Elisa Gonzalez at The Paris Review on Marilyn Monroe’s poetry. “Marilyn often spent long periods in front of the mirror, just looking at herself. This wasn’t only the rapture of narcissism. She studied and honed her movements and faces, learning to feel how she looked in the eyes of others. Especially given that Marilyn never sought publication, reading her work makes me think less of overhearing a conversation than of watching someone else’s shifting reflection. These dashed-off, insular poems embody an oft-submerged but ever-present feature of lyric poetry: a dialogue within the self, overheard by the self.”
Olivia Snow, in Wired: Are You Ready to Be Surveilled Like a Sex Worker? “Some precautions I’ve taken for my own safety as a sex worker include withholding my birthday, age, ethnic background, hometown, current city, former cities, commute, alma maters, graduation years, time zone, weather, current employers, past employers, even my favorite color. When I post photos, I photoshop out my face and tattoos, and I never reveal my natural hair. If I post a screenshot, I crop out any time stamps.”
John Gruber: How to Temporarily Disable Face ID or Touch ID, and Require a Passcode to Unlock Your iPhone or iPad. “Just press and hold the buttons on both sides. Remember that. Try it now. Don’t just memorize it, internalize it, so that you’ll be able to do it without much thought while under duress, like if you’re confronted by a police officer. Remember to do this every time you’re separated from your phone, like when going through the magnetometer at any security checkpoint, especially airports. As soon as you see a metal detector ahead of you, you should think, ‘Hard-lock my iPhone’.”
Jia Tolentino: We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse. “Pregnancy is more than thirty times more dangerous than abortion. One study estimates that a nationwide ban would lead to a twenty-one-per-cent rise in pregnancy-related deaths. Some of the women who will die from abortion bans are pregnant right now. Their deaths will come not from back-alley procedures but from a silent denial of care: interventions delayed, desires disregarded. They will die of infections, of preëclampsia, of hemorrhage, as they are forced to submit their bodies to pregnancies that they never wanted to carry, and it will not be hard for the anti-abortion movement to accept these deaths as a tragic, even noble, consequence of womanhood itself.”
Steven Johnson: Natural Magic. “When Charles Babbage encountered an automaton of a ballerina as a child in the early 1800s, the ‘irresistible eyes’ of the mechanism convinced him that there was something lifelike in the machine. Those robotic facial expressions would seem laughable to a modern viewer, but animatronics has made a great deal of progress since then. There may well be a comparable threshold in simulated emotion—via robotics or digital animation, or even the text chat of an AI like LaMDA—that makes it near impossible for humans not to form emotional bonds with a simulated being.”
Vulture’s interview with Bill Hader about the end of Barry, season three. “The very first shot of the entire series is not funny. It’s a dead body and that was very much on purpose. You’re just trying to do what’s honest for the characters and the story. When we got to those last two episodes, it felt like we were forcing things to be funny. It undercut what you wanted the characters to go through. When you’re doing a show about a murderer and dealing with domestic violence and trauma and PTSD and conversion therapy of a gay man, you can’t really be that funny at times. If you’re going to portray it honestly, the comedy comes from other moments, like in life.”
ArtNet: Surrounded by Visitors, the FBI Seized 25 Works Purportedly by Basquiat From a Florida Museum in a Mid-Day Raid. “The exhibition, titled ‘Heroes and Monsters’, was due to close June 30 before traveling to Italy. ‘A show like this, with supposedly unknown, unseen works by Basquiat would be a tremendous financial gain for any museum,’ Levin said. ‘The fact that there wasn’t one U.S. institution that had inquired and arranged to travel this show prior to the F.B.I. investigation speaks silent volumes.’”
Fred Wilson: Staying Positive. “Yes, it is our collective fault for getting out over our skis during the good times and not seeing tougher times ahead. Yes, we could have and should have been more conservative with our growth plans and hiring. Yes, it is our fault for putting our companies in the position where they have to let go of so many people. But it is also the case that the number one thing in times like this is staying in the game so you can play another round.” Reminder that we’re playing an infinite game.
