramen in their names but had more traditional Japanese names instead.

One of the clearest signals of ramen’s dissociation from China and its rebranding as Japanese was the change in uniform chosen by ramen chefs.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, however, younger ramen chefs, inspired primarily by Kawahara Shigemi, founder of the ramen shop Ippūdō, started to wear Japanese Buddhist work clothing, known as samue. Usually worn by Japanese potters and other practitioners of traditional arts, the samue, usually in purple or black, was worn by craftsmen in eighteenth-century Japan and would not have been considered appropriate for the ramen chef prior to the 1990s rebranding

Another important physical change marking the new wave ramen shop was the use of large displays of poems and life advice composed by the store’s owner to underscore their seriousness about the work of making ramen.

Although American familiarity with instant ramen can be dated to the early 1970s with Nissin Foods’ release of the Top Ramen brand…

Japan slowly shed its reputation as an “economic animal” (an appellation dating back to the 1970s) and gained a new identity as an incubator of fashion and cultural trends on par with Western Europe.

Japan’s passion for ramen began to define Japan itself; the more the Japanese defined ramen in national terms, the more the nation became identified with the noodle soup.

In one of his last postings, in June 2011, Wong noted that for health reasons he was eating much less ramen and had taken to a Mediterranean diet.

he told me I should consider increasing the water content of my noodles by 1 percent. Then he congratulated me on my success, rounded up his crew, and left.

Readers are informed that [David] Chang, like the rameniac Rickmond Wong, worked as an English teacher in Japan while learning to eat ramen but did not actually learn to speak much Japanese in the process (as is typical of many Americans living in the country)

Meehan draws attention to the vending machines dispensing alcoholic beverages, the displays of menus in the form of plastic food in front of restaurants, the clean automatic toilets, the gangsters with missing pinkies, and other well-worn aspects of life in Japan that foreigners unacquainted with the country never tire of writing about.

This was a breakthrough in American cinematic representations of Japan, and it was a dramatic departure from films with characters such as the Japanese widow who falls in love with the American who kills her husband (Last Samurai), the Japanese geisha who falls in love with the American who rescues her from the brutality of Japanese patriarchy (Memoirs of a Geisha), and the Japanese actors who serve as stage props or as jokes in and of themselves (Lost in Translation).

Eighty percent of ramen shops in Japan are independently owned, and small ramen shops remain resilient despite the struggles of most other independent food businesses since the 1990s.

The noren wake system, in which the ramen store owner provides a former worker who has at least a year of experience with his personal supply routes, broth and sauce recipes, and personal coaching, usually without any charge, has allowed for the spread of shops modeled after popular stores without any pyramid-like corporate structure.

Takenaka finds that Japan’s value can be located in the country’s smaller scale of production on average compared with the United States and its relative lack of capital concentration across industries, both of which allow for a culture of variation, eccentricity, and creativity to flourish.

Ramen has been the most prominent and successful global export of the Japanese restaurant industry since the internationalization of sushi in the 1980s, and it has become a global phenomenon in the last two decades.

what started as an exotic food from China famed for its affordability, quickness, and nourishing qualities developed into a staple of Japanese working-class cuisine,

The various categories into which the food is simultaneously placed (Japanese food, comfort food, “Chinese” fast food, nighttime post-drinking food, working-class lunch food, young people’s food, bachelor’s food)

Everything you do is a signal, or highlights from The Elephant in the Brain

The following are some notes, followed by a lot of highlights, from the book Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson [Amazon].

The book is about, in a word, signals. Everything we do is – in small and often large part – a signal to others:

We talk to seem smart and build alliances.

We make art to attract mates.

We donate to charity to impress neighbors.

We laugh to let people know that we’re ok, it’s just a game.

We pray to belong to a group.

We vote to show our loyalty.

Even this blog is a massive signal :P

Signals, signals, signals. Oh, and sex. Signals and sex.

In fact, this quote buried in the book’s footnotes might be the underlying reason behind all of the seemingly complicated but ultimately simple reasons behind why we do what we do:

As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about sexual love: “It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort… . It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts”.

The below are all highlights copied verbatim from the book, which I highly recommend. Very much in the Yuval Harari “things are both more complicated and more simple than they seem” vein.

GENERAL HIGHLIGHTS

To understand the competitive side of human nature, we would do well to turn Matthew 7: 1 on its head: “Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.”

The essence of a norm, then, lies not in the words we use to describe it, but in which behaviors get punished and what form the punishment takes.

Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager lifestyle.

