At the age of 19, MasterCard stamped my startup “VOID”: a command to cease and desist. I returned to college with empty hands and a bitter heart. At Penn, you were your stamps - earned and/or inherited. I took a job at a prestigious VC firm, survived a competitive summer, and collected one I’d been waiting for. The emptiness remained and my belief started to crack.

I’m not dismissing “stamps.” They’re useful. A good degree and a prestigious training ground help you cross borders; however, they don’t help you with the notoriously uncomfortable bed Joan Didion describes [in her essay, On Self-Respect]: “the one we make ourselves, the one we eventually lie down in alone.”

In my senior summer, I wanted to know who I was without an audience. Ten days of silent meditation. Three weeks of Muay Thai. Neither earned me a stamp, but both helped me make the bed. The VC job didn’t, so I spent my nights elsewhere - on robotics deep learning, a frontier with borders still being drawn.

I still collect stamps. But at night, I lie in a bed I made myself: lumpy, uncertain, mine. Stamps let you cross borders. Self-respect is what remains when you lie alone in a new bed as you chase your dreams on a foreign coast.

The core of Dan Wang’s Breakneck is a brilliant framing of the “Lawyerly vs. Engineering” society.

The Engineering Society has the advantage of physical dynamism, enabling a country to build infrastructure and scale manufacturing with *breakneck* speed by treating technology as a living practice of the factory floor. However, its disadvantage is a propensity for social overreach, where mechanistic leaders treat the population as an “aggregate” building material, leading to massive policy errors (Wang cites the one-child policy or Covid’s extreme lockdowns) because there is no system to check the state’s momentum.

The Lawyerly Society has the advantage of procedural protection, ensuring that individual rights are guarded and that the government is held to the “rule of law” rather than the whims of technocrats. Its primary disadvantage is institutional stasis, where an obsession with process and “democracy by lawsuit” creates a vetocracy that blocks new construction, drains industrial process knowledge (outsourcing / globalization to favor “capital light” businesses), and leaves the country physically stagnant.

Truly rare insights like this are treasures and they serve as a powerful lens for predicting geopolitical behavior and betting on long-term trajectories.

I picked up the book on the way to Breckenridge, just as I was weighing a trip to China before the new year. The timing was serendipitous. Reading this and Apple in China helped solidify our decision to get on the ground and explore the robotics scene firsthand.

If I have one critique, it’s that the book is perhaps too long for its central premise and that the thesis is hammered home a few times too many times. Conversely, the anecdotes are incredibly sticky. I found myself recalling them vividly while being in China and observing things myself.

Wang also does a good job deconstructing what “technology” actually is. He breaks it into three pillars:

1. Tools: The physical hardware.

2. Explicit Instructions: The blueprints and manuals.

3. Process Knowledge: The tacit knowledge gained only through practical, on-the-floor experience

Process knowledge is where China is accelerating and the US is atrophying. Wang’s plea is to bring (some/more) manufacturing back to the West. While he may lack a granular policy roadmap, his directional point is that losing the “muscle memory” of production is a strategic catastrophe. After seeing the supply chain of the robotics frontier and the hyper-compressed R&D cycles in China myself, it’s clear the US has a massive gap to close.

I’m still ruminating on what my own policy recommendations would be, but I intend to draft some soon.

Selections:

A rough rule of thumb is that China produces one-third to one-half of nearly any manufactured product, whether that is structural steel, container ships, solar photovoltaic panels, or anything else.

Only two American presidents worked as engineers

Many people still live under the strictures of the hukou, or household registration, an aim of which is to prevent rural folks from establishing themselves in cities by restricting education and health care benefits to their hometown

The fundamental tenet of the engineering state is to look at people as aggregates, not individuals.

To a first approximation, the twenty-four men who make up the Political Bureau (the highest echelon of the Communist Party, usually shortened to Politburo) are the only people permitted to do politics. Once they’ve settled questions of strategy, the only remaining task is for the bureaucracy to sort out the details.

Over the policy’s three-and-a-half-decade duration, China conducted nearly as many abortions, according to official figures, as the present population of the United States

The public soured on the idea of broad deference to US technocrats and engineers: urban planners (who were uprooting whole neighborhoods), defense officials (who were prosecuting the war in Vietnam) and industry regulators (who were cozying up to companies).

The lawyerly society grew out of a necessary corrective to the United States’ problems of the 1960s.

Though the political views of law students may twist in unexpected directions, we should keep in view that they are entwined most firmly around a pillar of personal ambition.

Since the middle of the twentieth century the American left pursued a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy that conservatives have revealed themselves to be no less capable at playing.

Designing new rules and committees have so often become the substitute for thinking hard about strategy and ends.

The lawyerly society is a systematic bias toward the well-off Lawyers are too often servants of the rich

A country can grow powerful when it trains a lot of engineers and puts them to work, even under less-than-great institutional arrangements

Chinese leaders are usually expected to administer a poor province before they can be promoted to the country’s political pinnacle.

Manufacturing hubs are everywhere, often making goods you don’t expect. Guizhou locals may be as surprised as anyone to host the world’s guitar capital.

“Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” China does little by way of redistribution from the wealthy to the poor; rather, it is enacting a Leninist agenda in which the state retains enormous discretion to command economic resources in order to maintain political control and to build toward a postscarcity world.

Shanghai alone moved more containers in 2022 than all of the US ports combined.

Americans are no longer able to appreciate that a physically dynamic landscape creates a sense of progress.

An educational system steeped in Marxism. For them, production was a noble deed to advance communism, while consumption was a despicable act of capitalism. This party believes that only the state has the wisdom to invest in strategic megaprojects, whereas consumers will waste money on themselves.

Since the state levies relatively light taxes, which it takes unobtrusively from citizens, it reduces the risk that people start asking questions about what the state is doing with their hard-earned funds and whether their taxes should entitle them to greater political participation. Low taxes make China stingy on welfare.

The lack of a safety net is one of the reasons that Chinese households save a great deal of their income for contingencies.

When Chinese officials talk about promoting consumption, it often involves building new malls or replacing old industrial equipment. In other words, it’s still more about investing to build stuff rather than shifting the propensity of households to spend a greater share of their income.

The defining feature of socialism was not economic redistribution but rather “concentrating resources to accomplish great tasks.”

Under Deng’s definition, the United States has also achieved plenty of socialism. The Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highway System, and the Apollo Program all concentrated resources to accomplish great tasks.

One of the Communist Party’s personnel practices (inherited from imperial times) is to rotate officials between various jurisdictions, forcing them to gain broad experience and preventing them from drawing their power base from their home province.

Tianjin has built not only China’s third-tallest skyscraper (ninety-seven floors, little occupied) but also one of its most photogenic libraries. The Dutch architects behind Tianjin’s Binhai Library put a bright white sphere in its center, around which undulating curves make up shelving space. Except few of these shelves held any books. Once I got up close, I could see that the beautiful shelves had only digital prints of book spines. All around me were people taking selfies rather than browsing or reading. I sometimes think of Tianjin’s library as a metaphor for China’s economy: great hardware that looks impressive from a distance, not filled with the softer stuff that actually matters. Tianjin could have focused on filling its amazing skyscrapers with better businesses. Instead, it could only build more hollow shells, while it gained considerable debt.

Agglomerations can achieve previously unseen levels of productivity, representing the difference between England and the rest of the world during the Industrial Revolution.

China produces so much in part because every province wants to be an automotive manufacturing hub. The country has over a hundred automotive brands, most of them small, all of them fighting for sales. The competition is so fierce in part because auto companies receive extensive support from local governments, who all try to promote their champion through cheap credit and consumer rebates to local companies. Shanghai, for example, is full of the locally produced SAIC-Volkswagen cars, w

“American manufacturers constantly asked themselves whether making masks and cotton swabs was part of their ‘core competence.’ Most of them decided not.” He put down his teacup and looked at me. “Chinese companies decided that making money is their core competence, therefore they go and make masks, or whatever else the market needs.” In 2020, I could have picked up face masks that were branded Foxconn (the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer), BYD (the world’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer), or JD.com (China’s second-largest e-commerce platform). Companies retooled some of their production lines to get into the masks and money business. Chinese conglomerates rarely hesitate to go after the core business lines of others.

Many of these Chinese companies will inevitably go out of business, after they’ve dragged down their competitors all over the world in brutal price wars. This trend has produced a frustrating quirk in China’s equity markets. Financial investors have seen that there is no relationship between Chinese stock market performance and GDP growth.

“Thought work,” ranging from presenting resettlement as a voluntary and happy choice to holding intensive one-on-one meetings with recalcitrant folks who do not want to leave. Officials mix inducements with threats until they wear down the farmers. Thus, the state has been able to achieve “voluntary” resettlement rates of 100 percent.

Public works give government officials plenty of discretion about how to build a project, giving them a lot of opportunities to accept kickbacks. Even if officials are upstanding, the developer might contract out the construction to a lower-cost builder, who takes a margin and subcontracts out again, and on and on until it reaches someone willing to cut costs to the bone.

The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai.

Under banners like “abundance agenda,” “supply side progressivism,” and “progress studies,” various movements are trying to loosen American supply constraints.

The United States will have to regain all the muscle it has lost for building public works as well as manufacturing capacity, and China will have to empower consumers by getting over its fear of making people lazy.

China would be better off if it built less and built better.

There is no way to achieve large-scale decarbonization without largescale construction, of the sorts of solar, wind, and electrical transmission projects that China has been so good at.

As John Maynard Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.”

China’s policymakers have declined to be bound by some of the fundamental tenets of Wall Street investors—reduce investment, shrink assets, produce profitability—all of which emphasize efficiency. Perhaps it will trigger financial distress in the future. So far, however, building big has improved the lives of regular people, not just a narrow set of elites.

Part of the reason that China dominates advanced manufacturing technologies is precisely because it tolerates lower profits while cultivating a large workforce.

At the peak times, three hundred thousand people work at Foxconn’s Shenzhen campus, about as many as live in Pittsburgh or St. Louis.

Another former Apple engineer told me that a grassy field had turned, four months later on his next visit from Cupertino, into an industrial building with six floors getting ready to install equipment. Local officials in Shenzhen, Sichuan, and Henan not only collaborated to find labor. They also offered cheap land, extended vast tax rebates, and built roads, dormitories, and factories. The central government pitched in to help too, creating “bonded zones,” which facilitated customs clearance.

Shenzhen the “Silicon Valley of hardware.”

Apple needed to hire nearly nine thousand industrial engineers in the earlier days of iPhone production. The company’s analysts expected recruitment to last nine months to hire that many engineers in the United States. In China, they were able to do it in two weeks. A large pool of good labor increases the speed of design and production cycles.

The dense network of factories also offered flexibility on manufacturing techniques.

“Almost always,” the engineer continued, “we found someone in Shenzhen by asking a guy who knows a guy whose cousin might be able to produce a few hundred thousand new screws.”

Proximity creates efficiency. When it’s time to do stuff, a company can collapse coordination that usually takes weeks into a business meeting lasting hours by convening all the relevant suppliers in one room the next morning.

“The peace dividends of the smartphone wars.” The hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the smartphone supply chain have caused the cost of electronic components—cameras, sensors, batteries, modems—to plummet.

