Tag: Scott Loftesness

Categories
Living Serendipity

The Infrastructure of Accident

I had a ham shack when I was in high school. A tight corner of my bedroom, a transceiver, an antenna wire running out through the window frame to somewhere up on the roof. Late nights mostly. The ritual of it: power on, headphones on, find a frequency, make sure it’s clear. Then send CQ. CQ. CQ. A call to no one in particular, to anyone, to whoever happened to be listening on that frequency at that moment anywhere on earth.

Sometimes nothing came back. Sometimes someone answered from a place I had no reason to expect — a voice, or rather a pattern of dots and dashes that resolved into a voice, from a callsign I didn’t recognize, from a grid square I’d have to look up on a map afterward. We would exchange signal reports and names and locations and often we talked longer. Our gear. What we did that day. Ordinary things, transmitted at forty words a minute across a great distance to a stranger I would never meet.

I did not know then that I was practicing something. I thought I was just playing radio.

We have decided, sometime since, that luck is a system. That serendipity is an architecture. That the people to whom good things happen have engineered the conditions for good things to happen, and that the people to whom good things do not happen have, at some level, failed to present the right surface to the world.

I am not sure when we decided this. Sometime after we stopped believing in fate and before we started believing in algorithms, in that narrow window when we still believed, provisionally, in ourselves.

The self-help literature on luck is a literature of verbs. Expand. Broadcast. Reframe. Sabotage your algorithms. The verbs are always active, always transitive, always aimed at a future in which the random becomes, retroactively, inevitable. You will look back and see the architecture. You will understand that the flight delay was an opportunity, that the canceled meeting was a gift, that the stranger in the adjacent seat was not a stranger at all but a node in a network you were already, without knowing it, building.

What the literature cannot account for is the canceled meeting that was simply a canceled meeting. The flight delay in which nothing happened except that you sat in a molded plastic chair in Terminal B and ate a sandwich that cost fourteen dollars and thought about everything you had not yet done. The stranger who remained a stranger.

I have been thinking about a used bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, at the corner of Dwight. Shakespeare & Co. It smelled the way all serious used bookstores smell — dust and possibility, which are not always different things. The shelves ran floor to ceiling and were not organized in any way that rewarded efficiency. You found things there the way you find things in dreams: without looking, and then suddenly they were in your hands.

I found a paperback copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem there. Someone else’s margin notes in blue ink, a handwriting I did not recognize and have never been able to stop thinking about. Whoever they were, they had underlined the same sentences I would have underlined. They had written yes in the margin next to things I did not yet know I believed.

I have no way of knowing whether that was luck or whether I had simply been the kind of person who wandered into bookstores and stayed too long. The kind of person for whom that particular door was already, structurally, open.

Buildings have architects. Someone drew the plans. But I cannot find, looking back, the moment I became that person. I can only locate the book.

The word serendipity was coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole, who derived it from a Persian fairy tale about three princes of Serendip who were always making discoveries by accidents and luck, of things they were not in quest of. Accidents and luck. The word has always contained both. What the contemporary literature has done is quietly eliminate the accident and keep only the luck — reframed now as preparation, as readiness, as optimized openness. The princes were not prepared. They wandered.

Anymore we are often uncomfortable with just wandering. Wandering has no metrics. A waste of time.

There is a thing that happens when you pick up a physical newspaper, one you did not choose from a menu of personalized recommendations online but simply lifted from a rack at the library because it was there. You read stories you would never have clicked on while reading on an iPhone. Not because you lacked interest but because no algorithm had yet determined that you had it. The story finds you before the system can decide whether you are the kind of person who would want to be found.

I go to the library some days for precisely this reason. It is a considered refusal — the same one the princes of Serendip were practicing, though they had no word for what they were refusing. The library does not know what I clicked on last Tuesday. It cannot optimize my morning. It can only offer everything, indiscriminately, and trust me to wander.

Life feels richer on those days. I have tried to understand why and have arrived, after some time, at this: on those days the world is larger than my prior assumptions about it. That is not a small thing. That may, in fact, be the whole thing. Here comes the sun!

Shakespeare & Co. closed in June 2015, after fifty-one years on Telegraph Avenue. The owner said the past few months had been unsupportable. He taped a note to the door and served his last customer and locked up around eight in the evening and that was that. Someone who worked there was quoted saying that the serendipity of finding a book that changes your life doesn’t happen on Amazon. Indeed. He meant it as an elegy. The infrastructure of accident had to be built by someone. It had to be maintained. It had to be, on some Tuesday evening, locked for the last time.

The owner locked up around eight. He had served his last customer. There was nothing more to do.

The margin notes are still in the book.

Categories
AI Blogs/Weblogs Living Menlo Park

The Foothills

It was later in his illness. Someone had set up a folding table in the garage and Chris was sitting at it in a folding chair, working through a stack of photographs. Signing them, one by one, telling me the story inside each one as it came up — where he’d been, what was happening just outside the frame, what he’d seen in the viewfinder that made him press the shutter at that exact moment and not a half second later. The garage was quiet. Outside, Menlo Park was doing whatever Menlo Park does on an ordinary afternoon. In here, a man was accounting for his life in pictures and I was standing there holding a camera, not quite sure what I was witnessing.

