Essays Vol. 2
Jon Snow and I have one thing in common: we both know nothing. I'm trying to fix my half of the problem. To that end, the first part of this review series was published a short while ago. Now for the second part:
The War on Error (from The Source of Self Regard) – Toni Morrison (2004)
Morrison points out that the current human imagination has shrunk. The West for all its self-mythology around progress and forward motion, has lost the ability to face the future at all. Every word we use to describe the present, be that postmodern, postcolonial or post–Cold War, has been built out of what came before the present.
The futures that are offered to us are either escapes or threats. From Morrison's vantage point, afterlife, grandchildren, and/or outer space are not vision but a rediscovery of past time. The alternative military version of the future is a manliness contest where women and children are the most dispensable collateral. Neither of these futures requires imagining anything novel or taking a closer look at the distribution of power.
What fills the gap in human imagination is consumption, marginal improvements to health, a little extra leisure time and money to spend it. Not only are we sold a limited future, but also a limited idea of what humans are and what they might be owed. I don't need to remind you that the author is a literary giant so the premise, while razor sharp, is packaged in a diplomatic fashion. I think it's worth mulling over but I'm also aware that many may not have the time, resources or energy to do that. Still, worth remembering that another world is possible when you see the nth reference to the past in tech, design or fashion.
The Importance of Being Hated – Chuck Klosterman (2007)
This was a highly entertaining and hilarious read. Definitely not a small feat since it is always harder to make someone laugh with your writing. More writers should write about negative emotions and how powerful of a driving force they can be. We brush them under the rug too quickly.
Reading this made me do a quick mental math of how many archenemies vs nemeses I have. I feel like it's probably ok to have several archenemies but you should only have 1-2 nemesis at a time. Anyone basic, insecure or loser-ish should not qualify. The other bit the essay made me think about was how some people make a nemesis out of you, but to you they are mostly a nuisance, parasite or something in between. Either way choose carefully. They have to be worthy, not a random troll.
If you do end up liking this one from Klosterman, I can also recommend reading the sister essay "Why Everyone Needs An Arch-Nemesis" for similar writing style and entertainment value.
The Age of Average – Alex Murrell (2023)
Creative fields from music to film to fashion to advertising to art direction have been overtaken by convention and cliché. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Everyone wants to do a nod to some era which gets old very fast. Alex noticed this and wrote an essay which went viral.
On a personal level, this reminded me of something my mom and my aunt would say when taking me out for clothes shopping in adolescence and explaining their process for selecting and buying fabrics: "you don't wanna look like every other person in the room or the street. If something is trending too much, distance yourself from it. Find what works for you and stick to it" Which, it turns out, is exactly what the author is advocating for. Resist "blanding", lazy moodboarding and blatant copying from the first person you like online. Chances are if you are copying them, so are thousands of others.
Three years later, it remains as relevant as ever (the author even published a second part to the essay recently after the original). To give some examples corroborating his premise, think of how startup launch videos and tech influencer marketing have converged on sameness or how when an anonymous or pseudonymous account becomes viral on Twitter, the content, subject matter and frequency of the tweets are very formulaic.
Perhaps the question we should ask is what does it take for our creative directors, designers and technologists to steer away from looking at the past and look towards the future? Is it incentives, permission to trust your judgement more or something else?
A Sense of Place – Wallace Stegner (1986)
Reading this felt like walking into a scene where a grandfather sits by the fireplace, surrounded by half a dozen grandchildren engrossed in his masterful storytelling. Stegner draws a distinction between housed and displaced people in America, the former having a long, rooted relationship to the land they live on, spanning decades or even centuries, and the latter more like rootless cosmopolitans who go wherever their destiny takes them. He is not overly critical of either, but he does emphasize the importance of having some relation to the land you inhabit.
Even though I fall squarely in the rootless cosmopolitan camp, I agree with almost all of his points. My take has been similar: that you should give back to whatever land you live on, know its history, its people, its landmarks; plant useful things; leave its natural beauty intact; do not misuse its resources; contribute through your labor/taxes/elbow grease. And at times, when the land is not associated with known history or significance, you get to be the man from the future, making history.
Despite much agreement with the author, I found myself perfectly neutral between the two camps by the end of the essay. It's beautifully written though, and the sentences work so well you'd swear the whole thing had a musical quality to it.
The Medium is the Message – Marshall McLuhan (1964)
My first introduction to McLuhan was around 2020-21 through his lectures and interviews on YouTube. His main message in this one: we shape our tools and our tools shape us.
In other words, once we get comfortable with a medium and start treating it as an extension of ourself, how does that influence our behavior in real life? from waking up early to get to a spot to get the perfect instagrammable pic to getting influenced by sports, wellness or beauty influencers to start new habits. McLuhan asserts that no matter how good or harmless our intentions may be, the medium will override those either blatantly or subtly. The algorithm will find you. Not only will it find you but it will restructure your perception of people and the world the longer you stay on it.
