Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Is the Future of Work Hybrid?

Marc Andreessen doesn’t think so. In fact, the venture capitalist titan makes the case that “hybrid” might bring together the worst elements work:

Maybe we shouldn’t try to have hybrid meetings. Maybe, in fact, hybrid meetings are the exact wrong idea. Maybe they’re the wrong idea because, maybe, instead of combining the best elements of being local and being remote, maybe they combine the worst elements of being local and being remote…I suspect the best-run companies over the next 10 years are not going to be the companies that are the best at hybrid. I suspect they’re going to be the best companies that are great at remote, or they’re going to be companies that take the choice of having people have actually a much deeper level of human interaction much more frequently. They’re going to push it on those extremes as compared to half-hour, hour-long meetings in the office.

2. Walking Around Hanoi

Chris Arnade’s diary of walking around Hanoi is a masterpiece of travel writing:

I was sitting at an outdoor bar on the edge of a smaller but equally busy road, the guest of, well everyone around me, doing cheers after cheers with strangers stripped by the heat to their shorts, being fed pig ears, corn-nuts, fish chunks, chickens feet, pigeon eggs, watching a 10 yr old girl, in an oversized “touch me, feel me, love me” t-shirt, expertly steer a moped onto the sidewalk, fill three old plastic Pepsi containers with Hanoi beer, somehow carry and balance them on the moped, before driving off to bring them back to her parents. Presumably.

Each paragraph, and the dozens of photos, capture how this buzzy city straddles past and future. One observation: "There are official markets in Hanoi, but they are only slightly denser versions of what takes place absolutely everywhere."

3. The State of Austin

“Austin is a mediocre city, but a great place to live,” writes David Perell. His summary will ring true with anyone who has visited:

Moving to Austin is the geographical equivalent of saying: “I don’t read the news anymore.” The people moving here are tired of others telling them what to think, which is why the people here are so much less likely to police your speech. That’s basically why I’ve stayed here too. I grew up in San Francisco and lived in New York, but became disillusioned with the intellectual homogeneity of both cities.

4. What We Got Wrong in Ukraine

Edward Luttwak – a political-military strategist, informal diplomat, defense expert, and colorful bon vivant – is a skeptic about the war in Ukraine. He blames both sides:

The military intelligence advisers both on the Russian side and the American side all belong to the same church. This church preaches “fourth-generation warfare,” hybrid warfare, postmodern information warfare – all new stuff, praised as nonkinetic...The important point is this. The Americans believed this mumbo-jumbo just the same as the Russians did. They all believed this nonsense, because none of them has real combat experience. They don’t know things. They were completely wrong about warfare.

Interesting side note. Luttwak also makes a case about the role of “intellectual achievement and smoking.” He elaborates: “One book I’ve never written, is ‘The Impact of the Arrival of Nicotine and the Scientific Revolution.’ A big jump in intellectual achievement took place among Europeans, all of whom smoked. The social history of nicotine begins with the sharpening of the brain. I stopped smoking long ago but still I miss it.”

5. Stanford Drives Out Fun

Palladium Magazine has launched a withering attack on Stanford University’s alleged strategy to destroy the informal chaos and non-conformity that was once the hallmark of the campus. “For a time,” the article notes, “Stanford experienced a brief golden age when a spontaneous, socially permissive culture combined with a class of 5%-acceptance rate baby geniuses.” No more:

What happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus. In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogenous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.

6. The Myth of YouTube Radicalization

A new research paper looks at whether YouTube’s algorithm is responsible for pushing its users down extremist, ideological rabbit holes. The research doesn’t support the theory:

[Our research] addresses public concerns with recommendation algorithms, finding little evidence to support the claims made in the popular press that the YouTube recommendation system systematically leads the average user to extremist content. To be very clear, this is not to suggest that YouTube is not a repository of extremist content that interested users can find through search functions, but rather that solely focusing on the recommendation algorithm may be missing the primary avenues by which individuals encounter extreme content on YouTube.

The paper concludes with another surprise: “YouTube pushes all users, regardless of ideology, towards moderately conservative and an increasingly narrow range of ideological content the longer they follow YouTube’s recommendations.”Websites Worth Reading

Real Clear Science - Five Facts About Time: When things happened

Axios’s labor market blog: Change in Jobs Over 2 Years

The Grumpy Economist: The state of academic economics

Feeds We Follow

@emollick: Thread on ethnic names in the US

@TennisReporters: Matt Cronin’s Wimbledon feed

@ZeroStarReviews: Memorable negative reviews