I made a photograph of him.

It’s at the top of his Wikipedia entry now. That’s how the world knows his face — a picture I made of him making sense of his pictures, in a folding chair, near the end. I don’t know what to do with that except carry it.

Chris Gulker had been a photographer long before he was anything else. Staff photographer at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. Twice nominated for a Pulitzer. Published in Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone. He had the eye first. Everything else — the virtual newsrooms, the blogrolls, the hacked-together color systems that dragged newspapers into the digital age — all of it came from the same instinct: look carefully, see what’s actually there, build toward what you see.

When I first met him he had just gotten a Leica M8. He talked about it the way he talked about everything he loved, which is to say with specificity and without apology.

He had driven an Audi TT. He had a Leica M8. He was not a man who made concessions to the ordinary.

He had glioblastoma. Diagnosed in 2006. Surgery, radiation, the whole negotiation with a disease that doesn’t actually negotiate. He knew the terms and he kept going — kept shooting, kept writing at gulker.com, kept thinking out loud about what was coming next, as if the tumor were an inconvenience and the future were the point.

He walked when he could walk. He talked when he could talk.

He died in October 2010. He was fifty-nine.

Twice a week in those last two years I’d put Lily in the car and drive over to his house. Lily was small and opinionated and she understood the trip as hers. We’d pick Chris up after breakfast, when the morning was still cool, and do the loop — one mile, flat, because flat was what worked. Then we’d come back to find Linda moving through the house, Chris’s wife of nearly thirty years, the still point of everything that was happening to them. Sometimes she’d join us and the conversation would open into something more alive, the kind of talk where someone says something offhand and suddenly everyone is leaning forward.

One of those mornings the three of us decided to start a local blog for Menlo Park. Linda would write and edit. Chris would shoot. We called it InMenlo.com.

When Linda wrote Chris’s obituary, that’s where she published it.

People talk about spending time with the dying as a kind of grace extended downward. It wasn’t like that. Those mornings were a gift — the ideas, the talk, the way Chris described what was coming as if he could already see it clearly from wherever he was standing. I left those visits more alive than I arrived. That’s the debt I carry. Not grief exactly, though there’s grief. More like an obligation to keep paying attention to the future he spent his life building toward.

Last month a man named Demis Hassabis closed a two-hour technology showcase in Mountain View — twenty minutes from where Chris and I used to walk — and said seven words I haven’t been able to put down since: We are at the foothills of the singularity. The audience applauded. Then everyone went home.

I keep thinking Chris would have had something to say about that.

Not the singularity part, necessarily — that word carries a slightly rapturous charge, too certain of its own prophecy. But the foothills part. The careful humility of it. The acknowledgment that what we can see from here — AI systems autonomously building operating systems, models that predicted a hurricane’s landfall and saved lives — all of it is still just approach terrain. The mountain is what comes after.

Chris spent his whole career in the foothills of things. Slightly ahead of the moment, always building infrastructure for a future that hadn’t arrived yet, always explaining to people who weren’t sure they wanted to know. He pioneered the blogroll. Built one of the first online newspapers. Hacked color into the San Francisco Examiner with Macintoshes and ingenuity when the system said it couldn’t be done. He was the wrong man for the present tense. He belonged to the next sentence.

He had the photographer’s instinct underneath all of it — the knowledge that you have to look carefully, that the light is always changing, that if you wait too long the moment is gone. He put the Leica to his eye and he saw. He put his hands on a keyboard and he built what he saw toward.

Lily is gone now too. She outlasted Chris, which felt right — she was stubborn and she loved the route.

I still think about those mornings. The cool air, the flat mile, Lily pulling us both forward. The way the real conversation started when we got back. The way Linda might appear and the whole thing would open into something none of us had planned. The way Chris talked about what was coming — not as speculation but as something he could already see, the way a photographer sees the shot before he raises the camera.

He always knew something was coming. He had a gift for the future tense I’ve never quite encountered in anyone else — and a photographer’s understanding that the future, like light, doesn’t wait.

I wonder what he’d make of the foothills. I think he’d already have the Leica out. And I know we’d still be talking about it.

Categories
AI Business IBM Management

Making It Up As We Went Along

There was a building along Route 270 in Gaithersburg, Maryland where people kept secrets for a living. Not the cloak and dagger kind. The corporate kind, which in its own way requires just as much discipline. The IBM Washington Systems Center occupied a two-story modern building that looked, from the outside, like any other outpost of late twentieth century American business. Inside it was something else. It was where IBM sent its hardest problems, and where the largest IBM customers in the world — the ones whose names you would recognize immediately — sent their most urgent ones back.

I worked there as a manager. But before I was a manager there, I was a hire. And before I was a hire, I was like every other IBM professional on the outside of a particular line — a line I didn’t fully understand until I crossed it.

At IBM there was a protocol so embedded in the culture it had almost ceased to be a rule and become something closer to a religious observance. New products were not discussed until they were announced. Not hinted at. Not alluded to. Not whispered about with a favored customer over lunch. The announcement came in the form of something called a Blue Letter — a formal communication from senior leadership that functioned as the official moment a product entered the world. Before the Blue Letter, the product did not exist in any conversation you were permitted to have. After it, you could talk about nothing else.

