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What I’m reading

A few reads for your weekend.

The One Device [book]

The story of the iPhone and how it came to be and a story that is two decades in the making. The retirement of Ive from Apple earlier this year marked a turning point: he was the last executive from the original iPhone team to leave the firm.

Insta Novels

In August 2018, Instagram followers of the New York Public Library were tapping through their Insta Stories when something unexpected showed up: the full text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, designed for a small screen, with small animations that brought the story to life as you flipped.

“Anywhere people want to read is fine by us,” says Richert Schnorr, the director of digital media at the NYPL. “We’re happy to meet people where they are.”

Four Years in Startups

San Francisco was tipping into a full-blown housing crisis. Real-estate brochures offered building owners enticements to flip. “Hi, neighbor!” they chirped. “We have considered and ready buyers eager to invest in your neighborhood.” There was a lot of discussion, particularly among the entrepreneurial class, about city-building. Everyone was reading “The Power Broker”—or, at least, reading summaries of it. Armchair urbanists blogged about Jane Jacobs and discovered Haussmann and Le Corbusier. They fantasized about special economic zones. An augmented-reality engineer proposed a design to combat homelessness which looked strikingly like doghouses. Multiple startups raised money to build communal living spaces in neighborhoods where people were getting evicted for living in communal living spaces.

There was a running joke that the tech industry was simply reinventing commodities and services that had long existed. Cities everywhere were absorbing these first-principles experiments. An online-only retailer of eyeglasses found that shoppers appreciated getting their eyes checked; a startup selling luxury stationary bicycles found that its customers liked to cycle alongside other people. The online superstore opened a bookstore, the shelves adorned with printed customer reviews and data-driven signage: “Highly rated: 4.8 stars & above.” Stores like these shared a certain ephemerality, a certain snap-to-grid style. They seemed to emerge overnight: white walls and rounded fonts and bleacher seating, matte simulacra of a world they had replaced.

Software margins

If the product is software and thus can produce software gross margins (75% or greater), then it should be valued as a software company.

If the product is something else and cannot produce software gross margins then it needs to be valued like other similar businesses with similar margins, but maybe at some premium to recognize the leverage it can get through software.

Navigating NYC schools

The mood of meritocracy is anxiety—the low-grade panic when you show up a few minutes late and all the seats are taken. New York City, with its dense population, stratified social ladder, and general pushiness, holds a fun-house mirror up to meritocracy. Only New York would force me to wake up early one Saturday morning in February, put on my parka and wool hat, and walk half a mile in the predawn darkness to register our son, then just 17 months old, for nursery school. I arrived to find myself, at best, the 30th person in a line that led from the locked front door of the school up the sidewalk. Registration was still two hours off, and places would be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis. At the front of the line, parents were lying in sleeping bags. They had spent the night outside.

I stood waiting in the cold with a strange mix of feelings. I hated the hypercompetitive parents who made everyone’s life more tense. I feared that I’d cheated our son of a slot by not rising until the selfish hour of 5:30. And I worried that we were all bound together in a mad, heroic project that we could neither escape nor understand, driven by supreme devotion to our own child’s future. All for a nursery school called Huggs.

Apple Maps’ expansion

Beautifully tracked progress of Maps’ latest updates in the U.S.

Working [Caro’s latest; excerpt]

I will never forget that night. It was the first time I had ever gone through files. The official met me at the front door and led me to a room with a conference table in the middle, and, on the table, high stacks of file folders. And somehow, in a strange way, sitting there going through them, I felt at home. As I went through the memos and the letters and the minutes of meetings, I could see a pattern emerging, revealing the real reason that the agency wanted the field to become a civilian airport: executives of corporations with offices on Long Island, who seemed to be quite friendly with the F.A.A. officials, wanted to be able to fly in and out of Long Island on their company planes without the inconvenience of having to drive to Idlewild or LaGuardia. I kept looking for a piece of paper on which someone came right out and said that, but I didn’t find one; everything I could find talked around that point. But between all the pieces of paper I found sentences and paragraphs that, taken together, made the point clear.

There are certain moments in your life when you suddenly understand something about yourself. I loved going through those files, making them yield their secrets to me. And here was a particular and fascinating secret: that corporate executives were persuading a government agency to save them some driving time at the expense of a poor kid getting an education and a better chance in life. Each discovery I made that helped to prove that was a thrill. I don’t know why raw files affect me that way. In part, perhaps, it’s because they are closer to reality, to genuineness—not filtered, cleaned up, through press releases or, years later, in books. I worked all night, but I didn’t notice the passing of time. When I finished and left the building on Sunday, the sun was coming up, and that was a surprise. I went back to the office, and before driving home I wrote a memo on what I had found.

