#230 Thrift-Flip economy, 15 Years of Dishoom, Powerpoint, Feeding the poor, Liquid dampers

Poker and chess, Sofi Bakery, Radical neighbouring, Hive architect & more

Sep 29, 2025

Vaṇakkam,

Festive season has kicked off here. Kids are on study break, many friends are traveling home or heading out on long vacations. We’ve planned a long overdue trip to the Chettinad region: Madurai, Karaikudi, and Kodaikanal. Hoping to soak in history, architecture, art, nature, and of course, food. If you have recommendations for these places or nearby, drop them in the comments or message me.

That’s what’s top of mind right now. Here’s a quick look at today’s post:

I’ve enjoyed each of these pieces and really hope you will find them equally exciting! Let’s go…

🥊 15 Years of Dishoom

Starting this curation with a story that brought joy, free from brand-speak.

In 15 Years of Dishoom, founder Shamil Thakrar shares the journey of care and craft behind Dishoom. From the celebratory video to his heartfelt blog, the storytelling inspires and makes you want to build with the same spirit. They’ve created a lore and lived it in every touchpoint, this blog included.

Success is also surely the slightly barmy idea of inventing a unique fictional owner for every Dishoom we open. It is investigating each character’s story deeply for months, writing it, re-writing it, understanding it, documenting it, and expressing it in design (and sometimes even in immersive theatre, or with an LP): whether it’s the history of Indian independence in our King’s Cross restaurant, the Swadeshi movement in Birmingham, Bombay’s history of espionage and the rise of Bombay noir in Glasgow, or the 1970s Bombay rock scene in Carnaby. It’s the jokes connected to these stories that we paint in Hindi and Gujarati on our walls. It’s embedding a little bit of Keats in a menu description. It’s baking the stories of Irani cafés onto our plates in Shoreditch for all to read.

I haven’t been to their restaurants yet, but it’s now on my must-visit list at least once in this lifetime.

And this isn’t the first time Dishoom has found its way into this newsletter. I’m resharing two gems from the archives: The Dishoom Battersea story and Dishoom’s quality culture. Both show how deeply they care about culture, storytelling and their craft.

There’s something about brands like Dishoom that makes them stand out. They build and share their world openly, yet their success is hard to copy. Some call these N of 1 businesses. Jargon aside, the linked article highlights other brands that have built loyal followings and great businesses on similar principles. See how many you recognize and relate to.

👗 GenZ and Thrift-Flip Economy

Saanya Ojha unpacks the Thrift-Flip Economy and offers a peek into how Gen Z is turning secondhand goods into a thriving business opportunity. It’s a short read but offers a good starting point to build your understanding of a new world.

The piece looks at trends in the West, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same wave is already building in India too.

📊 Powerpoint: One Damn Slide After Another

In “One Damn Slide After Another,” Erica Robles-Anderson and Patrik Svensson trace the long, messy history of PowerPoint and how it became the default format for almost any kind of speech.

We’ve all used it. Some love it, some hate it, but there’s no escaping it.

Part history, part research, part cultural commentary, this essay does a brilliant job of showing how such a simple medium has stayed almost unchanged for decades.

PowerPoint’s constancy is curious in two respects. Digital media have radically scaled up in the past twenty-five years. In the 1980s when access to media was scarce it made sense to think of a document as comprising an entire presentation. Today repositories of hundreds of thousands of high-resolution images are common as are computing devices that support multiple screens. That presentations have remained unchanged in spite of transformations in media content and distribution is in and of itself rather striking. More striking is how dramatically public reception shifted given nothing really changed. [...]
Particularly striking were the critical voices emerging from the armed forces. Presentation technologies like overhead transparencies, whiteboards, wall charts, and photographic slides have long been part of military culture but PowerPoint, it seemed, ruined briefings. Military commanders sounded like critical cultural analysts as they warned the public about the dangers of decontextualized statements, the conferral of false authority on dubious knowledge, the risks of misrepresentation inherent in software visualizations. Officers reported devoting at least an hour per day to slide making and commanders worried as the program became “deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.”

It’s a fun read if you’re up for an offbeat theme and a slightly nerdy conversation.

🍛 Feeding The Poor

For Works in Progress, Evan Zimmerman tells the story of how economists from University of Chicago fixed the broken distribution system powering America’s largest non-profit, Feeding America.

This isn’t a dry HBS-style case study. It’s a real-world problem-solving story. The sheer inefficiency and weak planning that once limited their impact was surprising.

It’s a short read, but a powerful reminder of how economics can shape efficient markets and change outcomes at scale.

Food banks could also access ‘credit’ to bid on expensive, high-quality items that exceeded their current share balance. Debts were repaid interest-free from future share allocations. This ensured smaller food banks could compete for premium products. Food banks could even bid negative amounts to accept hard-to-move products donors insisted on giving. Additional measures were introduced to help smaller food banks. Joint bidding allowed food banks to bid together to split truckloads that were too much for one organization but perfect for several. Less sophisticated food banks could delegate bidding to Feeding America staff, and a Fairness and Equity Committee could convene to review claims for additional shares due to unmeasured hardship.