Violation was not a career setback. It was a firing offense. Full stop.

That clarity had a kind of elegance to it. You didn’t have to calibrate how much you could say or navigate gray areas. The line was absolute. And because it was absolute, and because everyone knew the consequence of crossing it, the culture enforced itself. You didn’t need surveillance. You needed people to understand the stakes, and they did.

What I didn’t understand, from the outside, was what that line was doing to my imagination.

When you can’t see the roadmap — when the strategy and the unannounced products and the long arc of where the company is going are all behind a wall you have no access to — you don’t experience that as absence. You experience it as depth. The things you don’t know feel like they must be there for a reason. The gaps in the announced picture feel like the gaps in a great iceberg — what’s visible is impressive, but what’s below the surface must be more impressive still.

I had faith in IBM’s strategic intelligence the way you have faith in things you can’t fully see. And faith, uncontradicted by evidence, tends toward beauty. The hidden roadmap wasn’t just unknown — it was, in my imagination, a thing of coherence and intention and vision. It had to be. The alternative was too unsettling to consider.

Then I got hired into the Washington Systems Center and crossed the line.

There was no single moment of disillusionment. No specific product that shattered the dream, no strategy document that read like a disappointment. It was more like a gradual adjustment of the eyes — the way they adapt when you move from bright sunlight into a room lit quite differently than you expected. The room isn’t dark. It’s just not what you anticipated. And once your eyes adjust you can see perfectly well, but you can never quite recover the image you had of the room before you entered it.

The reality on the inside was messier than the dream on the outside. More improvised. More human. We were, in ways I hadn’t anticipated, almost making it up as we went along. Not carelessly — the people at WSC were extraordinary, the work was serious, the commitment was real. But the beautiful coherent roadmap I had constructed in my imagination from the outside bore only a partial resemblance to the actual thing. Strategy, it turned out, looked different up close. Less like architecture. More like weather.

I absorbed this alone. Nobody sat me down and named what I was experiencing. Nobody had the conversation with me that I would later learn to have with others. I found my way through it by degrees, the way you find your way through most things that don’t come with instructions.

What came out the other side wasn’t cynicism. It was something more useful — a clearer eye, a more grounded relationship to the institution I was part of. The faith hadn’t been wrong exactly. It had just been innocent. And innocence, once lost, can’t be recovered. But what replaces it, if you’re lucky, is something steadier.

Years later I was the manager. And I was hiring IBMers — good ones, experienced ones, people who had spent serious careers on the other side of the blue line. They knew the products cold. They knew the customers. They knew how to work. What they didn’t know, couldn’t know, was what waited for them on the inside of the wall they were about to cross.

I knew it. Because I had been them.

There is a particular expression that crosses a person’s face when the actual roadmap becomes visible for the first time. It isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s more like a subtle recalibration — a slight stillness, a momentary adjustment behind the eyes. The person in front of you is doing quiet interior work, reconciling what they imagined with what they’re now seeing. The gap between those two things is doing something to them, and they’re not sure yet what to do with it.

I learned to watch for that expression. And when I saw it I knew what was coming if I didn’t get ahead of it.

The danger wasn’t disappointment. Disappointment is temporary, and smart people move through it. The danger was what disappointment hardens into when it isn’t named and worked through — a corrosive cynicism that poisons not just the person carrying it but everyone around them. A talented IBMer who had invested a career in faith, discovered the faith was misplaced, and decided the whole enterprise was therefore hollow — that person could do real damage to a team. I had seen it happen, or the early stages of it, which was enough.

So I developed what I came to think of as the god is dead conversation.

The name came from Nietzsche, though the application was strictly practical. What Nietzsche meant — or one of the things he meant — was that when the organizing faith of a civilization collapses, the collapse doesn’t leave nothing. It leaves a vacancy that has to be filled with something else, something built rather than inherited. The god is dead conversation was about helping someone through that vacancy quickly, before they filled it with the wrong thing.

It wasn’t a long conversation. It didn’t need to be. What it needed to be was honest, and direct, and delivered before the cynicism had time to set.

I would tell them what I saw happening. I would tell them it was normal, expected, that everyone who crossed this particular line felt some version of it. I would tell them the dream they’d carried on the outside wasn’t foolish — it was a reasonable response to incomplete information, and the information had been incomplete by design, and the design had served real purposes. None of that made them naive. It made them human.

And then I would tell them what I’d learned on my own, without anyone to guide me through it. That the messiness on the inside wasn’t a failure of IBM’s intelligence or intention. It was just what strategy actually looks like when you’re close enough to see the seams. Every institution looks more coherent from the outside than it does from the inside. That’s not a scandal. That’s organizational life.

The conversations were tricky. There was real care required. You were asking someone to grieve something — the beautiful imagined roadmap, the faith in a hidden coherence — without tipping them into bitterness about what replaced it. You were trying to accelerate a process that, left alone, might drag on for months and quietly corrode their effectiveness. And you were doing it while also being their manager, which meant you needed them functional and engaged on the other side of the conversation, not just unburdened.

