Tag: perspective

Categories
Business History

The Architecture of Unseen Influence

We build our monuments over the wrong graves. It’s a bad habit of ours, this craving for the lone genius—the larger-than-life figure who supposedly commands the tides of progress by sheer force of will. But look beneath the surface of how things actually get built. The reality is messier. And a hell of a lot more interesting.

Take Thomas Edison. Secular saint of American ingenuity. The wizard who single-handedly lit up the dark. Except he didn’t. Edison wasn’t a solitary creator; he was a brilliant, ruthless aggregator of other people’s breakthroughs and a master of public relations. He invented the bulb, sure, but his real masterpiece was the myth of himself. In the process, he eclipsed the collective sweat of his own labs and the far more elegant alternating-current systems of his rivals. He’s our most overrated figure—not because he lacked talent, but because his shadow blinded us to how progress actually happens.

Morgan Housel nailed this structural blind spot by tracing the tangled ancestry of major turning points:

“Every current event – big or small – has parents, grandparents, great grandparents, siblings, and cousins. Ignoring that family tree can muddy your understanding of events, giving a false impression of why things happened… Viewing events in isolation, without an appreciation for their long roots, helps explain everything from why forecasting is hard to why politics is nasty.”

Look past the blinding light of the celebrity inventors and you find the long roots that actually remade our world. Take FCC Part 15. It’s an event almost no history textbook bothers to mention. In the early 1980s, a lone staff engineer named Dr. Michael Marcus looked at three chunks of the radio spectrum—stuff discarded as “garbage bands” reserved for industrial microwave ovens—and saw an opening. The entire telecom establishment thought he was chasing a recipe for chaotic interference.

Marcus didn’t blink. He spent years pushing through a dry, technical ruling in 1985 to open those garbage bands for unlicensed public use. A total footnote. Yet that single, unheralded bureaucratic open door laid the invisible foundation for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and the entire wireless ecosystem running your life today. Marcus didn’t get a ticker-tape parade; he got political friction and a quiet transfer to a back-office enforcement role. No hero on horseback. Just a guy in a cubicle who rewired the world.

We do the same thing with politics. We rank presidents by the volume of their rhetoric or the body count of their wars. Meanwhile, men like Chester A. Arthur get left in the dusty margins of trivia. Arthur was the ultimate product of the spoils system—a New York machine politician who climbed to power on institutional corruption. Then James A. Garfield was assassinated, and Arthur was thrust into the big chair. Something clicked. Instead of feeding the machine that birthed him, he turned inward, defied his old patrons, and signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act. He dismantled the very patronage system he’d mastered. It was a stunning act of quiet integrity that killed his political future but saved the republic’s administrative soul.

Or take Frances Perkins. Ask the average student who gave them the weekend, the forty-hour work week, unemployment insurance, and the abolition of child labor, and you’ll get a blank stare. Perkins was FDR’s Secretary of Labor. She wasn’t a regular on the campaign posters. She just stood in the back of the room, turning abstract economic suffering into concrete human safety nets.

I’ve been sitting with this for a few days, thinking about my own career—and the times I mistook the loudest person in the room for the smartest. I chased the visionary founders with the spellbinding pitches. I ignored the quiet engineers and the mundane infrastructure choices that actually determine whether an idea scales or snaps. It takes a few painful, expensive missteps to realize that the real compounding interest of progress is almost always generated in the dark.

History isn’t a solo act. It’s an intricate, mostly anonymous collaboration between accidental reformers, stubborn bureaucrats, and regulatory footnotes. If you want to understand where we’re going, stop staring at the stage lights.

Start looking at the wiring.

Categories
AI Silicon Valley Technology

The View from the Edge

“Living on the edge” usually means you’re taking risks. One of the guests on the More or Less podcast used it the other way: as a diagnosis. A description of people who’ve lost their depth perception.