Our ancestors did a lot of cheating. How do we know? One source of evidence is the fact that our brains have special-purpose adaptations for detecting cheaters. When abstract logic puzzles are framed as cheating scenarios, for example, we’re a lot better at solving them.

We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together working at cross purposes.

There are dozens of schemes for how to divide up the mind. The Bible identifies the head and the heart. Freud gives us the id, ego, and superego. Iain McGilchrist differentiates the analytical left brain from the holistic right brain, while Douglas Kenrick gives us seven “subselves”: Night Watchman, Compulsive Hypochondriac, Team Player, Go-Getter, Swinging Single, Good Spouse, and Nurturing Parent.

What this means for self-deception is that it’s possible for our brains to maintain a relatively accurate set of beliefs in systems tasked with evaluating potential actions, while keeping those accurate beliefs hidden from the systems (like consciousness) involved in managing social impressions.

Or as Venkatesh Rao says, “We ‘shop around’ for careers. We look for prestigious brands to work for. We look for ‘fulfillment’ at work. Sometimes we even accept pay cuts to be associated with famous names. This is work as fashion accessory and conversation fodder”

All ads effectively have two audiences: potential product buyers, and potential product viewers who will credit the product owners with various desirable traits”

HUMOR AND LAUGHTER

The most important observation is that we laugh far more often in social settings than when we’re alone—30 times more often

When Provine studied 1,200 episodes of laughter overheard in public settings, his biggest surprise was finding that speakers laugh more than listeners—about 50 percent more, in fact.

“We’re just playing” is such an important message, it turns out, that many species have developed their own vocabulary for it. Dogs, for example, have a “play bow”—forearms extended, head down, hindquarters in the air—which they use to initiate a bout of play. Chimps use an open-mouthed “play face,” similar to a human smile, or double over and peer between their legs at their play partners.

We don’t laugh continuously throughout a play session, only when there’s something potentially unpleasant to react to.

In any given comedic situation, humor precedes and causes laughter, but when we step back and take a broader perspective, the order is reversed. Our propensity to laugh comes first and provides the necessary goal for humor to achieve.

First you need to get two or more people together. Then you must set the mood dial to “play.” Then you need to jostle things, carefully, so that the dial feints in the direction of “serious,” but quickly falls back to “play.” And only then will the safe come open, releasing the precious laugher locked inside.

what laughter illustrates is precisely the fact that our norms and other social boundaries aren’t etched in stone with black-and-white precision, but ebb and shift through shades of gray, depending on context.

If exchanging information were the be-all and end-all of conversation, then we would expect people to be greedy listeners and stingy speakers. Instead, we typically find ourselves with the opposite attitude

Our hearing apparatus remains evolutionarily conservative, very similar to that of other apes, while our speaking apparatus has been dramatically re-engineered. The burden of adaptation has fallen on speaking rather than listening.

you’re looking for a backpack full of tools that are both new to you and useful to the things you care about. If Henry can consistently delight you with new, useful artifacts, it speaks to the quality of his backpack and therefore his value as an ally.

In casual conversation, listeners have a mixture of these two motives. To some extent we care about the text, the information itself, but we also care about the subtext, the speaker’s value as a potential ally.

The competition to show off as a potential lover or leader also helps explain why language often seems more elaborate than necessary to communicate ideas—what the linguist John Locke calls “verbal plumage.”

listeners generally prefer speakers who can impress them wherever a conversation happens to lead, rather than speakers who steer conversations to specific topics where they already know what to say.

If conversation were primarily about reciprocal exchange, we’d be tempted to habitually deprecate what our partners were offering, in order to “owe” less in return

We find a similar regulatory function of laughter when a father throws his three-year-old daughter into the air and catches her. If the toddler laughs, dad knows she’s enjoying the game and wants it to continue. If instead she gives a yelp or an alarmed cry, dad knows to stop at once.

ART

Ellen Dissanayake’s characterization of art as anything “made special,” that is, not for some functional or practical purpose but for human attention and enjoyment

“During the breeding season,” writes Miller, “males spend virtually all day, every day, building and maintaining their bowers.” The reward for all this effort is more mating opportunities. A successful male bowerbird can mate with as many as 30 females in a single mating season.

human art is more than just a courtship display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s value as a potential mate. It also functions as a general-purpose fitness display, that is, an advertisement of the artist’s health, energy, vigor, coordination, and overall fitness. Fitness displays can be used to woo mates, of course, but they also serve other purposes like attracting allies or intimidating rivals. And humans use art for all of these things.

