The other day, Google Ventures’ Daniel Burka asked his followers for suggestions on the best design books that aren’t about design. Burka offered up How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand as his selection. Agreed! Here are the responses I found most interesting (some of which actually are about design, more or less):
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, a reminder to put humans at the center of city planning.
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. I read this ages ago and still think about it all the time.
The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, a book that takes place entirely on an escalator ride.
Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull, about leadership, creativity, and storytelling at Pixar.
Read Burka’s summary of the thread at Medium (please clap).
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Some facts about the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with Cheese:
1. As you can see in the photo above, purportedly taken in 1974, there was originally a Quarter Pounder without cheese, which was scrubbed from the menu at some undetermined point (even though you can still order one sans cheese at the counter).
2. The patty on the Quarter Pounder with Cheese does not weigh a quarter of a pound. It weighs 4.25 oz after it was subtly micro-supersized in 2015.
3. The 4.25 oz is actually the pre-cooked weight anyway. The on-bun weight is more like 3 oz.
4. When I’m traveling a significant distance by car, on a trip that requires stopping for food, my go-to meal is a Quarter Pounder with Cheese, fries, and a Coke. Don’t judge.
5. The Quarter Pounder has been discontinued in Japan. No one knows why.
6. In the US, the Quarter Pounder comes with pickles, raw onion, ketchup, and mustard. But in NYC, they omit the mustard. That sound you heard was me slapping my forehead after learning this just now after years of not being able to figure out why my Quarter Pounders sometimes had mustard and sometimes didn’t. (I prefer them without.)
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The California Sunday Magazine gathered some advice from teens on topics like how to get people to care about something, how to cook with a blowtorch, and how to throw a good dance party. Here are excerpts from two of my favorites. How to meet new people:
If you’re trying to get into a new community, just fake it till you make it. Don’t have a mind-set of, Oh, I’m the new guy. No one’s going to want to be my friend. Fake a fun mind-set until you can be that fun, cool person without a second thought.
And how to organize a political rally (in one week):
I had to do most of the logistical planning during school. A lot of the people who were emailing me to help were from organizations, and they could only talk during their lunch breaks. Which would be right around 11:30, during math class. So I would be like, “Hey, can I go to the bathroom?” Then I’m in a bathroom stall on the phone — “Yeah, so can you bring, like, six cases of water and, like, two cases of granola bars?” At the end of the day, I would go home and do my homework, and the next morning, I would wake up and have a phone call at 7 before class.
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For his work Nowhere and Everywhere at the Same Time, William Forsythe sets in motion hundreds of pendulums in a room and invites people to walk among them, attempting to avoid collisions.
Suspended from automated grids, more than 400 pendulums are activated to initiate a sweeping 15 part counterpoint of tempi, spacial juxtaposition and gradients of centrifugal force which offers the spectator a constantly morphing labyrinth of significant complexity. The spectators are free to attempt a navigation this statistically unpredictable environment, but are requested to avoid coming in contact with any of the swinging pendulums. This task, which automatically initiates and alerts the spectators innate predictive faculties, produces a lively choreography of manifold and intricate avoidance strategies.
When I read the preview for the video at The Kid Should See This, I was expecting heavy brass pendulums cutting large swaths through the room, not unlike the first challenge in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where “only the penitent man will pass”. That would have been fun but perhaps too dangerous and not art.
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A Bite of China is documentary TV series on food and cooking in China. Writing for The Guardian, Oliver Thring called it “the best TV show I’ve ever seen about food” and one commenter called it “the Planet Earth of food”. While A Bite of China predates it by 3 years, Chef’s Table might be a better comparison. Here’s a trailer:
China has a large population and the richest and most varied natural landscapes in the world. Plateaus, forests, lakes and coastlines. These various geographical features and climate conditions have helped to form and preserve widely different species. No other country has so many potential food sources as China. By collecting, fetching, digging, hunting and fishing, people have acquired abundant gifts from nature. Traveling through the four seasons, we’ll discover a story about nature and the people behind delicious Chinese foods.
