#232 Kodak Story, Luckin Coffee’s Turnaround, Translation, Fact-checking & Wikipedia, Throwing Good Parties
House perfect with IKEA, Engineering Lego Cars, Tiny Worlds & Always Invite Anna
Hello,
Some days, you just can’t wait to show off what you’ve been working on. For me, that’s today — I’m thrilled to share everything I found exciting and worth curating for you.
But first, here’s a one-picture summary of my recent trip.
Karaikudi, as I’d mentioned earlier, was something else: absolutely out of this world. You can see a few more photos here. There are so many stories waiting to be told; let’s see how many I can bring to life soon.
Now, here’s a quick peek at what you’ll discover today:
Starting today’s curation with two stories of business turnarounds — one that didn’t happen, and another that’s work in progress.
Kodak’s story has been told countless times, its lessons clear and conclusive. Luckin’s, on the other hand, is still being written. Its approach to staying relevant feels like the right playbook to learn from. Whether this turnaround lasts or not, the early signs are promising and worth watching.
📷 The Dilemma that Brought Down Kodak
Kasper Karlsson dives deep into the dilemma that brought down Kodak. His essay traces Kodak’s journey from its founding to its peak as a global imaging giant; and then to its downfall.
But Kodak didn’t just build the tools. It built the narrative.
Through savvy marketing, the company made photography feel essential to modern life. Their ads weren’t focused on specs or film speed, but on the moments its cameras could capture. The phrase “Kodak Moment” slipped into everyday speech, shorthand for something fleeting and beautiful, something you’d regret not capturing. Your kid’s first step. A pose on a mountain summit. Your cat doing something other than ignoring you.
But as Karlsson reminds us, Kodak missed the digital wave it helped create.
New technologies often look like toys at first, limited, low-quality, and impractical. That’s why incumbents ignore them, and that’s how they get overtaken. While Kodak hesitated,
Sony, Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, and others leaned in. They pushed digital imaging forward, embraced the future Kodak had helped invent, and claimed the next generation of photography.
Kodak, meanwhile, doubled down on what it knew best. It launched half-hearted digital initiatives, but never gave them the internal support to thrive. The digital transition didn’t just undermine Kodak’s products but completely obliterated its business model. Consumers no longer needed film, development labs, or printing services. The entire analog supply chain, once Kodak’s fortress, became irrelevant.
Karlsson’s sharpest insight lies in applying the Jobs To Be Done lens.
Kodak saw digital as a worse version of film: lower resolution, fewer prints, and no physical output. But digital wasn’t trying to compete on those terms. It was trying to solve a different job, with instant sharing, convenience, and portability. The ability to see and send a photo without ever printing it was a new kind of progress, one Kodak didn’t recognize because it didn’t resemble their existing value proposition.
Stories from Constellation Software and Fujifilm’s reinvention add depth and make this essay an insightful read.
☕ Luckin Coffee’s Turnaround
Michelle Wiles traces Luckin Coffee’s wild ride: from its rapid rise to fame in 2020, through the dramatic fall after accounting fraud, to its unexpected and impressive turnaround today.
Three key steps of the turnaround strategies can be summarized as follows:
Step 1: HITS | Launch products that tap into consumer insight
Luckin nailed product-market fit with drinks like the Coconut Latte and Cheese Latte: fun, local, and culturally tuned to what Chinese consumers love. These hits made people reach for a Luckin cup again and again.
Step 2: ASPIRATION | Build emotional and cultural cachet
Luckin layered its brand with strong aspirational cues: partnering with icons like skier and model Eileen Gu, and co-creating limited editions with Coconut Palm, Moutai (China’s national liquor brand), and even Tom and Jerry. These collaborations helped the brand stand apart and stay ahead of copycats.
Step 3: TARGETING | Find the right customers at the right time
Luckin’s location and operations strategy is powered by deep data. Before opening in a new city, it studies everything: population density, GDP, education levels, income, urban trends, and even Starbucks’ footprint. Then it identifies a few prime zones, tests demand on delivery apps with heavy discounts, and only opens a physical store once the data proves out.
It all sounds deceptively simple; but that’s the magic. There’s no breakthrough strategy here, just a relentless focus on doing the basics right and learning from failure.
A good story of redemption, execution, and the timeless value of sticking to fundamentals.
The next three pieces explore a shared theme: facts, misinformation, and how we can fight the deliberate spread of falsehoods. As humans record and share more information than ever, the challenge of separating truth from noise keeps growing.
With GenAI and social media fueling this even faster, the scale of the problem has exploded. Let’s just hope our ability to find solutions can keep up.
📚 In Search of Zabihollah Mansouri
Amir Ahmadi Arian goes in search of Iran’s most famous translator, Zabihollah Mansouri. But along the way, he runs into a surprising truth: was Mansouri secretly the country’s most prolific author too?
This story dives deep into the art of translation and how the act itself can shape culture in ways far beyond what anyone expects.
