Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Winston Smith’s Singapore

Singapore is one of the most technologically sophisticated places in the world – and one of the safest. Yet according to a new report by Peter Guest on the website Rest of World, Singapore’s proud track record on public safety has taken an Orwellian turn:

That safety requires constant vigilance. The city must be watched…Ninety-thousand police cameras watch the streets, and by the end of the decade, there will be 200,000. Sensors, including facial recognition cameras and crowd analytics systems, are being positioned across the city.

More recently, the city has begun piloting a new kind of robot that “can automatically detect anti-social behavior, from smoking to illegal food stalls and gatherings, barking orders out of its speakers, recording video and reporting back to headquarters.”

2. Talk to the Hand

When Professor Richard Hughes Gibson finally returned to in-person teaching, he was struck by the impact of facemasks: “I hadn’t perceived how hard it is to read the responses of one’s audience when the most expressive part of the face is hidden.” He had to start looking for other clues:

I began to watch the hands of my students, friends, and children when they were engaged in masked conversation, and I observed that the most effective communicators delivered the most histrionic performances. They threw their hands up to signify exaltation and despair; they thrust their hands forward in supplication; they threw their hands down at their sides in grief and resignation; they cut their hands across the air in defiance. You might miss a few muffled words, but you couldn’t miss the point of what they were saying. I had known people with very expressive digits before. Now, though, I saw that the pandemic had given new urgency to the language of the hand.

3. How Obsolete Technologies Rewrite History

Samuel Arbesman’s wide-ranging essay on obsolescent technology – like rotary phones and analog clocks – makes an original and precise point: when one technology replaces another, we are forced to rethink parts of history that we once assumed were permanent. For example, print media:

With the advent of digital technologies and the Internet, print is again receding in its preeminence and a more oral sort of Internet culture has blossomed (though literacy is very much here to stay). The argument, then, is that this period of several hundred years when print media reigned, far from being the default state of civilization, was rather the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”: an evocative phrase for a singular period of time, a kind of interruption by print culture of the much longer—and perhaps more natural—oral culture.

4. Give It Away Now

Billionaire private equity pioneer and philanthropist David Rubenstein believes wealthy people make a big mistake when they give money away:

I am amazed that probably 99.9 percent of the population gives away about 95 percent of its money upon their death. You say to yourself, “Why are you waiting so long?”

I remember — I won’t mention his name, but a very famous businessman said when he was 93 years old, “I’m going to give away $400 million to my college upon my death.” You say, “Well, what do you need that $400 million for between the age of 93 and 94 and 95? Why don’t you just give it away now?”

5. NFTs for Dummies

In Harvard Business Review, a professor and an NFT collector offer a clear description of what non-fungible tokens are – and how they create value. A rare, jargon-free piece on the NFT phenomenon:

Because blockchains are programmable, it’s possible to endow NFTs with features that enable them to expand their purpose over time, or even to provide direct utility to their holders. In other words, NFTs can do things — or let their owners do things — in both digital spaces and the physical world.

NFTs can function like membership cards or tickets, providing access to events, exclusive merchandise, and special discounts — as well as serving as digital keys to online spaces where holders can engage with each other. Moreover, because the blockchain is public, it’s even possible to send additional products directly to anyone who owns a given token. All of this gives NFT holders value over and above simple ownership — and provides creators with a vector to build a highly engaged community around their brands.

6. In Sondheim’s Company

Just a few months before Stephen Sondheim’s death, Adam Hirsh of The Wall Street Journal called Sondheim “one of the greatest living American writers in any genre.” Hirsh’s tribute is worth reading:

It was always his ambition to write music as well as lyrics, and it took another decade of hits and misses before he created the first show that sounds like Sondheim. “Company,” in 1970, kicked off a quarter-century in which he wrote 10 outstanding musicals, collaborating with the directors Hal Prince and James Lapine as well as a variety of book writers. The subjects of these shows range widely, from the American opening of Japan in the 19th century in “Pacific Overtures” to the travails of former showgirls entering middle age in “Follies.” What unifies them is a musical and lyrical sensibility that is essentially literary. Sondheim’s real peers are the novelists and essayists of the period, who were drawn to urbane skepticism and disillusionment.

Websites Worth Reading

Reaching the Pinnacle on Social: Axios’s guide to social media prominence

Chartbook's 1st Birthday: Adam Tooze’s economic and social charts

2021 e-reader roundup: Six Colors review of e-readers

Feeds We Follow

@SBenzell: Thread on social distancing and its failures

@bencowling88: British epidemiologist

@gregweiner1: Madison scholar