I thought reaching #100 was a good milestone to go back and take stock of the past issues and see what’s stood the test of some time, or as my friend Kathleen put it, find “the signal in [my] noise”. I guess you could also call it a second derivative.
I started fD six and a half years ago, on April 14, 2017. I was taking time off school and working in New York. At the time, I was always sending people links to articles and I thought why not put it all together and send them to a small group of friends. First called, “Weekly Highlights” they were just some links on Medium before I started sending them out via email and then ultimately moved over to Substack here. This was before everyone and their mother had their own Substack (founded November 2017).
I’ve always regretted not keeping a diary. But looking back through the archives, I realized how much fD has become an intellectual journal, 100 snapshots on both sides of the camera—of the world around me and what I was noticing and caring about. Maybe it’s because I’m reading The Magic Mountain with my book club right now, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about time, specifically when we’re aware of it passing and having passed.
I took a break from fD when I moved to LA and started working, only sending issues out sporadically, several with the help of my friend Arthur. Early this year, a few people told me that they missed these (thanks Jake) and I realized too, how much I missed putting these issues together and sharing them. Doing that again for the past eight months has reminded me how fD has kept me at turns sane and sharp through the everyday years, work, and routines that can quiet the mind and soul.
I told myself when I started this, maybe I’ll go paid when I reach a 100 issues and now we’re here. If you’ve gotten value out of this newsletter you can now support the work by becoming a paid subscriber. The newsletter will still be free but being a paid subscriber will get you:
New issues one day early
Full access to the archives (I’ll put the archive paywall up in a week so everyone can still read this issue)
Some longform writing, including deep dives on subscriber suggested topics
Paid subscriber-only Chat where I’ll answer live questions and send out stuff that doesn’t make it into issues
Other perks to come, I’m open to ideas
These days, I don’t know most of my new readers personally1 but thank you for coming along for the ride and thank you to my friends who’ve been here from the start.
Good reading,
-Teddy
So there were a few things that I wouldn’t necessarily call trends. More so that reading back through the archives, it was clear some moments and narratives had moved out of “the now”. My view is that there was a “vibe shift”, a start of a new cultural era, in 2014 that I sometimes describe as post-Ferguson (not causal, just descriptive).
But within that, it already feels like we’ve had the beginning and end to the cultural climate of the Trump administration, especially the first few years that felt, to some, like a constant state of emergency. There are so many articles in the earlier issues of fD about the latest Trump fiasco and it all feels of a past era now, thankfully. It’s too easy to say that just because the country actually didn’t fall apart in that period that there wasn’t any real reason to freak out about everything. But I do think that feeling of acute crisis has faded… and at the same time has never gone away.
fD62 (Jun 2018) features an essay from Yuval Levin writing about exactly this feeling and warning presciently about the chronic moral fatigue that can arise from the attitude of “everyday crisis”. Not in terms of generating apathy but in normalizing the suspension of conventional rules and norms by way of appeal to emergency, effectively making those suspensions permanent.
Relatedly, the peak years of #MeToo, cancel culture, the Great Awokening, also seem to be behind us and dated in the earlier issues of fD.
On the tech side, everything about AI before ChatGPT came to life in November last year feels quaintly abstract, groping at prologue and trying to draw some of the unknown unknowns of how and when the impact of AI in our lives would be felt. On the other hand, previous cycles of blockchain interest (fD16, fD45, fD46, fD61, fD76) have left the promise of the technology well-defined but largely unfulfilled for now.
Some early radar pings & other highlights from the archives:
The first link in the first issue was a Rilke poem: “Archaic Torso of Apollo”. I laughed a few years later when I saw this Tweet. More on the poem and the promises and demands of beauty in fD14 (quoted below too).
An article on Amex’s status being challenged by Chase’s Sapphire cards. Anecdotally, it seems like Amex has gained back the upper hand recently…
A great essay on transhumanism. I really like Meghan O'Gieblyn’s prose. Reminds me I should read more n+1.
