34 / you only acknowledge a golden age when you see it glowing in your rear view
As always, thanks for reading
Chinese authorities raided Group M offices in Shanghai. No details as of publication beyond this, but wow. just wow. I’m 7+ years out from the China Advertising scene but whether run-of-the-mill bribery or something related to increased pressure on foreign firms, this is not good news. Bain, Capvision, Mint have all been raided in the last 2 years; I did some googling and couldn’t confirm if these raids are all from the same ministry / department as Group M.
I did double check, and my advertising friends are also surprised, not just me. Discovered via substack notes.
Hidden in the Korean “John Wick”, a tasty quote.
“Black tea is steeped in imperialism. That's what gives it its flavor. Anything this flavorful has to be hiding an incredible amount of carnage.”
Un-Su Kim, The Plotters
You can't live your life if you're always getting stuck on mysteries like this. You'd get so mesmerized by the inexplicability of your porridge falling into your bowl and bubbles rising in your water that you'd forget to eat or drink and you'd die. That's why we need the illusion of explanatory depth: most things have to feel like they make sense, even if they don't, so that we can get on with the business of living.
An extra good Saturday Post from the always-readable Trung Phan, examining the speed, volume, depth and gruesome-ness of communications during tragic events, from civil war to 9/11.
Oprah and David Brooks have a new self-help book out, so the well-read culture critics at The New Yorker make a meal of it. It’s a fun read
You could spend a lifetime, say, stubbornly chewing on what Aristotle, in the Ethics, means by eudaemonia. “Happiness” alone won’t suffice. Aristotle himself, treading carefully, writes, “We have practically defined happiness as a sort of living and faring well.” I am partial to the modesty of “human flourishing.” Others prefer something like “the activity of a rational soul in accordance with virtue”—a daunting ideal that held sway for twenty-five hundred years, until it was roundly rebuffed by the creators of “Jackass.”
In my continuous failure to stay in one rabbit-hole at a time, learning about advanced behavioral science led me to this ‘too dense for my brain’ treatise called “Irrationality: a history of the dark side of reason — which argues (among other things) that it isn’t rationality but irrationality that defines Homo Sapiens as unique from other life (the author takes time to include plants in the overall theory).
Behavioral Science often talks about Homo Economicus vs Homo sapiens (my favorite being casting George Costanza as Homo Economicus interacting with the real world) and this book takes a similar thread quite far. To extrapolate some of the argument, Plants, Ants, Elephants demonstrate behavior patterns that can be mapped to logic and rational ‘optimization’ decision making. Except humans.