this is sippey.com

George Saunders on getting the water to boil in a story:

We might, for simplicity, think about those first five minutes of a movie, and in particular, that first incident that tells you what the film is “about,” or “what you should be wondering.” For me, it’s a bit of an “aha” feeling, kind of like, “Ah, I see. Oh, this could be good.”

Elsewhere I’ve described this as the moment when the path of the story narrows.

One way of thinking of it, in terms of the famous Freytag Triangle: the water starts boiling when the story passes from the “exposition” phase, into the “rising action” phase.

A story made up of all non-boiling water is perennially stuck in the “exposition phase.” We might think of this as a section where the components are joined by a series of “and also” statements. “The house looked like this and also the yard looked like this and also the family was made of five members (and also, and also).”

(At this point, the reader may ask the Seussian question: “Why are you bothering telling me this?”)

Basically, it’s a world without (let’s call it) time-based complication. Nothing started happening at a certain point and then changed everything.

I sometimes joke with my students that, if they find themselves mired in this purely expositional mode, they should just plop this sentence in there: “Then, one day, everything changed forever.”

Then the story has to rise to that statement and, voila: boiling water.

I love his description of “the moment when the path of the story narrows.” When the scene setting ends and the writer works to focus your attention, and starts to bring the water to a boil.

Kieran Healy from 2019, Rituals of Childhood.

The United States has institutionalized the mass shooting in a way that [sociologist Émile] Durkheim would immediately recognize. As I discovered to my shock when my own children started school in North Carolina some years ago, preparation for a shooting is a part of our children’s lives as soon as they enter kindergarten. The ritual of a Killing Day is known to all adults. It is taught to children first in outline only, and then gradually in more detail as they get older. The lockdown drill is its Mass. The language of “Active shooters”, “Safe corners”, and “Shelter in place” is its liturgy. “Run, Hide, Fight” is its creed. Security consultants and credential-dispensing experts are its clergy. My son and daughter have been institutionally readied to be shot dead as surely as I, at their age, was readied by my school to receive my first communion. They practice their movements. They are taught how to hold themselves; who to defer to; what to say to their parents; how to hold their hands. The only real difference is that there is a lottery for participation. Most will only prepare. But each week, a chosen few will fully consummate the process, and be killed.

Via @ranjit, shonkywonkydonky’s complete Radiohead cover album, OK Computer but everything in my voice. “Airbag” broke my brain, but by “Exit Music (For a Film)” I was hooked.

Highly recommended: the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show with Jia Tolentino (author of Trick Mirror, a book I’ve probably recommended more often than any other in the last few years) about parenting, pleasure, psychedelics, reading, attention, smart phones and Cocomelon. This exchange hit home, emphasis mine…

jia tolentino: And it sometimes feels to me not that we’re turning away from the mess and the wonder of real physical experience, despite the fact that it’s precious. I kind of feel something within me sometimes that it’s too precious. It’s too much, that being present is work, in a way, that it’s this rawness, and it’s this mutability. It requires this of us and a presence. That is something that I have sometimes found myself flexing away from because of all the reasons that it’s good, in a weird way. Have you ever — do you know what I mean at all?

ezra klein: I absolutely know what you mean in a million different ways. I mean, I was a kid. Why do I read? I mean, now I think it’s almost a leftover habit, but I read to escape. I read to escape my world. I read to escape my family. I read to escape things I didn’t understand. And I read obsessively, constantly, all the time, in cars, in the bathroom, anywhere.

tolentino: Totally.

klein: Because it was a socially sanctioned way to be alone.

tolentino: Right.

klein: And nobody would bother me because it was virtuous for me to be reading.

Nim Daghlian summarizes what they took away from XOXO (again, driving my RAHMO). I particularly appreciated this particular bit from Darius Kazemi about the definition of “indie.”

Darius Kazemi says “Indie is just an economic descriptor” in his funny, insightful talk about the highs and lows of trying to make it building independent projects and communities on the internet, in part as a followup to his 2014 talk “How I Won The Lottery” This was to say that it’s a way of existing in the market, rather than a coherent aesthetic or a value system, and it can be liberating or fuck you up in equal measures.

And I also liked this:

I feel like all these conversations and calls to action I hear have this in common; they’re calling for an active and critical engagement with the internet – what we put on it, how we build it, and how we use it to connect with other people. For some people that means writing your own CMS from scratch and federating all your posts to multiple services. For others it might mean making a mutual aid Facebook group. Or maybe just starting a text thread with friends.

Both of these snippets are refreshing in their “different strokes for different folks” vibes. Because there is no one right way to internet.

