Hi friends,

Greetings from 40,000 feet. I'm heading home to Austin after a week recording interviews in Washington D.C. and New York for a new podcast I'm launching called How I Write.

Think of it like Chef's Table, but for writers. A chance to peek behind-the-curtain and see how your favorite creators do their craft. What if there was an equivalent of Stephen King's On Writing for every top writer? It's too much to expect all of them to write their own memoir, but a 90-minute conversation is the next best thing.

​If you want me to email you when the podcast episodes launch, click here.​

Today's Finds

Availability Cascades: H.L. Mencken once wrote: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” Availability cascades are a way of doing that. People like to focus on the content of what's said in the media, but rarely stop to ask: "Why am I seeing this story in the first place?" The answers orbit around narrative control. The authors of this paper, Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein, argue that the means of narrative control are shaped by "availability entrepreneurs," who introduce topics into the stream of discourse in order to advance their agendas. They shape public opinion by focusing people's attention on specific problems. The purpose of the news media, then, is to introduce and spread availability cascades — one of those ideas that you can't unsee once you're familiar with it. Read the full paper here or the summary here.

The Master Switch: Technology swings between paradigms of centralization and decentralization. This is a history of technological mediums, from the telegraph, radio, movies, and television to the Internet. Marshall McLuhan famously said that the "medium is the message." By that, he meant that the mediums of information influence society more than the content itself. When the means of information distribution change, so does the character of society. Here's a fun anecdote: Hollywood became the center of the movie industry because it was so close to the Mexican border. Creators at the time were trying to escape the Edison Film Trust, and since Los Angeles was so close to Mexico, they could escape the country if the legal battles got too nasty. Palm Springs also became the celebrity getaway because it aligned with the exact number of miles that stars could travel while under contract with the big studios. Here’s a YouTube video from the author of the The Master Switch, Tim Wu.

​The Deployment Age: What if financial bubbles aren't as bad as you think? What if, in fact, they're a necessary part of the innovation process? This is essentially Carlota Perez's argument in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, which Jerry Neumann summarizes in this article. Innovation comes in waves, and it takes a flurry of innovations to kickstart a boom. For example, the Railroad revolution was born out of the combination of high-pressure steam engines, precision machine marts, and improved metallurgy that allowed rails to be cast. Concentrated wealth, made possible by the stock market and limited liability in the corporate sphere, gave companies the cash to fund such giant railway infrastructure projects. This article isn't just about history. It outlines a theory that we can use to predict technological shifts.

On Being Known: A pair of haunting pieces about the peculiar emotion of “being known.” The first piece by Tim Kreider talks about an email someone received by accident, an email where they were the topic of discussion. Seeing the way others talk about us when they know we’re not there can be a strange and painful experience that reveals a split between ourselves and the rest of the world. We judge ourselves on intentions, but others on actions. This second piece builds on that idea. Here, the author (who goes by the name of Ava) talks about writing on the Internet. She puts it simply: being known is a dichotomy. Just about everybody wants to be seen and heard, but being known can have terrible psychological consequences. There are diminishing returns to being known. The purest connections I’ve made on the Internet came in the early days, back when only a few thousand people subscribed to my newsletters. Why write on the Internet then? This line stands out: “Finding people whom I’ve become close friends with, who really and truly understand me, is worth the embarrassment of sharing. It doesn’t feel good to be vulnerable but it often feels necessary.”

Why Jeff Bezos Dropped Physics: No matter how talented you are, you may lack genius in a particular area. Jeff Bezos wanted to be a theoretical physicist. But one night, while studying quantum mechanics, he realized his brain wasn’t wired to process highly abstract concepts. Upon learning that he wasn’t smart enough to be a physicist, he switched to computer science. He tells the story in this short and hilarious YouTube video.