What I had going for me was credibility. I wasn’t delivering a message from outside the experience. I had made the same crossing. I knew the specific texture of what they were feeling because I had felt it myself — the diffuse quality of it, the absence of a single dramatic moment, the gradual adjustment of the eyes. When I told them I understood what was happening to them, I actually did. I think they could tell.

Trial and error had taught me the shape of it. What didn’t work I had found out the hard way, at some cost, early on. What I arrived at had been load tested by real people in real situations. It wasn’t a framework from a leadership seminar. It was something I owned completely, which meant I could adapt it in the moment rather than execute a script.

Most of them came through it well. Better than well, actually.

What I hadn’t fully anticipated — though in retrospect it makes complete sense — was what replaced the faith once it was gone. It wasn’t the steadier, clearer-eyed pragmatism I had found my way to alone. It was something more potent than that. Something that surprised me the first time I saw it and then became one of the things I quietly counted on.

They came out the other side feeling superior.

Not arrogant. Not dismissive of colleagues still on the outside. But quietly, privately elevated — because they were now keepers of the secrets they had once only believed in. The blue line that had shaped their entire professional identity, that had defined the boundary of what they could know and say and imagine, was now behind them. They were on the inside. They had access. They had been trusted with the actual roadmap, the real strategy, the unannounced products that the rest of the world was still constructing faith-based pictures of.

The believer had become the keeper. And keeping, it turned out, was a more powerful identity than believing. The believer is passive — sustained by what they imagine. The keeper is active, responsible, trusted. They carry something real rather than something projected.

It solved my practical problem neatly, though that wasn’t why it moved me. What moved me was watching people find their footing on the other side of a genuine loss and discover that the ground there was solid — different from what they’d imagined, but solid. They hadn’t just survived the crossing. They’d been changed by it in a way that made them more valuable, more grounded, more fully present to the actual work.

Which was, I suppose, what the god is dead conversation had been for all along.

I think about that blue line often these days.

We are living through a moment when artificial intelligence is advancing faster than most people can track, and the organizations building it — the labs, the research teams, the companies placing enormous bets on where this technology is going — have their own version of the wall. Not identical to IBM’s. The competitive and legal architecture is different. The culture is different. But the basic structure is the same: there is what has been announced, and there is everything else, and most people are working entirely from the announced side.

Which means most people are doing what I did before I crossed the line at WSC. They are filling the gaps with faith. And faith, uncontradicted by evidence, tends toward beauty.

The unrevealed AI roadmap looks, from the outside, like a thing of coherence and intention. The capabilities that haven’t been announced yet must be more impressive than the ones that have. The strategy must be more considered than what’s visible. The gaps in the public picture feel like depth rather than uncertainty — like the part of the iceberg below the surface, which must be vast because the part above is already remarkable.

I am not saying this faith is wrong. I held the same faith about IBM and it wasn’t wrong exactly — it was innocent. The people constructing faith-based pictures of where AI is going are doing a reasonable thing with incomplete information. The information is incomplete partly by design, for reasons that make competitive and strategic sense, just as IBM’s secrecy made sense. None of that makes the faith naive.

But I’ve been inside enough walls to know what the inside tends to look like. And I think it’s worth saying, clearly and without cynicism, that the reality is probably messier than the dream. More improvised. More uncertain. More human. The people building these systems are extraordinary — the work is serious, the commitment is real — but they are also, in ways that might surprise you, almost making it up as they go along. Not carelessly. But without the complete map that the outside imagines must exist somewhere, fully drawn, waiting to be revealed.

Strategy, up close, looks less like architecture and more like weather.

This isn’t a counsel of despair. It’s almost the opposite.

The IBMers who crossed the line and survived the god is dead conversation didn’t end up with less than they started with. They ended up with more — a clearer eye, a more grounded relationship to the institution, a more useful kind of engagement with the actual work. The faith they lost was the innocent kind. What replaced it was steadier and more durable.

I suspect something similar is available to anyone willing to look at the AI moment with clear eyes. Not the disappointed cynicism of someone who expected a beautiful coherent roadmap and found a human institution instead. Not the breathless faith of someone still on the outside of the wall, filling gaps with generous assumptions. Something in between — harder to sustain, more honest, ultimately more useful.

The technology is real. The progress is real. The stakes are real. None of that requires the roadmap to be a thing of beauty. It just requires it to be worked on seriously by people who understand what they don’t yet know — which, from everything I can observe, it is.

What I couldn’t give those IBMers, and what nobody can give you, is the experience of crossing the line yourself. The god is dead conversation only works because the crossing has already happened — because the person sitting across from you has already seen the actual roadmap and is already processing the gap between what they imagined and what they found. You can’t have the conversation in advance. The disillusionment has to be real before it can be worked through.

Most of us will never cross the line into the AI labs. We’ll stay on the outside of the wall, working from the announced picture, filling the gaps as best we can. That’s not a failure — it’s just the condition most of us are in, the same condition those IBMers were in for their entire careers before I hired them.

But knowing the wall exists, and knowing what walls do to imagination, seems like it ought to change something about how we hold our faith. Not abandon it. Just hold it a little more lightly. Stay curious about the seams. Remain open to the possibility that the most important thing about the unrevealed roadmap isn’t what’s in it — but what we’ve projected onto it.

The blue line is still there. Most of us are still on the outside of it.