Shenzhen is the headquarters of many of China’s most dynamic companies, including BYD, the world’s largest electric vehicle maker; DJI, the world’s largest consumer drone maker; and Huawei, the beleaguered company that is the world’s largest telecommunications equipment maker. Electric vehicles are full of the electronic components borrowed from smartphones; the consumer drone is roughly a reassembly of a smartphone camera and sensor with propellers for flight.

The magic of Shenzhen is the combination of the world’s most creative hardware engineers sitting in a sea of components that improve every year amid a labor force of millions who know how to put together electronics.

Xi Jinping kneecapped most of China’s digital platforms. Xi prefers his industry heavy and his output hard. He scorned the virtual economy, denouncing the “barbaric growth” of capital and focusing instead on industrial developments. That meant throwing everything into manufacturing.

Americans expect innovations from scientists working at NASA, in universities, or in research labs. They celebrate the moment of invention: the first solar cell, the first personal computer, first in flight. In China, on the other hand, tech innovation emerges from the factory floor, when a new product is scaled up into mass production.

The Hall of Uselessness by the Belgian sinologist Simon Leys

“Rebuilding Every 20 Years Renders Sanctuaries Eternal.” Shrine staff make plans measured in centuries: They have a two-hundred-year road map to plant enough cypress trees to make the nearby shrine forest self-sufficient, rather than having to ship timber in from other parts of Japan. Their planning and the ritual make me wonder how much process knowledge the West has given up.

Instead of viewing “technology” as a series of cool objects, we should look at it as a living practice

Can we moderns preserve manufacturing knowledge without enacting the rituals of craftspeople?

The value of these communities of engineering practice is greater than any single company or engineer.

Ecosystems of technology

Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel, said it best in 2010: that the United States needs to focus less on “the mythical moment of creation” and more on the “scaling up” of products. Grove saw Silicon Valley transition from doing both invention and production to specializing only in the former. And he understood quite well that technology ecosystems would rust if the research and development no longer had a learning loop from the production process.

Apple’s collaboration in Shenzhen helped transform the city into the world’s most innovative hub for electronics production. But this win for Apple’s shareholders has been a loss for American power.

Wall Street has been far keener to invest in capital-light businesses: digital platforms like social media and search engines or chip companies that focus on design rather than cumbersome fabrication facilities.

The problem lies with American policymakers and executives who fail to grasp the importance of process knowledge.

Every US factory closure represents a likely permanent loss of production skill and knowledge.

Low-wage ecosystems like Shenzhen became a giant magnet for US process knowledge.

Beijing did something unprecedented for Tesla in 2018: It allowed the company to fully own its plant in Shanghai.

“Catfishing”

When Tesla vehicles started rolling out of the Shanghai Gigafactory in 2019, BYD saw its sales decline by 11 percent, while profits fell by 42 percent. But Tesla would eventually do the whole market a favor. As in the United States, the company’s audacious branding stimulated consumers to think of electric vehicles as more than high-powered golf carts. And Tesla made investments in China’s tooling ecosystem that other automakers exploited to produce better cars. BYD benefited as well, reporting record profits in 2023 and becoming the world’s largest electric vehicle maker.

Not every technology improves through iterative adjustments to manufacturing processes, but a great deal can follow its logic.

Xi has declared that China targets completionism, which means that not even “low-end industries” should move out of China. Rather than follow economic logic, in which production gravitates toward countries with lower labor costs —which the United States and other high-income countries have more or less accepted —Xi does not want industry to keep shifting around.

Small countries have had to pick their battles, as Denmark did in the wind industry and South Korea did with memory chips. China wants to have it all.

The Industrial Party. Their views are simple to summarize: that nation-states ruthlessly compete with each other; that science and technology are the decisive forces in this Darwinian competition; and that therefore the state must be organized around the pursuit of science and technology. They patriotically view the Communist Party as the world’s most capable political organization for this pursuit.

The Morning Star of Lingao, which has been serialized by a group of authors since 2009. It is an alternate-history project that imagines that five hundred people from contemporary China traveled back in time to Lingao County in Hainan (the tropical island that is China’s southernmost province) in the year 1628. Their goal? To trigger an industrial revolution in the Ming dynasty.

Rare earth metals are not really rare. Processing them, however, demands enormous amounts of energy and water while spewing carcinogens into the atmosphere. Few parts of the Western world have the stomach for processing rare earth metals, which is why China controls this supply chain.

Tariffs under Trump and subsidies under Biden haven’t decisively moved the needle. Indeed, China’s goods exports to the United States hit a near record in 2022, the same level as in 2018, when the Trump administration initiated tariffs on China.

Smaller population, the higher wage and standard-of-living expectations, and the dollar’s status as a global reserve currency make that harder

it is difficult to imagine that Americans can tolerate the work habits of people in Shenzhen or Henan: working on assembly lines for eight hours a day, eating at cafeterias at designated times, crammed six to a dorm room at night

the solution has to involve reconstituting its communities of engineering practice that prioritize process knowledge. It means attempting to build up every segment of manufacturing: training workers and creating incentives for manufacturers in order to relearn mass production.

By 2100, China’s population is projected to halve to seven hundred million.

For his third term, Xi shrank the Politburo to twenty-four members, dropping the one space that had been given to a woman.

Natural scientists like Paul Ehrlich (coauthor of The Population Bomb, 1968) and organizations like the Club of Rome (which published The Limits to Growth in 1972) explained that as the global population exceeded the planet’s “carrying capacity,” humanity was on track to experience something between the gradual decline of living standards and the total extinction of human life.

Mechanistic thinking made Song a bad cybernetician because his model failed to be dynamic to feedback.

For the four-fifths of Chinese who lived in the countryside, having several children was the basis of economic security. Without multiple children, and ideally sons, a farmer couldn’t count on having enough work and old-age support.

A reporter based in China, wrote about a woman who was seven months pregnant when officials demanded that she give birth right away. These officials formed a shock brigade to round up all third-trimester women because they had some birth quotas left in the year, while they weren’t sure whether they would have many next year. Against the objections of the woman’s doctors, they induced an early birth. Kristof described how she nearly hemorrhaged to death during the birth. Her child died. And this mother-to-be was left physically disabled.

Zeng Zhaoqi, newly appointed party secretary of Guan County, was humiliated that it ranked last in the province for family planning. So he summoned the twenty-two most senior party officials one day in April, berating them for their failings and shouting that their measures must be more extraordinary. He demanded there be zero births in the county between May 1 to August 10. In reports now censored, residents said that every woman was forced to have an abortion, no matter how far she was into her pregnancy or whether it had been authorized. Zeng found toughs from other counties —since locals were reluctant to hurt their own—to halt births. This incident in Guan County is known by two names: the “childless hundred days” as well as the “slaughter of the lambs,” since 1991 was the year of the sheep in the Chinese zodiac. The slaughter ended well for Zeng. He was rewarded with successively more desirable promotions in Shandong. His superiors didn’t seem to have a sense of irony when they appointed him later to be the deputy head of the provincial committee on Caring for Future Generations.

It was a risky strategy to produce an out-of-plan child. Many jurisdictions did not allow them to have the schooling or medical benefits available to an authorized birth. It meant they might miss early inoculations, be barred from school enrollment, and experience forfeiture of their land rights. They were essentially second- or third-class citizens whose most likely fate was to become unskilled migrants.

Chinese leaders were just enough exposed to the West to absorb this neo-Malthusian doomerism, without being exposed enough to the Western pushback against it. And the one-child policy could only have been implemented in the engineering state. While the state possessed a bureaucracy to enforce controls of such extraordinary scale, there wasn’t a sufficiently developed civil society to fight for legal protection against it.

It’s unclear if Deng was aware of the irony that he was attempting to impose planning on the population while he was trying to dismantle planning for the economy.

Whereas one of the former propaganda slogans read, “Have one child, it will be enough; the state will care for you when you’re old and tough,” a new slogan now reads, “Have three children so you won’t have to seek state-supported elder care.”

We have to get quite worried if anyone in power starts saying that science alone is an object to be pursued rather than having to situate it in a social and ethical context. There is still truth, I think, to Winston Churchill’s quip that scientists should be “on tap, not on top.”

Women tend to be discarded (often in contempt) once they’ve reached unmarriageable age, which state media considers to be twenty-seven years old.

One former employee of the Women’s Federation told the Wall Street Journal that her office in Guangzhou spends more of its budget to give to social media companies to censor gender-related topics than on women’s advocacy.

The state is starting to see that this dial cannot be turned back. Although the state has had many tools to prevent births, it can’t seem to find the right tools to encourage copulation.

Marriage has become even less appealing since Chinese judges are increasingly reluctant to grant a divorce: 70 percent of divorce applications were granted in the mid-2000s, a rate that fell to 40 percent a decade later.

Weaknesses in China’s political system, in which local officials prevented health workers from reporting the disease. Rather, Wuhan officials directed police to punish medical whistleblowers.

Carrying blank pieces of paper became a way to symbolize China’s censorship. It was a perfect echo: Whiteness represented the enforcement of pandemic controls, through the protective medical suits of massed groups of dabai (big whites), until young people appropriated it for protest. Later, antiCovid demonstrations in China were collectively known as “the white paper protests.”

For three years, the government made it difficult for people to buy ibuprofen, Advil, and other fever reducers for fear that people might disguise their fevers to avoid detection. During an outbreak, pharmacies limited purchases of fever meds or removed fever meds from their shelves entirely. Therefore, much of the Chinese population met this Covid wave without medication on hand.

We can agree that “science is real.” But we have to keep in mind that there is a political determination involved with how to interpret the science. And that is something the lawyerly society is better at. It has lawyers interested in protecting rights, economists able to think through social science, humanists who consider ethics, and many other voices in the mix, attempting to open policy prescriptions up for debate. China doesn’t have a robust system for political contestation; engineers will simply follow the science until it leads to social immiseration.

The one-child policy brought the Communist Party to reach deep into women’s bodies; the digital surveillance developed as part of zero-Covid has allowed it to control even a person’s daily access to her shower. There’s now a direct institutional linkage between the two policies. The neighborhood committees that took a starring role in enforcing Covid lockdowns haven’t been disbanded; they are now being used to call up recently married women to ask about their menstrual cycles and whether they wouldn’t like to have a few children.

The engineering state tends to begin impressively and end disastrously.

Companies and investors therefore wondered whether Xi was genuinely unaware of how much his policies had destroyed major segments of the economy. Perhaps nobody had told Xi that he was the most feared unicorn hunter of all.

Over the course of 2021, hardly any major Chinese tech company emerged unscathed. Xi’s regulatory storm wiped out a trillion dollars of market value from Chinese companies. New Oriental, one of the education companies, lost 90 percent of its market cap and then laid off 60 percent of its employees. Alibaba toppled from being an $800 billion company to just a quarter of that size two years later.

In the United States, the political drama is around legislative processes and Supreme Court rulings; implementation of policy is quickly forgotten as political attention moves to the next big issue. In China, the policymaking process is conducted significantly in secret, then its outcome is dumped on the people.

