📚 Invitation to a banquet, Icebreakers, Metaphorical Aquariums, Design Ah!

A Smart Bear + a lot more for the curious YOU

Hi and welcome to post #147.

I finally finished the most amazing book I’ve read in recent times (more on this below). And I’ve picked the next one. My podcast queue is growing longer, but these audiobooks are keeping me glued and I don’t miss the podcasts much at this moment.

My reading lists are getting super interesting with the new sources I’m discovering on Substack. The discovery & engagement features are fantastic and I’m surprised everyday with the kind of content format & themes I am discovering. You’re going to experience some of these in this & upcoming posts.

Quick update on the survey done last week: 3 out of 5 folks suggested Monday as the preferred day for reading this newsletter (other 2 preferred Sunday). I am not changing anything at this moment, but would repeat this survey in a few weeks. 

And now, let’s get to today's post. From book & blog recommendations to Japanese TV show, it covers a width that makes me excited. There is something for everyone, stay tuned till the end. 

I hope you like this post as much as I loved curating this one. 

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📖 Invitation to a Banquet

There are cooks who write and writers who cook, but very few succeed in blending both arts to perfection in the way Fuchsia Dunlop does. The flavours arising from these pages are sprinkled with insight and experience, its narrative is infused with anecdote and historical depth. This book is the perfect dish for anyone curious about the story of Chinese cuisine and a joy for those among us simply in need of food for thought 

-- Professor Roel Sterckx, author of CHINESE THOUGHT

I picked up the above snippet from the amazon listing of Fuchsia Dunlop’s book “Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food”. I could not find words to describe the magical experience that I had while I devoured this book. So I copied from Amazon.

I listened to the audible version (narrated by the author herself) and was spellbound as she goes into detail about every aspect of Chinese cuisine. I would wait every day for my commute to work to continue listening to the book, that was the level of excitement. Literally the most cannot-put-it-down book I have read in many years.

Below is the snippet from Dan Wang’s 2023 letter that got me trying this book. And I’m glad I did that. 

There were so many things I didn’t think about Chinese food until I read it in Fuchsia Dunlop. Her new book Invitation to Banquet is organized around 30 dishes to explain every aspect of Chinese cuisine: Cantonese sashimi, for example, to discuss knifework; and Mapo tofu to talk about the intense flavors that comes from fermenting the bean. Fuchsia raises the questions I have: “Where is the creativity, where the delight, in simply roasting a chunk of meat and serving it with bald potatoes and carrots, as the English like to do?” And I feel like she is speaking for me when she is lamenting the poor use of leafy vegetables in western cuisine: “either overcooked or served brutally raw as some strange kind of virtue,” compared to the Chinese greens, which are “more generously portioned than the apologetic little dishes of spinach served on the side… and cooked as carefully as anything else.” I wish that there was a book like this for every cuisine to introduce techniques and traditions through personal stories.

Fuchsia is a superb writer. The miracle of her books is that she combines extraordinary research with pleasurable writing. The latter comes from her appreciation for the physicality of eating. Her sentences ooze with sensuality on the ravishments of the cuisine, reminding us that food produces physical pleasure.

If you’re up to add a new informative yet super entertaining book to your reading list, go for this one. I highly recommend it.

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🤝 Icebreakers

One of the joys of reading random and vast over the last couple of years is that sometimes I stumble upon unexpected treasure chests.

Rob Walker

’s vast collection of ICEBREAKERS is one of those.

Here’s how Rob describes this collection:

“Icebreaker of the Week” is a recurring feature of the newsletter The Art of Noticing. Some are icebreakers I made up or experienced or found somewhere; many are submitted by TAoN readers. After many requests, I am collecting & sharing all the icebreakers here. 

If you find this useful or enjoyable, consider buying a copy of the book that spawned the newsletter, The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways To Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, And Discover Joy In The Everyday. There's a whole section of the book with exercises designed to help you converse with, listen to, and connect with others! Plus it makes a great gift :)

It’s a huge collection and does not need to be consumed in one go. Just keep this open in a tab, and visit whenever you’re looking for a quick moment of inspiration or surprise. A tiny smile on your face will be a bonus. And they can be a great prompt for you to discover a bit more about yourself.

Here’s a couple of the good ones that I read so far:

Using only food: Where did you grow up?

As a child, what was your third space – the space you felt you belonged, that wasn't home or school? What about as a teen? A young adult?

What dream have you never forgotten and why do you think this remains a conscious memory?

“If you could travel anywhere tomorrow, where would you go?”

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🧸 A Smart Bear

Jason Cohen’s “A Smart Bear” newsletter regularly offers a new way to think about the usual challenges faced in business & product building. These are simple ideas that help critically rethink & evaluate our understanding of how businesses operate.

I am sharing a bunch of useful ideas from recent posts.

1. The “errors” that mean you're doing it right. 

Adding back features you removed

If you’re not adding back features you removed, you’re not removing enough.

Many products never remove features. This indicates we’re not being critical enough, not weeding our garden, not learning what customers really want, not understanding what’s useful, not admitting when we got it wrong, not shifting when the market shifts. When we do remove a feature, sometimes it will turn out the feature really was important after all. While of course in a perfect world we wouldn’t have made that mistake, it’s a natural consequence of weeding.

2. Pick one and own it 

Hanging your hat on just one advantage that you can own completely is stronger than diluting your message by making many assertions.

It’s not just in face-to-face sales calls either. Your homepage becomes laser-focused. Your advertisements become pointed, powerful, pithy, and other words starting with “p.” Your 30-second pitch becomes compelling. You know what to blog and Twitter about. Your 5-minute product demo reinforces a singular point. Everyone knows who you are and where you stand.