James Carse: Finite and Infinite Games. “Infinite players look forward, not to a victory in which the past will achieve a timeless meaning, but toward ongoing play in which the past will require constant reinterpretation. Infinite players do not oppose the actions of others, but initiate actions of their own in such a way that others will respond by initiating their own.” (Ahhh, I love Readwise.)
even if it's fake it's real, tom cruise edition
I’ve yet to see the new Top Gun, but I honestly can’t get enough of the takes about the movie, and Cruise, and his career. The one from Alex Pappedamas in The New Yorker is my current favorite.
Last year, the visual-effects artist Chris Umé and the actor Miles Fisher used deepfake technology to create a series of somewhat terrifyingly realistic TikTok videos of Fisher as Cruise, doing things such as biting into a Blow Pop and remarking, “Incredible—how come nobody ever told me there’s bubblegum?” They’re effective in part because the actual Cruise’s own affect has become so indistinguishable from the way an advanced artificial intelligence might go about talking to reporters. Cruise’s own laugh is the best Tom Cruise impression you’ve ever heard.
The original “Top Gun” came out in 1986, 36 years ago. I’m looking forward to the third in the trilogy 36 years from now in 2058, when that perfect Cruise smile and that perfect Cruise laugh are fully powered by deepfake tech.
ArtNet on the new James Turrell Skyspace in Colorado. “Titled after the Colorado town where it resides, Green Mountain Falls Skyspace, joins more than 85 other ‘Skyspace’ installations built around the world, but it’s the first one situated on the side of a mountain, as well as the first in Colorado. … Nestled amid the pine trees, at a scenic viewpoint overlooking the town and Gazebo lake, the installation merges seamlessly with the surrounding landscape and fresh mountain air. The piece serves as a naked-eye observatory, augmenting the natural beauty by framing the ever-changing sky within its borders.”
The Pudding: A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon. Another home run from The Pudding. “The Gods illustrated below are imaginary. These made-up illustrations show how symbols and attributes in real Aztec iconography were composed to depict a God’s domain, abilities and needs.”
John Pistelli on Ulysses. “The opening chapters of the novel, the ones that deploy the famous stream-of-consciousness technique immersing us first in Stephen’s and then in Bloom’s inner lives (in chapters chapters one through three and four through six, respectively), brings us to the side of these protagonists as we are made viscerally to feel their intelligence and their loneliness, their sympathies and their sorrow, especially in contrast to their coarser fellows. … Every intellectual with a typewriter was producing hard-to-read novels in the 1920s, and we’re still reading this one and not most of the others, because, no matter how bitter a pill it may be for avantists to swallow, we care about Stephen and the Blooms the same way we care about Lizzy and Pip.”
When Elon Met Twitter. “(Also at one point Musk mentioned that he has seen no evidence of alien life, and no one really knew what to make of that.)”
Ben Thompson on MLS and AppleTV. “What is notable about this approach is that it is a bet against bundling; individual subscriptions are very hard to square with a bundle — how do you apportion the revenue? … Just because a bundle is better in theory doesn’t mean it will happen in practice: while I think any particular ecosystem, particularly the sports ecosystem, which is chock full of casual fans, would be worse off in an atomized world of individual subscriptions (instead of a bundle), we might end up there anyways, and Apple now has a head start in defining what that could look like.”
The Athletic has a deep dive on everything MLS and Apple, including this illuminating quote from MLS’ Gary Stevenson about the opportunity for Apple to dramatically improve the storytelling around MLS. “Imagine if we sign a star player from Colombia. Immediately, immediately, we have the ability to serve content to those fans in Colombia of that particular player in the Apple global distribution system, whether it’s Apple News, Apple Health and Fitness, Apple Watches, Apple Music, all of those different areas we expect to be integrated in and go forward with with Apple. So, to me, when you think about what are the intangibles here and why does this really make the most sense, it makes the most sense because we have that ability to distribute content.”
Nate Rogers at The Ringer on Kate Bush burning up the charts. “In previous eras, it was much harder to account for a population’s broad listening habits outside of the physical, new music they purchased in record stores; these days, streaming charts offer a more nuanced window into the day-to-day reality of what people play in their homes, cars, offices, etc.”
