Antonym Unburnable Edition
Antonym Unburnable Edition
Five minutes to read. Five minutes to print it out and set on fire to spite me.
Dear Reader
I’ve left the Jubilee celebrations back home for a few days near the Pyrenees.
This part of France is very warm, but also lush because of the microclimate around the mountains, which delivers frequent rain showers. We’re further south than St Tropez, but the garden table I’m writing at looks out on a valley of crowded greens and the sounds of myriad creatures. Apart from the fauna, it’s very quiet indeed. Heavenly. Last night I slept longer than I’ve done in months.
Unburnable book
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale has been made into a single “unburnable book” by Penguin Random House. Atwood celebrated this by taking a flamethrower to the thing. I love her.
As culture wars in the US are seeing books being banned from schools and libraries, the gesture of making an unburnable book is like a dare to the enemies of art and freedom.
As I write this the auction of the book at Sotheby’s has reached $100,000 with three days of bidding to go. Its proceeds will go to PEN America, a non-profit that works to stop suppression of literature.
It’s not often that you get to talk about the technical specifications of a book, a technology so resilient we forget to think about it much unless we’re in the business of making them:
8vo. Printed on black-and-white-coated aluminum Cinefoils, used in film production to wrap hot lights, which are stable to 660°C/1220°F, textblock hand-sewn with nickel wire, often used in electrical components, which is stable to 1400°C/2,600°F, head and tail bands are woven stainless steel, used in aerospace manufacturing, which are stable up to 1530°C/2790°F. Boards 3mm phenolic sheets, used in electronics manufacturing, which are stable to 540°F/282°C, opaque white and CMYK printing produced on an OKI five-colour digital press, with inks stable to 1200°C/2200°F.
Wow.
Side note: Bertelsmann, which owns Penguin Random House, issued an apology twenty years ago for it’s conduct under the OG book burners of 1930s Germany and for covering this up by positioning itself as a “resistance publisher” after the war. History is a tangle of ironies and ambiguities.
Writing tips from Clive Thompson
The dividing line between work and pleasure is thinnest when it comes to writing. It’s one important reason I write this newsletter out of office hours. As well as there being somewhere to put words-thoughts, writing is mostly a happy place for me. It flows. The problems come when it feels like hard work, and that’s when the advice of professional writers like Clive Thompson become useful. His book Smarter Than You Think is a brilliant examination of how we can use technology to enhance the way we think and make things with our minds, a much-needed counterpoint to the pearl-clutching paeans on how tech-makes-us-dumb. Dumb use of tech makes you dumber, smart use of tech makes you smarter–and both things can happen at the same time, but that’s a line of thought for another day.
Thompson’s talk on note-taking with pencil and paper vs typing them out is a fantastic. This week though, I found his collection of six short pieces on things he’d learned about writing in his 25 years as a journalist and author.
Clive Thompson's first draft method...
I begin each paragraph with a hyphen.
I lower-case the first letter of every sentence.
I don’t put a period at the end of a sentence. (A question mark or exclamation point is fine.) Instead…
… in lieu of a period, I end each sentence using two forward-slashes, like this //
I’m trying this out now for an article about procrastination, of all things. Curious to see how well it works.
Species are fleeting things
There’s perspective and then there’s perspective. In an essay for Nautilus Thomas Halliday, palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist, observes that within the span of a lifetime evolution is all but invisible. The dividing lines between species blur and continuum of lines of life adapting and re-adapting become flows more than staging posts. Species are fleeting things.
Ever since the earliest attempts at classifying the natural world, humans have been labeled separately from the rest of life, as something apart, something special. The trouble with taxonomic labelthat they, like communities of organisms, are not constant through time. In the modern day the distinction between humankind and our nearest relatives, the genus *Pan*, comprising chimpanzees and bonobos, is clear.
It is only with the benefit of geological hindsight that we can determine that a population in a slice of past time should be considered to be different. In real time, a species is a dynamic plurality, the sum of its component populations and individuals within and between which genes flow.
— “Portrait of the Human as a Young Hominin”, by Thomas Halliday, palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist
Turn that downturn upside down
Snap, an innovative social media platform, told investors that the global economy was worsening “further and faster than we expected”, prompting Brian Morrissey to offer his advice on weathering the all-but-certain downturn. Morrissey has been through three in his career in the media-advertising complex. (Subscribe to his always useful newsletter The Rebooting).
In short, cut costs and be in the business of selling something with measurable value (i.e. that generates your client revenue or savings).
He has a particular warning for in-house branded content studios:
Branded content. The most vulnerable area of brand advertising for publishers resides in their content studios that create branded content. These outfits carry high fixed costs that can become an albatross in a downturn. Years ago, during the boom in content studios, a publishing executive lamented that a critical flaw is that publishers don’t have the muscle memory and culture of dialing up and down their staffing. If an ad agency loses an account, it is expected to shed people as a result. Publishing operates differently. On the client side, brand content deals are typically hard to tie directly to sales, so they’re ripe for the chopping block.