Reading this confirmed what I've long felt: with each new tech or social platform you adopt, you gotta understand how it works; the light and the dark patterns, have an idea of what you're getting yourself into. You have to treat these places like a casino. If the platform is not taking any responsibility for getting you hooked, you must know when to go home.
A Mathematician's Lament – Paul Lockhart (2009)
Lockhart's complaint is that the current math education doesn't need reform so much so that it needs to be scrapped completely. The subject has been so thoroughly stripped of its creative and exploratory essence that what gets taught in schools is but the hollow administrative residue of mathematics. His grief is directed at what this does to students epistemologically: the formal proof apparatus, particularly in geometry, doesn't teach rigor so much as it teaches children to distrust their own perception. You can see that the angles of a triangle are equal. The ceremony around the proofs just instructs you that your intuitions require institutional ratification before they count.
The philosophical root cause, per Lockhart, is that the culture decided that math is an indispensable tool for science and engineering. Once that was agreed upon, everything exploratory became an inefficiency that had to be cut. The history, the aesthetics, and the beauty of the unsolved problem vanished. What remained was symbol manipulation, and the students who got good at it derived enough self-esteem from that competence that they would resist the suggestion that a much richer relationship with the subject was available.
What is worth noting is that this lament was written in the early 2000s. The resources for repairing an apathetic or fearful relationship with mathematics exist now in a way that weren't available before. The damage Lockhart describes is real. But so is the exit.
The Relativity of Wrong – Issac Asimov (1988)
"...I am sick and tired of this pretense that knowing you know nothing is a mark of wisdom." This is how you know that Asimov came out firing on all cylinders in this one. He posits that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts when thinking about an understanding of how the universe works. He moves from epistemological humility to the incompleteness of theories rather than calling them flat out wrong, to the practical implication that approximate knowledge is still functional and cumulative.
He claims that the direction of refinement of theories matters. Each approximation is wrong in a smaller way than the one before it. This is a more hopeful claim than the Kuhnian idea that our tools constrain what we can see. Both points can be true: our instruments limit perception, but within those limits, what we build is directionally cumulative rather than randomly provisional. Asimov's argument is that wrongness has a gradient, and that gradient is what scientific inquiries are about. I loved thinking about this one for days after.
An Error In The Code – Richard Preston (2007)
Richard Preston takes a rare genetic disorder, Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, an enzyme deficiency that causes compulsive self-mutilation in young boys, and renders the science legible without erasing the human cost. He weaves his way through biochemical history, treatment, and the time spent with patients and their caregivers. Worth reading as a reminder of how many invisible systems in our bodies have to work perfectly, every single time, for any of us to have even a single, uneventful day.
Three Crime Stories (from 97196 words) – Emmanuel Carrère (2019)
I went in without looking anything up, which turned out to be the right call. Carrère's crime essays (I read John Lambert's translation) operate without any of the moral scaffolding you'd expect from the genre. The writing is devoid of any hand-holding or signposted horror. The result is that you are left to process the disturbing material entirely on your own. I was lying in bed wide-eyed thinking: what the hell did I just read?
Three Crime Stories and The Roman Case are the standouts from his essay collection. The latter is as twisted as the former, if not more so. The third essay in Three Crime Stories is the weakest of the bunch. If you're into true crime, he's exactly what you're looking for.
In the Beginning Was the Command Line – Neal Stephenson (1999)
This one is part tech history, part tech criticism and part an extended analogy competition of Neal Stephenson with himself. His argument is that operating systems are metaphors, and the shift from command line to GUI traded depth of understanding for accessibility, with consequences nobody fully reckoned with. Microsoft won not because it was good but because it was cheap and ubiquitous; Apple won the aesthetics war through PR genius while being just as hostile to hackers and just as monopolistic in intent. Linux exists because of them, not in spite.
His argument that GUI culture produces people who believe hard things can be made easy, and lose the ability to think clearly about the future as a result, sits uncomfortably close to the truth. The multiculturalism section is perhaps the most interesting one: the claim that rootlessness produces fecklessness, that you need to be raised INSIDE something specific to have tools for judgment at all. He's almost philosophical here. The analogies are what make it readable across 30,000-something words: car dealerships, Egypt and Manhattan, Morlocks and Eloi, the Beverly Hillbillies, the overly simplified book reviews... It's for anyone interested in how technology shapes culture rather than just what technology does.