And the hidden roadmap still looks, from here, like a thing of beauty.

Categories
Pescadero

The Other Side of the Street

This is the coast south of Half Moon Bay, which is to say this is the part of California that people who live here do not talk about at dinner parties. The road runs through artichoke fields. The fog comes in the morning and does not always leave. Twenty minutes south of anything you’d call a town, there is a place called Pescadero, and if you have never stopped there you should stop.

Everyone goes to Duarte’s. This is correct. The soup is what they say it is.

But there is a gas station across the street, and this is where I want to take you.

The building is burnt orange. There are strings of lights along the front that were probably Christmas lights once. Inside, past the motor oil, there is a counter, and behind the counter someone is making carnitas that certain people — the kind who pay attention to such things — will tell you are the best in the Bay Area. The place is called Mercado & Taqueria De Amigos. It is cash only. There is a white sauce at the salsa bar that I have not been able to identify or replicate or stop thinking about.

There is a man who comes in at lunch — work boots, a particular kind of flannel — who does not look at the menu. The woman at the counter is already writing when he speaks. He sits outside. Eight minutes, start to finish.

California is full of places that exist entirely for the people who live in them. We drive past most of them. We are always on the way to the lighthouse, the next town, the thing someone told us not to miss. The gas station in Pescadero is not on the way to anything.

I keep going back.

Here’s a revised and extended version:

The Other Side of the Street

This is the coast south of Half Moon Bay, which is to say this is the part of California that people who live here do not talk about at dinner parties. The road runs through artichoke fields. The fog comes in the morning and does not always leave. It hangs in the cypress trees and in the low places between the hills, and some days it is still there at three in the afternoon, the light going gray and cold, the ocean invisible a quarter mile west.

Twenty minutes south of anything you’d call a town, there is a place called Pescadero. Population 643. A post office. A feed store. A bar that has been a bar since before your grandfather was born.

Everyone goes to Duarte’s. This is correct. You should go to Duarte’s.

But there is a gas station across the street, and this is where I want to take you first.

The building is burnt orange. There are strings of lights along the front — Christmas lights, probably, once, now just lights, strung there so long they’ve become part of the architecture, the same way certain things in certain places stop being decorations and start being load-bearing. Inside, past the motor oil and the WD-40, there is a counter. Behind it, someone is making carnitas. The place is called Mercado & Taqueria De Amigos. Cash only. At the salsa bar there is a white sauce that I have spent three years failing to identify and cannot stop thinking about.

There is a man who comes in at lunch. Work boots with the kind of dried mud that doesn’t come off, a flannel shirt the color of something faded, a straw hat with a cord that keeps it on in the coastal wind. He does not look at the menu because there is no version of this transaction in which he needs the menu. The woman behind the counter is already writing before he finishes speaking. He carries his food out back, where there are picnic tables under whatever sky the fog has left behind. His truck is parked along the side — an old Ford, the kind that has stopped being a vehicle and become a tool. Eight minutes inside. He stays longer out back.

If you walk up around the corner — it is a short walk, less than you think — there is an auto shop. The walls have been painted so many times in so many colors that the paint itself has become the material, layers of blue and cream and rust bleeding into each other like a tide chart, the wood beneath showing through in long vertical streaks. The doors are not garage doors. They are paneled, ornate, the kind of doors that belonged to something else in another century, pressed into service here and painted over until they forgot what they were. Above them, a small Ford dealer badge, neat and official, as if someone wanted to make sure you knew this was still a place of business.

Keep going. Cross the street. Further on, there is Saint Anthony’s — a white Catholic church with a steeple that rises into whatever the sky is doing that day, a rose window above dark red doors, a hand-carved wooden sign out front that someone made carefully, with time. It has been here long enough that the people buried in the surrounding hills were baptized here, married here, carried out those red doors for the last time. The man with the cord on his hat has probably sat in those pews. His parents almost certainly did.

If you keep walking — past the church, out along Pescadero Road where the land opens back up — you will find Harley Farms. They make goat cheese there, small rounds of it, sometimes rolled in herbs or edible flowers, the kind of thing that sounds precious until you taste it and understand that it came out of this specific soil and this specific fog and couldn’t have come from anywhere else.

California is full of places that exist entirely for the people who live in them. We drive past most of them. We are always on the way to the lighthouse, the next town, the thing someone told us not to miss.

The gas station in Pescadero is not on the way to anything. Neither is the church. Neither is the auto shop, or the farm at the end of the road with the goat cheese that tastes like the fog smells.

I keep going back. I’m still not sure I have earned it.

Categories
Storytelling Writing

The Craft in the Work: A Reading Guide to Ten Storytellers

There’s a kind of reading that’s really a form of listening — not to what a writer is saying but to how they’re solving a problem. Every great piece of nonfiction is an argument about structure, and most writers never explain it aloud. The argument is in the choices: where the piece starts, when it digresses, what it leaves out, how it ends. You can enjoy the work without seeing any of this. But once you start seeing it, you can’t stop — and eventually, some of it becomes yours.

This guide is for both kinds of reading. Each writer here is worth your time as a reader. Each one also has something specific and stealable for anyone who writes. I’ve tried to name both.

