Kickoff For November 11, 2024
On and off throughout the life of this letter, I've received an offer or two of sponsorship or partnership. Every time, I politely but firmly refused. While those offers were kind of flattering, accepting any of them wouldn't have been worth the real or perceived loss of independence. And that's more important to me than a little cash in my pocket.
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
How Did the First World War Change the Arts? — Wherein we get a look at the shifts in ideas and aesthetics around artistic endeavours after the so-called Great War, and the efforts to bring those changes (and the resulting art) to a wider audience.
From the article:
Perhaps what the First World War released above all was a spirit of ephemerality. Perhaps it was the notion of artistic durability that then began its long, slow death, leaving in its wake ‘a heap of broken images’ that flashed forward into the transience of performance and conceptual art.
On the Remarkable Legacy of Lewis Lapham — Wherein Elias Altman recounts the lessons he learned while working for and with the legendary writer and editor — lessons about writing, editing, and life in general.
From the article:
It’s a strange thing to have a walk-on role in the fifth act of a great man’s life. Lewis was exactly fifty years and one month older than I was. Twenty-two when I first entered the small Irving Place office—opposite The Nation—I understood that I would get to know Lewis in a specific mode, as an elder statesman of American letters.
The joy of clutter — Wherein Matt Alt explores the history of the West's obsession with Japanese minimalism while loking at the flip side of Marie Kondo: people in Japan who embrace clutter in their personal lives (and it's more common than we think!), and in doing so paints a more realistic picture of the life of the average person in Japan.
From the article:
[A]s the world turns to Japan to tidy up, it’s important to remember that these books were originally intended for Japanese readers; they weren’t written for the world outside. If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?
Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made — Wherein we get a peek into the mills that churn out loads of literary (and I'm using that term loosely) detritus and how ebook publishing platforms are complicit in the spread of that junk.
From the article:
None of this is happening through any willful malice, per se, on the part of the platforms that now run publishing and book-selling. It’s happening more because the platforms are set up to incentivize everything to cost as little as possible, even if it’s garbage.
The Rise and Fall of Matchbox’s Toy-Car Empire — Wherein we learn how the iconic maker of detailed toy vehicles came to be, the struggles the company overcame on its rise to success, and how it eventually came under the umbrella of its biggest rival.
From the article:
When put into shops just before Christmas of 1952, the mass-produced Matchbox models were not an overnight success. Their low price was a double-edged sword—they were accessible but not quite special enough to be the main-event Christmas present. After the holiday, however, as kids came into the shops with their pockets jangling with coins, the models fairly flew off the shelves.
The disastrous rise and fall of a $10 billion Bay Area unicorn — Wherein we look back at the dot com-era startup Webvan, learn about the company's crash and burn in the early 2000s, and see how Webvan's history is starting to repeat itself.
From the article:
By 2001, Webvan lost more than $1 billion and laid off 1,200 workers across the country. Drivers who once had a small fortune’s worth of stocks never cashed them in on time and were subsequently left with nothing. While they applied for jobs at Safeway, George Shaheen, the company’s former CEO, reportedly walked away with a lifelong salary of $375,000.