A prescient article on the technological disruption to come from drones, especially drone warfare:
The advantage of people with guns is that they are cheap and easy to train. In the modern day, it’s true that bombers, tanks, and artillery can lay waste to infantry—but those industrial tools of warfare are just so expensive that swarms of infantry can still deter industrialized nations from fighting protracted conflicts…
But another turning point in the history of humankind may be on the horizon. Continuing progress in automation, especially continued cost drops, may mean that someday soon, autonomous drone militaries become cheaper than infantry at any scale… Sometime in the next couple of decades, drones will be given the tools to take on human opponents all by themselves.
It didn’t take decades. Smith was more concerned by drone swarms controlling large populations, breaking the need throughout history for even the worst regimes to rely on manpower. But we’ve also seen in Ukraine, and very recently with Hamas, how conventionally weaker military forces have used drones to devestate much larger and better resourced forces.
I’ve always thought this story of the CIA’s trouble spying in China would make for a great espionage show or movie.
The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years…
Spoiler alert, they arrested the CIA mole a year later.
Very insightful interview with Princeton philosophy professor Alexander Nehamas on Nietzsche on friendship, art, beauty
To emphasize the importance of beauty is to connect art again to emotion and desire. To find something (or someone: this approach brings the beauty in art and the beauty in the rest of life together) beautiful is not simply to appreciate what you now see or know about them. It also involves the desire to get to know them better, in the hope that what you will discover will, in some way that you can’t know at the time, make your life better, just as your relationship with it so far has also made it better.
You are right: to find something beautiful is to hope that your life will be better if that is a part of it. Unfortunately, the promise of a better life that beauty makes and the hope that it will be fulfilled are not always realized: beauty, like friendship, is also double-edged.
In 2017, then Yale Law School student Lina Khan wrote a landmark article on Amazon and antitrust. Now, at 34, she’s the head of the FTC and leading the Biden administration’s revitalized and aggressive antitrust policy.
A New Yorker article from 2014 about gender, specifically what it means to be a woman, that anticipated a lot of the coming conflicts, especially in women’s sports.
A review of Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, a brilliant book that blends autofiction with historical fiction, imagining the lives of the early Christians through the lens of the author’s own faith and apostasy. I totally forgot I had read this review years ago when I read the book last year, my friend Arthur’s rec. It’s fantastic, strongly recommend.
A pre-Open AI profile of Sam Altman
An article on how, then 31, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) organized a palace coup to replace his cousin Muhammad bin Nayef as the new Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.
Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen on the uncomfortable position of Asian Americans under affirmative action, which the Supreme Court struck down this year. Gersen is a great writer and someone I always read on legal topics.
An article on LinkedIn losing a legal case against an analytics company that was scraping its data to train AI models, now a much more salient issue with post-ChatGPT.
Max Abrahms on the definition of terrorism
Crown Prince MBS solidifying his power
In a shocking development, Saudi press Al Mayadeen reported late on Saturday that prominent billionaire, member of the royal Saudi family, and one of the biggest shareholders of Citi, News Corp. and Twitter… Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal
Nassim Taleb on the “merchandising of virtue” and skin in the game
It is even more, much more immoral to claim virtue without fully living with its direct consequences
A profile of Marvel Studios during its heyday. Contrast to its lackluster performance post-Endgame.
Atlantic article on two conceptions of “free speech”. A debate that’s raging again today with the heated rhetoric on the Israel-Hamas conflict.
I’ve never forgotten this piece on coal mining in Central Appalachia. An examination of a hundred years of weak public institutions and monopoly power and its impact on everyday lives.
On the left’s blindness to antisemitism
On modern pop culture’s reliance on the metanarrative of good vs. evil, something largely absent in our folk tales and ancient epics.
