Just finished Stefano Mancuso‘s slim, spirited, and delightful volume “The Incredible Journey of Plants.” Here’s a remarkable paragraph about the perseverance required for German-born botanist Georg Eberhard Rumphius to finally have his 7-volume, 1,660-page life’s work published for our benefit, alas a half-century after his death:
Rumphius was one of botany’s true champions. During his sojourn in the Maluku Islands, he identified and described numerous vegetable species, previously unknown—a huge accomplishment that in Europe earned him the nickname “Plinio Indicus” (“Pliny of the Indies”), and all this despite a series of personal catastrophes. In 1670, at age forty-three, he became blind from glaucoma. In 1674, during an earthquake on Ambon, he lost his beloved wife, Suzanne (whose name he had given to an orchid), and a son. In 1687, a fire destroyed his library and most of his manuscripts and drawings. After years and years in which he managed to reconstruct his lost work, he sent it to Amsterdam to be published, but the ship was attacked and sunk by the French. Fortunately, he had kept a copy, and finally, in 1696, it arrived in Amsterdam. There, the Dutch East India Company decided it contained too much non-divulgeable information, and so it blocked publication of the work for almost fifty years. Rumphius died on Ambon in 1702. His Herbarium Amboinense was finally published between 1741 and 1750.
A leaf grows by enlarging the string of cells located along a central vein; single cells on the perimeter eventually decide independently when to stop dividing. From this tip, smaller veins develop, eventually completing the network at the stem; thus the overall maturation proceeds from tip to base. Once the most daring portion of the leaf is complete, the plant puts horse before cart and begins to slide sugar back down and in, down to where it will be used to make more root, which will be used to bring up more water, which will be used to expand new leaves, which will pull back more sugar, and in this manner four hundred million years have passed.
Every once in a while a plant gets an idea to make a new leaf that changes everything. The spines on a cholla cactus are barbed like a fishhook, sharp and tough enough to puncture the leathery skin of a tortoise. They also reduce airflow across the cactus’s surface, thereby reducing evaporation. They provide meager shade for the stem and a surface upon which to condense dew. The spines are actually the leaves of the cactus; the green portion is its swollen stem.
Probably within just the last ten million years, a plant had a new idea, and instead of spreading its leaf out, it shaped it into a spine, such as those we find today on the cholla cactus. It was this new idea that allowed a new kind of plant to grow preposterously large and live long in a dry place where it was also the only green thing around to eat for miles—an absurdly inconceivable success. One new idea allowed the plant to see a new world and draw sweetness out of a whole new sky.
Movies: “A Real Pain”; “The Seed of the Sacred Fig”; ”Sentimental Value”; “All We Imagine as Light”; “Nickel Boys”; “Sorry, Baby”; ”The New Yorker at 100”; “Perfect Days”; “Black Bag”; “Away We Go”; “The Brutalist”; “The Martian”; “F1.” + A bonus rewatch of Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women” with the kids.
TV: The four-episode “Adolescence” was unforgettable — made with extraordinary humanity and skill. Others I enjoyed: “The Studio”; “Task”; “The Pitt”; “Mare of Easttown”; “Eastern Gate”; “The Lowdown”; “Righteous Gemstones”; “Ludwig”; “I Love LA”; “A Man on the Inside.” Some comedy picks: Mike Birbiglia’s “The Good Life”; Sarah Silverman’s “PostMortem”; the Conan O’Brien/Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize special. As always, the latest “Great British Bake Off” season was a family fav.
Music: Enjoyed the new records from Jeff Tweedy, Ben Kweller, Wednesday, Earl Sweatshirt, Clipse, and Lucy Daucus, as well as the newly released “Nick Drake: The Making of Five Leaves Left.”
To close, with well wishes for the coming new year, here’s one of a few versions of “Saturday Sun” from that Nick Drake box set of unaccompanied demos, studio outtakes, and previously unheard songs.
Reading Alice Gregory’s fascinating New Yorker piece about the “strange afterlife of Hilma af Klint” brought me back to seeing the remarkable show of her work at the Guggenheim in 2018 (photo from our trip above). From the piece:
When, in 2018, the Guggenheim exhibited “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future,” “it was as if the Vatican of abstraction had canonized her,” Julia Voss, a German historian whose biography of the artist appeared soon afterward, said. The choice of venue seemed almost prophetic. Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral rotunda looked eerily like a temple to house her works which af Klint had once imagined. The show became one of the most visited in the Guggenheim’s history, and its paintings became a permanent backdrop on social media. In the Times, Roberta Smith wrote that af Klint’s paintings “definitively explode the notion of modernist abstraction as a male project.”