The first season is available on Amazon Prime (with English subtitles) but you can also find it on YouTube at varying levels of quality with and without subtitles and dubbed in English. (thx, seamus)
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From Alan Taylor at In Focus, the 10th anniversary installment of the Hubble Space Telescope Advent Calendar. One image taken by the Hubble for each day in December leading up to Dec 25th. Here’s Taylor’s caption for the image above:
A Caterpillar in the Carina Nebula. Scattered across the enormous Carina nebula are numerous dense clumps of cosmic gas and dust called Bok globules, including this one, which resembles a huge glowing caterpillar. First described by by astronomer Bart Bok, the globules are relatively small, dark, and cold regions made up of molecular hydrogen, carbon oxides, helium, and dust. The glowing edge of the caterpillar indicates that it is being photoionized by the hottest stars in the surrounding cluster. It has been hypothesized that stars may form inside these dusty cocoons.
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This morning, my friend Anil Dash tweeted this question out to his followers (here’s my incomplete answer):
Who is a person (not counting family) that opened doors for you in your career when they didn’t have to? Anytime is a good time to show gratitude!
Yesterday, I finished this podcast episode about Mister Rogers and they talked about when he made public appearances, either as an entertainer or a minister, he would often begin by asking the audience for a moment of silence to think about “the people who have helped you become who you are, those who cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life”. He even did it at the Emmys when accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award:
I’ve been thinking about Fred Rogers a lot lately…how much I miss him, how much I learned from him, and how much the world could benefit from his perspective and example right now. After this week/month/year, I think we could all use some of Mister Rogers’ radically compassionate humanism. So, if you wish, take a moment right now in silence to think about those who have cared about you and helped you become the person that you are.
Have a good weekend. I’ll see you back here next week.
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New Zealand drift racer Mike Whiddett recently travelled to Japan to explore Tokyo’s “extraordinary after-dark modified auto scene”. He found people making California-style lowriders, Dekotora (my favorite, if only for the sheer spectacle), illegally modified cars, and a man who says with a straight face that “driving an unmodified Lamborghini is boring”.
What’s interesting is that more than one of these guys in the video repeated some variation of “I don’t care what anyone thinks about me”. I….don’t believe you? If there’s one thing most humans care deeply about, it’s what other people think about them, particularly when you’re driving million-dollar, pulsing-neon supercars around the world’s most populous city.
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When Andrew Therrien told off a sleazy debt collector for calling about a debt he didn’t owe, the collector called back to threaten violence to Therrien and his wife. Therrien got mad and reached for the most potent weapon in his arsenal: the telephone. Over the course of the next two years, he charmed and bullied his way into the debt collection world in order to learn how it worked and how to take it down.
When the scammers started to hound Therrien, he hounded them right back. Obsessed with payback, he spent hundreds of hours investigating the dirty side of debt. By day he was still promoting ice cream brands and hiring models for liquor store tastings. But in his spare time, he was living out a revenge fantasy. He befriended loan sharks and blackmailed crooked collectors, getting them to divulge their suppliers, and then their suppliers above them. In method, Therrien was like a prosecutor flipping gangster underlings to get to lieutenants and then the boss. In spirit, he was a bit like Liam Neeson’s vigilante character in the movie Taken — using unflagging aggression to obtain scraps of information and reverse-engineer a criminal syndicate. Therrien didn’t punch anyone in the head, of course. He was simply unstoppable over the phone.
Great story…read the whole thing. This is perhaps not your takeaway from it, but reading this, I wonder how much different my life would be if I knew how to talk on the telephone 1/10th as effectively as someone like Therrien.
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My pal Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, has somehow found the time to also co-found a NPSL soccer club in Kingston, NY called Kingston Stockade FC. The club is only two years old, but they won their division this year, energized a community around the team, and have nearly reached the financial break-even point for 2017…you can read all about it in Crowley’s recap of how the team did in 2017. (And you can read his past writing about building the club from scratch.)
According to another club owner, year two was supposed to be more difficult than the first year…but that was not Crowley’s experience:
About a year ago, I remember talking to another owner of another club and he said something along the lines of “I know you had a great first season, but the second season is the hardest” — e.g. the novelty will wear off, the crowds will thin, etc. I remember being scared shitless by this piece of advice but our club experienced quite the opposite. Our overall attendance numbers were up (despite us having one fewer match on the schedule) and our biggest crowds were considerably larger than last year’s bigger crowds (and we hit our goal of 1000+ fans/game… twice!)