From where they sit, it looks like everyone is moving. The feeds are full of demos. The group chats debate which model won the week. Colleagues are building agents that book their dentist appointments and summarize their email while they sleep. David Sparks is selling a Robot Assistant Field Guide. The frontier feels like the present tense — not where things are heading, but where things already are.

When everyone around you has already crossed a threshold, you stop being able to see the threshold. You mistake the edge for the center.

The primary point — that the tech community wildly overestimates how much ordinary people want AI in their lives — lands harder when you hold it against that image. It’s not that the industry is wrong about the technology. It’s that it has miscalibrated the desire. Most people aren’t trying to optimize their Tuesday. They’re just trying to get through it. An always-on personal agent isn’t a solution to a problem they’re carrying.

Think about the woman in the Safeway parking lot, sitting in her car for three minutes before going in, scrolling back through her texts to find the thing her husband asked her to pick up. Egg product and cheddar cheese. She finds it, pockets her phone, and goes inside. The whole problem — the forgetting, the retrieval, the solution — lasted less time than it takes to read about it. She didn’t need an agent. She needed three minutes and a text thread she already had.

The edge distorts in a specific way: it makes appetite look like inevitability. From out there, adoption feels like a question of when, not whether. But whether is a real question. Most technology that could be woven into daily life never is — not because people couldn’t learn it, but because they didn’t want what it offered badly enough to bother.

The view from the edge is intoxicating. Everything looks like signal. But the middle is where most people live, and from there the signal looks a lot more like noise.

Which is why WWDC matters more than any model release this year. Apple doesn’t sell to people living on the edge. It sells to people who just want their phone to work. If Apple makes AI invisible enough — tucked into the camera, the keyboard, the thing that finds your photos — it stops being something you adopt and becomes something you already have. That’s a different motion entirely. Not convincing people they want AI. Delivering it before the question occurs to them.

Whether Apple can actually pull that off is a separate argument. But the watershed, if it comes, won’t look like a frontier crossing. It’ll look like a Tuesday that went slightly smoother than usual. Most people won’t even notice the edge they just walked past.

We will find out in a week or so.

Categories
Architecture Infrastructure

The Architecture of the Indestructible

We are conditioned to look for the center of things. When we try to understand an organization, we ask for an organizational chart. When we look at a nation, we look to its capital. Traditional architecture—whether of a building, a company, or an army—relies on a classic playbook: a strong hub, radiating outward. You find the center, you secure it, and the system holds.

But what happens when you try to decapitate an enemy, or a technology, that has no head?

In 1964, a brilliant engineer named Paul Baran sat at his desk at the RAND Corporation, trying to solve a Cold War nightmare: How do you maintain a communications network after a catastrophic nuclear strike? Baran realized that traditional networks were centralized—like a wheel with spokes. If you destroy the hub in the center, every single spoke becomes useless.

His solution was the distributed network, the foundational blueprint for what would eventually become the Internet.

“Under the proposed system, each station would need to be connected to only a few of its nearest neighbors… The system would be highly reliable, even if a large fraction of the stations were destroyed.”

Baran mathematically proved that if you remove the center, the edges don’t die. They simply reroute. A few decades later, telecom engineers used a remarkably similar logic to build cellular telephone networks. Instead of one massive, high-power radio tower serving an entire city, they broke the terrain into a grid of small, low-power cells. If one tower goes offline, the network degrades gracefully rather than collapsing. It bends, but it refuses to break.

There is a profound, poetic irony buried here. The United States government originally funded Baran’s research to create a distributed network so that its centralized monolith could survive. Decades later, asymmetric adversaries across the globe adopted that exact architectural philosophy for their physical defense doctrines—creating “Mosaic Defense” systems designed specifically so that when you destroy the center, the edges keep fighting.

They copied our homework to survive our strength.

I find myself thinking about this tension far beyond the realms of military strategy or software engineering. It is a metaphor for how we construct our lives. We often build centralized lives—anchored entirely to a single identity, a single career, or a single institution. We project a monolith of strength to the world. But monoliths are brittle. When the center is struck, the whole architecture crumbles.