The Chinese government often resembles a crew of skilled firefighters who douse blazes they themselves ignited.

China might close its doors in forty years, by the centenary of the founding of the People’s Republic. At that point, it will once again become the Celestial Empire, its people serenely untroubled by the turmoils of barbarians beyond its borders

So long as Beijing insists on capital controls, there’s a ceiling on how much the rest of the world will want its currency.

BRI projects have generated a positive return for Chinese lenders, though it is small. China has built useful infrastructure in countries that need it. So it’s not surprising that overall, developing countries hold China in more positive regard than do Americans and Europeans.

There’s one more thing that engineers are especially good at: building resilience into the economy. Rather than prizing efficiency and just-in-time deliveries, China has invested in redundancies and shock buffers.

one of the things that provincial governors are graded on is whether they are self-sufficient in rice and wheat, while mayors of major cities have to make sure that a variety of foods are grown locally. Mayors are graded on the amount of land they dedicate to vegetables and on ensuring that grocery markets are within walking distance for most residents, that there are no food safety scandals, and that prices are stable.

The Chinese government and Chinese companies tend, on average, to maintain greater stockpiles of different goods so they have better resilience. The American corporate dictum is that “inventory is evil.” Although having spare capacity hurts various profit measures of Chinese firms, especially its state-owned enterprises, they are better able to leap into action in any crisis. A lot of manufacturing and food capacity is a useful thing to have if there is another pandemic—or a war.

A country doesn’t need so many people to have a robust semiconductor industry: A few hundred thousand highly trained workers are enough. In 2025, China will graduate more than twice as many PhDs in STEM fields as the United States—and many in American universities are Chinese nationals likely to repatriate.

So far, export restrictions haven’t dealt a decisive blow to Chinese tech companies, which have found ways to limp along without full access to American chips. Even Huawei, which suffered the most intense US restrictions, is still selling 5G equipment globally and smartphones at home.

Free thought is essential for the humanities and the social sciences. But I’m not so sure that it’s a necessary condition for the natural sciences, for very little in chemistry, physics, mathematics, and engineering is innately political.

Beijing understands social media sites, like Facebook or TikTok, primarily as freewheeling platforms of expression. They bring little gain in economic productivity while creating huge potential for political unrest.

In the United States, physics and mathematics PhDs hardly have a chance to consider working in their field before a tech giant or hedge fund picks them up at the sidelines of a conference, flashes them with a humongous pay package, and folds these eager minds into their glamorous embrace.

It’s also possible that Western minds will be broken by AI. In the United States, every shift in mass media—from cable television in the 1990s, the internet in the 2000s, social media in the 2010s, and now AI—has increased discontent between the masses and the elites, as well as between the elites and each other. American society has become much messier than two decades ago, when people were bound by a consensual reality rather than spinning off into different worlds.

Industrial capacity should be understood, increasingly, as military capacity. All the drones, smartphones, and batteries that are overwhelmingly produced in China give it an advantage that the United States does not necessarily have.

China needs lawyers. Or, to be more precise, the ability for people to decline the state’s designs on their bodies, their speech, and their minds.

China’s two great sources of wealth creation: owning property (or participating in the great wave of construction) or owning a factory (and participating in the great wave of exports)

It is because I have benefited from their move that I feel somewhat embarrassed. Guilty, even. My parents are materially impoverished relative to most of their friends.

The Power Broker was also one of the books that played a part in the consolidation of the lawyerly society. On par with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, it taught Americans to fear and loathe engineers.

The problem with the American right is not its desire to make the government more efficient. Their problem is that they diagnose the causes of inefficiency as a lazy workforce rather than the mountains of procedure that civil servants labor under. DOGE would be more effective if it targeted reductions in process rather than personnel.

If ambitious people are mostly working in consumer internet companies, then there’s little wonder at the disappointment embedded in Peter Thiel’s quip: “We wanted flying car, instead we got 140 characters.”

American progressives have a slogan that every billionaire is a policy failure. Since common folks are more on my mind, I propose an amendment: Every rise in housing prices is a policy failure. Prosperous places with substantial job creation—especially New York, San Francisco, and Boston—have perversely done the most to block new housing. Overall, half of American renters are considered cost-burdened (meaning that they spend more than 30 percent of their pretax income on rent), and many people who would like to buy a first home cannot afford one. The lack of building new homes has locked people out of cities with good jobs. It is increasing segregation by class and race.

The United States inherited a common law system typical for anglophone countries, in which judges have much more discretion (relative to legislatures) to shape the law. It is no coincidence that housing and infrastructure costs are astronomically high across the anglosphere, including in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Ireland.

“The worse the society, the more law there will be. In hell there will be nothing but law, and due process will be meticulously observed.”

These are life lessons from J.D. Rockefeller Sr. to his son. I read it over the course of months, coming back to each new letter as a source of inspiration when I had a few minutes to spare (often on commutes). Perhaps because I’m already exposed to self-help twitter (the algorithm is making it a pain to get off it), very few of the ideas feel truly “novel” though they are definitely lindy. I’ve found it immensely helpful to read and be reminded as I’ve been trying to “live” this form of wisdom.

I always romanticized writing emails to my children to read when they grow up, so I hope to do something similar. I appreciate that life lessons can come from the smallest of moments and that those types of anecdotes and details can hold the best memories.

Compressed succinctly, this book would read as:

Never trade upside for comfort. Believe in yourself first. Master details obsessively. Give selflessly. Act early. Commit fully. Accept responsibility. Endure hardship. Seek victory. Listen more than you speak. Build wealth with friends. Avoid excuses.

Selections

The privileged but powerless people are a waste, while the educated but unaffected people are a pile of worthless garbage.

For strategic considerations, the first target I chose to conquer was not a small company that was vulnerable, but the strongest opponent, Clark Payne. This company was well-known in Cleveland and were ambitious, as they wanted to acquire my star oil refinery. But before the opponent decides, I will have to strike first to gain the upper hand. I took the initiative to meet the largest shareholder of Clark Payne, my old friend in middle school, Mr. Oliver Payne, and I told him that the chaotic and sluggish era of the oil industry should end in order to protect the industry that countless families depend on for survival. I wanted to build a huge, high-performance oil company, and welcomed him to join. My plan impressed Payne, and finally they agreed to sell the company for 400,000 dollars. I know that Clark Payne is not worth that amount at all, but I did not reject them. Acquiring Clark Payne meant that I would gain the title of the world’s largest oil refinery and will also serve as a strong pioneer in the industry to efficiently bring together the refiners in Cleveland.

The fable said: In ancient Europe, a man found himself in a wonderful place where he could enjoy everything in his afterlife. As soon as he stepped into the piece of music, someone who looked like a waiter came over and asked him: “Sir, do you have any needs? Here you can have everything you want: delicious food, all possible forms of entertainment and all kinds of pastimes, amongst diem are many beautiful young women where you can enjoy as you please.” After listening to the waiter, the man was a little surprised, but very happy, as he happily thought to himself: “this is not my dream in the world” Throughout the day he had been tasting all of the delicious food while enjoying the taste of beauty. However, one day, he was bored, so he said to the waiter: “I am bored from all of this and I need to do something. Can you find me a job to do?” He did not expect that the answer he received was the waiter shaking his head: “Sorry, my sir, this is the only thing we can’t do for you here. There is no work here for you.” The man was very frustrated and waved his hand angrily as he said, “This is really bad! Then I will just stay in hell!” “Where do you think you’re at”, said the waiter gently.

But some people are obviously not smart enough. They have ambitions but are too picky about their work. They are always looking for a “perfect” employer or job. The fact is that employers need punctual, honest, and hardworking employees. They only leave the salary increase and promotion opportunities to those employees who work hard, are very loyal, extra zealous, and spend more time doing things, because they are running a business, not a charity; they need those who are more valuable.

The more difficult or unpleasant the work is, the more urgent it is to accomplish it. The longer he waits, the more difficult and scarier it becomes. This is a bit like shooting a gun. The longer you aim, the lower the chance of you pulling the trigger.

The work bench is a type of attitude; it determines whether we are happy or not. In a group of stone masons who are doing the same job sculpting stone statues, if you were to ask them, “what are you doing here?” One of them might say, “You see, I am chiseling stone, and I can go home after chiseling this piece.” This kind of person always treats work as a punishment, and the word he often spits out from his mouth is “tired”. Another person might say: “You see, I am making a statue. This is a very hard job, but the compensation is very high. After all, I have a wife and four children, and they need food and clothing.” Regarding work as a burden, a sentence he often spits out from his mouth is “feeding his family”. The third person may put down the hammer and proudly point to the stone carving and say, “You see, I am making a work of art.” This kind of person always takes pride in and enjoys his work and often cites: “this job is very meaningful.”

To have the habit of doing now, the most important thing is to have a proactive spirit, get rid of the habit of being distracted, be determined to be a person of initiatives, be courageous in doing things, don’t wait until everything is ready, there will never be absolute perfection.

Whether it is to win wealth or to win in life, what good people think about in competition is not what they will lose, but what they should do to become a winner.

Honesty is a method and a strategy. Because I paid with my own honesty, I have won the trust of bankers and more people, and because of it I survived numerous difficult times, and embarked on an expressway to success.

Managing and using money is different from the determination to make money and it requires different beliefs. To manage and use money, you must be willing to manage the numbers yourself, and not just simply talk about management and strategy. God is shown in the details. If you neglect these details, or detach from the details, and authorize this “miscellaneous task” to others to do, it is equivalent to neglecting at least half of your important business responsibility. The details should never hinder enthusiasm. To be successful you need to remember two things: one is tactics and the other is strategy.

Once avoiding failure becomes your motivation for doing things, you embark on a path of laziness and powerlessness.

Look at those poor people and you will know that they are not incompetent or stupid neither are they not hard-working. They are deprived from opportunities.

Only realizing this after graduating, but ‘opportunity cost’ is the way you make real money in a career working for other people. You always need another bidder.

Failure is a good thing as long as it does not become a habit.

Fundamental expectations, like a broom in the hands of a cleaner, will sweep away all the trash that you face when on your way to success. Son, what are your fundamental expectations?

Optimistic people will see opportunity in suffering, and pessimistic people will see suffering in opportunity.

If you declare spiritual/mental bankruptcy, you will lose everything.

Too many people overestimate what they lack, but underestimate what they have. Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.

The great Greek orator Demosthenes, he was shy because he stuttered. After his father died, he left him a piece of land in hopes that he could live a prosperous life. However, the Greek law at the time stipulated that he must win the ownership of the land by debating in public before declaring his right to own the land. Unfortunately, because of his stuttering and shyness, he suffered a fiasco, and as a result he lost that piece of land. But he was not knocked down, instead he worked hard to better himself. As a result, he created an unprecedented speech climax. History has overlooked the man who acquired his property, but for centuries, the whole of Europe has remembered a great name— Demosthenes.

I hate it when my business fails and lose money, but what really concerns me is that I am afraid that in future business, I will be too cautious and become a coward. If that is the case, then my loss will be even greater.

“You can’t sharpen your razor on a velvet.”

As we continue to reach the peak, we must remember: each step of the ladder allows us enough time to step on, and then set foot to a higher level, it is not for us to rest.

