Editor’s Note
A few weeks back I traveled to see my parents up in the Pacific Northwest. This is my Dad’s book room.
Over 8000 books on plants, poetry and philosophy line those shelves. Each morning I reached for a random title off the shelf.
Inside these books, I found penciled brackets (< >) around key passages alongside numbers. I asked my dad about this notational system. “The brackets”, he said,” are like highlights. But by doing them in pencil, I am able to go back through the book and erase/add them at will”. “Then”, he continued,” when I find the key passage of the argument, I’ll write ‘crux’ next to it and transfer it into my journal”.
Synonyms for the crux of an argument include heart, essence, and the central point. In the Oxford dictionary, it is defined as “the decisive or most important point at issue.”
I found myself making a connection to my dad’s note-taking style while reading the classic Farnam Street piece, “The Work Required to Have an Opinion”. The crux of which can be found in the passage:
Doing the work required to hold an opinion means you can argue against yourself better than others can. Only then can you say, “I can hold this view, because I can’t find anyone else who can argue better against my view.”
Doing the work required to hold an opinion also gives you the right to have that opinion. As the article continues, the author talks about the difference between those who do the work and those who do not.
The difference between the people who do the work and the people who just reel off memorized opinion is huge. When you do the work, you can answer the next question.
This is the work I see my dad doing as he brackets, erases, and re-brackets key passages in his pursuit of the crux of the argument. He isn’t taking everything the author wrote as gospel, instead, he is doing the work required to have an opinion about the contents of that book. Whether that opinion is in agreement with the author or not.
Reflecting on this over the last couple of days, I think if I could describe my philosophy towards learning that would be it. For many of life’s questions, I don’t believe there is a lone truth-seeking to be discovered. Instead, there are many truths. The goal in many endeavors of thought is not necessarily to find the ground truth, but instead to do the work required to have an opinion on each of the primary truths that surround you. The goal is to understand the crux of other people’s arguments.
Anyways, next week I plan to begin making my own argument of sorts. This argument will center around how as a society, we need more avenues for creativity. This week, I recommend the Worldwide FM mixes by Kruder & Dorfmeister on Mixcloud, talk through the first few chapters I’ve re-read of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, share a bunch of articles on vibes in the Worth Your Times section, and share trailers for my favorite show on television right now: 100 Foot Wave.
What I’m Listening To
Kruder & Dorfmeister are a legendary Austrian duo known for their trip-hop/downtempo remixes of pop, hip hop, and drum and bass songs. In 1993 they released their first EP G-Stoned featuring the hypnotic 'High Noon'.
As the first post-acid jazz productions of labels like Ninja Tune or Mo Wax heralded a new era, Kruder & Dorfmeister, influenced by the elegiac arrangements of productions from the 1960s and 1970s of Afro-jazz and Pink Floyd, were already a step ahead.
Offers to make a full-length LP came pouring in, but after the success of their “DJ-Kicks” and “Sessions” CDs, which sold millions worldwide, they turned down most of them. Instead, they provided musician friends with distribution on their G-Stone label, hung out in the studio, and put together follow-up projects.
To this day the two still maintain an open concept, influenced by a wide-ranging taste in music and their ability to hear music, to feel, and to be able to realize their musical conceptions.
I recently stumbled upon the most remarkable distillations of this open concept in the mixes they have been putting together for Worldwide FM this Summer. To date, there have only been 3 of them, but each one is uniquely incredible! I haven’t been able to listen to anything else since Monday.
Songs arrive from every decade. Genres blend into each other. And everything is beautiful. Take a listen! These mixes can soundtrack work, dinner, and just about everything in between.
What I’m Reading
Of all the blurbs for William Finnegan’s, Pulitzer Prize-winning Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, my favorite comes from Sports Illustrated, “'Reading this guy on the subject of waves and water is like reading Hemingway on bullfighting; William Burroughs on controlled substances; Updike on adultery. . . . a coming-of-age story, seen through the gloss resin coat of a surfboard.
This blurb not only captures the love Finnegan has for surfing but the beautiful prose he expresses that love through. The memoir begins in Hawaii, where the future New Yorker writer first started surfing as a young boy. The rest of the memoir immerses the reader in a life spent traveling the world chasing waves through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa, and beyond.
The adventures are engrossing, but it is the relationships formed between man, board and water that is most compelling. At its heart, Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, a social history, an extraordinary exploration of one man's gradual mastering of an art.