The ten: John McPhee, Robert Caro, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Michael Lewis, Joan Didion, David Grann, Sam Anderson, Susan Orlean, Tom Junod, and Wright Thompson. Different registers, different obsessions, different methods. What they share is a commitment to making difficult things feel inevitable — and the discipline to make that look effortless.

They fall into three loose clusters, which might help you find your entry point. Structure builders — McPhee, Caro, Grann — write pieces that feel inevitable because the architecture is invisible but load-bearing. Emotional access — Orlean, Junod, Thompson — get you inside feeling before you know you’re there. Voice and form — Didion, Sullivan, Lewis, Anderson — the sentence, the digression, the explanatory seduction, the essay as genuine inquiry. The clusters overlap, and the best writers in each group are doing all three things at once. But if you’re trying to solve a specific problem in your own writing, the clusters tell you where to look first.

Continue reading “The Craft in the Work: A Reading Guide to Ten Storytellers”
Categories
Dayton Ohio History Memories

The Weight of What Arrived

The first thing you noticed was the smell. Hot metal and oil and something older underneath — not unpleasant, exactly, more like the smell of a thing that knew what it was doing. Dayton Typographic Service on a Saturday morning. Dad already at his machine, pencil tucked over his ear, fingers moving. I was four or five. I had no idea what I was looking at. That was most of the point.

A Linotype machine is the size of a small car and louder than you expect. It sets type by casting individual lines in molten lead — hence the name, line o’ type — and the whole apparatus runs hot, always, a controlled furnace at the center of the work. The operators moved around it with the casual authority of men who understood something dangerous well enough not to fear it. Dad was one of those men. He knew what he was doing with his hands, and watching him work was the first time I understood that intelligence could live in the body, not just the mind. The pencil over the ear was the tell. He was always thinking ahead of his hands.

We lived on Burleigh Avenue in a two-bedroom ranch so small the rooms felt like suggestions. There was a garage out back on the alleyway. The basement held more than you’d expect. The furnace, coal-fed, which Dad stoked every morning before the rest of us were awake — that heat, the warmth that was simply there when I came downstairs, was something he had made. He tended it the same way he tended the Linotype: with patience, with knowledge, with hands that knew the work.

But there was also the kiln. My folks did ceramics, and in a corner of that basement sat the kiln they fired their pieces in. To check the temperature you pulled out a cone — a small pyramidal piece of clay engineered to droop at a specific heat — and peered in at it through the door. I remember doing this, leaning in toward that rectangle of orange light, the blast of heat against my face, checking whether the cone had begun to bend. It was one of my earliest understandings that transformation was not instantaneous. You watched for it. You waited for the material to tell you.

There are men like that in every generation and then one generation there aren’t. They knew how things worked because they had no choice but to know. The furnace would not stoke itself. The type would not set itself. The knowledge was not academic. It lived in the hands or it didn’t live at all.

Union Station was only a few miles from Burleigh Avenue but it existed at a different scale entirely. You went through the main doors and there was a model railroad in the lobby — an elaborate layout, HO scale or maybe O scale, I was too young to know the difference — and sometimes they had it running, the little locomotives making their rounds through their little landscape, and I would stand there watching it with the focused attention that children bring to things they love. I did not know then that I was watching a miniature version of what was waiting upstairs.

The aunts and uncles came from New Jersey on the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Spirit of St. Louis, which ran between New York and St. Louis and stopped at Dayton’s Union Station, was a name that meant something to me before I fully understood what a railroad was. What I understood was this: when they came, they brought TastyKakes.

If you didn’t grow up in the Mid-Atlantic corridor you may not know TastyKakes, which is a condition I regard with sympathy. They are small cakes, individually wrapped, and they came in a cardboard box, and my aunts and uncles carried them off the train the way travelers have always carried the irreplaceable things of home. The Pennsylvania Railroad as delivery mechanism for Butterscotch Krimpets. The whole industrial apparatus of American locomotion bent toward that purpose.

But first there was the platform, and the waiting, and then the thing you felt before you heard it and heard before you saw it. The locomotive did not arrive so much as it asserted itself. The platform shook. The air changed. There was a sound that was also a pressure, a physical fact you received in your chest and your feet simultaneously, and then the engine was there, enormous, indifferent to its own enormity, trailing steam. Nothing I have encountered since has prepared me for anything the way that prepared me for everything. The world, it turned out, contained forces at that scale. It was useful to know.

My aunts and uncles stepped down onto the platform and there were embraces and the good confusion of arrival, and eventually the box of TastyKakes changed hands, and we drove back to the small house on Burleigh Avenue where Dad had been up since before dawn making sure it was warm.

I think about scale a lot now. The furnace that heated two bedrooms. The kiln glowing orange in the basement corner. The Linotype casting its lines of lead. The locomotive making the platform tremble. They were all of a piece — a world in which the forces that ran your life were large and hot and loud and present, operated by people who understood them through their hands. You could go see them. You could stand close enough to feel the heat, smell it, watch it do its work on the material.

Dad is gone now. Union Station is gone — demolished in 1976, replaced by a parking structure. The Linotype machines are in museums, or they’re not anywhere. The coal furnace was replaced by something cleaner and quieter and invisible.

I don’t know what my children will remember. I hope it has weight.