Consider Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, celebrated for its beautiful detail, the surreal backdrop, and of course the subject’s enigmatic smile. More visitors have seen the Mona Lisa in person—on display behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre—than any other painting on the planet. But when researchers Jesse Prinz and Angelika Seidel asked subjects to consider a hypothetical scenario in which the Mona Lisa burned to a crisp, 80 percent of them said they’d prefer to see the ashes of the original rather than an indistinguishable replica.

The advent of photography wreaked similar havoc on the realist aesthetic in painting. Painters could no longer hope to impress viewers by depicting scenes as accurately as possible, as they had strived to do for millennia. “In response,” writes Miller, “painters invented new genres based on new, non-representational aesthetics: impressionism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, abstraction. Signs of handmade authenticity became more important than representational skill. The brush-stroke became an end in itself.”

Fashion often distinguishes itself from mere clothing by being conspicuously impractical, non-functional, and sometimes even uncomfortable.

We’re eager to evaluate art, reflect on it, criticize it, calibrate our criticisms with others, and push ourselves to new frontiers of discernment. And we do this even in art forms we have no intention of practicing ourselves. For every novelist, there are 100 readers who care passionately about fiction, but have no plans ever to write a novel.

Miller’s observation that “sexually mature males have produced almost all of the publicly displayed art throughout human history”

CHARITY

Anonymous donation, for example, is extremely rare. Only around 1 percent of donations to public charities are anonymous.

People seldom initiate donations on their own; up to 95 percent of all donations are given in response to a solicitation.

In 2011, Americans donated $ 298 billion to charity, of which only an estimated 13 percent ($ 39 billion) went to help foreigners.

Many studies have found that people, especially men, are more likely to give money when the solicitor is an attractive member of the opposite sex. Men also give more to charity when nearby observers are female rather than male.

As early as the 12th century, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides distinguished various “levels of charity” in part based on how anonymous the donor was. Acts of charity in which the donor is known to the recipient were considered less noble than anonymous acts.

EDUCATION

Each of the first three years of high school or college (the years that don’t finish a degree) are worth on average only about a 4 percent salary bump. But the last year of high school and the last year of college, where students complete a degree, are each worth on average about a 30 percent higher salary.

In a North Carolina school district, a one-hour delay in school start time—for example, from 7: 30 a.m. to 8: 30 a.m.—resulted in a 2 percentile gain in student performance.

a lot of the value of education lies in giving students a chance to advertise the attractive qualities they already have.
Caplan, for example, estimates that signaling is responsible for up to 80 percent of the total value of education.

This suggests that public K–12 schools were originally designed as part of nation-building projects, with an eye toward indoctrinating citizens and cultivating patriotic fervor. In this regard, they serve as a potent form of propaganda. We can see this function especially clearly in history and civics curricula, which tend to emphasize the rosier aspects of national issues.

Children are expected to sit still for hours upon hours; to control their impulses; to focus on boring, repetitive tasks; to move from place to place when a bell rings; and even to ask permission before going to the bathroom (think about that for a second). Teachers systematically reward children for being docile and punish them for “acting out,” that is, for acting as their own masters. In fact, teachers reward discipline independent of its influence on learning, and in ways that tamp down on student creativity. Children are also trained to accept being measured, graded, and ranked, often in front of others. This enterprise, which typically lasts well over a decade, serves as a systematic exercise in human domestication.

One recent study (Bruze 2015) suggests that, in Denmark, people are earning “on the order of half of their returns to schooling through improved marital outcomes.”

John Gatto said what many teachers surely recognize, but few are willing to state so baldly. “Schools and schooling,” he said, “are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders”

HEALTHCARE

Patients in higher-spending regions, who get more treatment for their conditions, don’t end up healthier, on average, than patients in lower-spending regions who get fewer treatments.

Today, it’s a better drug for reducing blood pressure. Tomorrow, a new and improved surgical technique. Why don’t these individual improvements add up to large gains in our aggregate studies? There’s a simple and surprisingly well-accepted answer to this question: most published medical research is wrong. (Or at least overstated.)

Patients and their families are often dismissive of simple cheap remedies, like “relax, eat better, and get more sleep and exercise.” Instead they prefer expensive, technically complicated medical care—gadgets, rare substances, and complex procedures, ideally provided by “the best doctor in town.” Patients feel better when given what they think is a medical pill, even when it is just a placebo that does nothing. And patients feel even better if they think the pill is more expensive.

