Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. 23, Me, and the Police

How did the FBI and local police identify Bryan Kohberger as the chief suspect in the Moscow, Idaho murders? According to this report in Slate, it was not video footage or cell phone tower data that broke the case, but “forensic genealogy”:

This is one of the most high-profile cases in which this relatively new, ethically contentious method has been used so soon after a crime has been committed, and it will likely influence how law enforcement approaches it going forward....Genealogists look for partial matches, hoping to find relatives within the third-cousin range. They then began the process of building an enormous family tree, using a vast array of public records and more-traditional detective work to create a short list of people within that tree who could plausibly be the suspect.

2. Three Day Work Week

The Economist identifies nearly two dozen words that will make “vital vocabulary” for business conversations in 2023. The list includes "TWaT cities":

Fears early in the covid-19 pandemic that people would never return to offices were misplaced. But so were hopes that people’s working habits would eventually return to normal. Instead many workers have fallen into a pattern of travelling to the office only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Cities are in denial about this trend, but in 2023 they will have to adapt to the “TWaTs”. Bars are packed on Thursday evenings as workers say farewell to each other; watering holes can adapt fairly easily by altering shift rotas. But offices will have to be more creative, either by reducing staffing or finding other uses for their spaces on quiet days. Public-transport operators will have to adjust, too.

3. Can Apple Get Out of China?

 An exhaustive report in The Financial Times details how Apple has spent nearly a decade trying to move some of its manufacturing out of China – with little success. The FT explains why:

The operations that Apple orchestrates are so complex and massive — including factory hubs the size of western cities in China — that it is not at all clear the world’s biggest company has any viable options to overhaul the way it rolls out $316bn worth of iGadgets each year. “Nobody comprehends the scale of Foxconn’s manufacturing efforts, until you see it with your own eyes,” says Brian Blair, a former tech analyst who has repeatedly toured the key Apple supplier’s facilities in China. “It’s like trying to describe New York City to a villager.”

The article pours cold water on the idea that India could be an alternative for large-scale tech manufacturing: “Pegatron and Foxconn may be moving there, says Steven Tseng, tech analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, but their suppliers are not. ‘There is no supply chain in India,’ he says. ‘They have to import pretty much everything from China.’”

4. No More Long Tail

In a profile of Bela Bajara, Netflix’s head of global television, The New Yorker goes deep into how the streaming giant changed its strategy for creating hits. Once prepared to wait a season or two to build viewership, “the company today has little patience for shows that don’t perform immediately.":

 In the early two-thousands, the author and entrepreneur Chris Anderson coined the term “the long tail” to describe the idea that the Internet was fracturing what was once a single mass culture into a “mass of niches,” so that the future of the entertainment industry lay not in producing megahits that please everyone but in catering to many distinct groups of avid fans. [Co-CEO Ted] Sarandos told me that Netflix has jettisoned that thinking. “There was this misnomer about the Internet all along,” he said. “There is no long tail without the big head.”

5. Writing a Book 2.0

Steve Sinovsky, a former Microsoft executive, turned down a six-figure advance to write a book about the evolution of software. Instead, he decided to publish on Substack. His first chapter makes a powerful case for why Substack is the future of business publishing:

It was as if writers sat down and came up with just the right set of features that writers would want—not every feature right away, but it was obvious from the start that was the point of reference. By virtue of when I started, I ended up on the front lines of most new Substack features along the way, often trying to incorporate them into the ongoing storytelling. Substack added video, audio, embedding PDF attachments. Later Substack added incredibly effective community features for recommendation and discovery of other related works, which was a wonderful two-way street where many people were introduced to my writing by reading other sites about the history of computing, technology management, or related fields.

6. Tokyo Traffic School

Is Japan “the poster child of efficiency” or a bloated bureaucracy? A reporter for the BBC weighs the question from the waiting room of a Tokyo DMV:

When I renewed my Japanese driving license, the exquisitely polite staff shuttled me from eye test to photo booth to fee payment and then asked me to report to "lecture room 28". These "safety" lectures are compulsory for anyone who's had a traffic infraction in the previous five years…As it droned in to its second hour several of my classmates fell asleep. The man next to me completed a rather fine sketch of Tokyo tower.

"What's the point of it?" I asked my Japanese colleague when I got back to the office. "It's punishment, right?"

"No," she said laughing. "It's a job creation scheme for retired traffic cops."

Websites Worth Reading

The Cabinet of Wikipedian Curiosities: Strange Wikipedia Curiosities

Beijing Channel: What books sit on Xi’s shelf?

Visual Capitalist: Animated map of US population growth

Feeds We Follow

@ivyxvine: More ChatGPT tools

@danwwang: Thoughts from veteran Asian diplomat

@LevAkabas: Sports and data