Change of space, change of pace

After five years, I moved out of our SoHo office, 13 Crosby. There was a part of me that didn’t want to, but sometimes you have to shake things up a bit – get a change of pace and perspective. So, we’re going to take a bit of a break from a dedicated space and start exploring ideas in new ways.

As we got closer to the end of our lease, everyone, including me of course, went through their own rollercoaster of emotions. That’s what happens after five years of work in a home away from home. Colleagues, alumni, nearly everyone from our now extended network of 270 people (or so our Slack says) reached out to share an anecdote or something they loved and they’ll miss about it. One friend summarized it best: “That office touched and supported so many! Thank you for you and it supporting me on my own entrepreneurial journey.” No matter how you came through this space, it has no doubt helped shape some part of your work and your future.

We will get another space at some point soon, but in the meantime, I’m trying to get into the open-ended nature of remote work. I think the change of place, the bumping-into-people-in-new-neighborhoods, the serendipity will lead to big, new ideas.

I’ve been hopping between different startup offices. Ideally, I’d like to try to pick a spot that I can hang out in for a week or so (and set up meetings and all that around it for the week). In return, I’m going to try to help the startup there if I can and if it can also help inspire new ideas, then all the better. If you have a startup or founder I should hang with, hit me up! And yes, I’ll leave SoHo. 🙂

Above, an overhead shot of our office.

What I’m reading

Always have to love an interview with Matt from WordPress – and WP picking up Tumblr (which I was very active on from the very beginning: first as a links-blog, then as a photoblog).

Got to spend a bit of time with Om this week while he was in town and we caught dinner at Chez Ma Tante.

WordPress x Tumblr and the open web

I want to create a place on the web, which is fun and supportive and substantial. You’re an old-school web user. At one point, blogging had a real magic to it. A frisson. You’d have blog rolls and links and people would follow and comment and you’d keep up with things and it was a really, really nice social network. But it also was totally distributed and people had their own designs, and all those sorts of things. I think we can bring some of that back and reimagine it in the mobile world which is where Tumblr is also super strong.

Got to see Om in New York in the Summer

Back in my (current) hometown, I saunter. Here, like a pitcher who suddenly finds a reserve of energy in the middle of the season, my pace picks up. I smell the summer as I move. You know the smell of New York: a heady blend of stench from the gutters, cigarette smoke, and sidewalk stalls selling everything from hotdogs to kebabs. It’s the strong smell of hustle. And apparently, the Mayor has declared Le Labo Santal 33 the official fragrance of the season.

Neil Young

If you want to envision how Young feels about the possibility of having to listen to not only his music but also American jazz, rock ’n’ roll and popular song via our dominant streaming formats, imagine walking into the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Musée d’Orsay one morning and finding that all of the great canvases in those museums were gone and the only way to experience the work of Gustave Courbet or Vincent van Gogh was to click on pixelated thumbnails.

But Young hears something creepier and more insidious in the new music too. We are poisoning ourselves with degraded sound, he believes, the same way that Monsanto is poisoning our food with genetically engineered seeds. The development of our brains is led by our senses; take away too many of the necessary cues, and we are trapped inside a room with no doors or windows. Substituting smoothed-out algorithms for the contingent complexity of biological existence is bad for us, Young thinks. He doesn’t care much about being called a crank. “It’s an insult to the human mind and the human soul,” he once told Greg Kot of The Chicago Tribune. Or as Young put it to me, “I’m not content to be content.”

The tigress T-27

For centuries, Indian nabobs and the British elite hunted tigers for sport; an estimated 80,000 tigers were killed between 1875 and 1925 alone. By 1972, when Indira Gandhi outlawed hunting and began setting aside land for tiger sanctuaries, barely 1,800 animals remained in the wild. Since then, India has established 50 sanctuaries and waged a concerted battle against poachers, who supply tiger bones to the Chinese medicine trade. Today there are an estimated 2,200 tigers in India, and the number is on the rise.

;

The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly. Texts (both handwritten and printed) record the testing-out and tinkering-with of punctuation by the fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a “cultural rebirth” after the gloomy Middle Ages. In the service of these two goals, humanists published new writing and revised, repunctuated, and reprinted classical texts.