Via Daring Fireball, Departure Mono.

Notion has hit 100M users and there’s much to love in the email that Ivan Zhao, the founder, sent to celebrate the milestone.

In our early years, we were rather lost. … We had no business sense, struggled with building a horizontal tool. Notion almost died. (Thanks for the bridge, mom!)

And…

Notion is built on the 70s’ vision that software can “augment human intellect”. … The world needs a “LEGOs for software” and Notion is here to build that! With our LEGOs, a community of non-programmers can sell “software” built on Notion (some made $1M in 2023!) We dreamed of this in the original pitch deck, but I wasn’t sure it would come true. It’s gradually coming together, though instead of 15 months like we imagined in our original pitch deck, it took us 10 years 😅

And…

As with our mission, our love for craft hasn’t changed. We tried 30 shades of warm white paints for our office wall. We couldn’t find merch we love, so we made our own work jackets. We care about craft & beauty, and we want to bring them to this world.

What I love about Notion is that is both highly opinionated and internally consistent. Once you understand how Notion works, how those LEGOs fit together, the light bulb goes off about (a) what you can do with the tool, and (b) where your contraints are. (You can do a lot with LEGOs, but not everything.) I think Notion is one of the more interesting products to come out of “the Valley” in the last decade, and Ivan’s email was a nice peek into the culture driving the company. More like this, please.

Sam Kahn on the…I hate myself a little bit for using this word…vibe of every decade from the 1880s to the 2020s:

1920s — Pure hedonism. Hedonism tinged with grief, hedonism as the fruit of experience. The sense of being passed over by technology. José Capablanca seeing a film of himself at the peak of his life and weeping uncontrollably that he would never be that again. Benjamin Button’s misfortune of growing ever stronger and younger, only to sink again into senescence.

And:

1980s — Cocaine. Phil Collins’ psycho solo. Patrick Bateman catching up to a woman on the street at night. Seducing her with a glance at his suit. Cut to the next day, trying to have his bloody sheets cleaned at the dry cleaner’s.

Two widely-linked things are bouncing around in my head, and I think they’re saying the same thing. First, Ted Chiang on Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art, emphasis mine:

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

And second, Paul Graham on Founder Mode:

There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don’t know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who’ve been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we’re looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.

Graham argues that “there are things founders can do that managers can’t.” While there literally may not be tasks that a founder can do that a hired manager can’t, there are certainly decisions a founder can make that managers can’t. Because they lack the context, the experience and the history that a founder has. To bastardize Chiang for a minute, founder mode requires making choices at every scale; it’s the interrelationship between the large scale (strategy) and the small scale (the design of a listing page) where founder mode lies.

Alexis Madrigal on a mulberry leaf growing in his backyard.

In the shade, the leaf is solid and waxy, reflective—the blue sky right now is laying on its the ridges. The texture is so singular, so perfect that it reveals a new dimension of failure for our digital cameras. The lustrous sheen is inseparable from this particular green, and it cannot be captured. The leaf is not iridescent like an abalone shell; it doesn’t reveal rainbows through optics. But it should be in that same magical category! This is a green that reveals the whole spectrum of green and suggests that it might run beyond our perception. This is beauty. My eyes find the leaf from all the angles of our yard.

Emphasis mine.

I just finished and highly recommend Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey. It’s a fictional biography of a multi-hyphenate downtown New York artist from the 70s. It’s an alternate history of the United States. It’s a meditation on identity. It’s an investigation of what it means to make art. And it’s an obsessive love story, written by a widow who’s blinded by anger and grief.

Audrey Wollen’s excellent review in The New Yorker will give you a taste of what you’re in for.

Lucca’s biography begins with a wail of grief, and a repudiation of history. Lucca, the narrator and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is mourning the death of her wife, X, a maverick star of the art world, who built such a baroque structure of mystery around herself that even Lucca struggles to identify whom she has lost, whom her widowhood honors. X has done everything, been everyone: a conceptual artist à la Sophie Calle, a lyricist and producer on David Bowie’s “Low,” a stripper in Times Square alongside Kathy Acker, an interlocutor with the feminist Carla Lonzi, a fiction writer who inspired Denis Johnson, a terrorist on the run, even a secret F.B.I. agent. Familiar uncertainties – Who was this person whom I loved? Did I ever know her? Is it possible to love what one cannot know? – turn into a far-reaching, propulsive detective story that spans the last half of the twentieth century.

The question driving Lucca’s investigation appears, at first, to be a simple one: What was her wife’s name?