The Myth of "The Triumph of Fanaticism" in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire – Khaled El-Rouayheb (2008)
El-Rouayheb is responding to a thesis originating in Turkish historian Halil İnalcık's 1973 "The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age", later amplified by American historian Marshall Hodgson: that Ottoman scholars turned away from the rational sciences after around 1600, largely due to the rise of the puritanical Kadizadeli movement. His rebuttal is that the supposed decline simply isn't there when you look at what was actually being taught and researched in Ottoman institutions across that century. The thesis mistakes a handful of dramatic events for systemic evidence.
Perhaps the sharpest irony is that Mehmed Birgevi, the scholar who inspired the Kadizadeli movement, explicitly endorsed the study of logic, mathematics, and astronomy. When two widely admired historians establish something as axiomatic, the myth accumulates citations and starts to feel like settled fact. El-Rouayheb did the unglamorous work of going back to the actual record and finding not decline, but continuation.
Reading this, I kept thinking about the allegations against the medieval philosopher, Al-Ghazali, the claim that his writings dealt a final blow to Islamic scientific culture, a myth repeated by orientalist scholars and pop-science figures like Neil deGrasse Tyson, and debunked by multiple Muslim and non-Muslim historians alike (see this and this for context).
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist – Paul Kingsnorth (2017)
Kingsnorth mentions that mainstream environmentalism got captured by utilitarian logic and corporate language. But his response of grief, a walk in nature and withdrawal is not a good counter-position at all. He says he is an eco-centrist but that ecocentrism is available to him partly because he lives inside the infrastructure that people before him built, people who treated nature-as-a-resource rather than this enigmatic entity that needed to be left alone.
Two things can be true at the same time: (1) nature has intrinsic worth and (2) it's a resource that has to be actively managed. Kingsnorth's position is in the first camp but the question to be asked is when these two positions clash, survival and proximity of people takes precedence. It's not anti-environment so much as it is anti-paternalistic.
Of course, I understand that protection-comes-after-survival logic may be used to move the goal posts by people who fund sustainability projects but that doesn't mean we should abandon pragmatism. It means we avoid resorting to doomerism or emotionally charged but unrealistic slogans.
I like clean air, forests and pristine rivers as much as the next person but the grief articulated by the author in this essay is a very bourgeois one that he mistakes for universal ethics. Nature looks different if you're working with it rather than contemplating it. The country that is predominantly desert, the landlocked nation with no wind corridor... those are the places where Kingsnorth's grief is a luxury the locals cannot afford.
Postmodernism and Consumer Society – Frederick Jameson (1983)
Imagine being handed a clear glass of water that becomes thicker and murkier so that halfway through you're not sure what you're drinking. That's what it felt like reading this.
Jameson's position is that postmodernism arrived as a rebuke to high modernism. It filled a cultural vacuum left by the latter which, once shocking and subversive, had gotten absorbed into the establishment by the 1960s. He lays out its two features, pastiche and schizophrenia. Pastiche is blank parody which imitates dead styles without humor or critical bite. Schizophrenia (not the clinical type) is a collapse of historical continuity, where past and present lose their meaning and we're left with a series of disconnected present moments.
His core argument, as I read it: postmodernism as a cultural movement doesn't critique consumer capitalism but rather replicates and reinforces its logic. It reminded me of McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message" where he argued the medium itself reshapes perception, independently of content. Jameson is making an adjacent point: that the economic infrastructure of late capitalism reshapes our relationship to time and history, and postmodernism is what it looks like aesthetically.
The most striking observation was about the media's role in historical amnesia. The function of news isn't really to inform but to process events rapidly into the past, clearing the present for fresh content. Today anything older than 24 hours on any social platform is essentially from a previous discourse cycle. So while Jameson foresaw the mechanism; we are the ones currently living inside it.
If Jameson had to use Instagram Reels or TikTok today, he would have had a stroke since these are platforms where the scroll format is pastiche and historical amnesia is the default user experience design. McLuhan might have had a fighting chance. But even he was operating in a world where you got to finish a thought before the next stimulus arrived. The new age media landscape does not allow that.
Who Is the Bad Art Friend? – Robert Kolker (2021)
This was not for me. It reads like an average-Tribeca-manicure-appointment-gossip-fodder made into a 10,000-word essay: two writer-friends, a kidney donation, a disputed short story, and a copyright lawsuit that dragged on long enough to outlast whatever warmth was left between them. The sort of drama that sounds exhausting on a WhatsApp voice note, let alone in print.
My position: I don't side with either of them. Organ donation is a noble act. But nobility of act doesn't grant ownership over every piece of writing it might inspire. It's better to produce something new rather than be a monitoring spirit towards whoever you feel wronged by. If you already know whose side you're on, this piece will confirm you. If you don't care, you'll wonder, more than once as a reader, now-why-am-I-in-this?