Uninhabitable

This conversation brought to life one of the bigger challenges of the climate crisis: the fact that we all have to change, but each of us in different ways.

Cool tools

A few new cool tools in my kit. I was reminded to post some new favorites by a colleague at work, who came over to see what I had on my desk that was the latest-and-greatest.

• FYI – a Chrome extension to help you search your documents across services (I wrote about this in Use FYI last year).
• Woven – I still love Fantastical on desktop, but I have been trying this new calendar by an ex-Facebook team. The main reason it caught my attention is because it does a pretty good job of scanning my email to auto-suggest potential meetings and meeting invites – you can create, invite, add conferencing information, location and all that with a couple of clicks, and don’t have to copy-and-paste emails and figure out open times and timezones and all that.
• Clockwise – I’ve been using this calendar helper to block off “Focus Time” in my calendar. It automatically marks off two-hour-or-longer blocks during the work day so that I can get stuff done. It suggests moving potential meetings around so that you can have a distinct separation between Maker’s Schedule & Manager’s Schedule and get more of these two-hour blocks in your work week.
• Flighty – A beautifully done flight tracker app that I started using mainly because a bunch of others were talking about it on Twitter last week. I also really miss Dopplr and the stats on flights it used to give you. (Someone needs to rebuild a proper Tripit+Dopplr service where you can not only track your itinerary, but where you can learn from your friends as well.)
• MarineTraffic – I love boats, so when I was at the Spotify office high up in downtown Manhattan (as well as on a brief trip to the Mediterranean last month), I used it to look up what ships were what and where they were going and all that geeky stuff.

Also see: some new discoveries from last year.

Send-to-Kindle from Chrome

I came across Postlight’s Mercury Reader not too long ago. It’s great for improving the readability of long articles and essays online. Soon after, I also found out that it can send such pages to Kindle! This is a really cool hack to be able to read long reads from the web on your Kindle, with all the nice formatting and fonts that you’re already used to.

The Parser behind their reader is now open-source too, which I thought was cool.

Related: Amazon also has a Send-to-Kindle via Chrome extension, but it doesn’t seem to work as well for me.

Newsletters and the Inbox as our News Feed

All of a sudden, it seems just about everyone is either a) starting a newsletter or b) bragging that they started a newsletter back in 2012. (“I sent one before it was cool.”)

The move towards email newsletters has been going on for a while. Not sure the initial trigger that kicked off the conversation this past week. In one corner, maybe it was the good Craig Mod post “Oh God, It’s Raining Newsletters”. It’s newsletters once more because email is an open system that no one owns, a do-what-you-will-with-it bit of freedom from the big tech giants. We’re “leaning on an open, beautifully staid, inert protocol. SMTP [is] our savior.”

Underneath the trend:

• We’ve all been wanting away from the social platforms and the noise they bring: Email allows the writer to feel as if they’re writing in “Distraction-Free Mode”: they’re writing only for you. They don’t have to go into a platform to see everyone else’s thoughts before contributing their own. Curating links and writing thoughts takes time, and the writer better do a good job, lest they get unsubscribed. On the other side, when someone else reads it, their interface also is “Distraction-Free”: it only shows the writer’s note by itself, one-email-at-a-time — tap in to read it and swipe back to list;
• We crave owning our data, not just content, but fans & followers as well – their emails, the ability to start a new conversation directly with them, leaving it to the individual to determine whether to respond, block or share you;
• We want some sort of decentralization, whatever that means for who you are and what you care about: no middlemen taking a cut; no central authority in charge; no algorithms getting in the way and determining who and what gets seen; no bad actors getting between your content and your fans;
• We crave direct access to numbers – engagement, opens, replies – not the algorithms and what the central players decide – but what end readers care about. The readers are the ones opening your emails and sharing them based on how good your writing is.

To me, none of this is any different than all of us slowly starting up (or restarting) our blogs again. It’s a way to get back to owning our own destinies once more: brand & design, domain names & URLs, followers & micro-communities.

With our social feeds being so polluted these days, combined with the fact that we no longer have easy ways to subscribe to specific people and feeds through well-designed feed readers, we have no place else to go. The inbox has become the feed reader by default, as it used to be before we had RSS, readers, social feeds and the like. We’ve gone full circle to where we started, and there are many things broken about it (e.g., discovery), but it’s a move towards something better.