Instead of the chopping block, how about the “consolidation press”? If it’s hard to measure or hard to predict you should be running experiments. “I’m not sure what works so I’m going to do nothing,” is never going to work.
Morrissey also predicts that there will be a lot of discussion about how brands that invest through a downturn are more successful i t he recovery than those don’t—an idea he doesn’t buy, or rather doesn’t think will change any CMOs’ decisions. I wonder if the invest your way through a recession trope will recur in the next few months—we had a great deal of noise like this at the outset of the pandemic, before the cheap money and bailouts by governments took the edge off of the pain for big companies.
Meanwhile Elon Musk explained 10% redundancies at Tesla saying he had a “super-bad feeling” about the economy.
Musk to cut Tesla staff by 10% over ‘super bad feeling’ | Business | The Times.
Meanwhile, the advice from publications like Harvard Business Review is to care your way through a downturn. I don’t think Elon reads HBR.
This week’s…
Watching
Soldados o Zombies (Amazon Prime): Were I paranoid, I would be convinced–rather than just suspicious–that the streaming service algorithms had got together and engineered a series perfectly calibrated for my tastes for trash TV about narcotraficantes and zombies. SOZ: Soldados o Zombies (Soldiers or Zombies) is proudly B-movie in its DNA and gets down to business in episode one with drug lord jail breaks, US military experiments going wrong and a coyote pursued by zombie mini-pigs. I’m hooked. Watch it in the original Spanish for a paper-thin excuse that you’re improving your language skills.
Physical (Apple TV): Season one done. Looking forward to the next two. It’s great storytelling.
Top Gun: Maverick (cinemas): the Bruce Weber aesthetic is dialled down but everything else is dialled up and unlike some blockbusters that were parked by the pandemic, the two-year wait for Top Gun: Maverick was completely justified. All reports from friends and children of concur: it’s a solid-gold hit.
Reading
I finished The Guest List and Razorblade Tears (great reads both) were finished this week and I’ve moved on to:
The Cutting Room, by Louise Welsh. Listening to the Alan Cummings narrated audiobook of this.
Bad Actors by Mick Herron. I cannot and will not resist a new Slow Horses book and so I’m just. This is the eighth in the series and the first since the Apple TV series came out, so I’m wondering if Jackson Lamb will appear in my mind’s eye as Gary Oldman, or the fatter, grosser one that my unconscious cast him as for the previous seven…
That’s all for this week. I hope something you found lit your fire.
Antony
PS: Everything else
The things I want to write about but ain’t got the time.
Facebook doesn’t see audio as a threat anymore.
If Facebook sees something that is a future threat it buys or copies it quicksmart. Two years ago it looked like audio social was the coming thing, so it started Soundbites as a rival to the at-the-time $4BN-valued Clubhouse.
Facebook (FB) Is Pulling Back From Its Foray Into Podcasting - Bloomberg
There is no country called Turkey
“Turkey” is no more at the United Nations, which henceforth recognises it as Türkiye. The country formerly known as Turkey would prefer not to be associated with poultry, nor with duds nor “silly” people, according to a state broadcaster. By de-Anglicising the name, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan deepens his stamp upon the republic in time for its 100th anniversary next year. – The Economist Daily Briefing
War in the US?
It’s complicated, but possible. An FT review of three books on the topic.
In 1990, the CIA correctly forecast that Yugoslavia would break up within two years because its politics was hardening into ethnic factions. In 2022, America’s two parties are increasingly sorted along racial and identity lines. Republicans are white, small town and rural — the party now holds just one truly urban congressional district in New York’s Staten Island. Democrats are now almost entirely urban and multi-ethnic. The habits of a normal democracy in which the losing party forms a loyal opposition are vanishing.
“Is America heading for Civil War?”| FT Books Essay
Davos out of touch shock
Rana Foroohar of the FT thinks the global elite are failing fast:
If the rich don’t give a bit more today, they may have to give a lot more tomorrow. That was my conclusion from last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos. I came away feeling that the 0.1 per cent was more out of touch with the state of the world than it has ever been in the 20-odd years I’ve attended the conference.
[…]
Davos isn’t the problem — although it’s certainly not the solution. But the annual jamboree is a high-profile measure of the fact that despite all the talk over the past several decades about stakeholder capitalism and “doing well by doing good”, the state of the world isn’t improving.
FT | Talk of doing good rings hollow among global elite
Gen Z Guns
The 18-year-old killer who carried out the Texas School shooting last month got his guns from a company that targets young people with Call-of-Duty references and pay-later schemes.
Some of its advertisements invoke popular video games like “Call of Duty” and feature “Star Wars” characters and Santa Claus, messages that are likely to appeal to teenagers. The company was an early adopter of a direct-to-consumer business model that aimed to make buying military gear as simple as ordering from Amazon, enticing customers with “adventure now, pay later” installment plans that make expensive weaponry more affordable.
New York Times | “Gun in Texas Shooting Came From Company Known for Pushing Boundaries”