The lesson of our modern architecture is becoming increasingly clear, whether you are managing a network, building an organization, or navigating the quiet complexities of a human life. The fragile monolith is an illusion of safety.

The future belongs to the web that knows how to reroute.

Categories
News

Turning Out the Lights

[Note: see also The Murder of the Washington Post by Ashley Parker who writes: “Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, and Will Lewis, the publisher he appointed at the end of 2023, are embarking on the latest step of their plan to kill everything that makes the paper special.”]

I was struck this morning by the brutal dismantling of the Washington Post’s international reporting capabilities. The list of bureaus being shuttered by the paper reads like a roll call of the 21st century’s geopolitical fault lines: New Delhi, Sydney, Cairo, the entire Middle East team, China, Iran, Turkey.

It is a stunning retreat.

But to view this merely as a corporate restructuring or a casualty of the dying business model of print journalism seems to miss a deeper, darker signal. This seems like an actual cultural symptom.

“The world is becoming less America-centric by the minute while the United States is becoming more America-centric than ever.”

At the exact moment technology has rendered the world indistinguishable from a single room—where a virus, a meme, or a financial crash in one corner sweeps across the floor to the other in seconds—we are choosing to partition off that room.

There is a tragic symmetry to it. As the center of gravity shifts away from the us, the we respond not by engaging harder, but by closing its eyes.

When a newspaper that has shaped history decides that “reporting on the world” is no longer of valuable enough, it is doing more than saving money – although clearly that’s the primary motivation. It seems to be a surrender to the idea that what happens “over there” doesn’t matter enough to us because the people who were supposed to tell us it was coming are gone.

We seem to be turning out the lights in the rooms we find too difficult, believing that if we cannot see the world, the world cannot touch us. Feels wrong.

The moves closing these bureaus are part of broader cuts at the paper:

  • Closing the Sports section
  • Closing the Books section.
  • Restructuring and shrinking the Metro desk.
  • Suspending the Post Reports podcast.
Categories
Living Music

The Strangest of Places

There is a particular kind of silence that fills the room when you read the obituary of a contemporary. It isn’t just the news of a celebrity passing; it is a check engine light on your own dashboard. Bob Weir is gone. He was 78. I am 78.

I have good memories of seeing him playing with Jerry Garcia, Phil Lesh, et al at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Such a different time the 60’s were and the Dead’s music was a big part of that.

When you share a birth year with someone, you share a timeline. You walked through the same decades, witnessed the same wars, the same shifts in culture, albeit from different vantage points. For Weir, it was from the stage of the Fillmore or Winterland Ballrooms and stadiums across the world. For me, it was a different path. But arriving at this specific mile marker—seventy-eight years of age—feels like we both pulled into the same station at the same time, only for him to disembark while I stay on the train a little longer.

I was reminded of a line from “Scarlet Begonias,” quoted recently by Alyssa Mastromonaco:

“Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.”

In our youth, those “strangest places” were literal—backstage hallways, late-night diners, or the chaotic joy of a festival crowd. We looked for the light in the noise. But at 78, the definition of strange changes. The strangest place to find the light now is often in the mirror, observing a face that has weathered nearly eight decades. Or it is found in the quiet of an early morning, realizing that the absence of pain is its own kind of euphoria.

Weir spent a lifetime improvising, trusting that the music would find its way back to the tonic note. There is a lesson in that for those of us left here. The “light” isn’t always a flash of brilliance or a grand finale. Sometimes, if you look at it right, the light is simply the grace of being here, right now, able to listen to the song one more time.

The music never really stops, does it? It just changes players.

Categories
Goals Living

Arriving

There is a specific, quiet kind of melancholy that sets in the day after a massive victory. You spend months, perhaps years, pushing a boulder up a hill. You tell yourself stories about the view from the top. You convince yourself that the air is sweeter there, that the light is golden, and that once you crest that peak, you will finally exhale.

