📚 Finished reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which as a — spoiler alert — sucker for escape rooms and weird aliens I very much appreciated. I haven’t gotten to reading or watching The Martian yet, but if it either is half as good as Weir’s second offering it will be worth checking out.
Two good travel-adjacent articles that recently came out:
Here is Ganesh:
Travel is enormous fun. Besides that, it can be an educational top-up, if you arrive in a place with a foundation of reading. (And if you don’t over-index whatever you happen to observe in person.) But a connecting experience? A reminder of the essential oneness of humankind? If it were that, we should have expected national consciousness to recede, not surge, in the age of cheap flights, a dissolved Iron Curtain and a China that became porous in both directions.
To explain this away, some will insist on the difference between crass “tourism” and real “travel”. Please. This has become a class distinction, nothing more, like that between “expats” and “immigrants”.
And here is Arnade:
It is primarily we intellectuals and elites who culture shop, picking and choosing what works best for us. That’s true in Europe and the US, where each group of elites is inoculated from the least admirable qualities. Well-to-do Americans can escape the banal landscapes, either through travel or by living in the exclusive US neighborhoods that share European qualities, and find belonging in communities formed from their careers that cross national and cultural boundaries. Highly motivated Europeans can move to America, or work in a large corporation and escape European provincialism, while not giving up the aesthetic and communal benefits it offers.
It is the ‘normies,’ working-class, back-row, or whatever you want to call them, who make up the vast majority of citizens, that are tethered to live within their culture. That isn’t who is engaged in this debate, but it is who it should be about, not us cultural chameleons.
I am writing this from Zürich where I have spent a lovely spring day flaneuring in between business meetings. So, yes.
Quoth the Financial Times' How a little-known French literary critic became a bellwether for the US right:
René Girard is best known for his theory of ‘mimetic desire’. Now Peter Thiel and the vice-president are among his fans.
These are the headline and the subheading as seen in the latest issue of FT magazine. As a casual fan of Mr. Girard’s work I read the whole thing and it seems to be a fair description both of his major themes (mimetic desire, scapegoating) and of how they are being interpreted by the dramatis personae above. What the body of the article does not mention again is the word “bellwether”, and for good reason: Rene Girard died in 2015, age 91.
FT headline writers think that a dead person can still be a bellwether. Does ChatGPT?
“Bellwether” literally comes from the practice of putting a bell on the lead wether (castrated ram) of a flock so the other sheep would follow its sound. In modern English it’s a present-tense indicator—something (a region, product, company, demographic group, etc.) whose current behaviour gives an early signal of where things are headed.
Because the word’s sense is tied to leading or pointing ahead, the subject is almost always:
- alive (or at least active) now, and
- capable of exhibiting real-time behaviour that can be watched for clues.
A person who has already died can’t do that, so in everyday usage you won’t hear “the late X is a bellwether of …”. What you might hear instead are words such as harbinger, forerunner, prophetic voice, emblem, icon, or canary in the coal mine. These capture the idea that the person’s life, writing, or death ended up foreshadowing later events, but without implying that we could have looked at their behaviour as it unfolded to predict the future.
That said, in loose or rhetorical writing you could stretch the metaphor—for example:
- “The 1970s novels of Octavia Butler have become a bellwether for 21st-century conversations about race and biotechnology.”
Here the author really means Butler’s work signals themes that would later dominate, not that her actions are a live barometer. It’s creative licence, not standard usage.
Bottom line: Grammatically you can call a dead person a bellwether, but stylistically it feels off because the word implies an ongoing lead role. If you want to emphasise posthumous significance, choose a term like “prophet”, “forerunner”, or “canary in the coal mine” instead.
But “prophet” is overused, including in this article, so could we invent a word to describe a deceased person whose work signals themes that would later dominate? Deadwether is there for the taking, and we already have two examples: Rene Girard and Octavia Butler. Who else?
Today in titles that trigger me: Where is the YIMBY movement for healthcare?.
YIMBY is too simplistic of a concept to be easily applied to healthcare. It relies on a single dimension — how easy is it to build housing — and any proposed policy can be easily placed on the NIMBY/YIMBY spectrum. And since everyone can agree on where a particular policy lies on that spectrum, creating alliances is easy.
