The Rest Is History podcast: Victorian Britain’s Maddest Mystery . Roger Tichborne, a 25-year-old aristocrat and heir to a fortune, died in a shipwreck in 1854. “His mother, certain of her son’s survival, advertised extensively with a tantalising reward for her son’s return. Twenty years later a rough, corpulent butcher from Australia named Arthur Orton arrived in Europe and declared himself to be the long lost heir. The trial that ensued captivated the public…. " Writer Zadie Smith discusses the case, which is the basis of her new historical novel, “The Fraud.”
The Imaginary Worlds podcast looks at Doctor Who’s regeneration, which began nearly 60 years ago as a gimmick to replace a lead actor whose health was failing, and has become central to the Doctor’s story, “about an alien being who is striving to be better but keeps overshooting the mark."
Podcast host Eric Molinsky says the source of regeneration’s narrative power may be that we all change over time and when we look back on our past selves they seem like other people.
I went around and around the house looking for my phone, searching the usual places again and again, and finally got down on my hands and knees with a flashlight next to the bed and discovered the black phone had fallen off the nightstand and into a black shoe.
Ryan O’Neill: Let me repeat that back to you.
One of the most effective communications strategies I use is repeating back, in my own words, what was just explained to me.
I do this sometimes when doing interviews, but I find the people I’m interviewing will interrupt me to make the point themselves, or elaborate on whatever point I’m repeating back.
The Hyperloop was always a scam.
The tech industry’s move into transportation was not only a failure; it was an active campaign to deny the public access to better transit and trains because the billionaires of Silicon Valley don’t personally want to get around that way. The Hyperloop was one part of that, but so were the Boring Company, ride-hailing services, and self-driving cars. The Hyperloop’s failure provides a lesson we’re learning far too late: that Silicon Valley won’t deliver us a better world if they can’t find some way to profit off it.
What Happened When the U.S. Failed to Prosecute an Insurrectionist Ex-President. Historian Jill Lepore: After the Civil War, attempts to prosecute Jefferson Davis bogged down in politics, racism and legal pettifogging and went nowhere.
These kinds of lists are catnip for me.
Luxury Paradox: The more expensive something is the less likely you are to use it, so the relationship between price and utility is an inverted U. Ferraris sit in garages; Hondas get driven.
The Middle Ground Fallacy: Falsely assuming that splitting the difference between two polar opposite views is a healthy compromise. If one person says vaccines cause autism and another person says they don’t, it’s not right to compromise and say vaccines sometimes cause autism.
Focusing Effect: Overemphasizing factors that seem important but exist as part of a complex system. People from the Midwest assume Californians are happier because the weather is better, but they’re not because Californians also deal with traffic, bad bosses, unhappy marriages, etc, which more than offset the happiness boost from sunny skies.
I encounter the Focusing Effect regularly. I live in San Diego and do business with people from all over the world. I think they think my life is just surfing and campfire parties on the beach with Gidget.
I saw this sign on the ground next to an impressively large poop.
It’s All Bullshit: Performing productivity at Google.
Journalist JS Tan, writing at The Baffler, argues that Google has become a cesspool of bullshit jobs—engineers rewarded for building projects that are never deployed, or deployed and quickly abandoned, and bloated middle management. The company is trying to change its culture.
I’m reminded of Cory Doctorow’s observation that Google only ever built 1-1/2 products—search and I forget what else. It bought its ad business, which was like Jed Clampett luckily striking oil in his backyard. Google also bought other businesses that have been successful for it: YouTube, Google Maps, and Waze. (Maybe Gmail is the half-business of which Cory speaks?—Google did develop that.)
Google’s spectacular failures with Google Glass, Google+ and Google Reader, to name just three examples, suggest a company whose innovative powers are far more hype than reality. On the other hand, it’s no mean feat for Google to build and maintain its vast, global infrastructure of data centers and subsea cables, and keep its businesses—acquired or otherwise—successful.