Confidence produces the attitude of believing in “I can do it”, and the attitude of believing in “I can do it” can produce the abilities, skills, and energy. Whenever you believe that “I can do it”, you will naturally come up with a “how to solve” method, and success is born once you successfully solve the problem.

Everyone hopes that one day they can reach the highest level and enjoy the fruits of success that follows. However, most of them do not have the required confidence and determination, hence they cannot reach the top. It is also because they believe that they cannot reach it, so they find a route to take where they cannot reach the top, and their actions always stay at the level of ordinary people.

Faith is the father of success. Victory is a habit, and failure is also a habit.

I do not like to achieve a certain amount of victory. What I want is sustained victory. Only in this way can I become a strong one. Confidence motivates me to succeed.

Believing in success is a basic and absolutely necessary element possessed by successful people. But the loser has graciously discarded these.

I have talked to many people who have failed in their business and have heard countless reasons and excuses for failure. When these losers were speaking, they would often unwittingly say: “To be honest, I didn’t think it would work.” “I felt uneasy before I started.” “In fact, it’s not too surprising that this has failed.”

Adopting an attitude of “I will give it a try, but I don’t think there will be any results” will lead to failure in the end. “Disbelief is a negative force. When you disagree or have doubts in your mind, you will come up with various reasons to support your “disbelief’. Suspicion, disbelief, the tendency to fail subconsciously, and the lack of desire to succeed are the main causes of failure.

Successful people are just ordinary people who believe in themselves and affirm what they do. Never, never sell yourself cheaply.

Everyone is a product of his thoughts, thinking about small goals, will lead to small results. Thinking of great goals will win great success. And great ideas and big plans usually come easier than small ones, at least it will not be more difficult.

I always adhered to a principle: I can deceive the enemy, but I never deceive myself. Fighting back at the enemy who is shooting me will never disturb my conscience.

I only show my feelings when the situation is only beneficial to myself; I can let my opponent teach me, but I will never teach my opponent, no matter how much I know about it; think twice about everything, no matter how others may urge, do not act without making a full consideration; I have my own truth, only responsible for myself; be careful of those who ask me to treat them sincerely, they want to reap benefits from me.

A gentleman will never argue with the ignorant, and I certainly will not argue with those who “praised” my greed, but I cannot refrain from despising their ignorance.

The subtext of greed is that, I want more, and monopolize it! Who has never made me cry in my heart? Politicians will say, I want to be in power, and I want to be the governor before being the president. Businesspeople will say, I want to make money, I want to make more money. Parents will say that I hope my son can achieve something and live a prosperous and happy life forever. And so on. Only when limited by morality, dignity, and face value, can people tightly cover up greed and make greed a taboo.

I want to become the largest oil refiner in Cleveland, let the flowing oil creek turn into bundles of banknotes, I want to align every thought to profit motives and help myself become the king of oil. In the early days, I would do everything by myself and work all day long. I direct oil refining, organize railway transportation, and contemplate how to save costs and expand the petroleum byproduct market. I will never forget the days that left me starving and rushing around day and night.

Dedicate everything, remove all obstacles, and move forward at full speed.

In fact, I do not like money. What I like is making money. What I like is the good feeling of victory.

The people who can get ahead in this world are those who know how to find their ideal environment. If they cannot do it, they will create it themselves.

First, we terminated all business dealings with Pennsylvania Railroad Company. I instructed our subordinates to transfer the transportation business to the two major railway companies drat have always firmly supported us, asked them to reduce freight rates, compete with Pennsylvania Railroad Company, weaken its power; and at the same time order all refineries in Pittsburgh that depend on the Empire Company for transportation to close; subsequently they instructed all its own refineries that were in competition with the Empire Company to sell refined oil at prices far lower than them. Pennsylvania Railroad Company is the largest transportation company in the United States. Mr. Scott held large power when it comes to transportation. They were proud that they have never been conquered. But under my three-dimensional oppressive style of play, they could only surrender.

And compliance does not mean that we must lower our determination to pursue victory, but it means using an ethical way to win a clear victory, and it also means that under such restrictions, we must strive to pursue victory fairly and ruthlessly. I hope you can do this.

Once any person develops a habit, whether it is good or bad, the habit will always possess him. The habit of eating lunch for nothing will not help a person progress, but only make him lose the chance to win. But hard work is the only reliable way out.

“Gentlemen,” he said: “This is really the crystallization of the wisdom of all ages, and once people everywhere know this truth, most of our problems can be solved.” This saying is what we have known as: “There is no free lunch in the world.”

Don’t be the smartest person in the room. The importance of positive leadership is to give compliments to people.

You should be clear that knowledge is originally empty, and unless knowledge is put into action, nothing will happen.

To endure hardship deliberately is one of my beliefs of success.

What you get from hardship is having the ability to build your career on a solid ground, not in quicksand. People must have foresight, and only after a long period of hardship can they have a long-term harvest.

I just hope you are good at doing small things. Doing small things is the cornerstone of making big things. If you are at the top from the beginning, you will not consider the mood of your subordinates, and you will not be able to use others.

There are only two kinds of smart people in the world: one is smart people who use themselves, such as artists, scholars, and actors; the other is smart people who use others, such as managers and leaders. The latter needs a special ability - the ability to grasp the heart.

Everyone needs to know that all knowledge will be transformed into preconceived notions, and the result will be one-sided conservative psychology, thinking that “I understand”, “I understand”, and “society is like this”. With the prejudice of “understanding”, there will be a lack of interest in knowing, and if there is no interest, it will lose the motivation to move forward, and only boredom is left waiting.

A person who is smart is a fool, and a person who knows how to play a fool is really smart.

To this day, I can clearly remember a scene of pretending to be stupid. At that time, I was thinking about how to raise 15,000 dollars, and I was thinking about it when I walked on the street. Interestingly speaking, just as my mind was flashing with the idea of borrowing or borrowing money, a banker blocked my way. He whispered from the carriage: “Do you want to spend fifty thousand dollars, Mr. Rockefeller?” Am I lucky? I did not believe my ears even a slightest bit. But at that moment, I did not show even the slightest eagerness. I looked at the other person’s face and told him slowly: “That’s it... Can you give me twenty-four hours to think about it?” As a result, signed a loan contract with him on terms that were the most favorable to me.

Playing stupid brings you many benefits. The meaning of pretending to be stupid is to stay a low profile and become humble, in other words, to hide your cleverness. The smarter the person, the more necessary it is for them to play stupid, because as the saying goes — the more mature the rice, the more they sag.

Son, only after having hobbies can you then do it with ease. Now, start to love acting like a fool!

“Let me wait before talking” is the motto I always follow in business.

When I was young, I believed in a law of success: wealth is an accident, a by-product of hard work.

Today, even though I am nearly seventy years old, I still fight in the business world, because I know that the quickest way to end my life is to do nothing. Everyone has the right to choose retirement as the beginning or the end. That kind of idle attitude to life can poison people. I always think of retirement as starting again, and I have never stopped fighting for a day, because I know the true meaning of life.

Just pay a little attention and you will find that those who have not done anything or plan to do something, often have a basket of straw hats to explain: why he could not achieve it, why he did not do it, why he could not do it, why is he not the right person. The first action that the loser takes to settle the later events is to find various reasons for his failure.

At first, he still knows how much his excuse arelies, but after repeated usage, he will become more and more convinced thatit is completely true, and believe that this excuse was the real reason for his failure, and as a result his brain begins to be lazy and rigid, and the motivation to work hard to win in any way will be reduced to zero.

Occasionally, I have seen someone stand up and say: “I succeeded by my own efforts.” So far, I have not seen any man or woman, dare to stand up and say: “I am the one who made myself fail.”

“I have been annoyed by my broken shoes until I met a man who has no feet.” It is better to be grateful for your health than to complain about your discomfort.

I found that most people have two basic wrong attitudes towards “intelligence”: too underestimating their own brain power, and too overestimating the brain power of others. Because of these mistakes, many people despise themselves. They do not want to face challenges, because that requires considerable talent

the only key is to have a strong interest and enthusiasm for doing business. Interest and enthusiasm are important factors that determine success or failure

Why do so many talented individual fails? Here is the reason. If an extremely smart person is always using their amazing intellect to prove why things cannot succeed, instead of guiding their minds to find various ways to succeed, the fate of failure will find them. Negative thoughts have implicated their intelligence, making them unable to use their skills to accomplish anything

The way of thinking that guides us to use our intelligence is far more important than the level of our intelligence. Even the highest degree of education cannot change this basic rule of success. The educational level of innate talent is not the reason behind good performance, but the management of one’s thoughts. The best businessmen never have unfounded worry, but they are passionate. It is not easy to improve thequality of talent, but it is easy to improve the method of using talent.

Knowledge is only a kind of potential power. Only when knowledge is applied constructively,then will it show its power

He will often remind himself: My mentality is more important than my intelligence; He has a strong desire to establish a “I will win” attitude; He knows to use his intellect to actively create and find ways to succeed, not to prove that he will, fail; He also knows that thinking is more valuable than memorizing. He needs to use his mind to create and develop new ideas, find better new ways of doing things, and remind himself at any time: Am I using my mind to create history? Or is it just recording the history created by others?

the process of pursuing career success, the most important step is to prevent yourself from making excuses.

if you feel that you are a winner, you will behave like a winner; if you behave like a winner, you are likely to do more of what winners would do, thereby changing your “luck”.

It is impossible to find the best way to do anything. The best way to find the best idea is to have lots of ideas.

My principle of employing people is that those who are entrusted with important tasks are those who can find ways to do things better.

Before I started working with Roger, I tested him with a question. I said, “Mr. Roger, what do you think the government can do to abolish all prisons in thirty years?” He was confused when he heard it, and suspected that he had heard it wrong. After a while of silence, he began to refute me: “Dear Rockefeller Sir, do you mean to release all the murderers, robbers, and rapists? Do you know the consequences of doing this? If that’s the case, we will not have peace. In anyway, there must be a prison.” I wanted to smash Rogers’ monolithic head, and I reminded him: “Roger, you only said the reasons why the prison cannot be abolished. Now, try to believe that the prison can be abolished. Assuming it can be abolished, how should we proceed?” “This is too hard for me, Mr. Rockefeller, I can’t believe it, and it’s hard for me to find a way to abolish it.” This is Rogers’s method — no way. I cannot imagine how he will use all his talents to actively react when he is given a heavy responsibility, or when an opportunity or a crisis hit. I do not trust Roger; he will only turn hope into hopelessness.

When we believe that something is impossible to do, our brain will find various reasons for us not to do it.

I do not ask myself: Can I do better? I know I can do it, so I ask: How can I do better?

How can I do better today? How can I motivate employees today? What special services can I provide for the company? How can I make my work more efficient? This exercise is simple, but very useful.

Most people fail, not because they make mistakes, but because they are not fully committed.

“The end is just the beginning.”

success is a process of continuous reproduction, just like a prolific cow. When it gives birth to a calf, it immediately becomes pregnant with another. Back and forth, endlessly. The end is the last stop of a journey and the beginning of a new dream. Every great successful person builds himself up with small successes. They celebrate the realization of their dreams with the ending and at the same time, mark the beginning of their new dreams.

from the beginning you have to do everything possible in order to get an advantage. My experience tells me that there are three strategies that give me an advantage.

