The Bubonic Plague: Those Were the Days
Every month, High Lantern Group gathers a small list of interesting, provocative, and contrarian items that shed light on what makes great strategic positioning and thought leadership. We are happy to share them with you - and hear from you about ideas worth sharing.
Six Ideas That Made Us Think
1. The Bubonic Plague: Those Were the Days
Historian Simon Schama examines the social impact of pandemics. He starts with the bubonic plague, reviewing 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys’s musings as he makes his way through London: “I have never lived so merrily…as I have done this plague time.” The merriment wouldn’t last:
Pepys took it hard when one of his favourite taverns, The Angell on Tower Hill, in common with many others, closed. He and many like him exemplified Aristotle’s conviction that humans are, above all else, social animals; and that the vital energy of cities in particular comes from gatherings — in public squares, theatres, sports stadiums — where, through some collective elixir of attentive enthusiasm, individuals are lifted by the (not invariably) benign excitement of the crowd.
2. Full Metal
Longing for an outdoor escape? You might think twice after reading Will Bardenwerper’s description of his experience with the grueling test for aspiring Army Rangers:
A lifelong athlete, I reported to Camp Rogers in excellent physical condition, but I struggled to graduate. Ranger School almost broke the competitive drive I’d had my whole life. During Mountain Phase, I failed a knots test, and I ended up getting marooned at Camp Merrill for around five weeks, doing menial labor until I could “recycle” into the next class and try again. Eventually I made it through, but after that first failure I wanted to quit.
3. The Banality of COVID-19
In less than two months, the advertising industry has turned the pain of the pandemic into a series of advertising clichés. Some genius has captured the hackneyed, cringe-worthy tropes in three minutes of a YouTube video. A must watch.
4. Will Coronavirus Kill the Combustion Engine?
Dan Neil is the only “gear head” to win a Pulitzer prize. The car reviewer is normally content to spin prose around “silk-smooth dual-clutch seven-speed transaxle with multi-mode torque vectoring.” But this month he devotes a Rumble Seat column to the policy implications of fewer cars on the road. VW, he argues, points to the future:
The company has committed $50 billion to electrification, including new vehicle platforms and battery factories, like the one under construction in Tennessee. Meanwhile, technical development of IC platforms and powertrains has all but stopped. What you are seeing on dealer lots now is effectively obsolete. With the bottom falling out of the market, legacy car makers don’t need help defending the rump of a failing business model. They need help selling EVs.
5. Tulip Craze, Revisited
Bloomberg Businessweek looks at the decline of the global flower trade. Yes, weddings, restaurants, and various celebrations have been cancelled. But the disruption to a global supply chain that runs from Africa to Holland to everywhere is staggering:
The auctions are run by a cooperative, Royal FloraHolland, formed a century ago by a group of growers who met in a pub and devised a system to better control how their flowers were sold. Royal FloraHolland now runs four auction sites that handle the bulk of the global trade. Its facility in Aalsmeer, a concrete warehouse larger than 75 soccer fields, is one of the biggest buildings in Europe…The average day sees more than 100,000 transactions. Most of the flowers end up elsewhere in Europe, in under 12 hours.
6. Who’s Calling?
Daphne Merkin, writing in The New York Review of Books, tries to rekindle the romance of phone calls in an era before everyone was on camera. She succeeds:
Think of the centrality of the telephone in movies like Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), in which James Stewart, playing a photographer confined to a wheelchair by a broken leg, is forced to do much of his communication by phone—including to call the police to rescue Grace Kelly’s character, Lisa. Or of the heart-stopping calls made by the deranged and homicidal Jessica Walter to Clint Eastwood in Play Misty for Me (1971). Indeed, there was a time when talking on the phone, at least in films, had a somewhat sensuous quality to it—almost as sexy-seeming as smoking.
Websites Worth Reading
Tape Measures: How we mark social distance
Smithsonian's Sound of the Office: A nostalgic office soundtrack
Cancelled Conferences: Where MLK, The Boss, Tolstoy and others worked
Feeds We Follow
@ratemyskyperoom: Home office reviews
@LastDanceBulls: Stay connected between episodes
@UWVirology: University of Washington’s virology team