That stuck with me as I read the rest of the piece (which is written in plain, straightforward prose that’s perfectly readable even if you aren’t into soccer or business). I began gathering reasons as to why Stockade FC has thrived when other clubs might how found it difficult and framed them as lessons for anyone who runs a business or is in a leadership position.
1. The first thing is Crowley’s obvious enthusiasm and passion for soccer, starting a business, and his Kingston community (he and his family split their time between Kingston and NYC). No specific excerpt for this one (aside from this photo)…it’s infused throughout everything he’s written about the experience.
2. Be relentless. Sweat the details. Track everything you can. Look for opportunities everywhere to increase revenue and decrease expenses. Be practical. This is just one example of many:
Our hotel costs were ZERO because we designed our schedule so that we would not have an overnight trip. If you remember from last year, we did a 3 day / 2 night / 2 match trip through New Hampshire and Maine (aka: 2 nights in a hotel + 3 meals * 14 rooms). Dropping this trip from the schedule saved us a fortune. To say this another way: Our current business model (tickets/sponsors/merch) supports “day-trips by bus” and not “overnight trips and/or flights”.
3. Look for opportunities to build and grow from above:
With that said, and before we get real deep into Stockade FC data, I’m happy to share that this past weekend I was elected to the NPSL’s Board of Directors at our league’s Annual Operating Meeting (AOM). I am now one of 12 Board Members (and one of 2 representatives of the Northeast Region) operating under a two-year term. The Board Seat gets me a little closer to the bigger-picture decision making and the longer-team strategic planning for our league. It is literally the “seat at the table” I was referring to above and I’m excited to get back to work helping to build from the bottom up.
4. Look for opportunities to build and grow from below:
This is important to the club because a break-even club can operate forever. And this is important to me because I know that if we we can keep Stockade FC going for 10 years, we will have the opportunity to see the kids that we have inspired this season & last season trying out for our squad in a few years time. The idea of a Stockade FC squad full of kids who have been cheering on our club since they were 8, 10, or 12 years old is one of the things that motivates and inspires me the most about this entire project.
5. Do the right thing and often you’ll notice it’s a good business decision as well.
Game Day expenses were down 15% because we stopped buying bottled water for every match and instead started used refillable 10 gallon Gatorade jugs. A win for Mother Earth is a win for Stockade FC! (Btw, getting off plastic bottles, and the waste they produced, was an explicit goal of ours for this season.)
6. Acknowledge that you cannot do it alone. Crowley and his team bring some serious leadership and expertise to the table, but Stockade FC runs on volunteers from the community. Embrace them and don’t take them for granted.
And it’s impossible to talk about Stockade FC without talking about our $0 “Staff” costs. Our entire club is run by volunteers — sometimes an army of 30+ people who show up on game days to help with everything from setup + take down + scoreboard + clock + merchandise + tickets + managing the crowd + leading the youth teams at halftime + emceeing the halftime show + singing the national anthem + announcing on the PA + doing color commentary on the live stream + 100 other tasks. Without you all none of this would come together in the way that it does, so thank you! #WeAreStockade
7. I don’t know what business lesson this holds, but this is the perfect little detail about the club:
Our ticket prices were designed so a family of four can attend for $20 ($8 + $8 + $2 + $2 = $20). This is one of the many things I’m *really, really* proud of.
8. Don’t skimp where it matters and give back. Too many comp tickets for player’s families or first responders isn’t going to make or break your season.
It’s worth noting that less than 10% of attendance for any given is from comp tickets. This year we gave comp tickets to (a) press, (b) players family (4 tix max), (c) ballboys and ballgirls, (d) Radio Woodstock contest winners, (e) First Responder & Military Appreciation Nights.
9. “Think globally, act locally” isn’t just for activism. Stockade FC streamed their games online and sold merch to people from around the world. Their story is resonating around the country and the world. Hell, I live 300 miles away and I’m gonna try my damnedest to make it to a Stockade FC home game this summer.
Streaming continues to be an important part of the Stockade FC story — we know our story is being followed by people outside the Hudson Valley (and outside the USA!) and so streamed matches that are *enjoyable to watch* are a core part of our story.