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🐠 Social media sites are Metaphorical Aquariums

Elizabeth Lopatto

wrote - “Toward a unified taxonomy of text-based social media use” as a commentary on Thread’s journey & future. She starts from defining different types of users of a social media platform.

The silent majority of every successful text-based social media site is lurkers. These are sane, normal people with sane, normal lives. They are well-balanced and have hobbies. One of those hobbies is visiting social media sites, where they are usually looking for either information or entertainment. They’re the audience.

The development of trolls appears to be the internet’s version of carcinization

Of the remaining minority, there are several classes of user: the influencer, the commenter, the reply guy, and the poster. We’ll take them in turns.

The influencer is building a business. They are making #content. They are doing at least one of the following: posting for social capital, getting paid out by the social media site directly, or getting paid by sponsors for their posts. They are valuable in that they push internet commerce, but they are also usually operating within the bounds of safety, for fear of alienating sponsors.

The commenter is trying to have a conversation with another human being. They are hoping, however misguidedly, to have a meaningful interaction online. [...] The lesser trolls, who have nothing nice to say, ever, and live to annoy other commenters, are a notable subclass.

The reply guy can be thought of as the most important subclass of commenter; they are specific. They are usually interacting with or on behalf of a favored internet user. [...]

Finally, we have the poster, sometimes referred to as a poaster. The poster is required for every social network to function. Their lack of inhibition is part of what makes social media entertaining. 

[...]

I have come to believe that any social media platform that dips under 10 percent poster will fail, but as the early days of Bluesky demonstrated, if you over index on posters, you will have endless fucking chaos. It is possible that posters are deeply unwell. Certainly they are far too online.

Isn’t that what you’ve discovered during mindless hours of scrolling Twitter, Insta or even LinkedIn  feeds?

In the next few para, she applies her ‘metaphorical aquarium’ mental map to describe most social media platforms. I’ve not read such a succinct and simple explanation to understand the user behavior.

Worth a quick read!

(via Kottke.org) 

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⛰️ Two Modes of Learning

Kevin Kelly

defines two mode of learning - Hill-Making vs Hill-Climbing, 

There are two modes of learning, two paths to improvement. One is to relentlessly, deliberately improve what you can do already, by trying to perfect your process. Focus on optimizing what works. The other way is to create new areas that can be exploited and perfected. Explore regions that are suboptimal with a hope you can make them work – and sometimes they will – giving you new territory to work in. Most attempts to get better are a mix of these methods, but in their extremes these two functions – exploit and explore – operate in different ways, and require different strategies.

And with this definition in hand, he goes to expand on how technology, art and our civilization in general has evolved over the years. There are challenges in each mode, and he makes good references to explain it effectively. He has some comments on the current state of AI and how it can shape up. 

Read it for a new perspective on how we see progress.

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📺 Design Ah! (デザインあ) 

Arun Venkatesan describes his experience of watching – Design Ah! (デザインあ) – a show meant for Japanese kids to make them experience & appreciate design in a super fun way.

Here’s a snippet from his post:

Why is everything in Japan so well-designed? Is it due to culture, or perhaps, history? On every trip to Japan, I couldn’t find an answer to the question — that is until our last visit to Tokyo.

[...]

Set to catchy music, Japanese Hiragana characters danced across the screen for a few minutes. Then came a line animation wordlessly designing and redesigning a parking lot. Next was stop motion. Electronic devices came apart. As the camera zoomed out, the individual parts lined up into a grid.

We didn’t know what we were watching, but we were transfixed. Everyone from the adults to the one-year-old had their eyes glued to the TV.

His post covers the idea behind the show and enlists some recurring segments from the episodes. He has done the hard work of finding some good reference videos of Youtube, so you can experience it sitting in your home. 

What I saw in those videos kept me amazed. Nobody told us about design in such a fun & entertaining way, and so most of us don’t notice and appreciate these nuances. Japanese have found great solutions to things that others are not even aware of. 

Simply brilliant!

(via Sidebar)

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🪄 Arc Browser & the Art of Storytelling

I’m not a tools geek, I try a few of those that promise to solve a problem that I’m facing. Some of them work, most get forgotten. Only rarely I find a tool  that surprises me beyond my wildest imagination.

Arc browser is one such find for me. It’s a new browser and a search engine and as the founder says "it's a web browser that searches for you”. It’s fast, easy to use and just works! Its passionately nuanced and well crafted design is a bonus.

There is one more reason for my love for this product: “The browser company” does great storytelling around every aspect of it - helping me experience & appreciate the heart that is behind each tiny little detail that is making my experience WOW. 

Their launch videos, release notes, support tickets, board meeting discussions - all are superb examples of highly engaging stories passing on the love & passion that goes behind making this product.

I feel connected. In fact, I dream of working with such a team and on such products. It will be such a joy!

You can download the Arc Browser here.

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✨ Everything else

1. A Plush Dog, Samurai Sword and 42,439 Guns: Inside an N.Y.P.D. Basement. A lost and found of another level!

2. A vast collection of Japanese hotel and ryokan tag labels. There is so much detail in everything they do in Japan. (via Kottke)

3. FAA Aviation Maps: Among all of the visual information published by the U.S. government, there may be no product with a higher information density than the Federal Aviation Administration’s aviation maps. (via Kottke)

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That's all for this week, folks! 

I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.

If you liked this post, hit the ❤️ below, leave a comment or share with a friend or two. I really appreciate your feedback. It's highly helpful & encouraging.

Pritesh