Today’s post has a lot of Asian influence. It’s a sheer coincidence that it happened this way. From Craig Mod’s book to scenes from Bollywood movies - it’s an exciting mix, so I am sure you’re not going to miss the rest of the world.
Here’s a quick view of the lineup:
And now, onto today's finds…
🥤 Juice
Juice is the non-essential visual, audio and haptic effects that enhance the player's experience. For example, the delightful chimes sound that plays when Mario collects a mushroom. The 1UP text that appears is essential. Communicating the player gained an extra life. The sound is the Juice. Non essential but serves a purpose:
▪ reinforcing Mario did indeed collect the mushroom,
▪ that this was a good thing, by using a delightful sound and
▪ giving the player a small reward. Encouraging them to collect more and teaching them how to play.
So clearly this post “Juice” is not about anything fruity & healthy.
If games and delightful experiences are your fix, you should check this out. It explains the tiny little details that create magic. We don’t know of them, but they do their bit every time.
Brad Woods’s post is interactive which makes the topic & its content even more enjoyable.
🇯🇵 Cities: Tokyo
My journey of discovering cities takes us to Tokyo this week. Noah Smith claims Tokyo is the new Paris. He argues:
Many great cities become museums of themselves, their lack of new development an homage to their glory days. Tokyo refuses to do this. In a country that is aging and economically stagnant, Tokyo pushes ever forward into the realm of its own possibilities.
He describes the marvel of their urban design, train infra and a culture that’s taking giant leaps. It’s fascinating to read about how tiny little details matter so much in building the character of a city. It’s good to know some of these and I hope to notice them when I go there.
But ultimately it’s not the buildings or the trains that make a city; it’s the people. Tokyoites can be a bit more reserved than people elsewhere in Japan; the sheer size and bustle of the city necessitate a fast pace. But that’s a relative statement. Tokyo is part of Japan, and Japan is a country where store clerks will help you get where you’re going by taking out a piece of paper and drawing you a map and maybe walking half a block down the street with you. It’s also a much more socially egalitarian culture than we’re used to in the West, thanks to high inheritance taxes, copious public goods, and cultural factors too arcane to delve into right now.
As I discover these posts describing cities across the world, I am acquiring a language to understand these cities and how they come alive. As a resident we take it for granted and don’t appreciate it. As a tourist we don’t notice most of it. So, these discoveries over the written words can help bridge some gaps and make the 99% invisible visible for me.
Noah Smith has a good two post series on Japanese Urbanism to understand more about what, how and why. You can check it out here: Part 1 & Part 2
☕ Craig Mod’s Kissa Tales
Craig Mod recently shared a short interview he did with Kitchen Arts & Letters (a New York City bookstore specializing in food and drink).
“Capturing Japan’s vanishing cafe culture” explores the story of his book Kissa by Kissa which unravels the stories embedded within the fabric of the country’s traditional coffee shops, also known as kissaten.
I discovered Craig Mod’s work recently and am in awe! This interview gives some insight into his passion & taste. I am sharing some of the questions from this interview to give you some quick hints about why I am excited about his work.
Your book is often described as an "object" and an "artifact." How did you approach the physical design and production to elevate it beyond a traditional book?
The walk in your book is both a physical journey and a cultural exploration. How did encounters with cafe owners and locals shape the narrative, and why did you choose kissaten as a focal point?
How did you navigate maintaining a cohesive narrative across diverse genres in a blend of travelogue, photo book, and ethnographic study, especially when delving into the culinary aspects?
🏯 Eastern Culture
A couple of good reads to understand the eastern culture better.
Collective harmony and hierarchy are strongly idealised across East Asia. Communication is thus implicit and indirect. Conflict aversion and emotional suppression make it harder to learn what someone else really thinks. So what’s the solution?
Alcohol reduces people’s inhibitions. This promotes social bonding and information-sharing. As argued in Edward Slingerland’s book “Drunk”, it benefits businesses! But this exact same cognitive shift also elevates risks of sexual abuse. Women may prefer to leave early. By doing so, they miss out on homosocial boozing and schmoozing.
Alice Evans builds using Erin Meyer’s “The Culture Map” and her interaction with folks from China & Korea. From Dutch to Indians, each culture has a different communication style and that shows in the way interaction happens at work or outside.
Image Source: Alice Evan’s post
East Asian solutions involve drinking work to some extent, but have many disadvantages specially for women. Alice highlights them and suggests a few better ways to manage this.
David Robson talks about the surprising influence of geography on our reasoning, behaviour, and sense of self.
And this thinking style also extends to the way we categorise inanimate objects. Suppose you are asked to name the two related items in a list of words such as “train, bus, track”. What would you say? This is known as the “triad test”, and people in the West might pick “bus” and “train” because they are both types of vehicles. A holistic thinker, in contrast, would say “train” and “track”, since they are focusing on the functional relationship between the two – one item is essential for the other’s job.
It can even change the way that you see. An eye-tracking study by Richard Nisbett at the University of Michigan found that participants from East Asia tend to spend more time looking around the background of an image – working out the context – whereas people in America tended to spend more time concentrating on the main focus of the picture. Intriguingly, this distinction could also be seen in children’s drawings from Japan and Canada, suggesting that the different ways of seeing emerge at a very young age. And by guiding our attention, this narrow or diverse focus directly determines what we remember of a scene at a later date.