But then you arrive. You stand at the summit. You look around. The view is nice, certainly. But you are still you. The wind is cold. And, terrifyingly, you see a higher peak in the distance that you hadn’t noticed from the valley floor.

Sahil Bloom captures this phenomenon precisely in his framework on wealth:

“The arrival fallacy is the false assumption that reaching some achievement or goal will create durable feelings of satisfaction and contentment in our lives.”

We are culturally wired for the “if/then” logic of happiness. If I get the promotion, then I will feel secure. If I sell the company, then I will feel successful. If I hit the number, then I will be enough. We treat happiness as a location—a coordinate on a map that we are navigating toward.

The tragedy of the arrival fallacy isn’t that we have goals; goals are necessary for direction. The tragedy is that we mortgage our present contentment for a future payoff that bounces check after check. We treat the present moment as a waiting room, a sterile place to endure until our “real life” begins at the finish line.

But durability—that lasting sense of peace we crave—is never found in the outcome. Outcomes are fleeting. They are singular points in time that instantly become the past. Durability is found in the texture of the process. It is found in the struggle, the problem-solving, the quiet Tuesday mornings, and the friction of growth.

If we cannot find a way to fall in love with the climb, the summit will always feel hollow. The goal shouldn’t be the source of our happiness; it should just be the thing that organizes our energy while we find happiness in the work itself.

We never truly “arrive.” We just keep becoming. The journey is indeed the reward.

Categories
Curiosity

The Neutral Ground of Curiosity

We live in a time that demands certainty. We are constantly pressured to have a stance, to pick a team, to decide—right now—whether something is good or bad, right or wrong. It is exhausting. It feels like standing in a courtroom where you are forced to be both the lawyer and the judge.

But there is a quieter, more fertile ground we can stand on. Rick Rubin, writing in The Creative Act, describes it like this:

“The heart of open-mindedness is curiosity. Curiosity doesn’t take sides or insist on a single way of doing things. It explores all perspectives. Always open to new ways, always seeking to arrive at original insights.”

I love the idea that curiosity “doesn’t take sides.” It implies that curiosity is a neutral party. It isn’t there to win an argument; it is there to understand the argument.

When we approach the world with judgment, our vision narrows. We look for evidence that confirms what we already believe. But when we approach the world with curiosity, the lens widens. We stop asking, “Is this right?” and start asking, “What is this?”

Rubin reminds us that the goal isn’t to be correct; the goal is to be original. And you cannot arrive at an original insight if you are walking the same worn path of binary thinking. You have to be willing to wander off the trail, to listen to the opposing view not to defeat it, but to learn the shape of it.

I remind myself to try to drop the gavel. To stop judging the events of my day and simply witness them. To be the explorer, not the jury. Oh, and along the way, embrace serendipity!

I’m reminded of a couple of friends and colleagues. One seems to listen briefly but rapidly reach a black/white conclusion. Another seems to always want to explore further, asking questions to go deeper. One is much more enjoyable to be around. The other a lot less so! Which one can I be? Which one am I?

Categories
Living Quotations

Happy New Year: On Toughness, Unfairness, and Gratitude

Happy New Year!

Charlie Munger once said something that’s been rattling around in my head lately: “Life is tough, life is unfair. Things could be worse.” Today is Charlie’s birthday too.

Charlie’s commentary is not exactly the kind of sentiment you’d find on a greeting card or some inspirational Instagram post. There’s no call to “manifest your dreams” or promise that “this is your year.” And yet, as we stand at the beginning of 2026, I’m reminded yet comforted by Munger’s blunt assessment.

Because here’s the thing: life is tough. It doesn’t distribute its blessings evenly. It’s often unfair.

Some of us start the year nursing wounds from the last one. Some of us are grieving, struggling, or simply exhausted.

