2024 Reading Recap: links
The most interesting, fun, or funny things I read online this year
Looking for things to read on ski lifts? Here’s a roundup of the best of 2024 (not necessarily written in 2024!).
Arts, culture, & design
Where have all the connoisseur collectors gone?
Gotham, the gritty metropolis that is home to Batman, means ‘goat home’.
Paul Graham’s essay on good taste. I love reading essays on aesthetics, but they always come down to the same thing: someone really wants to justify the existence of an aesthetic standard and they construct elaborate arguments in defence of their worldview — but these arguments inevitably rest on assertions or untested assumptions. In this case, PG says good taste obviously exists, because if it didn’t, good art wouldn’t exist. Good art does exist because Leonardo is obviously a better artist than a random eight year old. And so if good art is a thing, so must good taste be a thing. But this isn’t the knock-out argument PG makes it out to be — as he acknowledges, not everyone agrees on what is great art, so PG admits there is a question of degree and context. But if you start admitting that, you have to admit that, for instance, an entire society may consider Leonardo to be a terrible painter; what then? At best, the argument PG is making is that art and taste can exist as somewhat objective concepts within particular milieus; as social groups grow larger, the less their members have in common, and the less likely they are to agree that something is great art.
List of good words. And, of course, Cellar Door.
Optimal Mario Kart configurations.
Life lessons from Gianni Agnelli.
Charles Eames advice for students. And if you want help making a Bertie's there for you.
How do you accidentally run for president of Iceland? TL;DR bad UX.
The elite students who can’t read. Don’t know man, my son is six, and is doing fine reading chapter books by himself. Parents, if your kids aren’t reading, maybe it’s your fault?
I can’t disagree with this strongly enough:
We need to renormalize parents being willing to say to childless people, with respect to many parenting, social, & civilizational issues: 'Sorry, it may not be your fault, but the fact that you don't have kids means you simply don't know what you're talking about'
This is absolute nonsense. You don’t need lived experience of something to have intelligent opinions on it. You don’t need to have had cancer to be able to diagnose it or cure it; you don’t need to have won an Olympics medal to be a good coach; you don’t need to be a piano virtuoso to judge music. And similarly, you don’t need to have children to realise that having them watch Paw Patrol 24/7 is a bad idea (as is, by the way, banning all TV; some things are great!). I see so many parents make entirely avoidable bad decisions — we shouldn’t be judging parents less, we should be judging them more. Too many kids are overweight, too many kids can barely read, too many kids are addicted to their iPads, too many kids are too scared to climb stuff. We need higher standards, not lower.
This is how everything should be taught.
Whither Tartaria, or what explains the shift towards minimalism? And another view on the same. And supply-side explanations (‘ornamentation became prohibitively expensive’) seem wrong.
Sentence structure: weight and clarity.
Digital entertainment costs $0.5 — $2.00 per hour.
Housing, infrastructure, & architecture
UK Foundations. If you’re only going to read one thing from this list, let it be this one.
Making architecture easy: a more sensible take on modern vs traditional debates on architecture.
Housing shortage & affordability crisis.
The housing theory of everything.
Housing lessons from Texas (& Croydon). MORE SUPPLY = LOWER PRICES — this isn’t difficult! Yet NIMBYs keep rejecting this extremely simple and basic truth. Why? Because of two misconceptions:
First, you won’t believe the number of times I’ve seen this argument, but people thing ‘they’ (builders etc) want to keep prices artificially high; so even if building were made easier, nothing would change. The mistake here is to think that profit-maximising capitalists care about high prices; they don’t, they care about high profits. Selling two houses for £25k in profit each is better than selling 1 house for a £40k profit.
Second, people look at empiric data and say ‘city X added Yk houses and yet prices kept climbing’ — overlooking that demand also kept growing throughout that period, and that looking at supply alone is meaningless.
How tax codes shape architecture. To quote Gordon Gekko, ‘It's all about bucks, kid. The rest is conversation’.
£300m and 360k pages planning applications. Does anyone even read those?
What happens when rent controls are repealed.
A Bauhaus primer, and a more in-depth essay on it, reviewing Tom Wolfe’s book on Bauhaus. A couple of thoughts here: first, I like pluralism: I think it’s a good thing that there’ve been so many architectural and aesthetic movements over time, and the philosophy behind Bauhaus is interesting and worth exploring. But I also think Bauhaus has been too successful and too dominant, and has resulted in too many boring and badly designed buildings and objects. Second, critics of modernism think that most people dislike modernism; but is that true? My office’s interior is very old-school — coated in mahogany and marble. But most of my colleagues hate it and are asking for white desks instead…
Related: America was supposed to be art deco.
