Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Merkel’s Anesthetic

Constanze Stelzenmüller blows up the idea that politicians need charisma. She offers a character study of departing Chancellor Angela Merkel, focusing on the German leader’s mastery of unpretentiousness, which “is itself a calculated expression of power”:

One of the most distinctive features of Merkel’s method is her anti-oratorical speaking style, which anesthetizes commentators and diplomats alike. She can deliver devastating zingers in a parliamentary debate or an interview when she wants to. When a talk-show host once portentously asked her what qualities she associated with Germany, Merkel dryly answered, “Well-sealed windows.” But her default delivery mode is what Germans now call merkeln: so deadpan and convoluted that it’s impossible to pin her down. Behind the style, however, is what German strategists have called “asymmetric demobilization”: dull the issues, depoliticize conflicts, and thus keep the opponent’s voters from going to the polls.

2. Parkin' in California

Donald Shoup, professor of urban planning at UCLA, is a foremost expert in parking. He is also the rare academic who writes with wit. The latest example is a letter he wrote supporting legislation to end the state-mandated requirement for free parking at all new housing developments in California, even if public transit is nearby:

Most California cities seem willing to pay any price and bear any burden to assure the survival of free parking. But do people really want free parking more than affordable housing, clean air, walkable neighborhoods, and a sustainable planet? A city where everyone happily pays for everyone else’s free parking is a fool’s paradise.

Planning for parking is an ad-hoc talent learned on the job and is more a political activity than a professional skill. Despite a lack of theory and data, planners have managed to set parking requirements for hundreds of land uses in thousands of cities—the Ten Thousand Commandments for off-street parking.

3. Software Intellectuals

The Baffler takes aim at “the philosopher-VC” and the pomposity of Silicon Valley’s most preposterous poseurs. Targets include Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, but also Ale Resnik:

A bright young business failure who’s rapidly making waves as one of the pluckiest new voices on the VC intellectual scene. Resnik took $149 million in funding for Beepi, his car rental startup, ran the company into the ground, then failed up into a job as “founder in residence” at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, before tripping into the CEO’s seat at Belong, a company that is “hard at work making Renting Meet Love.”

What does it mean to be “hard at work making Renting Meet Love”? Nothing, most people would assume, but the ostensible idiocy of this slogan is also its brilliance, since it acts as a signal to like-minded iconoclasts in the VC community that here, at Belong, truly revolutionary ideas are forming. No one wants to make Renting Meet Love! And this is precisely why we must, as a species, make Renting Meet Love.

Resnik has leveraged this rich portfolio of inadequacy into a place at the top table of Silicon Valley philosophers.

4. “Come you back to Mandalay!”

When British Prime Minister Boris Johnson casually recited a few lines from Rudyard Kipling’s "Mandalay" while visiting Burma a few years ago, he was scolded by The Guardian for being “pro colonial.” In The Critic, economist Todd G. Buchholz rushes to the defense of the Kipling poem in a wonderful reassessment:

Kipling’s poem would be boring if it dwelled only on words that remind us of swinging hammocks. Instead, it quickly switches gears, asking whether we can hear the boats with “their paddles chunkin’ from Rangoon to Mandalay?” How many other writers would use the word “chunkin’ to describe the mini-crashes of a waterwheel? He then throws in a phrase later cited by the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, declaring that “the dawn comes up like thunder outer China ‘crost the Bay.” With paddles chunkin’ and dawn thundering, the poem shakes us from any slumber.

5. #OscarsSoDull

It was national sport this month to mock the 2021 Academy Awards. Rob Sheffield’s assessment of the event in Rolling Stone takes the usual digs, but also makes a canny observation:

The whole gala was a revelation of how rusty our culture has gotten at the whole “talking to other humans” thing. These are Hollywood entertainers, showbiz schmooze pros, yet it was sad to see them keep losing track of time in their bumbling speeches. If the glitterati have lost their internal boredom meters in quarantine, what hope is there for the rest of us?

6. But Is It Art?

Last month, an NFT (non-fungible token) sold for $69 million at Christie’s. Like cryptocurrency and shares in GameStop, NFTs are in a trading frenzy, but John Phipps of The Spectator isn’t buying it:

The situation is this. People are spending unfathomable amounts of money on worthless images whose presence in an auction house is justified by marketing blabber disguised as critical engagement. The people buying these objects are relatively uninterested in the images themselves, but are using them as a means of prospecting about future fluctuations in their resale value. Does that not sound just a little bit familiar?

Websites Worth Reading

Kathie Coblentz Blogs: History of spreadsheets

British Pathé: Timeless food at Augusta National

Google Earth Engine: NY Mag’s collection of student recommendations

Feeds We Follow

@patrickc: Re-living 1971

@PlacesJournal: London bookshop

@FailedArch: Cultural essayist