The first strategy: Make up your mind from the beginning and pay attention to the competition and the resources of competitors.

The second strategy: research and review the opponent’s situation, and then make good use of this knowledge to form your advantages. Understanding the strengths, weaknesses, style of doing things, and personality traits of my opponents always gives me an advantage in the competition. Of course, I also need to know who I am.

When others do not regard you as an opponent, it is when you earn the most capital for future competition.

In a competition, the person who first discovers the opponent’s weakness and strikes hard is often the winner.

The third strategy: You must have the right mindset. From the beginning, you must make up your mind to pursue victory, which means that you must act positively and ruthlessly under moral constraints, because this attitude comes directly from cruel and ruthless goals.

They will ridicule themselves: “We earn more than ordinary people, and our lives are better than ordinary people. Why are we still dissatisfied and want to take risks?” In fact, such people already have a sense of fear. They are afraid of failure, afraid that everyone will disagree with them, afraid of an accident, and afraid of losing what they already have. They are not satisfied, but they have surrendered.

In any place, there are people who know they cannot succeed but they insist on blocking your way up and preventing you from attaining higher levels. Many people are ridiculed or even intimidated because of their ambitions

Asking a loser for advice is as ridiculous as asking a quack to treat a terminal illness. Your future is very important. Do not ask for advice from a yenta, because this kind of person has no prospects in their lives.

sometimes it is easier to become an excellent leader full of confidence and vitality than to become a leader who has lost vitality and is struggling and helpless, provided that he needs to know how to make his subordinates willing to give up their lives.

People can change their lives by changing their attitudes. If you believe that you can change your attitude you can change it.

If you are unable to actively establish your own goals, you will passively or unconsciously choose other goals.

when you have the courage to be honest about your purpose, you will gain emotional loyalty.

The purpose of resolute will and absolute tenacity can often inspire and encourage subordinates, so that they can deliver more outstanding performance in the future work.

“John, I know, you lead a group of very capable people. But I do not think their talents are extraordinary, but what puzzles me is that they seem to be invincible and can always easily defeat your competitors. I want to know what magic you have done to make them have that kind of spirit. Is it the power of money?”

Everyone at Standard Oil Company has a sense of responsibility, and they all know “What is my responsibility? What can I do to make things better?” But I never talk about responsibilities or obligations. I just create a sense of responsibility in the company through my leadership.

if we want to survive forever, our leadership style means we have to refuse blaming anyone or anything for any reason. The habit of blaming is like a swamp. Once you stumble and fall into it, you will lose your footing and direction, you will become unable to move and then fall into the predicament of hatred and frustration. There is only one result: losing the respect and support of your subordinates. Once you fall into this field, you are like a king who has handed over the crown to others, unable to dominate anything anymore.

when a problem arises, I will not feel resentful or dissatisfied. I will just think how can the situation get better? What actions can be taken to solve or repair the situation? Or how can we actively choose to move towards higher productivity and satisfaction.

If I can treat every obstacle as an opportunity to understand myself, rather than care about what others have done to me, then I can find a way out of the face of adversities.

Nothing can stimulate and strengthen the ability to do things like a sense of personal responsibility, and by entrusting the heavy responsibilities to my subordinates and letting them understand that I fully trust them is undoubtedly the greatest help to them. Therefore, I will not take the responsibilities that my subordinates must and can bear.

There is no blame or excuses at Standard Oil! This is the philosophy I insist on, everyone knows that. I will not punish them for making mistakes, but I will never tolerate irresponsible behavior.

almost all people have the defensive psychology of shirking real responsibility, so that the phenomenon of appointing committee responsibility can be seen everywhere. But it is harmful. The way to avoid defense is to start listening.

The biggest challenge for leaders is how to create an environment in which people feel that being open is more comfortable than hiding the truth. Proactively invite others to state their thoughts and encourage them to speak out with words such as “Say a little more” or “I really want to hear your opinion.” Contrary to what most people believe, in a dialogue, the listener is the one who has the power, not the declarant.

When you listen attentively, the original presenter will be more willing to listen to your opinions

Listening attentively is less like a technique, it is more like an attitude. A skier spends 100% of his attention when encountering obstacles, and he will never be distracted to think about what he wants to say to his partner later. In the same way, as an active listener, you give 100% of your attention to another person, and you will not want to blurt out what you think. In this way, you get rid of preconceived notions and open your mind to create a more meaningful and effective dialogue.

Do what you like to do, and leave other things to the people who like to do it.

If you don’t devote time to the things you love, you will never feel self-satisfied; if you don’t have self-satisfaction, you will lose the passion for life; if you lose the passion for life , you will lose the motivation of life. Counting on a person who has lost the motivation to do a job well is like counting on a clock that has stopped to tell the time accurately. It is ridiculous.

My purpose is to find the value that I value in every subordinate, not the shortcomings that I do not like. I find out what each employee is worthy of attention and strengths, and I am committed to turning the strengths of the employees into outstanding talents without trying to correct their shortcomings. Therefore, I always have subordinates who are capable and willing to contribute

John, no matter what you do, the best way to find the perfect idea is to have a lot of ideas. Before making the best decision, I will devote myself to look

For creative and effective options, consider a variety of possibilities, and actively try various options, and then focus on the best option.

You need to refrain from the urge to find simple, one-way solutions. Be willing to try various possible ways to achieve your goals, and have the patience to act in the face of difficulties, courage and resourcefulness, as well as the perseverance of never letting go without reaching the goal.

Whether we are drawing up a plan for a company or a single department, we must confirm that what we are drawing up is a strategy, not a means. The essence of strategy is flexibility, longterm, multi-faceted, and large-scale. They emphasize results such as how to grow or expand profits, rather than a measurable goal. At the same time, the strategy provides a general direction, not the only way to achieve success

There is only one way to overcome despair, and that is to continue to create possibilities to overcome obstacles. Simply put, hope comes from believing that there are alternatives.

When the situation seems to have fallen to the bottom and is irretrievable, they are like brave wrestlers, even if they are suppressed by their opponents

And it is difficult to get out, they will never give up any opportunity to turn over

What is more noble than having huge wealth is to serve the motherland in accordance with the needs of the motherland.

Our money is only used to create value for mankind, and we must not give any selfish people a little bit of benefit.

We are in an era where we continuously satisfy our needs below the neck but ignore the needs above the neck.

It would be great if an empty mind could be like an empty belly, needing to be filled up to satisfy the owner. Unfortunately, there is no such thing, but to accept the punishment of spiritual emptiness.

One must find one’s own home, so as not to wander or become a beggar.

Two years ago, when Mr. Carl Jung and I met unexpectedly, the psychologist told me a story: a man was trapped by a flood, and he had to climb to the roof to take refuge. Someone among the neighbors floated over and said, “John, the water is really terrible this time, isn’t it?” John replied, “No, it’s not that bad.” The neighbor was a little surprised, so he retorted, “How can you say that? Your chicken coop has been washed away.” John said, “Yes, I know, but I started raising ducks six months ago, and now they are all swimming nearby. Everything is fine.” “But, John, this time the water ruined your crops,” the neighbor insisted. John replied: “No. The crops I planted were damaged due to lack of water. Just last week, someone told me that my land needs more water, so it’s solved now.” The pessimistic neighbor once again said to the smiling John: “But look, John, the water is still rising. It’s about to rise to the level of your window.” The optimistic John smiled happily and said: “I hope so, these windows are really dirty and need to be cleaned.”

Everyone can change or be changed. Mr. Jung said that as long as a person changes his vocabulary, he can build his income, his enjoyment, and improve his life, and even change his life.

The lumberjack’s output will decline, just because he did not spare time to sharpen him and his axe?

“Pushing to the Front” by Orison Swett Marden

The driving force that led people to climb to the peak is a driving force that is maintained and emphasized regularly and is growing stronger. Those who have a successful life can undoubtedly realize that there is a lot of space in the peak, but there is not enough space for people to sit and stay.

No one can block our way home unless we do not want to come back. Let the light of the soul shine on our way forward.

Jesus wanted to teach his disciples what mission they should shoulder and what influence they should exert. They came to the world to purify and beautify the world they are in.

Our responsibility now is to dedicate ourselves completely to the world and people around us, and to concentrate on our art of giving.

People are nothing great, but there is nothing greater than people.

The person who thinks the most, feels the noblest, and acts the most righteous, lives the most fulfilling life.

We must teach the students that no matter how low a person’s position is, as long as he performs his duties, the American people should give him as much honor as a king.

Pride always comes before destruction and failure.

I hope everyone here knows that we should live in meaningful actions, not years; we live in feelings, not the numbers on the phone buttons; we live in thoughts, not air; The time should be calculated based on the beating of the heart under the correct goal.

This was a great refresher on core principles when I needed them most during my early days at Insight. It’s been fascinating to see these same ideas echoed in Rockefeller’s letters to his son (review coming soon).

The book’s core insight is that meaningful work (with ‘work’ defined somewhat broadly) is the primary mechanism for human evolution, where life is viewed as a series of upgraded problems to solve. True fulfillment requires transitioning from a low-agency mindset that follows inherited goals to a high-agency “sovereign" state where you define your own vision. By aligning your skills with increasingly complex challenges, you enter a flow state that collapses the distinction between work, play, and personal development.

Thanks Danny for pointing me toward this one.

—

Given the nature of the book, this will be more of a list of thoughts with quotes.

It arrived at the perfect time to remind me that ⅓ of life is spent at work. If that’s hollow, the rest follows.

“If you hate your work, and it drains your energy to enjoy the other third, and you are asleep the other third, there doesn’t seem to be a higher priority than to create, build, design, write, sell, invest, own, experiment, and discover a way to control what you do with your day.”

This prompted difficult questions. What am I really building with my days? A job? A career? Or something closer to a calling? 2025 taught me that while alignment isn’t strictly necessary for a great attitude, it certainly makes it easier to maintain.

To find that alignment, the book defines the spectrum between a job, a career, and a calling.

“A job is some unpleasant work you do for someone else for the sole purpose of making money. A job is a survival mechanism.”

By contrast, in a career:

“With each level of challenge, life becomes more complex and interesting. A career is extended schooling.”

Difficulty becomes development, which is beautiful. Finally, then there is a calling:

“Work you can’t pull yourself away from and others can’t help but pay you for.”

The boundaries start to blur. Money isn’t about survival, but creation.

“A job is not a career or a calling, but a career and calling are both jobs. A career is not a calling, but a calling is a career.”

There is a natural progression through these steps, and it is rare to skip any of them. Each layer informs your vision and your anti-vision.

“Your anti-vision is the future that you do not want to live.”

Sometimes it’s easier to name what you refuse than what you desire. For me, anti-vision is work that narrows instead of expands, environments where curiosity fades into routine, and conversations that circle around escape rather than creation.

