December 2021

Weekend Reads

This week on the Lindy Newsletter I discuss the origins of casual culture. Language is evolving, you can hear it for yourself in the office with certain phrases, but there is also convergence in how people speak:

I also write about the informality movement and much, much more.

It's remark

A new article in the Atlantic discusses if America is out of good ideas. I think people are just bored. Compared to the 2000s and 2010s it seems like there is less innovation. Much more significant, we have smartphones and technology which deliver fast dopamine and make everything easy. People are getting ADHD-like symptoms and becoming desensitized to everything. They want novelty and intense stimulation. Events like the Capitol Insurrection, GME / cryptocurrency “lottery”, off-the-rails politicians - those provide novelty and intense stimulation. Even if it never happens, the idea of a global apocalypse itself is capturing people’s attention.

If you are online a lot and follow "New Urbanism" type accounts on twitter you'd think NIMBYs are a minority. Turns out, in a recent study that a large majority of people are NIMBYs. Generally, New Urbanists are correct on a lot of things. US development post Euclidean zoning has been a nightmare. America had a brief love affair with the city beautiful movement and almost every beloved American neighborhood was built during this time.

The postwar-zoning paradigm gave power to cars and planners. It made life easy, aesthetically banal, and very functional. However this suburban world rapidly went off trend in the late 90’s. James Howard Kunstler is American suburbanism’s greatest critic.

We were given Truman show new urbanism as a solution. It didn’t catch on because there was too much mono culture architecturally and building entire towns all at once is weird and inorganic.

Now we’re at the worst phase of US development. We’ve taken the sprawl suburbs and tried to retrofit mixed use density on top of multi lane road-highways….

The pre war model worked really well. It seems politically impossible to reestablish because voters want too much of a say

I went to Italy this year and used nothing but trains to go all over Italy. I went from Rome-Venice-Florence (from there to Pisa and Cinque Terre back to Florence)-Naples. Really felt good not having to worry about parking and driving in a foreign country.

Pay toilets are common in Europe but uncommon in the United States. Pay toilets also are cleaner. It's a good system for everyone. I don't mind paying 1-2 bucks instead of having to go into a store. Sophie House writing at City Lab explains why. Pay toilets were made illegal in much of the United States in the 1970s. In 1970 there were some 50,000 pay toilets in America and by 1980 there were almost none. 

A nice tip on whether or not to escalate an argument with someone...

Scientists who injected idle mice with blood from athletic mice found improvements in learning and memory. A new study in which researchers injected sedentary mice with blood from mice that ran for miles on exercise wheels, and found that the sedentary mice then did better on tests of learning and memory.

A group will never admit they were wrong. A group will never admit, “We made a mistake,” because a group that tries to change its mind falls apart. I’m hard pressed to find examples in history of large groups that said, “We thought A, but the answer’s actually B.”

I think the essay is strongly written. In my experience with groups, part of the problem was that those who disagreed with the group were purged out of the group one way or another, either because they chose to exit out of disgust or because they were driven away, or something in between. So there was a "survivorship bias" in the group, where "surviving" sort of meant staying with the group.

Why do retaining walls collapse?

Bros., Lecce: The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever. Wondering why anyone would subject himself to this, I had to think about John Cleese, who had a truly bad hotel while filming Monthy Python. The rest of the crew ran away, but he actually decided to ask his wife to come over. Together they wrote down every atrocity the owner did to his guests. They wrote the script of Fawlty towers based on this experience.

Interviewing for jobs is probably one of the most important skills you can learn in life. It gets you into the door at companies and the right job can change your life trajectory. This article discusses an underrated part of interviews: scheduling.

I have a few as well:

- You will face rejection (likely a lot). Don't take this personally and don't let it affect your confidence.

- Unless you are an outstanding interviewee, this is like a skill/muscle which you need to develop and practice. Hence ensure that you don't schedule your "dream job/company" early in the process. Keep practicing.

- Always have a beginner / practice mindset. Otherwise, you will accept the first (suboptimal) offer that you get as you will hate the interview rigmarole. Interviewing is annoying / painful. Accept it and work through it.

- Keep applying and talking to companies even after you have started negotiations. There have been companies which have told me that another candidate accepted before me( and hence the position is no longer available) even when they have "granted me time" to make my decision. Similarly companies rescind offers.

- Blowing hot(too many interviews in a short while) and cold (no interviews / interviews for a while) can be debilitating to your confidence. Hence ensure that you have a pipeline of interviews so you are talking to at least 1 company a week.

Music

It was the D Chord heard around the world. Snarling, guttural — the opening of the 1958 instrumental “Rumble” instantly expanded the guitar’s vocabulary. The half Shawnee son of husband-and-wife backwoods preachers had introduced the power chord, playing both the guitar and its amplifier. A teenaged Paul McCartney had the “Rumble” 45 taped to his record player. Pete Townshend said he wouldn’t have ever picked up the guitar if he hadn’t heard the record. It’s from the power chord and its capacity for menace that we get both heavy metal and punk rock. “Rumble” — an instrumental — was banned in some radio markets. As he was creating the song, Link Wray’s hope was that people would dance to it.