Management, Finance, & Technology
Nike’s epic saga of value destruction.
Amazonians heading back to the office — but I think even more interesting is the declared war on bureaucracy.
Inside Disney’s Succession drama.
Forrest Mars Sr: his father founded Mars Inc; they fell out, so Forrest moved to England where he created Maltesers; moved back to the US, created M&Ms, and took over his dad’s business when the latter passed away, merging it with his own. Ran it until the 70s when he handed it over to his children; at 76 years old, he went on to found yet another chocolate company, which Mars bought from him. What a legend.
Snail farm sparks tax avoidance probe.
1982 article on writing with a computer.
When RAND made magic: TL;DR hire bright people, give them the resources they need, encourage excellence, and avoid micromanaging them, and magic will happen.
How Amazon blew its chance to dominate AI with Alexa. I think the article is unfair — it seems that Amazon has serious challenges to overcome to integrate LLMs with Alexa, and there doesn’t seem to be an obviously correct way of doing it. In general, all too often people blame companies that fall victim to innovator’s dilemma — but the whole point of the innovator’s dilemma, the reason that it’s such a killer, is that it’s usually the right thing to do for an incumbent to not invest in disruptive technology. Companies that end up being disrupted aren’t usually led by stupid executives.
People share stuff online to a) sound smart, b) be funny, c) look hot, d) look rich. Share this list with friends for (a).
A 1652 ad for coffee. Also, the first coffee shop in London was opened by a Greek. You’re welcome.
A day in the life of Brunello Cucinelli.
No-one reads CVs. But do read this one because it’s funny.
Minimum viable vs maximum possible products.
Characteristics of successful P&G managers.
In defence of Steve Ballmer. More generally, it feels like every other week I see some LinkedIn post denigrating ‘MBAs’ and praising engineers; such arguments are facile and stupid. There have been many legendary MBA CEOs — from A.G. Lafley at P&G to Warren Buffet —, and suggesting that the issues at say Boeing are because MBAs took over and pushed out the engineers is too simplistic.
6 lessons I learnt working at an art gallery. Number 6 (most people are not serious) resonates a lot:
As someone who has been self-employed for most of my life, I have often looked at institutions and felt, “How come they are so slow and bad at their jobs? How hard can it be?” But since I had limited experience, I figured that there was something hard about it that I was too naive to see.
I’m no longer sure I was naive. It was, at the gallery at least, very easy to do much (~3x) better than baseline. For example: when I first came on the board, they would talk about the “three legs” of the gallery: fundraising, workshops, and sales (café, shop, tickets). But when I sneaked away to look at the numbers, two of these “sources of income” were actually cost centers: fundraising and workshops cost us more than we earned.2 No one had looked at our bookkeeping to figure out how we earned our income! Also, they hadn’t factored in building maintenance costs, and when you did that it was clear that the current strategy would bankrupt us in 2-3 years.
This happens a lot more than you might expect!
Why you need maths to be a quant.
Politics & economics
The idiocy that’s the 2010 equality act.
Silly season in anti-trust: Hermes.
Death by a thousand paper cuts — on the growth & costs of bureaucracy. Some data points are mind-boggling — e.g. MIT has almost eight times more non-faculty employees than faculty. Madness.
Privatising railroads wasn’t the unmitigated disaster everyone portrays it to be — by all metrics, railroads have fared better under private ownership.
The UK is great at assimilating immigrants.
History
Qin dynasty follies: the TL’DR here is that if you enforce stupid rules, people will be more likely to break them. The particular example in the article is that in Qin China, if a general was late reporting for duty, he had to be executed. Of course, this meant that a general running late had a very strong incentive to rebel.
N.B. the concept of mar'it ayin: in Jewish law, appearing to break the law is illegal, even if the law isn’t actually broken. To me, the two concepts are linked: ridiculous, overly strict laws will be broken; which will encourage people to break more laws, even sensible ones.
The story of the pied piper originates in Hamelin, whose town gate has this inscription:
In the year 1556,
272 years after the magician
stole 130 children from the city,
this gate was founded.
12 yo Ottoman Sultan power play.
Probably untrue, but funny nevertheless:
When he became Prime Minister in 1828, Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington was confused by his first Cabinet meeting, writing: ‘An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders and they wanted to stay and discuss them.’
Many thanks! Great reads for my long flight 🙂
Great read.