The velvet worm, a squishy little predator that looks like the stretch-limo version of a caterpillar, has a whimsical MO: it administers death by Silly String.
That’s how you write a lede. From Elizabeth Anne Brown’s “Slime Attack,” a short front-of-book piece for Scientific American.
Everywhere I have travelled plants have surprised me by their dogged loyalty to place, even to the point of defining the genius loci, and then by their capricious abandonment of home comforts to become vagrants, opportunists, libertines. I’ve seen ancient goblin trees develop wandering branches as promiscuous as bindweed shoots, which might equally well lope off into the countryside or jam themselves into a city wall. I’ve marvelled at tropical orchids living off air and mist. Plants, looked at like this, raise big questions about life’s constraints and opportunities — the boundaries of the individual, the nature of ageing, the significance of scale, the purpose of beauty — that seem to illuminate the processes and paradoxes of our own lives.
The best hedge, I know against tightening intentions between the two superpowers is mutual curiosity. The more informed Americans are about Chinese, and vice versa, the more likely we are to stay out of trouble. The starkest contrast between the two countries is the competition that will define the twenty-first century: an American elite, made up of mostly lawyers, excelling at obstruction, versus a Chinese technocratic class, made up of mostly engineers, that excels at construction. That’s the big idea behind this book. It’s time for a new lens to understand the two superpowers: China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States' lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.
Breakneck is the story of the Chinese state that yanked its people into modernity—an action rightfully envied by much of the world—using means that ran roughshod over many—an approach rightfully disdained by much of the world. It is also a reminder that the United States once knew the virtues of speed and ambitious construction. Traversing dazzling metropolises and gigantic factories, Breakneck will illuminate the astounding progress and the dark underbelly of the engineering state. The lawyerly society has virtues, too, to teach China. Each superpower offers a vision of how the other can be better, if only their leaders and peoples care to take more than a fleeting glance.
A new study from the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue University shows that large language models fed a diet of popular but low-quality social media content experience a kind of “brain rot” that may be familiar to anyone who has spent too long doomscrolling on X or TikTok.
After describing the test:
The models fed junk text experienced a kind of AI brain rot—with cognitive decline including reduced reasoning abilities and degraded memory. The models also became less ethically aligned and more psychopathic according to two measures.
Great conversation: For his podcast The Rebooting — which explores sustainable media businesses — Brian Morrissey interviews Monocle’s Tyler Brûlé. I believe I first became a Monocle subscriber around 2010, when Tamara and I were living in Berlin. We still subscribe to a dozen magazines at the house, but that’s the one (including the brand’s books, seasonal newspapers, and sister magazine Konfect) that I greet with the most pleasure. An impressive business that knows itself supremely well. 🎧
Proliferation is catalyzed by two forces: demand and the resulting cost decreases, each of which drives technology to become even better and cheaper. The long and intricate dialogue of science and technology produces a chain of insights, breakthroughs, and tools that build and reinforce over time, productive recombinations that drive the fu-ture. As you get more and cheaper technology, it enables new and cheaper technologies downstream. Uber was impossible without the smartphone, which itself was enabled by GPS, which was enabled by satellites, which were enabled by rockets, which were enabled by combustion techniques, which were enabled by language and fire.
People all over the world tried to ride these waves in ways that might preserve their own dignity and power. Our contemporary idea of design—that hopeful amalgam of a concept—was born in the process. Inventing design helped people imagine reversing some of the damage wrote by the Industrial Revolution. It helped people convince themselves that capitalism fundamentally served human interests; that positive social change could be achieved without politics and governmental action; that problem solving could be both generative and profitable. And it enabled people of substantial power and privilege to imagine themselves as benevolent actors. ‘Design,’ in short, made capitalism feel, both to its participants and to its subjects, less brutal and inhumane—less destructive, in Joseph Schumpeter’s terms, and more creative. It seems to give them a way to reclaim the things they’d made and to re-embed them in a human order.