Roughly 11 percent of all medical spending in the United States, for example, goes toward patients in their final year of life. And yet it’s one of the least effective (therapeutic) kinds of medicine.

As Alex Tabarrok puts it, “More people die from medical mistakes each year than from highway accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS and yet physicians still resist and the public does not demand even simple reforms.”

Investigators reported that people who reside in rural areas lived an average of 6 years longer than city dwellers, nonsmokers lived 3 years longer than smokers, and those who exercised a lot lived 15 years longer than those who exercised only a little.

Doctors, having witnessed the futility of heroic end-of-life care, are famously keen on avoiding it for themselves, when they become terminally ill.

RELIGION

They walk seven times counterclockwise around the Kaaba—the black, cube-shaped building at the center of the world’s largest mosque. (See Figure 5.) They also shave their heads; run back and forth between two hills; stand vigil from noon until sunset; drink water from the Zamzam well; camp overnight on the plain of Muzdalifa; sacrifice a lamb, goat, cow, or camel; and cast stones at three pillars in a symbolic stoning of the devil.

Many Jews, for example, consider themselves atheists, and yet continue practicing Judaism—going to temple, keeping kosher, and celebrating the high holidays.

Compared to their secular counterparts, religious people tend to smoke less, donate and volunteer more, have more social connections, get and stay married more, and have more kids. They also live longer, earn more money, experience less depression, and report greater happiness and fulfillment in their lives.

A religion, therefore, isn’t just a set of propositional beliefs about God and the afterlife; it’s an entire social system.

So whenever people make a sacrifice to your god, they’re implicitly showing loyalty to you—and to everyone else who worships at the same altar.

It’s easy to say, “I’m a Muslim,” but to get full credit, you also have to act like a Muslim—by answering the daily calls to prayer, for example, or undertaking the Hajj.

Yes, you probably have “better things to do” than listen to a sermon, which is precisely why you get loyalty points for listening patiently. In other words, the boredom of sermons may be a feature rather than a bug.

Note that positions of greater trust and authority require larger sacrifices; if the Pope had children, for example, his loyalty would be split between his family and his faith, and Catholics would have a harder time trusting him to lead the Church.

Note, however, that a community’s supply of social rewards is limited, so we’re often competing to show more loyalty than others—to engage in a “holier than thou” arms race.

All these sacrifices work to maintain high levels of commitment and trust among community members, which ultimately reduces the need to monitor everyone’s behavior. The net result is the ability to sustain cooperative groups at larger scales and over longer periods of time.

A 2012 Gallup poll, for instance, found that atheists came in dead last in electability, well behind other marginalized groups like Hispanics and gay people. In fact, Americans would sooner see a Muslim than an atheist in the Oval Office.

As Jason Weeden and colleagues have pointed out, religions can be understood, in part, as community-enforced mating strategies.

Our species, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is wired to form social bonds when we move in lockstep with each other. This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes.

The particular strangeness of Mormon beliefs, for example, testifies to the exceptional strength of the Mormon moral community. To maintain such stigmatizing beliefs in the modern era, in the face of science, the news media, and the Internet, is quite the feat of solidarity.

Haidt: “To resolve [the puzzle of religious participation], either you have to grant that religiosity is (or at least, used to be) beneficial or you have to construct a complicated, multi-step explanation of how humans in all known cultures came to swim against the tide of adaptation and do so much self-destructive religious stuff”

POLITICS

the literature on voting makes it clear that people mostly don’t vote for their material self-interest, that is, for the candidates and policies that would make them personally better off.

Real voters, however, show remarkably little concern for whether their votes are likely to make a difference. Swing states see only a modest uptick in turnout, somewhere between one and four percentage

When people are asked the same policy question a few months apart, they frequently give different answers—not because they’ve changed their minds, but because they’re making up answers on the spot, without remembering what they said last time.

The kicker? Stalin himself wasn’t even in the room. His cult of personality was strong enough to sustain 11 minutes of applause even in his absence. At least 600,000 people were killed in these ways during Stalin’s purges.

This helps explain why voters feel little pressure to be informed. As long as we adopt the “right” beliefs—those of our main coalitions—we get full credit for loyalty.

Within nations, our most devoted activists are plausibly those who see themselves as political “soldiers” fighting for a cause, but whom opponents see as political “terrorists,” since their actions risk hurting both themselves and others.

12 profound excerpts from The Dhammapada: “If anything is worth doing, do it with all your heart. A half-hearted ascetic covers himself with more and more dust.”