Vision is the opposite. It is where work compounds, deep dives sharpen perspective, and projects serve as training grounds for a broader life. I imagine late-night projects and serendipitous friendships built on shared purpose. Looking back at my deep-dive experiences in 2025, this rings true. (Shoutout Ditty, Lonne, Adam, Zoey, Intel, and Vishnu—it takes stamina to do these, but I cherish that time spent working together.)

Sometime in 2025, I oriented toward robotics. Robotics has been a fascination since childhood — any sci-fi reader knows the dream of machines with intelligence working side by side in the physical world.

The opening chapter of my career began in a mature ecosystem. Inside Insight and across the SaaS landscape, competition is cut-throat. Robotics feels like what software may have been 30 years ago: destined to reshape everything, but currently "hardly working," slow to deploy, and demanding a rare mix of daring builders and patient backers.

While I may have previously felt gated by a lack of academic background, today I have a PhD in my pocket via ChatGPT and Gemini. I have the tools to access the brightest minds and the funding to aggressively chase curiosities. The wall between “employee” and “entrepreneur” has collapsed.

“The difference between an employee and entrepreneur is the difference between low agency and high agency.”

High-agency people set their own goals. Low-agency people inherit them.

“True agency can only be developed when you blame yourself for every problem, even when you’re not at fault.”

It can initially sound harsh, but it’s actually freeing. Life is nothing without problems to solve.

“Without problems, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life.”

The real question isn’t how to avoid problems, but which ones to choose. At Insight, I’ve seen the saturation of AI and software. While it felt tough to imagine a career in a consolidating market, I now see my current training as a way to learn timeless investing principles, deal fluency, and institution building.

When you create to solve problems at the right level, the work feels alive.

“The sources of psychic entropy are boredom and anxiety… If your skill is too high and the challenge too low, you get bored. If your skill is too low and the challenge too high, you get anxious.”

I know the state of restlessness on one side and self-doubt on the other. But in between lies flow, the rare balance where skill and challenge meet.

“Challenge is the source of enjoyment. Enjoyment comes from solving problems….Projects are how you turn problems into solutions. Projects create a frame for your mind to expand into.”

I’ve started to see my work as a series of these "containers" for flow. Some are professional, while others are personal (meditation, creative writing, or training for a sport or competition).

The highest stage the book describes is contribution.

“You don’t see work as clock in, clock out. You don’t see rest as a treat. You don’t see play as a hobby if you have the time. You see all of them as necessary counterbalances.”

This necessarily reframes success. It isn’t title or number of deals, but whether the problems you wrestle with naturally lead to service (giving!).

“You don’t only consume and take, but you create, share, and give back.”

To contribute in ways both small and then hopefully large (as an investor, a builder, or a student) feels less like chasing a career and more like building a life’s work.

Selections:

Read through once for consumption and a second time for digestion.

If you hate your work, and it comprises one third of your life, and it drains your energy to enjoy the other third, and you are asleep the other third, there doesn’t seem to be a higher priority than to create, build, design, write, sell, invest, own, experiment, and discover a way to control what you do with your day.

A job is some unpleasant work you do for someone else for the sole purpose of making money. A job is a survival mechanism. A job is one milestone on the path to living up to those who shaped your mind.

A job is similar to schools from the perspective that good marketing can make up for a bad product.

A career is a commitment to development in your work.

With each level of challenge, life becomes more complex and interesting. New paths for knowledge and skill acquisition become apparent. A career is extended schooling.

A calling is work you can’t pull yourself away from and others can’t help but pay you for.

A job is not a career or calling, but a career and calling are both jobs. A career is not a calling, but a calling is a career.

create work that doesn’t feel like work no matter the difficulty of that grand task.

Like lifting weights, you start for the vanity, stay for the therapy, and cultivate a philosophical sense of mastery behind the pursuit.

Your journey from job to career to calling will not be one without mistakes and ego, and that’s okay. It isn’t supposed to be any other way, and you will experience significant emotional backlash if you try to skip steps. At the start, you create to make money. In the end, you make money to create.

All pursuits are materialistic until a philosophical sense of mastery is formed, even the most “spiritual” pursuits. Then, it becomes your vehicle into the unknown. A vessel to expand and evolve. Like a relationship, you are attracted by their looks and are only then introduced to the depth of their being. Looks, in all domains of life, are as important as depth. But most people fear what lies beneath, so they bounce around on the surface, distracted by anything that allows them to forget their pain.

The future of work will consist mostly of entrepreneurs, specificallcyreators, and if not entrepreneurs, elite employees who have the traits of entrepreneurs in increasingly rare positions.

The difference between an employee and entrepreneur is the difference between low agency and high agency.

High-agency individuals are those who create their own goals and actively pursue them without permission from another. Low-agency individuals are those who are assigned goals and pursue them because they don’t have a mind that allows them to see any other option.

True agency can only be developed when you blame yourself for every problem, even when you’re not at fault.

People inherently know that challenges make life interesting, so they pursue more, but once they reach their limits, they begin justifying their newfound comfort with statements like, “I just like the stability of a job.” Then and there, your calling disappears. You eliminate the possibility of further novel challenge. That is dangerous.

Other domains of your life can only advance as high as your ability to contribute to others through your work.

If you are wondering where your child-like zest for life went after the progression of your schooling ended, now you know. Being an entrepreneur is hard, but being an eternal employee is harder. Not because of the work, but because of the mind. Self-development is a gateway drug into entrepreneurship because it teaches you that improving others is the next level of improving yourself.

“Employee” and “entrepreneur” are not titles, they are states of mind. They aren’t a role you play, but who you are.

Employees are not always entrepreneurs, but entrepreneurs can be employees. Since entrepreneurship is a state of mind, you can have a job and still cultivate a sense of agency.

The evolution of your work is a direct reflection of building your vision. Sometimes that entails working at a job you hate, at a startup you love, or on a little creative side project, as long as they fuel your vision.

If you don’t want to work long hours, solve the problem of prioritization. If you like the “stability” of a job, solve the problem of self-management.

Entrepreneurs who lack fulfillment aren’t entrepreneurs. They may seem like it in their work, but they have the mind of an employee. They are employees to an invisible employerresidue from their programming—that secretly planted a new goal in their head that shapes their ability to identify and solve the right problems.

Your psyche is wired to hunt, but physical threats aren’t an issue anymore. The real threats of today’s world are psychological and spiritual. A mental game. We are built for survival, but the question is no longer how to survive; the question is how we evolve beyond and integrate our survival to make life meaningful.

Money is a great tool to continue a life of novelty and challenge. You know, the thing that disappears after you graduate school and get acquainted with your job.

because it buys the resources to solve more challenging problems since time and labor only go so far.

True education is what allows the individual to solve their own problems (rather than assigning general temporary relief)

The education system is focused on training people to be useful workers for their own benefit (because you aren’t the one paying for that education system

It does not make sense to pay someone based on the amount of work they do, especially in a future where that work will be more efficient, worth less, and require fewer resources to complete. However, it does make sense to pay someone based on the level of problems they solve, as problems constantly evolve as work does.

If enjoyment comes from the feeling of progress being made, connection to something greater than yourself, and receiving meaningful feedback from both, then conscious entrepreneurship is how you sustain and control the enjoyment in your life. And by filling your own cup, you begin to overflow, and your natural desire shifts to helping other people.

If you only learn as much as your top-of mind goal allows, and that goal is to get a high-paying degree for the sake of status and security, then by the time you exit this system you are no different from a lion in the Savannah or polar bear in Alaska. If you were to swap the two, both would fail to survive because they are niche specialists.

A good metric for determining if you are on the right path is if your work changes at a minimum of every year. You evolve. Your interests evolve. You identify new problems once previous ones are solved.

Humans find fulfillment in caring for others, like how you may be better at taking care of your dog than you are at taking care of yourself. The more you can care for others—through the progressive overload of responsibility or training with emotional weights—the more fulfillment you receive. In this sense, money isn’t the only form of profit. One could consider it their life’s work to evolve through these stages to contribute to humanity at their highest potential. Note that you do not break free from lower levels. You do not break free from the care of your family for the care of an animal. You integrate the former into the latter.

Aristotle believed that the final cause of a thing is its function, and that a full explanation of anything must consider its final cause.

Teleology (telos meaning goal, logos meaning reason) is the idea of explaining something by referring to its purpose, end, or goal. Cybernetics studies how systems self-regulate and selforganize toward the end goal of a system.

Distinguish vertical development from horizontal development

You can only solve a problem once you expand your mind beyond the problem. You need to stop, zoom out, and open your mind to view your problems from a higher perspective. From there, you can create a goal that opposes the problem, collect ideas that form a theory, and experiment with potential solutions until the problem is solved. Once it’s solved, you solidify a new level of purpose.

Immerse yourself in environments and education that begins to change the goals your mind operates on. Block out time to work on improving the value you have to offer. Acquire complementary skills to the ones you use in your job or career. Experiment with side projects. Expose yourself to massive experience until you are able to make enough money to see beyond your survival.

The mentors of the past and present that you look up to, like Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Plato, Krishna, or any other influential individual you hold in high regard have a high degree of status and power. Otherwise, their message would not have captured your attention, persuaded you to change your mind and behavior, and persisted for thousands of years. But that’s the thing, they didn’t have a marketing budget, they had a message. A life’s work to spread. That was the source of their power.

To solve bigger, more meaningful problems that increase the baseline level of purpose of humanity. But you can only do that once you’ve attained some form power and influence. Once you’ve created the art, products, or services that improve the lives of the recipients. Once you’ve built the body that reflects the character by which you interact with the world. Once you’ve built the mind that harnesses power with persuasion, not force or deception.

You find spirituality in experience. You find it in the story of creating your own way. You find it in the highs and lows of pursuing goals and solving problems. You find it in correcting the mistakes you made and learning how to move in a better direction. Spirituality comes from the journey, but that journey is only possible with a conscious destination. If you can’t find meaning in life, it’s because you haven’t started pursuing the goals you’ve been suppressing because you’ve been tricked into thinking they’re bad.

In the status stage, much of what you learn and do will be from what others teach you. In the creativity stage, you take your expanded knowledge and begin to create your own way of doing things. You’ve tried different training regimens, business models, and coping strategies to the point of realizing the patterns and principles between them all. You’ve unlocked a perspective that allows you to navigate intersecting domains with grace.

The contribution stage is where the separate domains of your life collapse into one. You don’t see work as somewhere that you clock in and clock out. You don’t see rest as a treat that you can only indulge in once work is done. You don’t see play as a hobby that lasts thirty minutes at night if you have the time to do it. You see all of them as necessary counterbalances to one another. Work, rest, and play become difficult to distinguish. Rest becomes a way to regenerate your creative ability for your work. Play becomes what you do for work. Work is so deeply integrated with your life that anything you do can pay back tenfold in more ways than cash. Your footsteps leave pits of value in their path.

Your entire life begins to revolve around how you can best contribute to the world. You become a perspective vessel for reality. The true value lies in the mind you’ve developed, and you are able to adopt the perspective of a strategist or visionary. You hunt for and gather information, synthesize it with your experience, and distribute it to those who want to benefit from it. You become less of a leech. You don’t only consume and take from reality for your selfish personal gain, but you create, share, and contribute back to the world.