Yesterday via Kottke, I learned that Michael Sippey built a new project: 3books, a nicely organized collection of all the books that Ezra Klein’s guests have recommended at the end of his show. Generous project, well-executed. Clicking through and adding a few titles to my to-read list, I was surprised and delighted to see a familiar cover: “Finding Freedom: The Untold Story of Joshua Glover, Freedom Seeker,” published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press and recommended by Ben Wikler last summer.
I had the privilege of serving as the editor of ”Finding Freedom” back in the mid-2000s, when I had moved to Madison, where Tamara was in grad school. This was one of three books I edited in a part-time role there, and I hadn’t heard anything about it since. I can still remember working through the MS in a tiny conference room with authors Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald, who had worked together over many years researching Glover’s life and mapping underground railroad routes into and out of Wisconsin. How wonderful to learn that not only is the book still being published, but that the current edition has a foreword from UW-Madison historian Christy Clark-Pujara.
Just finished “Empire of the Elite: Inside Condé Nast, the Media Dynasty That Reshaped America” by Michael M. Grynbaum. Lots of juice for the magazine junkies among us. And written with sharpness and style. Here’s the author early on, setting a scene of Si Newhouse finally feeling free to break from the influence of his father, Sam:
Now, as he sat in the gilded sanctum of Emanu-El, the encomia to his father emanating from the lectern, Si gazed at the dark wooden coffin, festooned with roses, that would be Sam’s final resting place. He was a few months shy of his fifty-second birthday, and this was the first time that the specter of his father’s disapproval, a looming presence in his life since childhood, had fully lifted. Sam Newhouse had never fully respected the magazines that Si had chosen as his life’s work; in his mind, Condé Nast was a minnow in the Newhouse sea, an unserious realm best left to his unserious son. No longer. Si had ambitions of his own, which over the next decade would vastly expand the Newhouse empire. On the day of Sam’s funeral, Advance Publications was valued at roughly $2 billion. By 1988, it would be worth $7 billion, a 250 percent increase. It would control the esteemed New Yorker, a revived smash-hit version of Vanity Fair, and the gastronomic bible Gourmet. Its dowdier titles would be revamped to appeal to an ascendant and free-spending aspirational class. Sam had been too set in his ways to detect the coming trend, but American culture was shifting Si-ward. The idealism of the I960s was yielding to the materialism of the 1980s, a new preoccupation with the navel-gazing, ego-stroking life. Si, who at Condé Nast had surrounded himself with the masters of the zeitgeist, was prepared, and he had already put something into motion that marked the true start of Condé’s inexorable eighties rise, a magazine whose prescient title managed to dovetail with both the spirit of the era and Si’s own newfound sense of liberation: Self.
Thought I’d pick back up the tradition of a batching up a week’s intake and/or happenings:
Enjoyed Sophie Lovell’s “Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible,” a chunky volume pairing photographs of sharply designed products with essays about the designer’s career and influence. (Gary Hustwit’s 2018 documentary about him is also very good.) Rams’s credo: “We are economical with form and color, prioritize simple forms, avoid unnecessary complexity, do without ornament, instead [there is] order and clarification. We measure every detail against the question of whether it serves function and facilitates handling.”
It was a treat to see the artist Ruth Asawa featured on the PBS NewsHour’s Friday evening program. My wife Tamara curated “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work” for the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2018, and it’s been special to see recognition for Asawa’s remarkable work (and life) continue to grow in the years since.
I wrote recently about enjoying the NYT’s package on the 100 best movies of the 20th century. Highly recommend this episode of Wesley Morris’s Cannonball podcast, in which he and film curator Eric Hynes discuss the project and, toward the end, talk through their own picks with affection and humor. (Morris on one of his picks, “Magic Mike XXL”: “It’s basically ‘The Odyssey’ with g-strings.”)
This NYT piece made me smile “He Read (at Least) 3,599 Books in His Lifetime. Now Anyone Can See His List.” Like the subject, my own father‘s been doing this for at least 50 years. His habit inspired mine, which began in the late 1990s. While I’ve kept track digitally for the past few decades, I still have my notebook from the early days. Here’s one image below from 2001 and early 2022, a fantastic stretch for reading (including “White Teeth,” “Ulysses,” “Infinite Jest,” “Carpenter’s Gothic,” “For the Time Being,” “Revolutionary Road,” and “The Painted Bird").