I just finished reading the Dhammapada as translated by Eknath Easwaran [Amazon]. The book is a very very small part of the Pali Canon, a canonical collection of the Buddha’s teachings.

I’d also read Easwaran’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Both are quick reads, and his translation style is literary and powerful. Highly recommended if you’re hungry for soul food.

Below are some of my favorite excerpts.

**

For hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can. This is an unalterable law.

More than those who hate you, more than all your enemies, an undisciplined mind does greater harm. 43 More than your mother, more than your father, more than all your family, a well-disciplined mind does greater good.

The immature go after false prestige –precedence of fellow monks, power in the monasteries, and praise from all. “Listen, monks and householders, I can do this; I can do that. I am right and you are wrong.” Thus their pride and passion increase.

Better than a speech of a thousand vain words is one thoughtful word which brings peace to the mind. Better than a poem of a thousand vain verses is one thoughtful line which brings peace to the mind.

If you do what is evil, do not repeat it or take pleasure in making it a habit. An evil habit will cause nothing but suffering. If you do what is good, keep repeating it and take pleasure in making it a habit. A good habit will cause nothing but joy.

I have gone through many rounds of birth and death, looking in vain for the builder of this body. Heavy indeed is birth and death again and again! But now I have seen you, housebuilder; you shall not build this house again. Its beams are broken; its dome is shattered: self-will is extinguished; nirvana is attained.

The mantram is weak when not repeated; a house falls into ruin when not repaired; the body loses health when it is not exercised; the watchman fails when vigilance is lost.

Take refuge in the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha and you will grasp the Four Noble Truths: suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the Noble Eightfold Path that takes you beyond suffering.

There is no fire like lust, no sickness like hatred, no sorrow like separateness, no joy like peace. No disease is worse than greed, no suffering worse than selfish passion. Know this, and seek nirvana as the highest joy.

Gray hair does not make an elder; one can grow old and still be immature. A true elder is truthful, virtuous, gentle, self-controlled, and pure in mind.

“I will make this my winter home, have another house for the monsoon, and dwell in a third during the summer.” Lost in such fancies, one forgets his final destination.

An act performed carelessly, a vow not kept, a code of chastity not strictly observed: these things bring little reward. If anything is worth doing, do it with all your heart. A half-hearted ascetic covers himself with more and more dust.

**

Why coolness is positive rebellion and other fun facts I learned in the book Hit Makers

Hit Makers was recommend to me by a friend in the music business, who found it a profound and practical study of how things become hits. And he’s right. Whether you’re a businessperson, a musician, a film maker, an ad exec, or just a curious soul, reading this book will make you better at what you do. It will help you understand culture and the consumer mind.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

But perhaps every hit is a cult hit. You could easily say that from a majoritarian standpoint, nothing is popular. The mainstream does not exist. Culture is cults, all the way down.

There is an old Japanese term that perfectly sums up this surfeit of content: “tsundoku.” It means the piling up of unread books.

people crave fresh voices telling them familiar stories, because they enjoy the thrill of discovery but ultimately gravitate to the comfort of fluency.

In study after study, people reliably chose the words and funny shapes that they’d seen the most. […] Their preference was for familiarity. This discovery is known as the “mere exposure effect,” or just the “exposure effect,” and it is one of the sturdiest findings in modern psychology.

Even governance is showbiz: One third of the White House staff works in some aspect of public relations to promote the president and his policies, according to political scientists Matthew Baum and Samuel Kernell. The White House is a studio, and the president is its star.

A cheeky UK experiment found that British students’ opinion of former prime minister Tony Blair sank as they listed more of his good qualities. Spouses offer higher appraisals of their partners when asked to name fewer charming characteristics. When something becomes hard to think about, people transfer the discomfort of the thought to the object of their thinking

The most significant neophilic group in the consumer economy is probably teenagers. Young people are “far more receptive to advanced designs,” Loewy wrote, because they have the smallest stake in the status quo.

Writing poetry without rhyme is “like playing tennis without a net,” the poet Robert Frost once said. In music, repetition is the net.

But in all cases, the hero is the synthesis of his friends. The thinking Spock and the feeling McCoy are two halves of Captain Kirk. The brilliant Hermione and the sensitive Ron balance out Harry Potter. Luke Skywalker combines Han’s bravery and Leia’s conscience

The good news is that getting your child to like broccoli is possible through repeat exposure. The bad news is that familiarizing broccoli is an expensive chore for parents, requiring up to fifteen servings for kids to accept the bitter vegetable.