I first read Barbarian Days when it came out. I remember putting much of the rest of my life on hold as I worked through its pages. I returned to it this week, as a surf fever took hold of me after watching 100 Foot Wave (see below). This time I’m listening to the audiobook - expertly narrated by the author.
The third chapter covers 1968. The author is in high school and drifting further away from his family. Not in an anxious way, just in a way a surfer does when he finds himself closer to wui-wei in the water than outside of it. 1968 is a year of historic change. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy are both assinated. The draft is ripping apart families. And shortboards are replacing longboards.
I key in on this last part because the author does a great job of showing how new technology - the short surfboard - moves through the pace layers of society. Waves that used to easily be shared because of the relative lack of mobility of longboards, now had to be claimed. This changes the culture of surfing, Old surfing legends were discarded, no longer featured in surfing mags or worshipped by fans. This opens up opportunities for a new generation of surfers. Shops were left with stockpiles of obsolete boards while facing unprecedented demand for these new boards.
The key here is that the technology was not front in center, but a catalyst. The revolution started with a group of surfers in Sydney who “were into something new, fresh, different. Purely local, nothing imported, a burning desire to ride much shorter boards, and start using the vertical element of the wave.” But that “purely local” desire ended up sending shockwaves - first through the sport, then through the scene.
From music to computers, to surfing, this almost spontaneous process emerges time and time again. It is also at this intersection, where the product meets the people, that I find most compelling.
Find the book here
Worth Your Time
TikTok and the Vibes Revival (The New Yorker) - What a haiku is to language, a vibe is to sensory perception: a concise assemblage of image, sound, and movement. A vibe can be positive, negative, beautiful, ugly, or just unique. It can even become a quality in itself: if something is vibey, it gives off an intense vibe or is particularly amenable to vibes. Vibes are a medium for feeling, the kind of abstract understanding that comes before words put a name to experience. That pre-linguistic quality makes them well suited to a social-media landscape that is increasingly prioritizing audio, video, and images over text. Through our screens, vibes are being constantly emitted and received.
Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics (Thesis Eleven)
What is a vibe? (Its Her Factory) - On vibez, moods, feels, and contemporary finance capitalism.
Inside the Facebook Group Dedicated to “Oddly Specific Playlists” (Slate) - music lovers are refining the mixtape for the modern era—and for every theme, vibe, and mood possible.The fragmentation of (digital) well-being (Social Media Collective) - While current accounts of living well purport to be for all, well-being inescapably remains value-laden and locally interpretable.[ What, then, of the contemporary fragmentation of well-being? What worldviews are revealed by splitting well-being into separate categories? This article considers one of the more recent shards of this question– digital well-being.
Unfortunately, I Care About Power Lines Now (The Atlantic) - If America wants to fight climate change—or enjoy the benefits of a modern economy—it must get much better at building electricity transmission.
What makes a product "cool"? [Salon] - Researchers argue that it can’t just be slick and original, it also needs subcultural appeal.
What Makes Things Cool? How Autonomy Influences Perceived Coolness [Journal of Consumer Research] - Six studies find that behaviors expressing autonomy increase perceived coolness, but only when the autonomy seems appropriate. Autonomy seems appropriate, and hence increases perceptions of coolness, when a behavior diverges from a norm considered unnecessary or illegitimate.
100 Foot Wave
A few months back when discussing Bo Burnham’s Inside my friends used the following anecdote to describe how good it was: “I didn’t look at my phone the whole time”
When I heard that testimony, I immediately opened up Netflix to watch the special. The promise of something so compelling that I wouldn’t find Twitter, Discord or Instagram somehow open in the palm of my hand during the show was enough to convince me. Alas, Inside did not have the same effect on me. After that, I was beginning to worry if anything would.
And then 100 Foot Wave came along and I was like “what phone?!” The six-part HBO Max series intimately captures the decade-long odyssey of surfing pioneer Garrett McNamara, who, after visiting Nazaré, Portugal in hopes of conquering a 100-foot wave and it is fucking awesome.
We’re only two episodes in, but the soundtrack, the cinematography and the story of how Garret McNamar’s perseverance was able to push the sport of Big Wave surfing to to unimagined heights and transform the small fishing village into the world’s pre-eminent big-wave surfing destination is so utterly engrossing that I don’t dare pick up my phone.
Watch it on HBO Max