🌇 Liquid Dampers in Skyscrapers

It’s been a while since I caught up with one of my favorite YouTube channels, Practical Engineering. In a recent video, they explain the hidden engineering of liquid dampers in skyscrapers.

Now, I know none of you were waiting to learn about liquid dampers today. But I still recommend watching this. This is how science should be taught in schools: practical, engaging, and alive. Their videos always pull me in because they show science in action—something I can almost touch and feel.

Dampers aren’t just used in buildings. Bridges also take advantage of these clever devices, especially on the decks of pedestrian bridges and the towers of long-span bridges. This also happens at a grand scale between the Earth and moon. Tidal bulges in the oceans created by the moon’s tug on Earth dissipate energy through friction and turbulence, which is a big part of why our planet’s rotation is slowing over time. Days used to be a lot shorter when the Earth was young, but we have a planet-scale liquid damper constantly dissipating our rotational energy.

Next time I’m in a skyscraper or a bridge, I’ll be looking for its dampers. That extra spark of curiosity takes knowledge off the page and into real life. Isn’t that what education is all about?

🃏 Life is Poker, Not Chess

Chess rewards perfect moves. Poker doesn’t. You can play flawlessly and still lose, or play badly and win it all. Life is poker, not chess. Hidden cards, shifting rules, too many players, and luck that can wreck skill in an instant. Most people keep playing chess in a poker world. That’s why the “right” moves so often disappoint.

That’s the premise of Robin Guo’s Life is Poker, Not Chess.

If you agree with his take, keep reading. In this well-crafted piece, he shows how lessons from poker apply to both work and life. Here are a few of my favorite parts (though I recommend reading the full essay at the source).

On Variance and Time Frame

Here’s where life diverges from poker in a beautiful way. In poker, variance is symmetric. You can only win what’s in the pot. In life, variance is asymmetric. The right job, right investment, or right relationship can return 1000x. This means you should actually seek more variance in life than in poker, not less. You want to maximize your exposure to positive black swans. But only if you can survive long enough for the odds to play out.
That’s why it’s important to figure out what you want to do earlier, even if it’s just directionally correct. Pivots are totally fine and happen all the time, but each pivot means starting the compounding clock over.

On Imperfect Information

Analysis paralysis is just another form of folding every hand. Yes, you never lose when you fold. You also never win. The players who succeed aren’t the ones with perfect information. They’re the ones who make better decisions with imperfect information.
I’ve started using this heuristic: once I have enough information to make a decision that’s 70% likely to be right, I pull the trigger or fold. Waiting longer is just anxiety management, not risk management.

On Bluffs

The threat of the bluff is often more powerful than the bluff itself. If people know you never bluff, they’ll run you over. If they know you always bluff, then they’ll call you down light. The optimal strategy is to bluff just enough that they have to respect it.

🍞 Sofi Bakery: Art of Bread & Community

Mohammed Nayeem Mir’s photoessay for Goya tells us story of Sofi Bakery, a traditional kandur that keeps the art of bread and community alive in Kashmir.

It is a story of food, culture, and belonging. I wish I had known more about kandurs and Kashmiri bakeries before my trip a couple of years ago. Visiting them would have been a wonderful way to experience the warmth of local hospitality and culture.

Stories like this need to be told and shared. I hope places and traditions like Sofi Bakery not only survive but thrive. In a world full of copy-paste experiences designed for instant moments, it is places like this that make travel, and life itself, truly worthwhile.

When I ask Hilal why he keeps doing this the traditional way, without shortcuts, without machines, he just says, “This isn’t work. This is who we are.” He grew up watching his father and grandfather, learning by sight. This is an inheritance that can’t be measured in money. “My customers come here not only for bread, but for a sense of belonging. Every morning, they gather, greet each other, share a few words. And in that daily rhythm, something special happens everyday, something that isn’t about commerce at all,” he says. Hilal believes the future may not be as bleak for traditional baking as some fear. “People are coming back to these things, especially the younger ones.”

✨ Everything else

Radical Neighbouring with Adam Wilson. Sand River Community Farm in upstate New York is an experiment in gift economy and community building. When Adam Wilson received $500K from a community member to take the land off the market, he chose a different path. Since then, all food from the farm has been shared freely with neighbors and visitors.
The Hive Architect is a short documentary about honey bee conservationist Matt Somerville and the log hives he builds to house wild bees.
Do you know what geoguessing is? The GEOGUESSR World Championship 2025 highlights show this game at its competitive best. The level of craziness is off the charts. There are some versions available online that are free-to-play. Give them a shot with your team/friends. It is fun and also a neat way to practice lateral thinking and have some nerdy fun.

ICYMI, here is the link to last week’s post.