Hi friends,

My mission with Friday Finds is to share links that help you escape the news cycle & the hum-drum of what everybody's talking about right now.

The Internet's information architecture has a serious recency bias. What's been published lately gets prioritized over the highest quality information. "What's trending" has become synonymous with "what's worth reading." This newsletter is an act of rebellion against such a nonsensical way to structure our media environment. I expanded on these ideas in this video, which hits close to the mission of Friday Finds.

Before we get to today's Finds, I want to share some exciting Write of Passage news. We’re launching Writing Sprints — a workout class for your mind. If you have ideas to share but keep getting in your own way, Writing Sprints will help you beat back self-doubt and finally hit "Publish."
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In this intense one-day course, you’ll write a draft, get feedback from our team of trained editors, and publish alongside a group of other writers. If you're interested, click the button below to stay updated. Enrollment opens on May 31st.

Friday Finds

​Chronological Snobbery: C.S. Lewis' term for the way we foolishly prefer the new to the old. We repeatedly choose the urgency of the moment over the wisdom of our ancestors. But great pieces of writing don't have a "read by" date. In fact, it's the opposite. Great books get better with time because they reveal the intellectual biases of the modern day. Lewis defined Chronological Snobbery as "the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited." It's a sister to my idea of the Never-Ending Now, which I outline in this article.

​The Foreword of Amusing Ourselves to Death: Neil Postman argued that studying the information environment of a society was the clearest way to understand it. Every medium exerts a heavy (felt, but unseen) influence on culture. When media technologies change, so do our conceptions of truth and the good life. Media even influences the ways we think about God. Studying the Bible, Postman said, helped the Jews ascend to unprecedented levels of abstract thinking. They transitioned from an image-centric form of worship and into a word-centric one. Iconography became blasphemy, and a new kind of God entered culture. By freezing speech, writing also gave way to logic, history, and science. Postman's book is worth reading in its entirety, but I especially recommend the short, 337-word foreword.

​Einstein’s Dreams: A splendid collection of short stories from the philosopher-physicist Alan Lightman. All of them are about time, relativity, and physics as if they were the dreams of Albert Einstein. My favorite one is about body time vs. mechanical time. Body time is the world of hunger, moods, and circadian rhythms, while mechanical time is the world of clocks and alarms. It'd be fun to switch between these time speeds throughout the year. To help myself enter the calm flow of body time, I’ve deliberately chosen not to put any clocks in my home.

​Process Knowledge: The author, Dan Wang, continually inspires me to level up my craft. He’s one of the most learned people I know. One time, he spent an hour breaking down the structure of Chinese politics for me and some friends. It was so well done that if it had been public, it would have been a viral YouTube video. In this essay, he laments the decline of America’s manufacturing base — through the lens of process knowledge, which he defines as earned experience that can’t be communicated. Beyond that, he paints a vision for Silicon Valley as a place where people give hardware manufacturing the respect it deserves.

​The Geopolitics of Oil: An introduction to the economics of the oil industry. One interesting lesson is about the demand elasticity for oil. In the short term, demand is very inelastic. If the price of gas goes up by 300% tomorrow, you'll probably still drive to work. But if the price stays high, demand will become elastic. You'll adopt new lifestyle behaviors, such as working from home or taking the train. This is different from, say, a soda. If the price goes up by 300%, you're more likely to choose an alternative right away. Oil production also takes a long time to spin up. You can't really "make" oil. You have to mine it. Thus, you can't immediately boost production. But in the long run, the price of oil (not the demand for it) is the most important variable in determining how much gets produced. Though this article is about oil, I particularly enjoyed learning about copper production, which is concentrated in only four countries: Chile, Peru, China, and the United States. Collectively, they produce more than half of the world’s copper. Relative to oil, it can be easily stockpiled. And every year, the United States consumes 1.8 million tons of it, one-third of which is imported.