The Joel Test for 2017 - Dale Myers (2017)
Most people in tech have heard of the Joel Test which is a no-nonsense, but slightly dated, 12-point checklist on evaluating how well a software team is functioning. It hinges around the idea that good software shops need a bunch of unglamorous practices and following more than 90% of those would be a better than sprinkling the company's blog with methodology buzzwords. Dale Myers wrote a revised version of this test where he condensed the 12 points to 9 and introduced three new points about code review, coding standards, and onboarding. The resulting list is more relevant and up-to-date for modern software teams.
The only two points where I felt like there was room for discussion were (1) UI/UX designers and (2) onboarding. In the original essay, Joel Spolsky was asking whether you ever watch a real person use your product before shipping it. You can have a full UX team and still never do that on the dev side. Onboarding is also trickier since it measures culture more than practice, which makes it harder to score honestly in an interview context (I mean saying "we have documentation" is technically a yes for onboarding but having it doesn't mean it would make your job easier and seamless in the start).
In Praise of Shadows – Junichiro Tanizaki (1933)
"To quibble over matters of taste in the basic necessities of life is an extravagance." So true brother, but sometimes an essay on aesthetics is necessary. Tanizaki is lamenting the disappearance of a Japanese visual culture that was built around shadow, patina, and restraint, only to be replaced by Western modernity that is laden with electric light and chrome fixtures. In his world, beauty is inseparable from context: the lacquerware glowing in candlelight, the aged timber darkening with use, the woman whose mystery is heightened by her concealment behind the four walls of a house etc. etc. When you remove the shadows, you remove the depth.
Where the essay sags is the us-versus-them framing. The Orient-versus-West binary gets repetitive, and what starts as cultural criticism morphs into a middle-aged man grumbling that Japan is copying America too enthusiastically. It's good prose but you feel the limitations of his vantage point accumulating by the end.
Here's some other essays I read but didn't feel too strongly about:
Shooting an Elephant – George Orwell (1936): Ah! the things people have to do sometimes for saving face. Orwell is faced with a dilemma of hunting down a rogue elephant in Burma, who has killed a coolie, and is causing general mayhem. His essay is more like articulating the struggle going on within him than an attempt at absolving himself. The more interesting secondary detail was the calculus placed on the life of an elephant versus the life of a coolie. This is a far more unpleasant place to dwell in if you think about it.
Is It Ok To Be A Luddite? – Thomas Pynchon (1984): Pynchon writes that there is a cultural split between (1) literary intellectuals and (2) scientists and technologists where the former has aestheticized a romantic resistance to the machine. He takes a detour to explain the original Luddites and how they were not anti-tech but pro-workers and the current pejorative use of the term delegitimizes the structural critique. I say this as someone who does not like most modern day Luddites.
His optimism for tech towards the closing, that it might solve the cultural rift, is more poignant than misplaced. What has filled the gap in the meantime is Silicon Valley solutionism. The things he hoped tech would solve are still big, thorny problems at large.
A Defence of Baby Worship – G.K. Chesterton (1903): This was short and sweet. Chesterton claims that we take adults Very Seriously but not babies. We indulge them but often forget that within them is an entire universe and that they have not experienced anything yet which means the whole world is open to them for interpretation. There's some neat food-for-thought in there in how we treat adults vs children and also the reminder that people who choose to bring them in this world have a heavy responsibility on their shoulders.
The Scourge of "Relatability" – Rebecca Mead (2014): Mead's error is that she is right about the problem but wrong about who is responsible. I do agree that art need not always flatter its audience but the issue is that the market has learned to exploit that want. Seeing your life or an aspect of your personality reflected in art is only natural, but "relatability" as the only metric for the success of a work is a commercial corruption, not a reader's failing. Who pumps out vapid music, reality TV, airport books, and algorithmically optimized short-form reels? Is it the readers with bad taste or producers, executives and editors chasing trends before they fizzle out? We have to stop blaming everything on the audience because, at this point, it's just lazy.
The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma – Junot Diaz (2018): Díaz, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, recounts being molested as a child. That sentence alone should tell you what kind of essay this is. The bulk of it is about what comes after; the mask he built over decades, the enormous difficulty of confronting a stolen childhood, and the emotional wreckage that accumulated when the damage was kept under wraps. Díaz is engaging without being overly sentimental or self-loathing. That he wrote it at all is its own kind of courage.
Computers can be understood – Nelson Elhage (2020): Hope-core for anyone learning to work with software, and written with the kind of no-nonsense clarity that makes it both refreshing and reassuring. There is a particular strain of writer I really like: software engineer who has been in the business of writing and maintaining software long enough to have real opinions, and keeps a personal blog sharing war stories and personal anecdotes while still being unpretentious. Elhage is squarely in that domain.
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That's all for now. Thanks for reading! If there's anything you'd like to recommend, dispute or laud after reading this, feel free to @ me on Twitter or drop a line via email.