But there is much more to a translator’s potential impact and responsibility than the accurate transmission of a text’s original meaning. There is no better illustration of this point than Mansouri’s exceptionally peculiar career.
Here’s a snippet that beautifully illustrates Mansouri’s work.
There is, though, a catch. I have been referring to Mansouri as a “translator.” But by contemporary standards, the most popular translator in the history of Iran translated hardly anything at all. Most of his works are a hodgepodge of source text mixed with his own additions and musings, which he offered so generously as to sometimes overwhelm the original. In some cases, the author of the book Mansouri was supposedly translating didn’t even exist. He would write something of his own, then make up a French name and publish his work under the fictive author’s byline. Many would say that one of the most popular literary figures of twentieth-century Iran was a full-blown charlatan.
While that sounds deceptive, Mansouri’s intent wasn’t malicious.
He regarded himself as the provider of a unique service to his readers. He cared so much about being read by the undereducated that he frequently used colloquialisms and slang to simplify his prose and even included deliberate errors in his texts to mimic the speech of those with less formal educations. He sometimes noted to his editor in the margin of a piece: “I know this is incorrect, but this is a commonly used phrase, so I’d like to keep it.”
Today, his legacy splits opinion. Some call him a fraud, others a genius who democratized reading. Twisting facts or adding personal interpretation can seem harmless, but being aware of it is crucial. That awareness is what protects us when harmless storytelling crosses the line into distortion or deliberate propaganda.
🕵️ History of The New Yorker’s Fact Checking Department
Traditional media, especially news organizations like The New Yorker, have long drawn a clear line between fact and fiction. The history of The New Yorker’s vaunted fact-checking department by Zach Helfand captures this craft with remarkable depth. His byline says it best: Reporters engage in charm and betrayal; checkers are in the harm-reduction business.
Behind every story lies an invisible world of purists, where even the smallest deviation is treated as blasphemy. Like quality itself, fact-checking follows higher-order rules—there’s no such thing as doing it halfway.
A few snippets stayed with me:
A joy of the job was that you became an expert for two weeks on some subject you’d never thought much about—rocket science, foreskin, sand. (“Suddenly, the writer gets this paid friend to care about the same thing they care about,” Rachel Aviv observed.) We’d send around e-mails with subject lines like “Anybody ever been a competitive rower?,” “Anybody well versed in the history of young, heavily scrutinized female celebrities?,” “Anyone happen to have an in with the Gabonese President?”
The focal point of the department was the checking library, which contained reference books such as Who’s Who in the People’s Republic of China, Debrett’s Peerage & Baronetage, and the Physicians’ Desk Reference for Herbal Medicines. (New checkers are advised that you can’t trust books—they tend not to be fact-checked. But reference works help, and endnotes are a gold mine.) The library had another relic—a metal Rolodex that Calvin Trillin has said belongs in the Smithsonian. (Under “C”: “Chomsky,” “Cher (actress),” “Congo,” “Cold Fusion.”) Every Friday, the department held a meeting in the library, where checkers discussed thorny stories and bitched about difficult writers and editors.
Ross had a literal mind. He once complained to E. B. White that Stuart Little should have been adopted by the Littles, rather than born to them, since, obviously, humans can’t conceive mouse-boys. He revered facts. He’d been gathering them and checking them long before there was a checking department. John Cheever recalled that Ross made two small but brilliant suggestions on the story “The Enormous Radio.” Cheever added, “Then there were twenty-nine other suggestions like, ‘This story has gone on for twenty-four hours and no one has eaten anything.’ ”
And the line that sums up the spirit of this world:
Checking is a forced humility. The longer you check, the more you doubt what you think you know. We are constantly misunderstanding one another, often literally.
What a beautiful reminder that truth, in the hands of those who care deeply, is never accidental.
📖 How Wikipedia Survives
And finally, let’s peek behind the scenes of one of the last true bastions of knowledge: where the fight to preserve facts is tougher than ever, yet somehow still holding strong.
Josh Dzieza’s How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the Internet breaks (archive version here) is a long read, but a deeply rewarding one. It explores how Wikipedia earned, and continues to deserve, the world’s trust in an era when most platforms are losing it fast.
We’ve all relied on Wikipedia, often without a second thought. This essay shows the discipline, structure, and community that make that reliability possible.
Some interesting snippets (emphasis mine):
But as impressive as this archive is, it is the byproduct of something that today looks almost equally remarkable: strangers on the internet disagreeing on matters of existential gravity and breathtaking pettiness and, through deliberation and debate, building a common ground of consensus reality.
Instead of trying to ascertain the truth, editors assessed the credibility of sources, looking to signals like whether a publication had a fact-checking department, got cited by other reputable sources, and issued corrections when it got things wrong.
