Hi friends,

Hello from the Las Vegas strip.

This city is such a strange place. It's a sprawling concrete jungle driven by the pursuit of maximal profit, with little regard for virtue or temperance. Judging by the slot machines at the airport and the strict standardization of taxi fares, it didn't take me long to feel the consolidation of power here.

It's easy to have disdain for Vegas, but I have to admit that the combination of scale and sizzle puts me in a state of perpetual awe — and I simultaneously love and hate this place with a burning passion.

Today's Finds

​Learning from Las Vegas: This 99% Invisible podcast about Las Vegas is a good introduction to the city's gaudy and garish architecture. It's a fabricated world and it was fake from the start. The first casino-hotel complex was called El Rancho, and it made gambling feel like a Wild West experience even though the actual cowboys never made it to Vegas. Since the Strip technically sits outside of the city limits, it's unaffected by zoning laws, which also gives builders the freedom to continuously grow and redesign the city based on what people want. Rather than condemn the city, it's worth asking what Vegas can teach us about what modern urbanism should look like. For starters, maybe architects should be more influenced by the 'populist' taste of ordinary people.

​Making Architecture Easy: One of the puzzles of the modern world is how much the quality of architecture has declined. Old buildings tend to be so much more heart-warming. This piece makes a few interesting distinctions. The first is the difference between a 'genius' and a 'vernacular art.' Music is a genius art. The vast majority of what we listen to comes from a small minority of songwriters and composers. The easier a creation is to replicate, the more likely it'll become a 'genius art.' Architecture is the opposite. Even the best architects have probably designed less than 100 buildings, and we rarely know who designed the building when we step into it. I also like the distinction between "foreground and background arts." A foreground art, such as film, is primarily enjoyed at the center of your attention. But architecture is a background art. People usually experience it while thinking about other things.

Peter Thiel and N.T. Wright, on Death: How much should we fight death? Is it a tragedy to avoid with technological progress, something to surrender to, or something else? Thiel says: "It would be healthy for us to not treat death as natural and fight it in every way possible." Wright says: "In the Bible, the answer to death is not to postpone it, but to go through and out the other side." The links above will take you to short clips, but you can watch the full interview here.

​It’s Charisma, Stupid: An old article from Paul Graham, where he argues that the more charismatic candidate has won every election since 1964. Why? Television, which rewarded a different kind of presidential candidate. He cites an exception from the 1968 election but says it actually proves the rule because television debates were still evolving. Here’s a relevant data point from my What the Hell is Going On essay: “During the U.S. presidential election in 1968, the average soundbite—that is, any footage of a candidate speaking uninterrupted—was still a little more than 40 seconds, but that had fallen to less than 10 seconds at the end of the 80s and 7.8 seconds in 2000.”

​Roman Concrete: One of my foundational beliefs is that modern people seriously under-estimate the technical skills that humanity has lost. This is particularly true for tacit skills that are difficult to express in image or writing. Roman concrete is one example. For decades, scholars didn't understand how it was so durable. The Pantheon is 2,000 years old, still standing, and holds the record for the world's largest dome of unreinforced concrete. MIT researchers think that Roman concrete is particularly powerful because of the way quicklime, pozzolana, and water were mixed at incredibly high temperatures, which may have given the lime clasts' self-healing abilities.

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How I Write

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​Garry Tan isn't just the CEO of Y Combinator. He's also a passionate writer, has a YouTube channel with 251,000 subscribers, and once turned a $300k investment into $2 billion.

Here are a few of his best ideas:

1. Short words have long legs. The worst thing you can do is alienate people using jargon. All good communication incites action, which means you have to use words people are familiar with.
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2. If you refuse to solve smaller problems, the chance of you solving big problems goes to zero.
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3. Better believers than skeptics: “Being a believer is more profitable than being a skeptic because if you're a skeptic and right, you make no new thing happen. If you're a believer and you're right, something awesome happens. Nice incentive to be positive sum.”​

(Listen: Apple | Spotify | YouTube)

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