If the lead male character sleeps with somebody else during this break, the audience will ultimately forgive him when he reconciles with the lead actress, Bruzzese said. But if the female lead sleeps with somebody during this temporary breakup? Even the women in the audience will stop rooting for her.

“If you look at the most universal forms of laughter shared across species, when rats laugh or when dogs laugh, it’s often in response to aggressive forms of play, like chasing or tickling,” Warren told me (and, yes, rats can laugh). “Chasing and tickling are both the threat of an attack, but without an actual attack.”

This is the life span of the laugh track: It was conceived in controversy, grew up to become a social norm, and is dying a cliché. In other words, the laugh track was a fashion. The sound of other people laughing, which used to make people laugh, now makes many people cringe.

Clothing, once a ritual, is now the definitive fashion. First names, once a tradition, now follow the hype cycle of fashion lines. Communication, too, is now coming to resemble the hallmarks of a fashion, where choices emerge and preferences change, sometimes with seeming arbitrariness, as people discover new, more convenient, and more fun ways to say hello.

If you think Tinder and dating apps are destroying romance today, you would have hated cars in the 1900s. Cars didn’t just hasten a historical shift from teenage codependence to independence. They fed the growth of a high school subculture.

But what is coolness, anyway? In sociology, it is sometimes defined as a positive rebellion.

When you share something online, you are giving up nothing. In fact, you are gaining something quite valuable: an audience. Sharing, in the context of information, isn’t really sharing. It’s much more like talking.

“The best jokes are so specific that they feel private,” he told me. “It’s that surprise, I think, that people like—that I shared something that felt almost too small and personal for anybody else to know.”

First, people seek out others who are like them. Sociologists call this “sorting.” Second, individuals change to become more like the group around them. This is called “socializing.”

Publicly, people often talk about issues. Privately, they talk about schedules. Publicly, they deploy strategic emotions. Privately, they tend to share small troubles. Publicly, they want to be interesting. Privately, they want to be understood.

HBO does not rely on dial testing, focus groups, or surveys, its executives told me, because its business model requires something subtler. Its economic imperative is to build a television product that viewers feel like they have to pay for—even when they don’t watch it.

“When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.” – Jeff Bezos

Originating in late 1800s medicine, the word “tabloid” first referred to a small tablet of drugs. It soon became a catchall for a smaller, compressed form of anything, including journalism and newspapers.

Writers used to call each fad a “nine days’ wonder.” In the 1960s, Andy Warhol predicted that everybody would have just fifteen minutes of fame. The half life of notoriety is shrinking.

Umberto Eco called Disneyland “the quintessence of consumer ideology,” because it “not only produces illusion,” but also “stimulates the desire for it.”

(all of the above are from Hit Makers by Derek Thompson)

Knaussgard and his autobiographies


I read the first book in Knaussgard’s series of autobiographical novels several years ago and was immediately taken in by his thoughts, his style, the flow. And last month I began to read the second book and once again I was reminded of why he’s such a special writer, and this a special work. For me, below is such a snippet:

After we came home from Idö I realized that this was all or nothing, I told Linda I was moving into the office, I would have to write day and night. You can’t do that, she said, that’s not on, you’ve got a family, or have you forgotten? It’s summer, or have you forgotten? Am I supposed to look after your daughter on my own? Yes, I said. That’s the way it is. No, it isn’t, she said, I won’t let you. Okay, I said, but I’ll do it anyway. And I did. I was totally manic. I wrote all the time, sleeping two or three hours a day, the only thing that had any meaning was the novel I was writing. Linda went to her mother’s and called me several times a day. She was so angry that she screamed, actually screamed on the phone. I just held it away from my ear and kept writing. She said she would leave me. Go, I said. I don’t care, I have to write. And it was true. She would have to go if that was what she wanted. She said, I will. You’ll never see us again. Fine, I said. I wrote twenty pages a day. I didn’t see any letters or words, any sentences or shapes, just countryside and people, and Linda phoned and screamed, said I was a fairweather father, said I was a bastard, said I was an unfeeling monster, said I was the worst person in the world and that she cursed the day she had met me. Fine, I said, leave me then, I don’t care, and I meant it, I didn’t care, no one was going to stand in the way of this, she slammed down the phone, she called two minutes later and continued to swear at me, I was on my own now, she would bring up Vanja alone, fine by me, I said. She cried, she begged, she pleaded, what I was doing to her was the worst thing anyone could do, leaving her alone. But I didn’t care, I wrote night and day, and then out of the blue she called and said she was coming home the following day, would I go to the station and meet them? Yes, I would.