Robin Sloan: Specifying Spring ‘83. “Spring ‘83 is a protocol for the transmission and display of something I am calling a ‘board’, which is an HTML fragment, limited to 2217 bytes, unable to execute JavaScript or load external resources, but otherwise unrestricted. … I recommend this kind of project, this flavor of puzzle, to anyone who feels tangled up by the present state of the internet. Protocol design is a form of investigation and critique.” Need to dig in to this.
Marcus Thompson: Draymond Green’s fingerprints are all over Warriors’ Game 5 win, especially this bit about that incredible moment when Draymond followed Tatum to the bench after the Celtics called timeout. “This was a version of a player taking a shot during a dead ball and an opponent swatting it out of the air. Can’t let shooters see the ball go in. Can’t let scorers steal confidence between whistles. … Play had stopped. The Celtics were headed to the bench for their timeout. But the Warriors’ ball pressure didn’t let up. A defiant Tatum, unwilling to show signs of surrender, responded by keeping the rock and taking it to the bench with him. So Draymond followed Tatum all the way to the Boston bench, backpedaling into a hedge of green like the Homer Simpson GIF. The Warriors star didn’t care that he was surrounded by the entire Celtics roster. He was following the ball. He was being a nuisance. He was sending a message. He was doing what Draymond does.”
Even if it’s fake it’s real, the architect seal of approval edition. “An architect lent his license to a New York City developer to approve buildings he didn’t design.”
Jamelle Bouie: The Gerontocracy of the Democratic Party Doesn’t Understand That We’re at the Brink. “What’s missing from party leaders, an absence that is endlessly frustrating to younger liberals, is any sense of urgency and crisis — any sense that our system is on the brink. Despite mounting threats to the right to vote, the right to an abortion and the ability of the federal government to act proactively in the public interest, senior Democrats continue to act as if American politics is back to business as usual.”
US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index. Interested in digging into the details of inflation? All the data’s here. (Via Data is Plural.)
Matthew McConaughey: To Make the Loss of These Lives Matter. “Counselors are needed in all these places where these mass shooters have been for a long time. I was told by many that it takes a good year before people even understand what to do next. And even then, when they become secure enough to take the first step forward, a lifetime is not going to heal those wounds.”
Dan Pfeffer: How the GOP Plans to Wash Away the Truth about Jan 6th. “Democrats continue to view political communications as a combination of press management and public relations. Republicans correctly understand that messaging in high-intensity information warfare is waged in a digital environment. Most Congressional Democrats continue to operate in a long-extinct media world where facts matter and traditional media sources are the best way to deliver those facts.”
Blackbird Spyplane on credits in movies, music and fashion. “Just appreciating the visual representation, as name after name goes by, of the fact that MAD PEOPLE besides the director, writer & actors worked to make the thing I just watched — a collectivist counterbalance to romantic yet pernicious myths of INDIVIDUALIST GENIUS that can make us focus disproportionately on “numero uno” at the expense of fellowship & communitarian obligations!”
Tim Kawakami has a long read on Steve Kerr’s signature season. In this quote Kerr says psychological safety without saying psychological safety. “What really helped was I came in here with a blank slate as a coach and a five-year contract. I wasn’t afraid of getting fired. And I was gifted this incredibly talented team that allowed me to do that stuff and we could still win. Between the job security I had, starting out with my contract and then my relationship with Bob and his trust in me and the talent we had, which allowed us to maneuver and mess around with some lineups, maybe even losing some games as a result, but with the big picture in mind. It was way easier for me than for say, some coach who took over a lottery team and was going to get fired in a year if he didn’t win some games.”
R.E. Hawley, BeReal and the Fantasy of an Authentic Online Life. “The fantasy of an authentic social-media experience is as compelling as it is categorically impossible. It would, after all, be nice to discover that the secret to peering into the fully realized, complex personhood of another was as simple as finding the right design. But for all the documentation of our lives now available to us – posed or “real” – we do not appear to know one another more profoundly or intimately for it.”
Web3/Crypto: Why Bother? From Albert Wenger, back in December. “As a first approximation all the big powerful internet companies are really database providers. … Only they get to decide who has permission to read and write to this database and which parts of it they get access to.”
WeatherKit from Apple may not be the biggest announcement from yesterday’s WWDC, but it’s one of the most interesting. “In keeping with Apple’s commitment to privacy, WeatherKit is designed to give hyperlocal forecasts without compromising user data. Location information is used only to provide weather forecasts, is not associated with any personally identifiable information, and is never tracked between requests.”