At their best, these ground rules ensured debates followed a productive dialectic. An editor might write that human-caused climate change was a fact; another might change the line to say there was ongoing debate; a third editor would add the line back, backed up by surveys of climate scientists, and demand peer-reviewed studies supporting alternate theories. The outcome was a more accurate description of the state of knowledge than many journalists were promoting at the time by giving “both sides” equal weight, and also a lot of work to arrive at. A 2019 study published in Nature found that Wikipedia’s most polarizing articles — eugenics, global warming, Leonardo DiCaprio — are the highest quality, because each side keeps adding citations in support of their views. Wikipedia: a machine for turning conflict into bibliographies.
In 2009, law professors David A. Hoffman and Salil K. Mehra published a paper analyzing conflicts like these on Wikipedia and noted something unusual. Wikipedia’s dispute resolution system does not actually resolve disputes. In fact, it seems to facilitate them continuing forever.
These disputes may be crucial to Wikipedia’s success, the researchers wrote. Online communities are in perpetual danger of dissolving into anarchy. But because disputes on Wikipedia are won or lost based on who has better followed Wikipedia process, every dispute becomes an opportunity to reiterate the project’s rules and principles.
I’ll admit, I use it less often these days, at least directly. Maybe because GenAI tools now serve me beautifully written summaries built on its data. The lazy part of me accepts that as “enough” fact-checking. But it’s not. I probably need my own guardrails for truth-seeking.
As for Wikipedia, the way it adapts to this next phase of the internet will be fascinating to watch. Its strength still lies in the core of what makes human knowledge powerful: open collaboration, shared trust, and accountability. And maybe those ideas will outlast every algorithm trying to replace them.
🎉 21 Facts about Throwing Good Parties
It’s festive season, and many of you might be gearing up to host a party or two. If that’s you, Angela (reportedly New York’s No. 1 socialite) shares some of her best tips for throwing good parties from her years of experience.
1) Prioritize your ease of being over any other consideration: parties are like babies, if you’re stressed while holding them they’ll get stressed too. Every other decision is downstream of your serenity: e.g. it’s better to have mediocre pizza from a happy host than fabulous hors d’oeuvres from a frazzled one.
2) Advertise your start time as a quarter-to the hour. If you start an event at 2:00, people won’t arrive till 2:30; if you make it 1:45, people will arrive at 2:00.
16) Put the food in one part of the room and the drinks in another, or spread the food and drinks out around the space, so that people have lots of excuses to move around the room.
Her advice hits home. She calls out the exact challenges I often face, and her solutions are surprisingly simple and doable.
🪑 House Perfect with IKEA
I’m an IKEA fan; a fan, not yet a heavy user. My home isn’t filled with those flat-packed marvels that put your engineering degree to the test. At best, a few small accessories and handy utilities make the cut.
But I love visiting IKEA stores. And reading anything that talks about its lore. I’ve always found IKEA fascinating. Its story and spirit have often shown up in this newsletter. House Perfect by Lauren Collins (archive version here) is the latest addition to that list — and probably the best one yet.
It’s a deep dive into the culture IKEA created, and the culture that created IKEA. The essay is full of sharp insights and delightful anecdotes, so much so that the nuggets below could almost be a post of their own. Still, I’ll share a few of my favorites here. For the rest, go read the full piece — if you’re anything like me, you’ll love it.
IKEA calls itself the Life Improvement Store. The invisible designer of domestic life, it not only reflects but also molds, in its ubiquity, our routines and our attitudes. When IKEA stopped selling incandescent light bulbs, last year, six hundred and twenty-six million people became environmentalists.
IKEA omits words from instruction booklets, because words make instruction booklets thicker, which makes them more expensive.
We liked the SNÄRTIG bud vase, the surface of which is dotted with tiny bubbles, like eyelet lace. It cost fifty-nine pence, which makes it what IKEA calls a “breathtaking item”—so affordable that you can’t afford not to buy it. We took two. IKEA offers the serendipity of the yard sale without the mothballs.
It is said that Americans keep sofas longer than they keep cars, and change dining-room tables about as often as they trade spouses. IKEA has made interiors ephemeral. Its furniture is placeholder furniture, the prelude to an always imminent upgrade. It works until it breaks, or until its owners break up. It carries no traces.
We were standing on the gray path that guides customers through an IKEA store. “We call this the Main Aisle,” Albrecht said. “You should feel safe that you can walk it and you won’t miss anything.” The Main Aisle is supposed to curve every fifty feet or so, to keep the customer interested. A path that is straight for any longer than that is called an Autobahn—a big, boring mistake.
✨ Everything else
Engineering Lego Cars to climb increasingly tall walls: what a perfect metaphor. It’s not really about Lego at all. That’s just the playful doorway. What it’s really about is science and engineering: trial and error, repeated failure, iteration, small wins, and switching tactics when you hit a dead end. It’s a lesson in how persistence and creativity drive real innovation.
I can’t stop admiring Michael Davydov’s Tiny Worlds. They’re so intricate and delicate; almost like little dreams captured in glass. My study desk would look magical with one of those.
And to wrap things up, here’s a short and touching read that lingers beautifully: Always invite Anna
ICYMI, here is the link to last week’s post.
That’s all for this week, folks!
I hope I’ve earned the privilege of your time.
See you next Monday.