Four passages I highlighted, just to give you a taste:

Page 33:

But I know now a person always exceeds and resists the limits of a story about them, and no matter how widely we set the boundaries, their subjectivity spills over, drips at the edges, then rushes out completely. People are, it seems, too complicated to sit still inside a narrative, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from trying, desperately trying, to compact a life into pages.

Page 140:

“Is life in the small things, in songs or stories, or is in the large things, in the country, its laws, in the liberty and safety of others?”

Page 175:

You are not your name, you are not what you have done, you are not what people see, you are not what you see or what you have seen. On some level you must know this already or have suspected it all along — but what, if anything, can be done about it? How do you escape the confinement of being a person who allows the past to control you when the past itself is nonexistent?

And finally, page 269 – one small example of the world building Lacey does throughout the novel:

Though it is difficult to imagine now, the occupation of “artist” in America was seen, prior to World War II, almost exclusively as a male calling; it was only through the intersection of a variety of economic and cultural events that this stereotype was inverted and women were seen as the sex to whom “art” belonged. (Why it had to belong to one sex or another is another matter entirely.) Many have identified the Painters’ Massacre of 1943 as a crucial turning point in this reversal. In December of that year, a mob of Southern separatists stormed an opening at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York, killing fourteen male artists – Marchel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock among them – while sparing all the women. This act of terrorism might have been more well-known if it hadn’t been one of the less-deadly incidents perpetrated by similar groups; as it stands, it appears more often in art history books than in books on the Great Disunion.

So good. Go read it.

File under “texting in public,” I love the trailer for Netflix’s Starting 5. For…reasons.

File under “trust and safety is hard,” Finn Voorhees had Apple repair his iPhone screen but then found himself suddenly banned from Snapchat.

I began to suspect that Apple had given me a refurbished iPhone as a replacement, and the previous owner had been banned for violating Snapchat’s guidelines. … DeviceCheck allows developers to set and query two bits of data per device, which persist across app deletions, reinstalls, factory resets, and even device transfers between users. Apple’s documentation suggests using this for limiting free trials to once per user or banning devices with known fraudulent activity. They even mention that developers are responsible for resetting these bits when a device changes ownership, but it’s unclear how developers could verify that this has occurred.

File under “defining a security is hard,” Ben Weiss’ at The Verge on what’s been happening at OpenSea is worth reading. Two quick thoughts. First, given today’s news that the SEC sent them a Wells notice, maybe killing creator royalties (to better compete with Blur?) wasn’t really the move? Second, this quote is just brutal:

“They hired these fucking animals, these reptiles from like Amazon, Facebook, Google,” said another former employee. “The white walkers came in through the fucking door like in Game of Thrones.”

File under “real estate is hard,” David Wertheimer on the news that New York’s Flatiron building is going condo:

For most of the first century of its life, the Flatiron was a thriving space, with thousands of people walking into its lobby and filling its 22 stories with an ever changing population, each generating their own experiences, their own memories. The building was lively inside and out. That is likely never to return.

And finally, file under “someday, maybe, I hope to stay there” Colin Nagy at WITI on the renovation happening at the Park Hyatt Tokyo:

This is one of the most high wire acts that can happen in hotels: evolving a beloved icon, while retaining its magic elements. Park Hyatt Tokyo is a place where you either get it, or you don’t. But it is a place with integrity, timelessness, and a design intention that has been executed with remarkable consistency over time.

I also love this video from the hotel’s 25th anniversary that Nagy’s a part of…

Greil Marcus has a new book coming about why he writes, adapted from a lecture he was invited to give at Yale.

Each speaker writes a book on why they write and then draws a lecture from it, he said. When? I said. September, he said. I can’t, I said. I’m still learning how to walk again. No, next year, he said. The idea that in a year, in the best circumstances, I’d be able to travel across the country and speak in public was so absurd—I’d been having speech therapy twice a day for months, having lost the ability to speak with any emotion, feeling, emphasis, flair, or really meaning—I said, sure, figuring why not, there’s no chance it will happen. At that point I didn’t know if I’d ever write again and did care if I did or not.

Via Futility Closet, Danny Jansen will become the first MLB player to play for both teams in a single game. (Rain, suspension, trade.)

Quanta has a great primer on the vagus nerve:

The vagus nerve is critical to generating mind by integrating the brain and body. Choking is terrifying because death could be mere minutes away. That heightened mental state is dependent on signals coming from the body — the inability to breathe or swallow — and the vagus nerve both senses and controls the choking response. If your heart suddenly starts racing, you might experience a panic attack; controlling heart rate is a prime function of the vagus nerve.

And at Nautilus, Steve Paulson goes deep on hallucinogens.