To those with those feelings the New Year’s promise of a fresh start can feel pretty hollow when you’re dragging the same problems across an arbitrary calendar line.

I don’t think that final phrase—“things could be worse”—is Charlie being pessimistic. It’s perspective. Even when life is tough or unfair, there’s still something worth holding onto.

As we step into this new year, maybe our resolution should be simple: to face life’s toughness with honesty, to acknowledge its unfairness without being consumed by it, and to remember, on our hardest days, that we’re still here. That things certainly could be worse—and because they’re not, there’s room for gratitude, for effort, for hope.

So here’s to a 2026 full of clear eyes and full hearts, to being smart and honest enough to recognize what’s unfair, but having the wisdom to appreciate what remains.

To really savor moments of joy whenever and wherever we find them. And to keep perspective.

Happy New Year.

Categories
AI AI: Large Language Models Claude Creativity Writing

Co-Creation

Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School, has written a popular book on artificial intelligence titled “Co-Intelligence“. Like I do with most books I read, I’ve collected a series of highlights of various passages I found interesting when I read Mollick’s book – a book I enjoyed very much. This morning I came across one of those highlights which sent me off on this exploration.

But first let me share a perspective. A few friends of mine – when exploring how they might use artificial intelligence – reject the use of AI tools for helping them write. They feel strongly that the words an AI creates aren’t their own and strongly reject simply using an AI-generated output to create articles for their blogs, etc. I certainly appreciate their point of view – but I’m finding a more nuanced perspective on this question is more appropriate for me.

What I’m finding is that when I invoke AI to help me explore a topic, an idea, etc. that the result will almost always open up my thinking by exposing me to things, ideas, etc. that I hadn’t considered. In so doing, I come away feeling “richer” in the sense that I’ve learned – and not simply written – in the process. How I use the work product created by the AI varies – sometimes it’s helpful in critiquing something I’ve written. Other times I use it to help me better understand something – or explore by stepping outside my own brain.

Here’s an example from some exploring I did this morning. During my morning review of my Kindle book highlights using Readwise, I came across a quotation from Mollick’s book that I highlighted:

“If you can link disparate ideas from multiple fields and add a little random creativity, you might be able to create something new.” (Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence)

I love the idea of how creativity is influenced by the often seemingly random interconnections between ideas – and this quote concisely made that point. I wanted to explore this further so I asked Claude Sonnet to help me by writing an article in the style of author John McPhee that’s based on the quote. Here’s the exact prompt I used with Claude:

You are an expert writer in the style of John McPhee. You are helping me write interesting articles for my blog. Create a 750 word draft article for my blog based on the following quotation: “If you can link disparate ideas from multiple fields and add a little random creativity, you might be able to create something new.” (Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence)

I’ve been finding that Claude often does a more creative form of writing as compared to other chatbots. The article that Claude returned in response to my prompt really surprised me – so much so that I thought I’d just share it directly here.

So here we go…the following wasn’t written by me – rather, it was co-created based on a prompt from me and written by my co-intelligent partner Claude.

The Art of Cross-Pollination: Cultivating Innovation in Unlikely Places

In the verdant fields of central New Jersey, not far from where I sit typing these words, a peculiar ritual unfolds each spring. Farmers, their hands calloused from generations of working the land, don white protective suits that make them look more like astronauts than agriculturists. They move deliberately through their orchards, carrying small paintbrushes and vials of pollen.

These are the pear farmers of Mercer County, and they’re engaged in a practice as old as agriculture itself: cross-pollination. But why, you might ask, are they doing by hand what bees have done for millennia? The answer lies in the delicate biology of pear trees and the fickle nature of their reproduction.

Pear trees, it turns out, are notoriously poor self-pollinators. To produce fruit, they need pollen from a different variety of pear tree. But pear blossoms produce relatively little nectar, making them unattractive to bees. So these farmers, in their space-age suits, play the role of bees, manually transferring pollen from one variety to another, ensuring a bountiful harvest come autumn.