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
Friends Gratitude Kindness Living

The One Thing Money Doesn’t Buy

Somewhere there is a couch that launched a hedge fund.

It belonged to a man named Carter, and for the better part of a year it was where Dan Loeb slept while he figured out what came next. No office. No fund. No Third Point. Just a friend’s apartment and the specific grace of someone who didn’t need you to have already become something before they let you in the door.

When Loeb finally landed at Jefferies, Carter gave him a few hundred thousand dollars to manage. That became a million. The million became seed capital. Third Point was built on top of it — thirty years of it, billions of dollars of it — and all of it traces back, in some straight unbroken line, to a couch and a person who said yes before the evidence was in.

Patrick O’Shaughnessy asked him about it near the end of a long conversation. The kindest thing anyone has ever done for you — it’s the question O’Shaughnessy always asks, and it always cuts through. Loeb had just finished making a case for kindness as a serious value, not a soft one. Something that belongs at the top of the hierarchy, he said, next to honesty and intelligence. The mechanism that unlocks empathy. He noted, almost reluctantly, that it also compounds in business — before adding that the moment you start treating it as an investment, you’ve already lost the thread.

Then he quoted Palmer Luckey.

The one thing money doesn’t buy you is friends that believed in you when you had nothing.

Luckey built Oculus in his parents’ garage. Sold it for two billion. Founded Anduril. He has spent his adult life proving that if you are relentless and strange and right, you can make almost anything happen with money. And what he noticed, somewhere in all of that, is where money stops. Not at luxury. Not at access. It stops at loyalty that predates your success. You cannot purchase the memory of Carter’s couch. You cannot acquire, at any price, the specific knowledge that someone held you when you were nothing yet.

I have been thinking about the people in my own life who did some version of this. Not always with money. A call made on your behalf before you knew you needed it. A door held open to a room you couldn’t see. These moments are nearly invisible when they happen. They only become legible later, once the room turns out to matter — once you can look back and trace the line.

The line is always shorter than you think. And it always ends at a person.

Categories
AI

The Coach Who Wouldn’t Change

In 1975, a twenty-four-year-old Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the first digital camera. It was the size of a toaster, captured a black-and-white image at 0.01 megapixels, and took twenty-three seconds to record a single photograph to a cassette tape. Sasson showed it to his managers. Their response, as he later recalled, was essentially: that’s cute, but don’t tell anyone about it.

Kodak was not a stupid company. It was a dominant one. At its peak it held 90 percent of the American film market and 85 percent of camera sales. Film was not just a product line — it was the entire economic architecture of the company. Processing fees, paper, chemicals, the retail relationships built around the assumption that photographs needed to be developed. Digital threatened all of it simultaneously. So Kodak did what dominant companies do when confronted with a threat they can’t absorb into the existing model: they managed it. They ran studies. They filed patents. They made incremental moves. They protected the thing that was working rather than building the thing that would work next.

Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The digital camera had been sitting in their own archives for thirty-seven years.

Nokia’s version of the same story has a different texture. Where Kodak’s failure was about protecting a margin, Nokia’s was about identity. Through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, Nokia was mobile phones — not a major player, but the category itself. At its peak it held over 40 percent of the global handset market. The company had navigated a remarkable transformation earlier in its history, shedding paper mills and rubber boots to become a pure technology company. It knew how to change. It had done it before.

What it couldn’t do was change from a hardware company into a software one. When the iPhone arrived in 2007, Nokia’s internal assessments were, by most accounts, accurate. They understood the threat. They had touchscreen prototypes in development. What they couldn’t manage was the cultural distance between building phones that were superb physical objects — durable, reliable, made to exacting standards — and building phones that were primarily platforms for software that other people would write. The excellence that had made Nokia great was manufacturing excellence. The game was becoming something else, and manufacturing excellence was not only insufficient for the new game; it was actively in the way, because it oriented every decision toward the object rather than the experience.

Nokia’s market share collapsed from over 40 percent in 2007 to under 5 percent by 2013.

Andy Grove, who built Intel into the dominant force in semiconductors, called it plainly: only the paranoid survive. He meant it as a prescription. His successors treated it as a trophy.

Both stories have the clean shape of settled history. We know how they end. The verdict is in, the lesson is available, and it’s easy to read them now as cautionary tales about obvious mistakes made by people who should have known better.

This is the wrong way to read them.

Kodak and Nokia didn’t fail because they were blind. They failed because they were standing on a fulcrum — a moment when the old game and the new game were both plausibly real — and they chose the wrong side. At the time, that choice was not obviously wrong. Film was still enormously profitable. Nokia’s hardware was genuinely superior. The rational case for staying the course was real, and the people making it were not fools.

The reason the Kodak story is still told fifty years later is not that the mistake was obvious. It’s that it wasn’t — and they made it anyway.

Which brings us to now. Because there is a fulcrum in front of the enterprise software industry, and nobody knows yet which way it tips.

The companies in question — Salesforce, ServiceNow, and most of the SaaS category built over the last twenty years — were constructed on a simple and powerful premise: that businesses would pay recurring subscription fees for software that managed their customer relationships, their workflows, their data. The premise was correct. It produced some of the most durable businesses in the history of technology.