A job is the “secure” and “safe” route touted by those who haven’t discovered the depth of life. It can quickly chain you to responsibilities that narrow your mind and drain your energy. You can’t effectively pursue your life’s work by neglecting your relationships and mental and physical health.

If you are passionate about your work, late nights and bad habits will impact your ability to create. If you aren’t serious about your work, these problems won’t register in your mind as problems. They will stick around and lead to entropy. When your work demands your best self, the path to developing your mind, body, and relationships becomes clear. You must uphold them or else your work suffers.

Your purpose is the source of your struggle, and nobody said that struggle can’t be fun. The fundamental problem, or problem of all problems, is that people rarely dive into the unknown and fail to recognize that as the problem that begins their problem-solving journey. This mostly comes down to conditioning, identity, and perception.

Without problems, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life. A life without problems is a life without purpose. You have no reason to step into the unknown, discover ideas, create knowledge, deposit it as a contribution, and live fully. Problems, like ideas, are infin

If there is any point in your life where you are not wrestling with a meaningful problem (this includes mindfulness, meditation, and other forms of spirituality that make it seem as if you aren’t solving the problem of an entropic mind), it is safe to say that you are not in the process of producing value or creating the potential to contribute to something greater than yourself.

It’s wise to note that there is an enemy of progress. When you encounter a problem—or a conflict between where you are and where you want to be—entropy has the potential to increase. Entropy, in brief, is that all systems fall into chaos unless an effort is made to maintain order.

The sources of psychic entropy, or the mind falling into chaos, are boredom and anxiety. Both stem from a mismatch of your skill level and the challenge of a situation. If your skill is too high and the challenge is too low, you get bored. Boredom leads to self-centeredness. Your mind starts thinking of something better, and often more pleasurable, that it could be doing with its time. If your skill is too low and the challenge is too high, you get anxious. Anxiety leads to self-consciousness. Your mind starts thinking of how it’s not good enough.

You begin wondering why your life is getting worse while your days remain the same. Most people’s lives are determined by how they choose to cure their boredom.

The first leap into a new way of life will have a buffer period of high anxiety. This is nature’s way of testing how serious you are about seeing what you’re capable of.

When you’re living at the edge of your abilities. The flow state. Locked in. You feel invincible. Nothing else matters but the task in front of you. You become one with the problem. You move with purpose. People gravitate toward you because you have something they’ve lost. Your life’s work is to maximize your time in this optimal state of ordered consciousness

Start where you are but challenge yourself. This is how you acquire an interest-based education. You view your life as a story that unfolds in chapters, phases, and cycles. Each chapter has goals, problems, highs, and lows that reveal themselves as the pages turn. Each chapter is a macrocycle of life. Once you understand it, you can identify which part of the story you are in, become aware of its components, and ease your mind until you enter the next phase.

Your life’s work doesn’t happen at some imaginary future moment. It happens at every passing moment. One foot in the unknown. Not so deep that you get anxious, and not so shallow that you get bored. But right where the meaningful flow of information is maximized

You feel lost at one moment, but if you have faith, you soon become curious. That curiosity leads to a period of intensity, a season of rapid progress where there is nothing you’d rather be doing but pursuing your purpose. Post-intensity, you enter a period of consistency where you maintain a higher baseline than before. You reach a new level of purpose and continue your ascent from a similar point in the spiral. You may not feel like you are progressing, but if you look down the mountain, you will see how far you’ve come.

Instead of obsessing over discovering your life’s work, pay attention to the opposite: where your life will end up if you keep performing the same actions. If you understand entropythat all things tend toward disorder—you understand that by doing nothing with your life you choose to slowly drown in chaos. You don’t stay the same. You dig yourself deeper into a hole without trying.

When people say, “I don’t know what I want,” what they’re really saying is, “I don’t want to do the work it takes to get what I want.” It’s not that you don’t know what you want. It’s that you know what you don’t want—meaning you know what you want—and are hiding from the pain of reinventing yourself. You are hiding from the slow structural redesign of your identity.

I’ve always known what I wanted because it’s extremely simple to observe society and know what I don’t want: A job I hate. Work I don’t care about. A body that lacks energy and aesthetics. A partner I can’t stop arguing with. A mind that I can’t come to grips with. These are the main problems that lie in the conditioned human experience.

When you learn how to create a story worth telling by forging your own path, how you attract others becomes trivial.

Your anti-vision is the future that you do not want to live.

The greatest decision you can make is to change your physical, mental, and spiritual environments for good. Immerse yourself in a pool of new people, new ideas, and new potentials that challenge you to create, expand, and transcend.

Big goals are for direction. Small goals are for clarity.

Be stubborn with vision and loose with details. Your goals will change, and that’s okay.

Projects. Projects are how you turn problems into solutions. Projects create a frame for your mind to expand into. Projects, after a period of invested mental energy, become a magnet for ideas and experience. Serendipity increases. Pattern recognition increases. Dopamine increases to signal information that helps you actualize the project.

The creative challenge appears when you attempt to achieve a goal without betraying your vision. You can become rich without sacrificing your family. You can become healthy without sacrificing your work. You can become valuable without sacrificing what makes life worth livin

When your skill is the perfect match for the challenge of a situation, the world goes quiet, and you become one with the problem to be solved.

Challenge is the source of enjoyment. Enjoyment is found on the tightrope between boredom and anxiety. Enjoyment comes from solving problems.

Avoid getting locked into paradigms and beliefs that narrow your mind on one idolized path. Your vision is like a battery. You must fuel it with experience, education, and misdirection.

If you have the agency and desire, you can find a path to acquiring the knowledge you need to build what you want.

Most people think their problem is that nobody finds their interests interesting, but the reality is that they don’t know how to make their interests interesting to other people.

When most people want something, they explain what they want without understanding the mind of the other person, so they rarely receive it. Learning to persuade allows you to strive for mutual benefit—a positive-sum game—because you are able to articulate their desires often better than they can.

the path forward for sovereign individuals is to build their own audience, rather than being at the whim of any given system that allows you to tap into their audience.

When you publish your work in public, with intention, persistence, and iteration, you increase the surface area of people who may care about your work. For those who think this sounds uncertain or difficult, I must remind you that the other option—what you’ve been doing—is more uncertain or difficult while hiding under a veil of comfort and ease.

You offer them value in exchange for another form of value. In the case of a product, it’s money. In the case of media, it’s attention. Both are valuable. Don’t waste people’s time.

Value is perception.

The levels of problem awareness are unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, and most aware. Most people you come across will lie between unaware and solution-aware. Your job is to speak to them where they are. You aren’t going to speak to someone who isn’t aware they have a problem the same way you would speak to someone who’s already tested solutions. This requires creativity and dexterity. It can’t be taught through words. It can only be learned through persistent trial and error on a long enough time horizon, which is why so few people have this irreplaceable skill.

Pull from your vision and get specific. What are you helping them achieve? What is the transformation? The more specific you can get with this, the more desire it will generate in a reader, viewer, or listener who is already aware of the problem.

The greatest marketing strategy is clarity paired with pure honesty

If you were to take these ideas with you as you push into the unknown, you will notice these persuasion principles everywhere you go, and that will teach you more than the words on this page. That, by all measures, is the best way to learn. Perspective, persistence, and pattern recognition.

You are attempting to amplify the problem to show the reader that it is a higher priority than they think because the longer the problem goes unsolved, the more damage it can do.

A process, in this context, is a creative system that breeds knowledge, skill, and awareness to bridge the gap between problem and solution.

To improve your writing is to improve your thinking, leaning, and earning. Through that error correction, you inadvertently learn psychology, marketing, sales, persuasion, human nature, and the topic being written about. Writing is how you engage in an interestbased education.

Choosing a niche and a life of fulfillment mix like oil and water.

First, you don’t have experience with a niche you choose, and most entrepreneurs fail because they try to solve a problem they haven’t experienced. And since you will probably never experience that problem outside of theory, you are working by proxy. You are studying the map, not the territory. It can work, and plenty of people have found success with this method, but I am here to help guide you toward a life of deep purpose. Second, it prioritizes finding, not attracting or becoming. You learn a skill for someone else.

The biggest problem with choosing a niche is that it is static. You box yourself into a little bubble of thoughts. Similar to the pursuit of prestige that comes from focusing on one area of study like a college degree, this creates a stupefying conformity that has high potential for replacement. You can only learn so much within a box. The beauty of becoming the niche is that it evolves as you do. Your niche isn’t a static target—it’s a living, breathing extension of your personal development. As you solve new problems, discover new interests, and create new knowledge, your business naturally expands to encompass these areas. Choosing a niche is for specialists.

Practice self awareness, the greatest business, marketing, and sales skill.

A human must orchestrate the tools at their disposal toward an evolving vision for the future.

The older I get, the more I believe that everything meaningful in life is gated by a single bottleneck. A million dreams can keep you awake, but one constraint holds the key. Find it, and everything begins to move.

A bad life crisis ends in resignation. “I’ve worked too hard. It’s time to give it up. A good one sends you to Europe, not to escape, but to observe. To study how they live with beauty, leisure, and quiet dignity. Not that I’m in a crisis… I just have a wedding to attend and some remote-work embedded into my job.

Things are beautiful here. The buildings proclaim, “Greatness stood here.” Yet it’s not just focused on the past – as it’s not fully decayed, like so much of Rome. People also sit by the river, on top of bridges, under the tunnels with ivy growing off the side, and they kiss. Romance is built into the city.

But then I remember that even the most romantic places hide their dissonance. Paris dazzles on the surface, but beauty can mask the fractures underneath (Larry David suggests looking at a man’s wife to see if he has integrity). I think about the infidelity rate, and I remind myself that looks deceive. And yet, surface beauty still matters. Deep beauty is rare, self-fulfilling, and it transforms. But Paris makes a strong case that even shallow beauty, done right, can nourish the soul. I’m sure both kinds of beauty matter more than I admit.

Max lives in a truly quiet area. There are few cars and few tourists despite being minutes away from the Eiffel Tower. I noticed there are also no AC boxes blowing in the background. As we’ve discussed, surely this causes more deaths for old people, but the tradeoff is they probably sleep better and suffer less sound pollution. Andrej Karpathy might call this an improvement for the soul. On the other hand, the French tend to drink on a daily basis. I’m not sure if alcohol disrupts sleep more than noise. Maybe it balances out.

Every city lives by rules (spoken or unspoken). Tourists, often in negligence, float above them. But if you live there, the city starts to shape you. Paris invites an elegant essence. The people truly embody it. That elegance seeps into the gait of those who walk here. Into their taste, their sense of purpose, their freedoms.

New York has its own code: hustle. The city wakes before 6 a.m. Effort is measured in hours. Skyscrapers rise because ambition needs altitude and peaks. Paris, however, limits its buildings’ height. The constraint breeds its essence. In New York, delis and pizzerias are honest and world-class but ~rough. Here, even a corner boulangerie patisserie feels like an extension of the city’s aesthetic will.

You can feel what Parisians collectively attend to. How a croissant flakes, how linens hangs off the shoulder, how light fills a room.. In Paris, it’s seduced by form, texture, detail. The architecture spills into the street. Restaurants stretch onto cobblestones, people talk, watch, and linger. And what they watch is beautiful. The people. The buildings. Each other. A city in love with its reflection… but not in the way of selfies. They’re simply content in their beauty.