No such luck for American healthcare, where there are many dimensions: accessibility of new procedures (clinical trial YIMBYism), accessibility of approved treatments (insurance YIMBYism), accessibility of healthcare providers (practitioner YIMBYism), accessibility of MDs in particular (doctor YIMBYism)… And even there it is not clear what the YIMBY-equivalent stance would be. Does clinical trial YIMBYism mean you want more trials, quicker trials, or just more drug approvals and doing away with trials entirely? If you are a doctor YIMBYist, do you want to increase the number of medical schools? Residency and fellowship slots? Enable more foreign medical graduates to enter practice? All of the above? But then how do you deal with practitioner YIMBYists, who want to do away with most doctors altogether and delegate most work to physician assistants, nurse practitioners and, at the end of the line, large language models?
There is not a single person in America who would say its healthcare system is working, and yet it is clear why there is no unified front on how to fix it.
To be clear, I quite like the ideas brought up in that leading article. The five sample issues it names — breakdown of the direct doctor/patient relationship, unclear fees for service, frequent insurance switching, no room for insurer creativity, too much money spent on end-of-life care — are spot on. If I had to pick one thing where I would want to be a YIMBYist, it is to remove any direct influence of the federal budget on healthcare. A large pot of money leads to hypertrophy of every other part of the system which down the line lead to many of the issues above. But is that really a YIMBY attitude?But alas the issues in question are too complex to be boiled down to a YIMBY-equivalent jingo, and to emphasize that point the article has an addendum linking to a 10,000-word report on the topic which at a glance seems to be raising the right points but I couldn’t really tell you since I have a day job that doesn’t leave much time for reading 10,000-word policy papers.
It took me four years to drop my Apple Watch habit, but drop it I did. Goodbye, constant notifications. Farewell, nudges to breathe and to stand up and to convert my walk to the grocery store into “an activity”. I will hardly miss you, phantom vibrations and the pale white band around my wrist. You were good for heart rate and pace tracking, and for that you can still sit in the drawer, awaiting my next run.
The de-watchification of my everyday life began a few months ago when I forgot to take it off the charger after leaving it there for the night. This in itself was an aberration as I tended to keep it on at bedtime for sleep tracking The number of times I checked the results of this tracking is, of course, zero. This is also how many valuable insights on my sleep patterns I received from Apple’s Fitness app. and only charge it for a half-hour in the morning. I failed to notice a change on that first watchless day, or on subsequent days. A $30 Casio — itself an indulgence since similar performance could be had for under $10 — gave time just as well and did not require charging. With luck, I may eventually get to cleaning and repairing a slightly more substantial timepiece I got some 20 years ago, victim of an inept shopping mall jeweler trying to replace its battery.
This is not the only way I tried to introduce more friction into my life — see the iPhone dumb-down of a few months ago. Kyla Scanlon’s latest article, If you haven’t yet checked out Kyla’s blog, please do so now. It is for economy and finance what Ruxandra Teslo’s blog is for biology. The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction, outlines the reasons why one should think about more friction better than I ever could. There is a clear distinction between the frictionless digital and the friction-full physical world, only the frictionlessness of the digital realm is largely an illusion, a sleigh of hand, for:
… we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and overworked labor. The effort doesn’t disappear; it just moves.
It was easy enough to nod my head in agreement for I thought of this every time I ordered my groceries to be delivered. But in Apple Watch’s nudge economy the underfunded infrastructure was my calendar and the overworked labor was me.
📚 Finished reading: The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis:
In design terms, this means that it is wrong for computer systems to tell people what to do and how to do it. In this view, reliance on artificial intelligence is abhorent because it installs a machine in the empty sky and recognizes that machine as the new authority. Instead, the computer should be a repository, a library in which anyone can find what they seek and to which everyone can add their own contribution. Tinderbox follows this path.
This is from Mark Bernstein’s new book Thinking with Tinderbox and I can only nod along.
📺 The Perfect Couple (2024) was perfectly shot — Netflix production values seem to have improved — and also too muddled. The White Lotus meets The Afterparty, sure, but did they really need to add Big Little Lies, Knives Out and who knows what else to the mix?
📚 Finished reading: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher, so enthralled I was by his guide for the perplexed that I quickly jumped to the more well-known of his works. It was good timing: Abundance is becoming the Sapiens of this generation and Small Is Beautiful is the antidote.
It takes a special kind of negligence to accumulate $200,000 in traffic tickets over 7 years. To post about it on Reddit while whining about your car being impounded is the chef’s kiss. Many thanks to the ANC Commissioner who immortalized the now-deleted posts and to DC Councilmember Charles Allan for making it happen.