The threat AI poses to this model is not subtle. If an AI agent can handle a customer service interaction, manage a workflow, or synthesize a CRM record without a human touching licensed software to do it, then the per-seat subscription model — the economic engine underneath all of it — starts to look like film processing in 2003. Theoretically intact. Quietly at risk.

The responses of these companies have been instructive, and they’ve diverged.

Here is the honest position: we don’t know yet. The fulcrum is still in motion.

It’s possible that Salesforce’s Agentforce is the Kodak digital camera — the real thing, built by the right company, that gets buried under the weight of protecting what already works. It’s possible that the SaaS model is more durable than the threat suggests, that enterprises will pay for trusted platforms regardless of the underlying labor model, and that the companies racing hardest to cannibalize their own revenue streams are making a different kind of mistake. It’s possible that ServiceNow’s consistency is discipline, or that it’s the Nokia instinct to keep building the best version of the thing that used to win.

What the Kodak and Nokia stories actually teach — not the simplified version, but the harder one — is that the mistake is never visible in the moment it’s made. It only becomes visible later, when the fulcrum has tipped and the choice that was once defensible has become permanent.

The coach who wins five championships holds the philosophy and rotates the players. The coach who wins one holds the players and calls it philosophy.

The enterprise software companies standing at this moment have a version of the same decision. The ones who make it correctly will, in twenty years, be the ones we cite as examples of adaptation. The ones who don’t will be the ones we cite as examples of something else.

We just don’t know yet which is which. That’s not a comfortable place to stand. It is, however, exactly where we are.

Categories
Reading Writing

The Starting Five I Keep

On November 25, 1963, every journalist in America was at Arlington Cemetery covering the state funeral of John F. Kennedy. Jimmy Breslin went to find the grave digger.

His name was Clifton Pollard. He was paid $3.01 an hour. He had been called in on his day off because the foreman thought he was the best they had, and the foreman was right about that. Breslin spent the morning with him while the ceremony unfolded a few hundred yards away — the dignitaries, the riderless horse, the flag folded into a triangle and handed to a widow. Pollard ate a ham sandwich and kept working.

The piece Breslin filed that afternoon is still taught in journalism schools sixty years later. Not because it covered the funeral better than anyone else. Because it didn’t cover the funeral at all. It found the true subject by ignoring the announced one.

That instinct — turn away from the obvious, walk toward the unglamorous specific, trust that the universal is hiding there — is the one idea I’ve returned to more than any other. It shows up in two very different writers who occupy, in my mind, the same position on the roster.

Breslin got there through deadline fury and a saloon-bred instinct for where the real story was breathing. He didn’t theorize about it. He just did it, on a deadline, in a city that rewarded the loud and the fast. John McPhee got to the same place by an entirely different route: patience, structure, and a willingness to spend six months learning how canoes are made or what happens to a piece of shad on its way up the Delaware River. Breslin worked like a man catching a cab. McPhee worked like a man building a cathedral.

But the underlying claim is identical. If you stay with a specific, unglamorous subject long enough — if you resist the pull toward the obvious center — it will eventually yield something that couldn’t have been reached directly. Pollard and his shovel. The orange grower and his grove. The nuclear physicist who also happens to be a canoe builder. The method is the same. Look where no one else is looking. Wait longer than feels reasonable. Write what you find.

This is one player, really. Just wearing two different jerseys.

The second seat belongs to Wright Thompson — not a single book but a stance. The premise that the most revealing place in any story isn’t the event itself but the moment before and after it, when the subject is alone with something they haven’t yet put into words. Every piece in this tradition is quietly asking: what is this person carrying that they can’t say out loud? It’s a question that turns out to apply well beyond sportswriting. It applies to most things worth writing about.

The third is whatever the Apple design era taught about constraint and clarity. Not nostalgia — something more durable. The idea that removing something can be an act of confidence. That the most useful things often appear to be doing less than they are. This one surfaces constantly in writing, in argument, in the editing pass where you decide what the piece actually needs versus what it accumulated along the way. Features are easy to add. Knowing what to cut requires a different kind of certainty.

The fourth is the philosophy embedded in spaced repetition — not the algorithm but the claim underneath it. That knowledge you don’t revisit isn’t really yours. That understanding decays on a predictable schedule whether you acknowledge it or not. The honest response isn’t anxiety about this; it’s the habit of return. Going back to the same passage, the same idea, the same question on a different day, and finding it has changed — or finding that you have.

The fifth seat shifts. That’s probably the right design. Four constants and one that evolves is roughly the correct ratio for a starting lineup that has to play in different eras. Right now that seat belongs to the question of what AI does to a practiced human sensibility — whether it erodes it by substitution or clarifies it by contrast. Earlier it was held by a certain kind of systems thinking. Before that, something else. The player who earns that spot is always the one asking the question the current moment most needs answered.

The coach who wins five championships doesn’t do it with the same roster. But he does it with the same philosophy. The starting five aren’t the players who happened to be good once. They’re the ones who keep earning their minutes regardless of what the season throws at you.

Breslin knew where to find Clifton Pollard because he’d been looking in that direction his whole career. The skill wasn’t the story. The skill was knowing that the story was never where everyone else was standing.

That’s the one I keep coming back to.