Wesley Yang on Asian Americans and their threat to affirmative action
Philosopher John Gray on hyperliberalism
Another MBS appearance, a profile on his ambitions to reshape the Middle East
A thought-provoking essay by David Graeber on the “conventional” story of human development and its connection with misguided searches for the “origins” of inequality. If you liked Sapiens or are interested in inequality or anthropology
Wesley Yang, on “microaggressions”, a term I haven’t heard said in a while but I think only because it’s been completely sublimated into our culture at large
A great read on the new paradigm of DTC startups that were already becoming ubiquitous by that point. First time I encountered the idea that “CAC is the new rent”
Comcast’s Gulati has a phrase for this phenomenon: “CAC is the new rent.” In other words, for companies reliant on paid marketing, their digital customer acquisition cost (CAC) is a lot like paying for brick-and-mortar stores in the old model, or selling wholesale. Essentially, this undermines one of the most basic precepts of the DTC movement, that these companies are cutting out the middleman and therefore can afford to charge much less for higher-quality goods.
A reminder that I need to actively seek out more from Venkatesh Rao and his blog Ribbonfarm since he left Twitter. A fascinating essay on the American economy and the infrastructure of its backend to our cosy consumer experiences
Yuval Levin’s essay on “the crisis of everyday life” that I wrote about above.
John McWhorter’s insightful essay on “atonement as activism” that anticipated the way people lapped up the ideas of people like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi a few years later
Joan Didion’s Vogue essay on self-respect which has stayed in my mind since my friend Arthur sent it to me.
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.
A wild oral history of Bennington College in 1982 when Donna Tartt, Brett Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem among others, were tearing up campus.
Several essays on decadence vs. the sentiment of Andreessen Hororwitz’s pronouncement: “it’s time to build.”
A portrait of Xi Jinping as a young man. Really interesting profile on Xi and the impact of his early life.
In 1968, Mao tried to restore order by sending millions of young people into the countryside to be “educated.” That is how Mr. Xi, at age 15, wound up in Liangjiahe, a cluster of about three dozen homes, mostly traditional cave dwellings, 220 miles northeast of his father’s birthplace.
Conditions were brutal. Flea-ridden and often hungry, he spent much of the next seven years building wells, digging fields and herding sheep. There was no school
[Xi] rarely speaks of those years, but in interviews before taking power, he said they hardened his view of politics. He recalled denouncing his father, being jailed three times and having Red Guards threaten him with execution.
“People who have little contact with power, who are far from it, always see these things as mysterious and novel,” he said in 2000. “But what I see is not just the superficial things: the power, the flowers, the glory, the applause. I see the bullpens”—a reference to Red Guard detention houses—”and how people can blow hot and cold. I understand politics on a deeper level.”
On the quant revolution shaking up the bond market
A longer write-up on crypto
Examining Russia’s motivations, just a month before they would invade Ukaine
Great pieces in this one: on Ozempic, a Ted Chiang essay on ChatGPT, and my friend’s powerhouse essay in American Affairs on finacialization and shareholder capitalism
The most powerful economic force financialization has unleashed to benefit shareholders is not greed, but consensus. By creating incentives to maximize overall industry profit pools and minimize competitive investment, a shareholder-centric asset governance model has undermined the competitiveness of markets and encouraged a de facto coordination among firms that benefits asset owners at the expense of broader prosperity.
My friend Matt Mandel’s great essay on effective altruism
On the rise of activist investing in South Korea
On the war in Ukraine depleting Western countries’ ammunition stores. This is going to be a problem for years going forward
On reports that Ozempic is curbing more habits than just overeating
On the spike in dangerous close calls at American airports. It’s been 14 years since the last fatal major US airline clash. Unless we solve the structural issues that, at the rate these are happening that streak could end in the near future.
On the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action. Already starting to trickle into other spheres, curious how it plays out over the years
On the growing political power and cultural voice of Muslim Americans and their social conservatism
this week many of those same residents watched in dismay as a now fully Muslim and socially conservative city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from being flown on city property that had – like many others being flown around the country – been intended to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community.
Write-up on the nature of modern celebrity