As I watched this process unfold on a crisp April morning, I was struck by a quote I’d recently encountered from Ethan Mollick, a professor at the Wharton School: “If you can link disparate ideas from multiple fields and add a little random creativity, you might be able to create something new.”

The pear farmers of Mercer County, in their own way, embody this principle. They’ve taken an idea from one field (entomology) and applied it to another (agriculture), adding their own creative twist (the paintbrushes and protective suits). The result? A thriving pear industry in a region where it might otherwise be impossible.

This concept of cross-pollination – of ideas rather than pollen – is not unique to agriculture. In fact, it’s a principle that underpins much of human innovation and creativity.

Consider, for a moment, the work of Frances Glessner Lee, often called the “mother of forensic science.” Lee was born into wealth in the late 19th century and, like many women of her social standing, was skilled in the domestic arts, particularly miniature-making. But Lee had a passion for criminal investigation, nurtured by her friendship with George Burgess Magrath, a medical examiner.

In the 1940s, Lee combined these seemingly disparate interests to create the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death – intricately detailed dioramas of crime scenes used to train detectives. These miniature crime scenes, built with the precision of a dollhouse maker but imbued with the gruesome details of a murder scene, revolutionized forensic training. Lee had taken skills from the traditionally feminine world of crafts and applied them to the male-dominated field of criminal investigation, creating something entirely new and profoundly useful in the process.

This principle of creative cross-pollination extends far beyond the realms of agriculture and crime scene investigation. The history of human progress is littered with examples of innovations born from the unlikely marriage of disparate fields.

Take, for instance, the development of GPS technology. The seeds of this now-ubiquitous system were planted when physicists William Guier and George Weiffenbach at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory realized they could track the Soviet Sputnik satellite by monitoring its radio transmissions. This was an impressive feat in itself, but it was their colleague Frank McClure who made the cognitive leap that would change the world. McClure realized that if the scientists could track a satellite from the ground, they could also use satellites to track positions on the ground.

This insight – born from the collision of rocket science, radio engineering, and a healthy dose of Cold War paranoia – led to the development of the Transit system, the precursor to modern GPS. Today, this technology guides everything from missile systems to the smartphone in your pocket, all because a group of scientists were able to flip their perspective and see their work from a new angle.

But perhaps the most striking example of creative cross-pollination comes from the field of medicine. In the early 1940s, a Scottish bacteriologist named Alexander Fleming was researching influenza. One day, he noticed that mold had contaminated one of his petri dishes – a common enough occurrence in a microbiology lab. But Fleming observed something unusual: the area around the mold was clear of bacteria.

This chance observation, combined with Fleming’s willingness to investigate rather than simply discard the contaminated sample, led to the discovery of penicillin. Fleming had linked the disparate fields of mycology and bacteriology, added a dash of serendipity, and created something that would revolutionize medicine and save countless lives.

As we navigate an increasingly complex and interconnected world, the ability to cross-pollinate ideas from different fields becomes ever more crucial. The challenges we face – from climate change to antibiotic resistance – are too complex to be solved within the confines of a single discipline.

So perhaps we should all take a cue from the pear farmers of Mercer County. Don our metaphorical protective suits, pick up our idea-paintbrushes, and venture into unfamiliar orchards of thought. For it’s in these unlikely places, where disparate ideas collide and combine, that the seeds of innovation are sown.

Categories
Creativity Writing

Beyond the Backdrop: Crafting Fiction

Michael Lewis recently interviewed author Amor Towles and the New Orleans Book Festival. They had a great conversation and I highly recommend it (YouTube video)!

Near the end of the conversation with Lewis, Towles shares an explanation of the role history plays in his writing. Turns out he’s shared this explanation many other times during other book talks.