☎️ Wrong Number
Shruti Rajagopalan’s “Sorry, Wrong Number” narrates India’s telecom revolution from the early days till date. But she does it in a really fun way - using references from our movies (Bollywood to be more precise). Phone operators, wrong numbers, cross connections, trunk calls, license raj, Sam Pitroda, MTNL and more - she has got all this covered. And for references, you will revisit ‘Mr India’, ‘Here Pheri’, ‘Satya’, ‘Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro’ and many more classics.
What a joyful way to understand the journey and how our cinema reflected it at every moment.
Sample this for a sneak preview:
This was not the only nod to the controlled political economy of the eighties in Mr. India. The unsavory characters (Daga, Teja, Wolcott) were gold smugglers at a time when gold, foreign exchange, and imports were tightly controlled. And thanks to price and quantity controls on essential commodities, even the local grocer in the movie (Roopchand) was a small time villain and involved with the big time smugglers in black markets of grains and adulteration of food. Sridevi (Seema) using the phone in her editor’s office is not unusual.
State owned enterprises also got their foreign exchange allocation through this command-and-control system, though with less corruption compared to the problems faced by private businesses. Though the DoPT received priority, poor incentives of government employees to update technology led to delays. The consequence was low rates of call completion, crossed connections and wrong numbers. GP Manish writes that in India “the national average call-completion rate for local calls stood at a low 40 percent in 1984–85, and the corresponding figure for long-distance calls stood at 20 percent in 1985–86. This meant that a subscriber had to make, on average, two and a half attempts to make a successful local call and five attempts for a long-distance one.” These problems were faced by Americans in around WWI but continued in India for eight more decades! And naturally found its way into everyday life and culture.
I discovered Shruti’s substack through Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog. It keeps surfacing such gems and topics that would otherwise remain hidden for me. That’s one advantage of latching on to some good sources and expanding your network from there.
🌪️ Coordination Headwind
Alex Komoroske talks of how coordination headwinds impact an organization’s output. He has used emoji and simple words to explain how organizations function (or dysfunction). Those 171 slides kept me glued while he talked about efforts, rewards, priorities, escalations and more.
His core idea is to think of organizations like slime mold and allow them to live & grow like one. I like the analogy here, it helps understand the idea really well.
There is no radical idea here, just the most basic truth - but the way it has been told is remarkable and makes it worth your time. Here’re a couple of slides for preview:
There was a product in the seventeenth century that was universally considered a necessity as important as grain and fuel. Controlling the source of this product was one of the first priorities for many a military campaign, and sometimes even a motivation for starting a war. Improvements to the preparation and uses of this product would have increased population size and would have had a general and noticeable impact on people’s living standards. And this product underwent dramatic changes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, becoming an obsession for many inventors and industrialists, while seemingly not featuring in many estimates of historical economic output or growth at all.
The product is salt.
I had no clue! And clearly, we don’t understand anything about the salt. From its use in food, to impact on agriculture, to how it shaped the global economy and funded empires - its history is hardly documented.
Anton Howes’s “Age of Invention: The Second Soul” attempts to explain some key parts of that history. Fascinating read! Makes me wonder how little we know about even the simplest things around us.
A few more snippets:
A population deprived of salt was thus one that was weaker and more prone to disease — and at a time when the vast majority of the economy’s energy supply came from the straining of muscle, both human and animal, that weakness in effect meant a severe energy shortage. Although the main fuels for muscle power were carb-heavy grains like wheat, rye, oats, and rice, the indispensable ingredient to getting the most out of these grains was salt — just as how nuclear power uses uranium as its fuel, but also requires a suitable neutron moderator. A population deprived of salt would quite literally be more lethargic and sluggish, making it less productive and poorer too.
Indeed, there is something unusual about the landlocked areas of much central Europe, which may help explain why the Holy Roman Empire had so many tiny sovereign states: it had a great many inland salt sources. I’ve not had a chance to look into it carefully just yet, but it’s striking how almost all the major players in the region — Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, the Palatinate of the Rhine, Lüneburg, Lorraine, Burgundy, and Brandenburg — each controlled salt sources of their own during their periods of greatest influence. Many bizarrely small sovereign states, too, like the Provostry of Berchtesgaden, seem to have maintained themselves by exporting salt.
✨ Everything else
Jon Keegan’s “Trademark Design Codes” takes us to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ‘s massive public databases of registered trademarks, some of which go back to 1870. The explainer around design code & interactive search makes it a fun read!
Elizabeth Goodspeed shares a set of 1970s cartoon maps of 30+ cities including Pittsburg, Montreal, Calgary and Miami. They are BEAUTIFUL!
Yuliya Krishchik is a contemporary embroidery & needle felt artist who makes amazing Space art. Simply stunning. (via Dense Discovery)
I don’t have words to describe Vorja Sánchez’s beautiful sketches. Colossal describes it like this - “whimsical creatures are brought to life by the sound of pencil on paper”. Enjoy not just the output but the process - it's therapeutic.
That's all for this week, folks!
I hope I've earned the privilege of your time.
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