📚 White Lotus backstory, Sentence lengths, King of fruits, Creative power of constraints, Paris of South America

International payments, $20,000 electric pickup, 100 years of MTR, 13 circles & more.

Hello, this is post #209.

Welcome to the new readers who joined thanks to Suchita’s kind recommendation. This newsletter is where I share my curiosity—hope you find something here that sparks yours too.

I made a quick trip to Gurgaon last week for a work event. It went well, and I had a great time meeting our users and catching up with the team. But the real highlight? Two of the most energising conversations I’ve had in a while.

Dhruv and I go way back to our WIMWI days. We hadn’t met in years, but talking to him felt like we were right back in our old dungeon—nothing had changed. And then there’s Gaurav G, who’s been a mentor and inspiration since my Nokia days. His curiosity, passion for building meaningful things, and constant drive to learn always leave me charged up. I left both conversations feeling genuinely uplifted.

On the home front, we’re almost there! Just a week to go before the puja and then we’ll be ready to move in. I’ll share more soon—thanks for sticking with me through it.

For now, here’s a quick look at what sparked my curiosity last week:

Before we dive in; a quick favour …

Liked this post? Let me know what caught your attention—I’m always tinkering with ideas based on what resonates. And if you know a fellow restless mind who’d enjoy this, send it their way. The best conversations start when curious people trade thoughts.

And now, let’s get to our main features.

💸 Circle Payments Network

Osborne Saldanha dives deep into the Circle Payments Network and explores whether it could solve the problem of slow, expensive international money transfers.

I get that this might not be everyone’s cup of tea, so feel free to skip ahead to the more fun bits of today’s newsletter.

But if you do click through, you’ll find a good explainer on a rarely discussed part of the global money movement—and where it might be headed. It’s worth checking out once in a while, just to spot new and interesting problems waiting to be solved. This snippet was a discovery for me:

The Plumbing: At the heart of the old system lies "Correspondent Banking". Banks hold accounts with each other in different countries – Nostro ("our" money held by them) and Vostro ("your" money held by us). To actually move money, they send instructions back and forth using SWIFT, a secure messaging system. SWIFT standardises the message (codes, language etc.), transfers the message, audits the messages, but doesn't move the money itself. A typical cross-border payment relies on and passes through 3-5 financial institutions, each adding their own fees and potential delays.

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🪷 The White Lotus: Backstory

I’m still recovering from that wild Season 3 finale. The whole season built up tension so well, and the ending totally delivered. I loved it—and now I’m just hungry for more.

But with the next season at least a year away (though yay for the greenlight!), I’ve been nerding out on all things White Lotus. One great read came from one of my favorite writers, Trung Phan. He did a fantastic job telling the story of Mike White's 15-year journey for "The White Lotus."

Trung Phan is a master storyteller, and you’ve to experience this piece on his blog. Here’s a one tiny trivia from the backstory:

Then a break: in July 2020, HBO calls “out of the blue” and asks, “We don't have any programming, is there anything you can do in a COVID bubble that you can do quickly, cheaply, that can be on the air in 2021?”

White goes, “Yeah, I got it.”

And HBO instantly replies, “Great, it's greenlit.”

“Mike literally didn't know what [the show] was,” says Bernad. “But he had been thinking about these three different shows over the last 15 years. He combined all those elements [Honeymoon Hotel, Coolidge, Murder Mystery] and that became The White Lotus.”

And while you’re at it, don’t forget to enjoy Trung’s coverage of Home Depot’s $20B gardening business (insane!) and the robot that took over the dairy industry (I knew there is some automation, but this is wild)

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🗣️ Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?

Sentence lengths have declined. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.

[…]

So the decline predates television, the radio, and the telegraph—it’s been going on for centuries. The average sentence length in newspapers fell from 35wps to 20wps between 1700 and 2000. […] Warren Buffett’s annual letter to shareholders dropped from 17.4wps to 13.4wps between 1974 and 2013.

That last bit probably caught your attention. In this LessWrong piece, Arjun Panickssery digs into an interesting question: why have sentence lengths decreased?

It’s a short read, but packed with solid hypotheses and logical reasoning. I didn’t expect scientific proof—just a curious take on how our language, spoken and written, keeps evolving. And for that, it delivers well.

And if you’re feeling adventurous, check out the invention that ruined English writing a shot. It dives into the “Great Vowel Shift” and might just explain why English spellings can be so baffling.

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🍍 King of fruits

Ordinary yellow pineapples were once so rare, people rented them just to show off at dinner parties. Étienne Fortier-Dubois’ “Work in Progress” piece tells the story of how that changed. It’s a well-crafted look at the history and the innovation that made pineapples cheap and everywhere. From geo-political twists and cultural quirks to clever marketing gimmicks, this story has covered it all. I really enjoyed it, and thought you might too.