I’m a sucker for these types of projects: “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century,” as selected by 500+ directors, actors, and other “notable names in Hollywood and around the world.” Love the chance to see individual ballots as well. The fluid presentation allows you to note what you’ve seen (82 in my case), mark what you’d like to see, and create your own top-10 ballot. Here’s mine:
A few more I have great memories of seeing since 2000: Yi Yi, Columbus, Ida, Cold War, There Will Be Blood, Winter’s Bone, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Boyhood, The Lives of Others, The Master, Private Life, Past Lives, Marriage Story, A Separation, Drive My Car, Tree of Life, Tár, Anatomy of a Fall, Manchester by the Sea, Lady Bird, First Cow, The Squid and the Whale, The New World, Saint Omer, Petite Maman, Aftersun, George Washington, Selma, Get Out, The Best of Youth, Bright Star, Meek’s Cutoff, Ex Machina, and Gerhard Richter Painting.
Altman and Ive are positioning their device as a solution to screen fatigue. They promise that their gadget will free us from technology, as evinced by their softly smiling faces in their joint portrait and the warmth and companionship of the café in which they conducted their video interview. But we will only get to this appealingly humane place, they imply, by adopting more technology—their technology. Speculative mockups online imagine an A.I. companion device that looks simple, like a rounded metal amulet—it would be Ive’s style to make the design approachable yet austere. Yet the sleek and frictionless object will rely on a vast infrastructure of factories and server farms; the labor of human maintenance workers and moderators; and, ultimately, the corpus of information that has been digested as training data, which is effectively the entire history of human thought. The little pendants around our necks will be a hundred million Trojan horses, smuggling A.I. into every aspect of our lives. The comforting tone of Altman and Ive’s pitch belies the enormous uncertainty of what their plan would unleash. A recent study in the United Kingdom found that forty-six per cent of youth ages sixteen to twenty-one would prefer to live in a world in which the internet doesn’t exist. Given all the regret and dread that digital culture has prompted, some two decades since the advent of social media, it seems worth thinking twice before allowing Altman and Ive’s incipient creation to occupy our time and our minds, too.
In 1983, Harold Williams — who had once been dean of the UCLA management school — became chairman of the $1.4B Getty Trust. Rumelt explains that Williams grew the Getty “from a small elite collection to a major force in the art world.” The two spoke in 2000, three years after Williams retired. Williams explained his strategy this way:
The Getty Trust was a very large amount of money, and we had to spend a considerable amount each year. Our mandate was art, but I had to decide how to actually spend the funds. We could have simply built a great collection—that would have been the obvious thing to do. Buy art. But I wasn’t comfortable with that as a direction. All we would really accomplish would be to drive up the price of art and move some of it from New York and Paris to Los Angeles.
It took some time, but I began to develop the idea that art could be, indeed, should be, a more serious subject than it was. Art is not just pretty objects; it is a vital part of human activity. In a university, people spend a great deal of effort studying languages and histories. We know all about marriage contracts in remote tribes and the histories of many peoples. But art has been treated as a sideshow. I decided that the Getty could change this. Instead of spending our income on buying art, we could transform the subject. The Getty would begin to build a complete digital catalog of all art, including dance, song, and textiles. It would develop programs to educate art teachers and host advanced research on art and society. The Getty would host the best conversation talent in the world and develop new methods of conserving and restoration. In this way, I decided, we would have an impact far beyond simply putting art on display.
Rumelt provides this coda:
With $65 million to spend each year, Williams could have simply bought art or given money to schools and universities for their arts programs. But by aiming to transform the study of art, Williams designed an objective that was novel and nicely scaled to the resources at his disposal. Put simply, he invested where his resources would make a large and more visible difference. This is the power of concentration—of choosing an objective that can be decisively affected by the resources at hand. There is no way to know whether Williams’s strategy created greater good than a simpler strategy of giving away more money, but it did make a bigger bang and, thereby, attracted more energy and support from employees and outside organizations.
I had the privilege of serving as the editor of ”Finding Freedom” back in the mid-2000s, when I had moved to Madison, where Tamara was in grad school. This was one of three books I edited in a part-time role there, and I hadn’t heard anything about it since. I can still remember working through the MS in a tiny conference room with authors Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald, who had worked together over many years researching Glover’s life and mapping underground railroad routes into and out of Wisconsin. How wonderful to learn that not only is the book still being published, but that the current edition has a foreword from UW-Madison historian Christy Clark-Pujara.