The EU mandates USB-C on phones. Consumer protection theater. I’m sure standardizing power outlets across Europe is next on the EU’s agenda.
The Pragmatic Engineer: Shipping to Production. From YOLOing it to multi-tenancy rollouts, an excellent guide with tons of links to how companies like Uber, Facebook and Doordash manage shipping code to production.
Simon Willison on playing with GPT-3. “Everything about working with GPT-3 is prompt engineering—trying different prompts, and iterating on specific prompts to see what kind of results you can get. It’s a programming activity that actually feels a lot more like spellcasting. It’s almost impossible to reason about: I imagine even the creators of GPT-3 could not explain to you why certain prompts produce great results while others do not. It’s also absurdly good fun.”
it's LEGO all the way down
Maggie Appleton gave a great talk at Sanity’s Structured Content Conference a couple weeks ago titled The Block-Paved Path to Structured Data. I missed it in person, but caught up with the YouTube, and her well-designed site for the talk, which includes the text of her talk presented alongside her slides (oh how I wish more people did this).
Way back in the olden days, I was part of the crew involved in “microformats,” the precursor to JSON-LD. All the apps that we envisioned that would take advantage of all of these little snippets of structured data never really materialized, and instead we were just doing all that markup work for the Google to improve SEO. This is still the case, almost 20 years on. Why do JSON-LD? For the googlebot. Ah, the power of platforms.
Appleton, instead of trying to rehash all the battles over the semantic web, shifts the context. What if the problem isn’t about the applications consuming the data, but the applications producing the data?
How do we make it easier for everyone to create structured data? Or put more specifically, what type of interfaces might enable non-developers to create structured data?
Appleton makes a compelling argument that the “block UI” that you see in apps like Notion, Coda or Craft, is a potential answer here. That UX pattern, combined with a protocol like the one proposed at blockprotocol.org, opens up the possibility of a richer ecosystem of connected applications that can discover and share structured data. Not just from document editors like Notion, but low code “DIY Saas Tooling” apps like Fibery, Retool or Hash (where Appleton works).
Blocks allow end-users, meaning anyone who is not a professional developer, to create, edit, and delete the data within these blocks. All without writing any code. The users are in control of the data rather than the developers.
Blocks also enable what I call modular, composable interfaces. Open canvases where users can drag and drop blocks into place like legos. These are easy to use and accessible to a much wider audience than any markup or syntax could hope to be.
I hadn’t really been following the Block Protocol work until now. The “new” (now 5+ years old) generation of document editors initially differentiated themselves from the competition with their block UX (hit that slash key to format your block), but I love this line of thinking around composable interfaces and tools that can adapt their behavior based on a set of interoperable blocks.
And because I’m that old, all of this reminds me of the bits in Douglas Coupland’s 1995 novel Microserfs, where the team of protagonists were buliding “Oop!” (an imaginary product Grantland said “anticipated Minecraft more than a little bit”). Of course the whole text of the novel has ended up online; this paragraph is pitch perfect.
As the Lego Generation ages (and as the Oop! product invariably grows more sophisticated), Oop! becomes a powerful real-world modeling tool usable by scientists, animators, contractors, and architects. Object Oriented Programming design allows great flexibility for licensees to develop cross-platform software add-ons.
As always, it’s LEGO all the way down.
it's messy
Wilco has a new record coming, Cruel Country. Jeff Tweedy, in his newsletter, shares some of the background promo material, which includes this gem of a graf.
The whole record is comprised, almost entirely, of live takes, with just a handful of overdubs. Everyone in the room together with a leaky drum booth and no baffles. It’s a really great way to make a record. But due to artistic curiosity and no small shortage of challenging logistics, it’s an approach we haven’t used in years — maybe not since Sky Blue Sky. It’s a style of recording that forces a band to surrender control and learn to trust each other, along with each others’ imperfections, musical and otherwise. With no “one” person in charge, the goal can be vague. But a certain type of faith emerges. A belief that we’re all heading toward the same destination, and we either get there together or not at all. It’s messy. Like democracy. But when it’s working the way it’s supposed to, it feels like gathering around some wild collective instrument, one that requires six sets of hands to play. An instrument that forces one to communicate wordlessly and sprout deep tangles of roots, like an old forest.