By the late eighteenth century, ‘pineries’, as pineapple gardens were called, had become a regular feature of large European estates. The fruit had gone from being a rare curiosity to become an expensive but attainable luxury, at least for the wealthy. It became common practice to display a fresh pineapple at dinner parties to impress guests. This led to delightfully absurd situations: the pineapple became valued more for showing than for eating, and some people, who wanted to show their wealth but couldn’t afford multiple specimens, reused the same one again and again for weeks until it began to rot. A rental industry of pineapples arose to meet this demand. A pineapple was one of the riskiest items a maid could carry around since it presented a particularly attractive target for thieves.

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🪑 Creative Power of Constraints

I’m holding back from dropping some overused line about how constraints fuel creativity—we’ve all heard it by now. Instead, I just want to enjoy some real examples of that creative power. And who better to curate them than one of my favorite creatives, Arun Venkatesan?

I loved all the examples, but the pwnisher CG challenge was a pure visual delight—it seriously made me go wow!

Here’s a quick look at what the challenge was about and a sneak peek at what came out of it.

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🇦🇷 David Perell in Buenos Aires

Travel writing is one of the most fascinating forms of storytelling. Every place you visit holds layers—history, culture, architecture, food, music, and more. Every conversation can reveal a story. Every moment can take you somewhere unexpected.

That’s what makes travel writing so hard. As a writer, it’s easy to get swept up in the magic of a place and lose the thread. But the best writers find a way to capture that magic and share it with the reader.

David Perell’s “Buenos Aires: The Paris of South America?” is a great example. His words take you there. You see the city, feel the rhythm, and start to believe the myths. It made me want to book a ticket right away.

Here are a few snippets from his post:

On French & Italian influence

Reflecting their obsession with Europe, the elites hired French and Italian designers instead of Argentinian ones, which is why the cemetery doesn’t look Latin. These mausoleums were the Birkin bags of the time. Many of them even have glass doors as a way of saying: “Look inside to see just how rich I was.”

Buenos Aires is Latin for a city so influenced by Europe, and European for a city so influenced by Latin America.

On their driving

There’s a romance about the way locals drive. Come to think of it, their driving style reminds me of the way Argentinians play soccer, and especially, the ready-for-a-fight passion they brought to their semifinal game against Holland in the 2022 World Cup, and the elegance of Diego Maradona’s iconic “Goal of the Century” against England in the ‘86 quarterfinal when he weaved between defenders, juking them left and right, as if the ball was tethered to his foot, with levels of grace that’d historically been reserved for the tango dance floor.

If you enjoy travel writing, I highly recommend Sam Mendelsohn. His pieces on India are packed with detail and are a real joy to read. Now, whenever I plan a trip—whether within India or beyond—I always check to see if he’s written about the place.

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🛻 Slate’s $20,000 Electric Pickup

The Slate Truck is set to be a sub-$20,000 American-made electric pickup. How is it that cheap? On the surface, it's the bare-bones feature set: no paint, no stereo, no touchscreen. But as this Verge article explains, there's much more going on behind the scenes.

Slate took a radical approach to product design, manufacturing, and now as launch nears, even marketing and servicing. All of it geared toward slashing costs to a number that once felt impossible. The piece also shares some eye-opening insights into how the auto industry really works.

By eliminating paint, and thus eliminating the paint shop, Slate’s manufacturing process is massively simplified. So, too, the lack of metal body parts. “We have no paint shop, we have no stamping,” says Jeremy Snyder, Slate’s chief commercial officer who formerly led Tesla’s global business efforts.

The simplification goes simpler still. Slate will make just one vehicle, in just one trim, in just one color, with everything from bigger battery packs to SUV upgrade kits added on later.

“Because we only produce one vehicle in the factory with zero options, we’ve moved all of the complexity out of the factory,” Snyder says.

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✨ Everything else

1. What’s the connection of Mafatlal and Shammi Kapoor with the early days of the internet in India? Prashant Baid investigates in his usual geeky ways and unearths a lot of gems! Hats off to Pea Bee for such curious adventures. (via Sarthak’s substack)

2. Did you know Mavalli Tiffin Rooms (MTR) was once called Brahmins’ Coffee Club? This visually rich piece from Goya gives a quick dive into the history of this iconic Bangalore eatery.

3. 13 Animals made from 13 circles. This is the real power of imagination! (via Dense Discovery)

   

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ICYMI…

Sometimes the best ideas need time to simmer. Last week’s edition might’ve arrived in a busy moment—so here’s your chance to revisit it fresh. Trust us, it’s worth the double take. (P.S. The comment section is still wide open.)

📚 Airbus story, Construction physics, Arguing with a toddler, Sam Altman on productivity, Rethinking money

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That's all for this week, folks!

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

If this piece sparked something for you, I’d love to hear what stood out—leave a comment and let’s keep the conversation alive. And if you know someone who’s always asking "why?" or "how come?", pass this along to them. The world gets more interesting every time a curious mind shares what they’ve found.

Pritesh