Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. The Job as Performance Art

“You can stop pretending your corporate role is real,” writes Alex McCann on The Persuasion, a Substack. He compares corporate jobs to the emperor’s new clothes, “but we’ve all agreed to keep complimenting his outfit because our mortgages depend on it.” McCann elaborates:

The pandemic pulled back the curtain for a moment. When everyone worked from home, it became obvious who was actually doing things and who was just... there. Some people’s entire roles evaporated when they couldn’t physically attend meetings. Others discovered they could do their “full-time” job in about three hours a day. Now we’re back in offices, and everyone’s pretending again.

But the free time isn’t going to waste. It’s creating possibilities: “People are not quitting. They’re using the corporate infrastructure—the steady salary, the laptop, the stability—as a platform for building something real. The corporate role hasn’t died; it’s become a funding mechanism for actual work.”

2. The Chinese Are Coming...to Japan

The Financial Times reports on a new group of emigrants: Chinese nationals taking up residence in Tokyo. The FT interviews a woman named Cao, who sees her apartment building filling up with new arrivals from China:

Despite her misgivings about it, Cao is unavoidably a member of this burgeoning diaspora. She is Run-ri: the label given to the wave of middle-class Chinese who have moved to Japan for a lifestyle they see as impossible back home. Some Run-riwant permanent residency in Japan, and the ability to travel back to China for business. Many arrive with no intention of ever returning. Cao says she is here to assimilate, but cannot guess how many of the other Run-ri are. It’s a phenomenon few saw coming, either in Japan or China.

3. The End of History

Of all the movies on Netflix, 80% were released after 2015. When Ted Gioia tried to watch Citizen Kane, the algorithm suggested a movie about fast food. Writing on his blog, The Honest Broker, Gioia contends that Netflix is hardly alone: “The larger truth is that the Internet creates the illusion that all culture is taking place right now”:

When you walk into a library, you understand immediately that it took centuries to create all these books. The same is true of the Louvre and other great art museums…You feel the weight of the past. We are building on a foundation created by previous generations— and with a responsibility to future ones.

The web has cultivated an impatience with that weight of the past. You might even say that it conveys a hatred of the past.

And the past is hated all the more because history is outside of our control. When we scream at history, it’s not listening. We can’t get it cancelled. We can’t get it de-platformed. The best we can do is attach warning labels or (the preferred response today) pretend it doesn’t exist at all.

4. It's Xi’s Army Now

As Xi embarked on an unprecedented corruption crackdown that took out political rivals, he also began to restructure the People’s Liberation Army so it could “fight and win wars” — a tacit acknowledgement that it lacked the ability to do so. A decade into that effort, an ominous government notice published on the social media platform WeChat showed he was ramping up his makeover of the armed forces.

 Excellent graphics in the Bloomberg report show the extent of Xi’s house cleaning.

5. Athlete, Scholar, Citizen

Ken Dryden, the former NHL goalie who died this month, may have been the most accomplished professional athlete in modern sports. He won six Stanley Cups while earning a law degree from McGill. After hockey, he practiced law, became president of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and wrote The Game, one of the best books ever written about hockey. He ran for provincial parliament and became a cabinet member. He was also an outspoken public citizen on topics ranging from childcare to climate. The Montreal Gazette’s Jack Todd remembers interviewing him:

Articulate as he was, Dryden was never an easy interview — especially for broadcast types looking for sound bites. As a taker of notes rather than someone who used a tape recorder, Dryden drove me nuts. He spoke in full paragraphs, with proper punctuation. He could use clauses, and sub-clauses, and keep it flawlessly grammatical while discussing the most complex issues — leaving note-takers floundering in his wake.

6. Are You in Group One?

As tech writer JA Westenberg waits her turn to get on a flight, she wonders why “we’ve built our lives around proving we’re in Boarding Group One.” Airline status offers the clearest mirror of modern life:

In theory, our world is supposed to be allergic to these rituals. We claim to be egalitarians, believers in merit - champions of the ordinary person. But watch the faces at Gate 32 when Group One is called, and you’ll see how false those democratic ideals turn out to be. Status is the air we breathe. You can see it in the shoes we wear, the brands we flex, the followers we count, the schools our children attend. Boarding Group One ties it all together: the desire to be seen, the fear of being left behind, the gnawing suspicion that life is an exclusive club and the velvet rope is always just ahead.

Websites Worth Reading

Photos of Armani: Through the Years

Photos of Shohei Ohtani Ads: Throughout Japan

Photos of Ken Dryden: On and Off the Ice 

Feeds We Follow

@vitrupo: Interviews about AI

@EddyElfenbein: U.S. labor force participation rate by men

@LevAkabas: Graphics about sports