Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Life of a Salesman

Arthur Miller got it wrong. Or so you might conclude from this gripping New Yorker profile of Sam Taggart, the swaggering, hyperconfident founder of D2D Experts – a company that trains thousands of door-to-door salespeople. In the era of ecommerce, knocking on doors is making a comeback:

The boom was fueled in part by the advent of the national “Do Not Call” list, in 2003, which dampened phone solicitation, and in part by the very information glut that helped cripple door-to-door in the first place. To deter customers from doing research—to reconstruct the gloriously profitable world of information asymmetry—companies need to catch them unawares. Who among us, when we answer the door, has any inkling of the actual cost of a treatment for ants, roaches, and mice in a three-thousand-square-foot house? Shopping online is about finding the best price; shopping on your doorstep is about being bowled over by someone with all the answers.

The article also contains powerful sales gems, like the Instant Reverse Close: “When the customer raises a powerful objection – ‘We don’t need home security, because we’re moving out next month’ – Taggart replies, ‘That’s exactly why you do need it!’

2. Unbreakable Steel

If you think Danielle Steel – the pulp-romance, supermarket novelist of the 1980s and 1990s – is some aging has-been, think again. The LA Review of Books offers a revealing profile of Steel, exploring how she became one of the most successful writers in history, even as the publishing industry consolidated and killed the careers of independent novelists like her:

Something unsettling has happened to Steel. For the first couple decades, she published one or two novels most years. From 1997 through 2014, she plateaued at a steady three. In 2015, she ticked up to four. Then, in 2016, an alarming six. She’s done six or seven annually since. That’s a novel every 50 days or so for a woman now 74 years old.

3. Antigen Tests: “Dangerous to Public Health”

Before it was fashionable, Larry Brilliant was America’s most influential epidemiologist. In his latest discussion about COVID with Wired, he argues that rapid tests are doing harm:

Antigen tests are great at the back end of the disease when you’re trying to determine if you’re still infectious. But they're terrible for the first two days, when the rate of false negatives is so high. Between the false negatives and the fact that they don’t report into public health, antigen tests are dangerous to the public health.

4. Kareem on Russell

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar offers a poignant tribute to the late NBA legend Bill Russell. Abdul-Jabbar praises Russell’s pioneering defensive style – and his longtime public activism. Even though they led “two long lives that intertwined for six decades,” it was their first meeting, when Abdul-Jabbar was a young upstart and Russell a star, that stuck with him:

They say you should never meet your heroes. That it’s mostly disappointing, disillusioning, or disheartening. But that wasn’t my experience. I was thrilled. He spoke to me. And I thought I saw in his eyes a recognition of someone, like him, who had a passion for the game that burned deep and hot and bright.

Or maybe that’s what I wanted to see.

Either way, it fueled me to strive harder to be more like him.

5. Nolan Bushnell’s Game

Sequoia, the venture capital giant, looks back on the achievements of Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and inventor of Pong. The breadth of Bushnell’s accomplishments in early tech is astonishing:

As a young man Bushnell also made a ham radio, a speaker phone, a rudimentary neighborhood telephone network and a system of lights on his bedroom ceiling that would illuminate during storms. Later, he would invent the world’s first functional car navigation system a full decade before the advent of GPS.

6. Has Audible Become a Monopoly?

Cory Doctorow loves audiobooks. And hates Audible. His online screed against the audiobook retailer – and the policy labyrinth of Digital Rights Management – captures the zeitgeist of vilifying anything with the whiff of monopoly. His case against Audible is not entirely persuasive, but it’s a piercing look under the company’s hood:

In the years since the Amazon acquisition, Audible has become the 800-pound gorilla of audiobooks. They have done all kinds of underhanded things – like buying up the first couple books in a series and releasing them as Audible-only recordings, then refusing to record the rest of the series, orphaning it. They're also notorious among narrators for squeezing their hourly rates lower than anyone else. Audible also refuses to sell into libraries, so all the "Audible Original" titles are blocked from our public library systems.

Websites Worth Reading

Salman Rushdie’s 1996 Commencement Speech: Worth re-reading after the attack

How to Walk Around London: What to see, and how to see it

Failed Architecture: As an infographic

Feeds We Follow

@drfPrivman: A legend retires from Daily Racing Forumg

@culturaltutor: Cultural lessons by tweet

@shellykittleson: Veteran Middle East reporter