10. Small teams can act big. The same forces that allowed Instagram’s 13-person company to get acquired by Facebook for $1 billion enable small teams to produce, for instance, a live-streaming experience that rivals the big networks for not a whole lot of money and effort.
And this year, our rockstar team of tech-savvy volunteers has raised the bar for what it means to stream a 4th Division soccer game. Last year’s goals were about “consistency” — “we gotta stream every match”. This year’s goals were around “professionalism” — let’s work in on-air graphics, color commentary and multiple cameras. The team officially outdid themselves when we had live video streaming from a drone during our Conference Championship match (for serious!)
11. Have larger goals that are outside the strict purview of your business. The goal of the US men’s national team winning a World Cup in the next 30 years isn’t going to sell more tickets, but having that as part of your story is going to open up opportunities for your club and everyone else.
Do something to make USA soccer better, faster. We started our club because we ultimately want to make soccer in the United States better, faster. (My original back-of-a napkin goal was: “What can we as fans do to better the US Mens National Team’s odds of winning a World Cup in our lifetime”).
12. Get involved in your local community. But not just that, actually give a damn about your local community and the people and other businesses in it. With everyone working together, you raise all the boats. Non-zero sum games, yo!
On some level, we’ve done much much more than “create a soccer team” — we’ve built something that folks in Kingston have started to rally around and are proud of, and we’ve helped to leverage some of that momentum and excitement and energy into a mechanism that could transform parts of Kingston’s actual urban infrastructure (through this $10M grant). We’re just a tiny, tiny, tiny part of the grant… but, hey, we’re a part of it!
13. Celebrate when successful team members move on to bigger opportunities. Build a team that people want to be a part of because they can develop the skills to move up (either inside your team or outside of it).
Last season, Stockade FC midfielder Dylan Williams got picked up by Australian 2nd division club Launceston City FC. This year, goalkeeper David Giddings got picked up by Swedish 3rd division team Värnamo Södra. Two players from our 2016 squad (Matel Anasta & Matt Koziol) were invited to play in last year’s NPSL Showcase (aka: NPSL All-Star Game w/ scouts) and we’ve expecting 1 or 2 players from our 2017 team will be invited to play in next year’s Showcase.
14. Success begets success. Winning the league obviously helped attendance and raised the team’s profile locally and nationally. But winning the league started with hiring the right coaches and finding the right players…and that started with all the other things on this list. It all connects.
15. Share your knowledge with others. From the start, one of Crowley’s goals has been to run a completely transparent club. He shares every single detail and the club’s finances are an open book. He writes clearly and enthusiastically without a lot of jargon. Move past thinking that other teams are your competition and start thinking about how everyone can work together to achieve larger goals by sharing what works and what doesn’t with each other. Compete on the field but collaborate in the community.
As a tiny business owner without employees or a real-world presence, some of this doesn’t apply to me, but I’ve found Crowley’s posts about Stockade FC incredibly valuable not when thinking about kottke.org from a business perspective but also when considering larger questions about how I want to live my life. Thanks, Dennis!
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In their distinctive style, Kurzgesagt tries to explain the concepts behind and pros & cons of Universal Basic Income in just 10 minutes. In US, UBI would be a massive change to how our economy and society functions, so much so that it’s challenging to predict what the effects would be. Nonlinear systems, yo!
Update: Aw dammit… I totally forgot to connect the part of the video where they talk about the non-monetary value of work — which is a worry of UBI critics — to something that Ludicorp (the small company that built Flickr and sold to Yahoo! in the mid-2000s) had on the company’s about page. It was a passage from Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action and the Cultivation of Solidarity by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores & Hubert Dreyfus:
Business owners do not normally work for money either. They work for the enjoyment of their competitive skill, in the context of a life where competing skillfully makes sense. The money they earn supports this way of life. The same is true of their businesses. One might think that they view their businesses as nothing more than machines to produce profits, since they do closely monitor their accounts to keep tabs on those profits.
But this way of thinking replaces the point of the machine’s activity with a diagnostic test of how well it is performing. Normally, one senses whether one is performing skillfully. A basketball player does not need to count baskets to know whether the team as a whole is in flow. Saying that the point of business is to produce profit is like saying that the whole point of playing basketball is to make as many baskets as possible. One could make many more baskets by having no opponent.
The game and styles of playing the game are what matter because they produce identities people care about. Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.
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