Here’s a rough recap of his explanation:

Imagine that you’re in a theater and you’re about to see is stage play. Let’s say it’s a play of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” What you’re looking at is a living room of a wealthy Russian estate in the countryside with fine furniture. At the back of the room are two French doors, and if you look through them into the distance, you can see the cherry orchard itself. It’s spring, and the trees are in bloom, and you can see the blossoms.

What you’re looking at, of course, when you look across the stage through the French doors, is actually a painted canvas behind the doors. That’s the way a set crew will make a backdrop – they’re going to paint a picture of this orchard and drop it behind the doors. They will not paint it in a hyperrealist style but in an impressionist style like Renoir or Monet, because that’s what’s going to look right to the natural eye at that distance. It should look a little blurry to give the feeling that it’s afternoon. Maybe the blossoms look like they are even moving in the breeze.

In front of that, on either side of the French doors, are bookcases made out of plywood and painted to look like mahogany. On one side is a staircase that goes up to nothing, and on the other is a door that goes nowhere. All a part of the stage set.

But in front of all that is an actual table surrounded by actual chairs, and on the table is an actual china tea service.

It is very important that these things be actual because let’s say that there’s a sister sitting at the table having tea alone, and the brother slams this door as he comes in, stomping across this stage. He’s clearly in high emotion, and what we want to hear is the physicality of the wooden legs scraping across the wooden surface of the stage when he pulls back that chair to sit down and pulls himself up. When he slaps the surface of the table to make a point, we want to hear the physicality of that contact. And when the sister delicately, patiently puts down her teacup, we want to hear that gentle clink of the china on china. It’s very important that these things be real because that’s what allows us in the audience to focus on this moment in a very precise way.

For Towles, history is the painted backdrop, and he’s not interested in describing that in a hyperrealist style. He gives it an impressionist style because the role of history in his work is to provide a sense of time, of place, of mood – but that’s it.

Now in front of that, sits a lot of plywood that’s been painted to look like mahogany. This stuff he hopes makes you pause and ask “Did that actually happen or did he make that up?”

But in front of all that is the actual table and chairs. Just like in the play, it’s very important that that be very real to you. They should be so real to you that when you’re reading a scene around that table, you feel like you’re sitting at the table, and that you can read the changes in expression on the faces of the brother and sister. You can hear the nuances in their voices as they exchange their ideas and sentiments. It’s very important that this feel real to you because that’s actually where all of the action is.

Towles’ theatrical metaphor perfectly captures the essence of crafting historical fiction. History serves as the evocative backdrop, transporting readers to a specific era without getting bogged down in minutiae. This allows space for the reader’s imagination to flourish, fostering a deeper connection with the story. Towles’ intention is not to deliver a history lesson, but to create a believable atmosphere where characters and their narratives can truly shine.

At the heart of action is that single table with the china tea setting – the piece of the set that is startlingly, undeniably real. When the brother slams through the door in raging emotion, we don’t just want to see the movement – we must hear the grating screech of wooden chair legs against wooden floor. As the distressed sister delicately replaces her teacup in its saucer, that gentle clink of china on china must sing out and resonate.

Towles’s theatrical metaphor is a profound reminder that an author’s role is to create an immersive staging ground where characters can indisputably come to life for the audience. But the author’s craft is only fully realized when the players succeed in elevating the audience’s emotional experience from that of witness to full-fledged participant, intimately sharing the lives captured in that snapshot of illuminated reality.

Have you ever been swept away by a historical fiction novel that transported you to another time and place? If so, then you’ve likely experienced the magic that Amor Towles weaves with his words. Dive into one of Towles’ captivating novels and witness firsthand how he masterfully brings the past to life on the stage of his imagination. Perhaps, inspired by Towles’ approach, you’ll even pick up a pen and explore crafting your own fiction masterpiece.

Regardless, the next time you lose yourself in a captivating period drama, remember the artistry behind the scenes — the meticulous construction of a believable world where timeless human emotions take center stage.

Suggestion: start reading Amor Towles with his first novel: Rules of Civility