This question about a transpersonal reality hangs in the air, lurking behind this psychedelic moment. It shapes how we interpret the mystical experiences so common in psychedelic therapy. It informs metaphysics—the philosophical tradition that wrestles with fundamental questions about reality, like the relationship between mind and matter and the space-time continuum, which are precisely the kinds of questions that tend to surface in psychedelic experiences.

I had planned on being in Portland for XOXO, but life intervened. Jason Kottke isn’t helping my RAHMO (regret at having missed out):

And most of all, thanks to the Andys (Baio, McMillan) for putting on XOXO for all these years. It is a singularly impactful gathering that’s touched/changed/bettered too many lives to even count. XOXO is perhaps the most thoughtful thing I’ve ever experienced — I can’t imagine how difficult it’s been for them to sustain that level of kindness and attention to detail across this many festivals and years.

In lieu of being in Portland, I finished a rewatch of Damon Lindelhof’s HBO show The Leftovers. Season one hews close to the Perrotta book, and beats you about the head and neck with grief. But seasons two and three go somewhere beautiful, especially in the relationship between Kevin and Nora. If you haven’t watched it and are looking for something worthwhile on HBO Max, give it a spin. And then, once you’re through it, read Emily St. James’ and Caroline Framke’s review of the final episode, “The Book of Nora.” (Don’t worry, no real spoilers in the quote below.)

Why shouldn’t the series finale of The Leftovers send a goat to wander the desert, weighed down by figurative sin, until Nora found him tangled up in necklaces and metaphors? The Leftovers can be an incredibly subtle show, but it loves itself an obvious symbol, too, and the goat is a great one. Is it on the nose? Absolutely. But it also represents something The Leftovers does really well. Sometimes, life is incredibly on the nose; if you look for them, there are obvious symbols for whatever you’re going through lurking around every corner.

Emphasis mine.

Good way to start a Monday: Sylvan Esso remixes The District Sleeps Alone Tonight.

Ten links, no context.

1. An illegal one-person boycott.
2. Tim Walz can teach you how to drive stick.
3. He said his running mate would be Phyllis Diller.
4. Dragons are pretty big, I guess.
5. This season clearly should have been 10 episodes.
6. Medieval beat machine.
7. I promise it’s all a lot cooler than anything out of the Forgotten Realms.
8. In the meantime, there’s nothing to do but write.
9. Anything a friend once did, apps do “better.”
10. How are pink fairy armadillos real?

Hey ChatGPT, write a sonnet based on these:

In lands where dragons soar and legends rise,
A governor instructs in driving’s art.
Phyllis, a specter, dons a bold disguise,
Her laughter echoes, playing every part.

Medieval beats from times long past now play,
A symphony of dreams both strange and bright.
Forgotten realms in twilight’s soft decay,
Give way to tales that shimmer in the night.

Through apps that mimic friends, we find our way,
In digital embraces, cold and new.
Yet pink armadillos in the clay,
Remind us of the wonder that is true.

With letters penned and bicycles restored,
We craft our lives in worlds both real and scored.

OK, computer.

Heather Cox Richardson on how like bankruptcy, even democracy happens gradually and then suddenly:

Every time we expand democracy, it seems we get complacent, thinking it’s a done deal. We forget that democracy is a process and that it’s never finished.

And when we get complacent, people who want power use our system to take over the government. They get control of the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, and they begin to undermine the principle that we should be treated equally before the law and to chip away at the idea that we have a right to a say in our government. And it starts to seem like we have lost our democracy.

But all the while, there are people who keep the faith. Lawmakers, of course, but also teachers and journalists and the musicians who push back against the fear by reminding us of love and family and community. And in those communities, people begin to organize—the marginalized people who are the first to feel the bite of reaction, and grassroots groups. They keep the embers of democracy alive.

And then something fans them into flame.

Emphasis mine. And sort of related, today’s Red Hand Files from Nick Cave, answering a question about loneliness:

Philosopher, neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says we require three things to attain a meaningful life. The first is feeling part of a wider community – family, friends, and society in general. Second is an understanding of nature and a connection to the natural order of things, which McGilchrist feels we have largely lost. Finally, we need to form a relationship with the sacred or divine – this can be found in art, music, poetry and religion, where we acknowledge the ineffable and all-encompassing force that holds the world together.

Barack Obama, Our Endorsement:

But Kamala has more than a resume. She has the vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands. There is no doubt in our mind that Kamala Harris has exactly what it takes to win this election and deliver for the American people. At a time when the stakes have never been higher, she gives us all reason to hope.