Emphasis mine. I’m not sure about the democracy analogy, because I’m not sure we any longer share a belief or faith that we’re all heading toward the same destination. But there’s a reason I’m obsessed with music documentaries (including the recent 8 hour Beatles-fest), which is that bands making music can feel an awful lot like 0 to 1 product development. Either we get there together or not at all.
fast brain, slow hands
Dan Hon’s Things that Caught My Attention is one of my favorite blogs / newsletters, because it’s just chock full of Dan-ness. This is a good thing. The past few days he’s been responding to a challenge from Robin Sloan, who wanted him to “try writing about something that had nothing to with technology.”
And today’s is excellent. It’s a story about brains and hands. I’m just gonna quote a few grafs of this; saving it for me and sharing it with you.
This brain thinks it’s a fast brain: it sees patterns and pieces of things and jumps from place to place and then suddenly, snap, there is a new thing made from those pieces of things that is not quite the same as one of the old things: it’s subtly different and then boom we’re suddenly at one of those large maps in the situation room where troop deployments are being planned and the fast brain is pushing things around using a large wooden stick to get things into the right hands.
But the fast brain is hooked up to slow hands.
And…
The fast brain is just a massively complicated computing engine for taking in input and then performing operations on it and when it looks at itself it doesn’t even know if there’s an itself there’s just: a giant sphere. A solid, impenetrable, giant sphere.
ken norton on art and science of pm
Ken Norton, who always brings the donuts, delivers some wisdom from his career in product management.
The “art” of product management matters more than the “science” over the long term. In product management, there’s an art and a science. The science is all of the stuff you read about: managing a backlog, writing a PRD, KPIs, marketplace dynamics, growth metrics, analytical thinking, the latest agile whatever. The “art” gets dismissed as soft skills: communicating, empathy, leading without authority, having difficult conversations, storytelling, making decisions when you don’t have all the information, dealing with ambiguity, inspiring others, and connecting deeply to customers and their problems. The thing is, science gets more attention because it’s easier to understand, and therefore better for hustling boot camps and selling software tools. This trend is troublesome because it implies there’s one “right way” to do product management, and all you need to do is learn the technique or buy the right tool, and you can pass the interview, get the job, and win.
I’ve been working with Reforge the past few months as an “Executive in Residence,” helping to teach two fantastic courses: Product Management Foundations, and Mastering Product Management. Both of these courses are packed full of incredibly useful frameworks for developing product strategy, working through a product design process, developing a roadmap, setting and evolving OKRs, etc. But in the weekly case discussion I’m leading with the Reforge members, what I’m trying to do is bring the “art” to the science — helping the hundreds of people on our Zoom calls understand that learning most often comes from making mistakes, and getting things wrong. I think that approach working? Some people dig it…some people want more framework time. 🤷♂
Frameworks and tools can improve your chances of getting things right, but the longer I do this job the more obvious it is to me that a massively underappreciated role of the PM is how you make people feel when you’re side by side with them, shipping and iterating.
Go subscribe to Ken’s newsletter. It’s consistently excellent.
what's a computer?
Robin Sloan, in The slab and the permacomputer, puts a finger on what makes deploying a contract to the Ethereum blockchain feel so…different.
Even so, I can’t deny that Ethereum’s “world computer” is interesting and, even more than that, evocative. The Ethereum blockchain is one entity, shared globally, agreed upon by all its participants: that’s what makes it useful as a ledger. The Ethereum Virtual Machine, a kind of computer — simultaneously sophisticated and primitive — is likewise one logical entity, even if it’s distributed in space and time.
As with a lot of things in crypto, the feeling is as much mystical as it is technical. I understand why people get excited when they deploy an Ethereum contract: it feels like you are programming not just a computer, but THE computer. That feeling is technically wrong; it is definitely just a computer; but since when did the technical wrongness of feelings prevent them from being motivating?
One of the “mystical” Web3 things that is delightfully breaking my brain is that the EVM is forcing us ask the question (again): What’s a computer?
