Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Welcome to the Office of the Future

If you didn’t like cubicles or open offices, brace yourself for what’s next:

Sensors are all the rage. Sensors in chairs measure how long workers are at their desks. Sensors in the floor measure when and how they move. Sensors in RFID badges and smartphones track where they go. Sensors (in the form of video cameras) track whom they are with. Panasonic has added WiFi sensors to lighting systems, which can monitor face-to-face interactions across entire buildings and workplaces.

2. Staying in the Picture

The Hollywood Reporter "floods the zone" in collecting reminiscences about inimitable Hollywood mogul, Robert Evans, who died this week. Although his career probably peaked with The Godfather and Chinatown, Evans was kept on the Paramount payroll until this past summer:

At the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, following the premiere of The Kid Stays in the Picture, the documentary about his career (and the title of his 1994 autobiography), Evans was asked what single thing he would change about his life. "The second half," he answered.

At the other end of the Hollywood spectrum was journeyman actor Robert Forster, who played bail bondsman Max Cherry, the character that made Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Before Forster died earlier this month, he described the long trough of his acting career:

"I went 21 months without a job. I had four kids, I took any job I could get,” Forster told the Chicago Tribune in 2018, raising and then lowering his hand to indicate his fortunes. "My career went like this for five years and then like that for 27. Every time it reached a lower level I thought I could tolerate, it dropped some more, and then some more. Near the end I had no agent, no manager, no lawyer, no nothing. I was taking whatever fell through the cracks."

3. What If We Like Being Polarized?

Jonathan Rauch offers an original take on the political tensions that roil the country (and disrupt many families at Thanksgiving). Polarization may not, he argues, be about politics or ideology:

What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything? To put the point in a less metaphysical way, what if tribalism as such, not ideological disagreement, is behind much or even most of the rise of polarization? What if emotional identification with a partisan team is driving ideology, more than the other way around?

4. America’s Best Search Engine

Michael Lewis begins his essay looking for federal employees who aren’t considered “essential” during government shutdowns. In the process, he stumbles upon on a peculiar corner of expertise and continuous improvement in the Coast Guard that reminds us why and how American government still works:

The history of search and rescue at sea is mostly the story of people neither being searched for nor being rescued. For most of human history, lost at sea meant gone for good…The United States had always been a leader in search and rescue; our country has made more of a priority than any other of saving its citizens at sea. If you were lost at sea there was never much of a question which country you wanted to have looking for you.

5. I Hear You

Buried in Alex Danco’s rambling blog post about why audio has emerged as the most important form of social media, there’s an interesting observation about the difference between hearing arguments and watching them on video:

There’s a famous story about the Nixon-Kennedy debates that I misunderstood for a long time. Following a presidential debate between Richard Nixon and JFK, those who had listened over the radio overwhelmingly felt that Nixon had won, whereas those who watched on TV felt that JFK won. I remember originally hearing this story and thinking that the point was somehow that TV was more “superficial” than radio, and that JFK’s handsome face or easy on-screen charm somehow overruled the debate’s substance on TV but not on the radio.

I’ve now come to understand that this wasn’t the point at all. The lesson has nothing to do with the content of what either of them were saying. The content doesn’t matter. What matters is that Nixon was a Hot candidate: sharp, saturated with information, abrasive, and in your face. But JFK was a Cool candidate: relaxed, speaking easy, in slogans that invited multiple interpretations, creating plenty of gaps for the audience to fill in themselves.

6. The Devil Ate Cheetos

Reeves Wiedeman’s juicy narrative about the decline of Conde Nast, the once-grand publisher of Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, and Architectural Digest, is a study of how management loses touch with reality. Of the many missteps Wiedeman recounts, the most pitch perfect is his description of how the publisher’s trendy new overlords tried to bring its tech and creative functions into a single “hub” called Co/Lab:

In an attempt to compete with tech-company perks, the 33rd floor, home to Co/Lab, had couches, Ping-Pong tables, and excellent snacks. “Word got out,” one employee told me. “They had seltzer, string cheese, good beer, packets of hummus and guacamole, Chex Mix. There were containers of walnuts and almonds and those really good pretzel chips.” Editorial employees started making their way from other floors “like ants marching up and down.” One Co/Lab staffer told me New Yorker fact-checkers often appeared on Friday afternoons to stuff their backpacks with beer. It created a new social dynamic in which certain developers now identified themselves as a higher caste in much the same way Vanity Fair and Vogue staff used to look down at their counterparts at Details and Brides. Some developers started to complain about the encroachment by the proletariat. “It turned into this weird French Revolution vibe where everyone in tech was allowed to have Cheetos but editorial assistants weren’t.”

Websites Worth Reading

Policy Tensor: Geopolitics, data, finance. Fascinating charts.

Off Duty Lists: WSJ's listicles. Worth bookmarking.

Bittersweet Monthly: Online publication exploring re-emerging urban areas.

Feeds We Follow

@niubi: Bill Bishop, Sinocism newsletter author

@RFERLPress: Radio Free Europe on Eastern Europe

@FarandWidecom: Indispensable travel feed