Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. The Life of a Writer

The notable Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses “what writers and editors do.” His Paris Review essay is part literary analysis, part autobiography, and 100-percent entertaining:

I remember a time in my late twenties when I was working for a literary magazine, we had commissioned a contribution from an established poet, and I was given the job of taking care of it. I read the poem and responded with a few comments, some suggestions as to minor changes, and a tentative inquiry as to whether the poem might be developed a bit further in the same direction. The reply that came back can be summed up in a single question: “Who are you?” In fact, there may well have been an undertone in that reply warranting an even more forceful wording: “Who the hell are you?”

2. The Importance of Peter Huber

Thomas Hazlett pays tribute to polymath economist Peter Huber, who died this month after a long, debilitating illness. Hazlett explainswhy Huber’s work redefined how we think about telecommunications – and dozens of other subjects:

Peter Huber had no conflicts and started from scratch. The Geodesic Network: 1987 Report on Competition in the Telephone Industry, later cited widely as "the massive Huber report," became a runaway bestseller for the Government Printing Office. The report brilliantly detailed how technologies of freedom were primed to crush old monopolies with disruptions at the network's "edge"—personal computers, software, devices—if policymakers would lean back. The 450-page, data-dense thesis was delivered to the DOJ in 11 months; weeks early, as that was all the time Huber needed to go from zero to the world's leading authority on perhaps the most complicated public policy issue yet invented.

3. Our Next War Games

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s annual report is, not surprisingly, devoted to what we should learn from COVID. The most interesting parts focus on how we can prepare for the nextpandemic. On the agenda are war games:

The world needs to regularly run germ games—simulations that let us practice, analyze, and improve how we respond to disease outbreaks, just as war games let the military prepare for real-life warfare. Speed matters in a pandemic. The faster you act, the faster you cut off exponential growth of the virus. Places that had recent experiences with respiratory outbreaks—such as Taiwan with SARS and South Korea with MERS—responded to COVID-19 more quickly than other places because they already knew what to do. Running simulations will make sure everyone is ready to act.

4. Against Stylistic Writing

Stephen Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, and Helen Sword are wildly popular writers who earn praise for their style and clarity. Dominik Lukes disagrees. On his blog, Metaphor Hacker, he makes a case for why we should not try to imitate them and “write a press release while presenting an argument”:

The problem with the likes of Steven Pinker and Helen Sword is that they like their own writing way too much. But I don’t. Like their writing, that is. I want to get some information from them and I want to get examples and counterexamples for the points they make. I want them to get to the point. I am not reading them for enjoyment, that’s what fiction is for. I am reading them to learn what they have to say and I have to wade through a morass of stories, pointless metaphors, geysers of words. They are aiming for eloquence but effluence would be a better term for what their reader gets.

5. Chinese Lab Spill

Nicholson Baker’s lengthy investigation into the cause of the COVID pandemic brings mainstream credibility to a theory that has lurked on the internet for months: that the COVID-19 outbreak started with an accident in a Chinese lab. The plausible, gripping assessment bodes poorly for the future:

What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A lab accident — a dropped flask, a needle prick, a mouse bite, an illegibly labeled bottle — is apolitical. Proposing that something unfortunate happened during a scientific experiment in Wuhan — where COVID-19 was first diagnosed and where there are three high-security virology labs, one of which held in its freezers the most comprehensive inventory of sampled bat viruses in the world — isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just a theory.

6. Will Hybrid Offices Work?

Asheem Chandna has doubts:

The risk for management teams is that a hybrid office can inadvertently create a two-class system of employees: those who are Zooming in, and those who are “in the room where it happens.” This development seems inevitable. Video calls, by their very nature, need to be scheduled. But the reality of brainstorming and hashing out ideas is that it works best for those who can walk down the hall, sit around a table, or pop their heads into someone’s office. Innovation by its very nature is boundary-less and doesn’t fit within the confines of a 60-minute video chat.

Websites Worth Reading

Sidecar: Recently launched New Left Review blog

HLG Brand Pressure Index: HLG’s index on the issues putting pressure on companies

Will Hybrid Offices Work?