Max Fischer's clubs, ranked
It’s college application season, and I can personally attest that there are a lot of high school seniors that are currently stressing about their GPAs, their standardized test scores, their essays…and their extra-curricular activities. As a reminder of just how absurd this whole process is, here’s a list of the club activities of possibly the greatest extra curricular film participant of all time, Rushmore’s Max Fischer…ranked by potential attractiveness to college admissions officers.¹
- Max Fischer Players, Director
- Yankee Review, Editor-In-Chief, Publisher
- Astronomy Society, Founder
- Trap & Skeet Club, Founder
- Debate Team, Captain
- French Club, President
- Calligraphy Club, President
- Yankee Racers, Founder
- Fencing Team, Captain
- Rushmore Beekeepers, President
- Bombardment Society, Founder
- Kite Flying Society, Co-Founder
- Stamp & Coin Club, Vice President
- Model UN, Russia
- 2nd Chorale, Choirmaster
- Lacrosse Team, Manager
- Track & Field, JV Decathlon
- Kung Fu Club, Yellow Belt
- Piper Cub Club, 4.5 hours logged
¹ Also, I had this list kicking around in my Notes app, just begging to be shared.
the optimism of modernists
Lorin Hochstein has a great, short post about the distinction between modernism and post-modernism, and the connection to software engineering. In short, modernists believe that the world is turbulent and dynamic, and can be constantly remade anew; while post-modernists believe that “we can never cast off our history and start from scratch.” He writes…
We software engineers are modernists at heart. We see the legacy systems in our organizations and believe that, when we have the opportunity to work on replacement systems, we will remake our little corner of the world anew. Alas, on this point, the post-modernists were right. While we can change our systems, even replace subsystems wholesale, we can never fully escape the past. We ignore the history of the system at our peril.
Thought experiment: define “our organizations” in the paragraph above at different scales: individuals, teams, teams of teams, companies, industries, states, nations, the planet. Where can you escape the past? Where must you have the modernist’s optimism to believe you can?
"I assumed that this will fail"
Marcin Wichary on The Making of Four Laps:
“Why did I do this? It seemed like a weird gimmick and a fun challenge. Like with many of my weird creative projects, for most of the time I assumed that this will fail — after all, I have heard of anyone doing something like this, and I had no idea if the tech was even available — but at least I will learn something.”
If you haven’t watched it yet, you should. I won’t spoil it for you.
20 years of personalization at Netflix
Gibson Biddle has an amazing retrospective of 20 years of personalization at Netflix, and its role in the company’s product strategy. The screenshots alone are worth the trip down memory lane.
It took Netflix more than a decade to demonstrate that a personalized experience improved retention. But consistent growth in this proxy metric convinced the company to keep doubling down on personalization until many years later, Netflix proved that personalization improved retention in a large-scale retention test.
This is an interesting proposition…
Here’s the long-term personalization vision: twenty years from now, Netflix will eliminate both the “Play Something” button and its personalized merchandising system, and that one special movie you’re in the mood to watch at that particular moment will automatically begin to play.
…not necessarily because of what this means for personalization (given a 20 year time horizon, this feels achievable), but what this would mean for creators. If the only decision is “Do I keep watching” how might that change the first few seconds of any new show or movie you’re watching? For better or worse, our next generation of filmmakers are currently learning and evolving these creative strategies on TikTok.
it has to be a team
Matt Levine, how does he do it? Seriously, there must be a team of people that are “Matt Levine.” There’s no way it’s just him, right? Every day with things like this, a graf from today’s newsletter about Dogecoin.
Just imagine traveling 10 years back in time and trying to explain this to someone; just imagine what an idiot you’d feel like. “There’s going to be this online currency that people think is a form of digital gold, and then there’s going to be a different online currency that is a parody of the first one based on a meme about a talking Shiba Inu, and that one will have a market capitalization bigger than 80% of the companies in the S&P 500, and its value will fluctuate based on things like who is hosting ‘Saturday Night Live’ and whether people tweet a hashtag about it on the pot-joke holiday, and Bloomberg will write articles and banks will write research notes about those sorts of catalysts, and it will remain a perfectly ridiculous content-free parody even as people properly take it completely seriously because there are billions of dollars at stake.”
What a timeline we’re on.