Reading List
The most recent articles from a list of feeds I subscribe to.
‘If You Take the Weasel Job Then You Must Be the Weasel’
Hamilton Nolan, writing at How Things Work:
There are only a few reasons why you might be hired for a prestigious job that you are obviously not qualified for. One is “they have recognized you for the genius that you are.” The urge to conclude that this is, in fact, the reason must be overwhelming, if you are the person in question. But this is rarely the explanation.
Another possibility is “the person who hired you is a fucking idiot.” This happens. A number of current United States cabinet secretaries got their jobs this way.
The most likely reason, though — one that often overshadows the other ones — is, “you are willing to carry out the dirty and distasteful things to come.” This is why weird hirings at the top always provoke dread among all the other employees. Maybe you are a hidden gem, sure, but Occam’s Razor says that you are probably just a hatchet man.
Nick Bilton, a former tech writer for the New York Times and Vanity Fair and maker of a few documentaries, was just hired as the new head of 60 Minutes.
Bilton tried to introduce himself to the (remaining) staff at 60 Minutes this morning and it did not go well.
‘We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World’
Om Malik:
The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in serial form in 1881, aimed at Italian children in the way the 19th century aimed things at children, full of suffering, consequence, and moral instruction delivered through catastrophe. The puppet is hanged. He is swallowed by a giant fish. He watches companions degrade into beasts of burden. The world he moves through is predatory at every level, and the institutions that should protect him are either absent, corrupted, or actively hostile to his interests. [...]
Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.
The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.
I’m not sure which sphere of interest this essay applies better to: post-AI tech, or post-Trump politics. I mean, goddamn, what a paragraph this one is:
The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs. The Field of Miracles stays open because people keep wanting to bury their coins there.