Rebecca Traister, The Case for Being Unburdened by What Has Been:

I felt excited not in spite of my uncertainty, but because of it. I felt that our national political narrative was finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don’t know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, underpolled, creative measures to change, grow, and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us. No more clinging to the walls of the past for safety, no more adhering to models or traditions or assumptions that the autocratic opposition has shown itself willing to explode over the past two decades in its own efforts to win.

Open Secrets:

Within 36 hours of Biden’s announcement on July 21, Harris raised more than $100 million, according to her campaign, including $81 million in the first 24 hours. The $100 million cash infusion would more than double the $96 million the Biden-Harris campaign had in cash on hand at the end of June. Harris’ team said the massive haul, which includes money raised across the campaign, Democratic National Committee and joint fundraising committees, represents the largest 24-hour total in U.S. history.

Let’s fucking go.

M.G. Siegler at Spyglass (my favorite tech blog right now, bar none), writing about the newly released video of Steve Jobs speaking at the Aspen Design Conference in 1983:

Everyone knows the famous/infamous “reality distortion field”, but it really undersells Jobs’ ability to command a room by speaking in a way that’s intensely human.

Too many of our current crop of entrepreneurs and CEOs just cannot do this for whatever reason. So many over the years have tried to emulated such abilities for obvious reasons, but they may mimic the look and feel of such a talk, but can’t copy the underlying empathy that seems to exist within Jobs in these settings. You can say it’s an act, but it works. Over every talk. Over years and years. Time and time again. It’s both a command of what he’s talking about and an ability to convey true belief in what he’s talking about. Mixed with a way to make it all relatable to seemingly every person in the room.

Emphasis mine. The talk itself is absolutely worth watching, and it’s wild trying to imagine a time when most of the audience present didn’t yet own personal computer, Apple or otherwise. I love this bit (especially because I’m currently reading the early chapters of Chris Miller’s Chip War):

Third thing about computers: they’re really dumb. They’re exceptionally simple. But they’re really fast.

Linus Lee implores us to create things that come alive.

Within my little corner of the world, I think we’re often victim to an even more myopic pathology of this kind: we think that technology involves a computer, or spacecraft, or a microscope, or some other fragile thing cursed to be beholden to software. But writing is technology. Oral tradition is technology. Farming is technology. Roads are technology.

Technology exists woven into the physics and politics and romance of the world, and to disentangle it is to suck the life out of it, to sterilize it to the point of exterminating its reason for existence. to condemn it to another piece of junk.

If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag everything they touch into the realm of the living. And once in a while, if you are so lucky, may you create not just technology, but art — not only giving us life, but elevating us beyond.

Emphasis mine.

Poet Diana Garza Islas, in the Paris Review, Rorschach:

Two monkeys with wings defecate suspending a ballerina whose skull is split. Her tutu reveals thighs from the fifties, toned. Their hands are on her poor wounded head; she has no feet. One of the monkeys, the one on the left, has a badly defined jawline. The woman has a perforated abdomen.

Janna Levin talking with Natalie Priebe Frank in Quanta, What Can Tiling Patterns Teach Us?:

FRANK: [David Smith] was part of an online community of tiling enthusiasts that stretches across the world. And he was looking for interesting tiles in the following way that’s commonly practiced. So what you do, you can start with a hexagonal tiling of the plane. So it’s just all hexagons. And then put a dot in the center of the hexagon. And draw a line from that dot in the center to the middle of each edge. Not the vertices, but the middle of each edge. And so you end up making the hexagon look like six little kite-shaped things stuck together — they’re called polykites.

And so what you do is you take those little kite-shaped things and you just simply regroup them. And you just say, “OK, now that set of eight of them that are all stuck together, that’s my tile. Let me see if I can tile with it.” And so, people have categorically gone through the low levels of all the possible combinations of those things. Someone in the literature a few years prior had pointed out a tile with a very large corona or possibly a tile that didn’t tile. And so David started playing with this particular version.

LEVIN: Yes, and he called his “the hat” because it vaguely sort of looked like a big top hat.

FRANK: They decided it looked like a hat.

LEVIN: Some people called it a T-shirt.

FRANK: Yeah. But it got called the hat and that’s fine.

Finally, Noah Kalina on fireworks:

I used to be obsessed with fireworks. Fountains specifically. You know, the kind that only go about ten feet high. Was it because I was born on the fourth of July? Probably not. I liked fireworks for the same reason most people like them. I enjoyed fireworks for their hypnotic visual displays and their captivating booms and crackles. They have an undeniably mesmerizing effect. Also, fireworks are often associated with celebrations and communal gatherings, evoking feelings of nostalgia, joy, and togetherness. I think those are the normal and healthy reasons to like fireworks.