Cities are shaped by what people choose to see. And what they choose to ignore. Path dependence is real and culture has gravity. The place pulls you into its shape. Stronger cultural forces always overwrite weaker ones. Could a Parisian ever be at home in West Philly?

—

There is no freedom free’er than having the conviction to follow your dreams. Bison ranch wasn’t the end game. The end game is here and now. The end game is the 6 inches between our ears. Bison ranch is perhaps just a nicer environment to play.

Borrowing this from online: “male “healing” is actually about feeling power, agency, and capability.” Talking about feelings is pleasant, but true healing is found in depth. This belief is not from a theoretical, but a lived experience.

Ask a man what made him/her feel most accomplished in the past year, and you’ll uncover his priorities and his worldview.

On this trip, I’ve asked myself: why do I value ‘depth’ and ‘taste’ to such an extreme? It’s because of a feeling I get. How best to explain it…?

Well, how bland is a life without ‘taste’? For someone who’s developed it, I’d imagine painfully so.

A man loses his nose, and with it, flavor collapses into the flatness of five senses: salt, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. He drinks a Leffe beer and misses the faint whisper of vanilla. He eats but misses the experience.

(As a child, my sinuses were often congested, leaving me with a dulled sense of smell. By extension, I’m sure a muted palate as well. I still enjoyed the food, but not for its intricate flavors and aromas. My appreciation was driven more by sheer hunger after long days of physical activity.)

He dates, but doesn’t know what being deeply cared for feels like. He plays games, but never feels the thrill of real competition. It gets worse: he can’t even distinguish between extremes… He meets a 10x founder/engineer and can’t spot greatness. He stumbles into an incredible early-stage company but can’t read the signals. Can’t parse the SaaS metrics. Can’t smell opportunity. So he checks every thought through the filters of his more talented peers. Because he can’t trust his own instincts. It’s a feeling far scarier than lack of knowledge. Beneath it all was a strange cocktail of curiosity, guilt, and inferiority. For so long, I’ve been haunted by the question of taste.

This pernicious ‘feeling’ invaded many corners of my life. I felt it horribly in English class, when on my first read through I had glanced over the beauty in prose, intentional narrative perspective, and the author’s inner mind that Professor Egan would so passionately explain. It was only slightly softened by the ugly comfort of judgment that, unlike our classmates, at least I’m not majoring in English and still don’t get it on the second pass through.

The truth was that I didn’t believe I could quickly see what others could.

I felt it in my career most of all. Early on, I didn’t believe I could distinguish the categories or people that made a truly great Insight investment. While my closest friend raced ahead and realized he didn’t enjoy the rules of this game at Insight nor the company of its players, I was still reading the rulebook! Even in Thailand, where I trained in Muay Thai for the explicit purpose of being gritty, I couldn’t see the opening thread in the fight.

What is true freedom? Is it standing at the Sharpe Ratio? Sleeping lightly and waking joyfully? A buddhist presence? A connection with the “>”?

I wonder how much of what I’ve missed in life came down to something as simple as attention. Not intelligence. Not luck. Just the ability to notice and see what’s good and what’s meaningful. Taste without attention is impossible. Perspective without presence is shallow. The boatloads of dollars come to those with both good taste and lots of perspective. In most cases, simply surviving matters – returns from time in the game triumphs over most else.

But now that I’m finally starting to believe that I can be somebody, I want to play at the frontier.

—

I’m leaving for the wedding on Monday morning. Today, Maxime and I scoured thrift shops looking for a blazer and shoes to match the white pants I bought in Las Vegas. We searched for hours and hours in the dusty closets and tiny basements of the Vintage Parisian scene. There was no AC, very often no fans, and lots of mid-day heat. A half-day later, we found what we were looking for: a wonderful beige linen blazer that was light for the summer and versatile for travels. Depending on how you wear it, it passes for Americana or European summer. Shoutout to Maxime for waiting and weighing in on every option (a patient friend moment of epic proportions).

At a nearby shop, I picked up a pair of Italian suede summer shoes. Even at 50% off, they were a hefty price to pay. I’d seen them the day before on my way to see Amit at a park and spent 30 minutes going back and forth before deciding to pass. But my mood changed today. I weighed it differently. I considered how bad my outfits looked with the ONs. I thought about wearing these back in the States. About how showing up underdressed to someone’s wedding just feels disrespectful.

In both the personal and the professional, value accrues from how long + how closely we’re willing to look.

Maybe the bottleneck isn’t in the choices themselves (cities, clothes, ideas) but in the attention we give them. This year, I’ve started paying closer attention… to what I value, what I overlook, and what I quietly fear in myself. The growth’s been slow, but real. Taste starts with attention. Taste begins with attention. And attention, I think, is where all beautiful things begin. Maybe even freedom.

A plus,
Sourish

Thanks for lending me your copy, Wyatt. This may, in fact, end up being the single most important book I read (as it pertains to my career choices, voting, etc.). Sneaky big problems have a way of not showing up in your ballot.

The authors do a great job at expressing how AI defeats humanity and the book is littered with examples to appeal to your need for illustrative stories. It’s almost a mute point; I think their premise stands tall even without them.

There seems to be many more bad outcomes than good ones. My personal observation is that very few people even know about the alignment problem and fewer care to educate themselves on it (quite disturbing).

Notes:

• You don’t get what you trained for. The preferences that wind up in a mature AI are complicated, practically impossible to predict, and vanishingly unlikely to be aligned with our own, no matter how it was trained

• Once AIs get sufficiently smart they’ll start acting like they have preferences (again we’re unsure what they will be)

• Nobody anywhere has any idea how to make a benevolent AI and that nobody can engineer exact desires into AI

• Gradient descent is not the same as natural selection. Gradient descent works directly on every part of a large mind that it’s tuning, whereas natural selection tunes small genomes that work as a sort of recipe for a large brain. Gradient descent will not instill exactly the right preferences into their AIs.

• AI research is an alchemy, not a science

  • They’re looking for outputs without understanding the black box that creates it. We can look at the web of weights & biases across neural networks and still not come close to understanding it. Likewise, certain neurons in the human brain light up when you see a loved one, but if you were to look back and just try to understand what “love” as an emotion or feeling is through scans of the neurons that activate, you wouldn’t get very far.

• The 4 compounding curses, as it relates to nuclear and to an even greater degree ASI, are a great framework.

1. An engineering challenge is much harder to solve when the underlying processes run on timescales faster than humans can react

2. An engineering challenge is much harder to solve when there is a narrow margin for error, especially if it’s a narrow margin between ‘unimpressive’ and ‘explosive’

3. Self-amplifying processes, like an overwhelming reactor boiling off its coolant water and then overheating more, leave little room for error… Overheating nuclear reactors don’t start trying to fool the operators into complacency until the reactor is ready to fully explode.

4. Complications make engineering problems worse… The complicated internals of a nuclear reactor have nothing on the unknown complications that lurk in the hundreds of billions of weights that make up a modern LLM.

• Bad arguments:

  • We’ll design AI to be submissive

  • We’ll just have AI solve the ASI alignment problem for us

  • AIs are trapped inside computers

• As Nassim Taleb would say, the threat of AI has made humanity the most fragile it’s ever been

• Realizing we’re in an ‘arms race’, the question becomes

Gil Vicente’s Auto da Alma (The Soul’s Journey) is a short allegorical play written in 1508 where a human soul travels through life accompanied by a guardian angel and hounded by the devil. Along the way it wavers between vanity, wealth, and despair before finally finding refuge at the “inn” of the Church. Funny enough, I found out about the story while overhearing Gil Vicente’s name while touring a church in Lisbon.

Reading it, I recognized a pattern I knew well. I have lived this cycle before. Temptation does not arrive once and vanish. It circles back again and again. Ambition, pleasure, burnout, retreat discipline, ambition, repeat. For years I barely noticed it happening. I heard the whisper (“do it just this once, you are young, it will not matter”) and I obeyed. I became a prisoner to my own devices.

What stunned me in Auto da Alma was the Devil not as seducer but as director. He doesn’t only tempt with pleasures but also stages them. “Put your arm here. Fold your arms proudly. Now strut.” He choreographs the Soul into spectacle. And the point is not joy. The point is visibility.

That image struck me because I had lived under a similar direction myself. At Penn, I observed the unspoken grammar of being seen: a gait of confidence, offhand nods that signaled belonging, and to a lesser extent, the things you wore and had. The “scene” was rarely about enjoying itself. It was about looking like you belonged to it. That is the trick we fall prey to: confusing visibility for fulfillment. If I am seen, I must belong. If I am seen, I must matter. I can count the times I truly enjoyed the scene on one hand. But I remember wanting to be seen in it.

That is when I saw how the Viente’s Devil changes masks. Sometimes he appeals to appetite. When that fails, he appeals to ego. He flatters: “You are too noble for rules, too important to bow. Be free.” He reframes freedom as refusal of obedience and refusal of discipline. It feels intoxicating.

And when ego fades, another mask appears in the form of respectability. It’s no longer a wild temptation but a sober one. It’s harder to detect because it wears the costume of common sense and stability. I have long chased the point of no return, where compounding wealth frees me from constraint: no thought to dinner prices, freedom to travel anywhere, the slightly nicer house on the block in the already nice neighborhood. On its face that is prudence. Yet somewhere along the way prudence crosses into fixation. And New York tempts you to keep moving that line forward until the fixation becomes invisible. It’s respectable, even praised. But it’s also dangerously binding. A personal fixation is built from a collective one… respectability is invisible because culture turns it into the norm.

Culture and leadership really does matter (so much). It defines what is celebrated, what is mocked, what is forbidden. The culture we choose to live in, abide by, and build for… it, by our own free will ends up coercing us. We quickly chase the very things that draw us away from our authenticity, from our real curiosities, from the slow work of quiet discipline. Often when I have chased the stage, I have neglected the seeds that needed watering. And then, by my own choice, I have had to step back to replant them.

If spectacle enslaves, hardship frees. Chase things that make me struggle at a deep mental or physical level because they feel like the Angel’s language. Yet even hardship can become a performance if I let the gaze of others into the room. The line is thin. The same gritty run that centers me can become a badge and the same meditative discipline that allows for silence in me can become a distorted brand. Time has a way of collapsing illusions. Uniforms that once seemed like badges of privilege can calcify into burial costumes.

So what do I actually seek? Not wealth as spectacle and not freedom as defiance, but slack: space to do meaningful work without panic. That pursuit can be clean fuel if it is tied to discipline and inputs. It becomes dangerous when it hardens into fixation. Even good concerns can become snares if they drain away from the practices that restore.

The test I return to is simple. Does this send me back to the Inn—discipline, community, solitude, curiosity? Or does it send me back to the stage?

There is a moment in the play when the Soul flips. It admits complicity: “I gave you too many of my years.” Then it demands release: “persecute me no more.” That order here crucially matters. Owning it and then asking for release is how suffering becomes insight instead of despair. Even in suffering, though, there can be triumph, because suffering can teach you to tell the voices apart.

Borrowing from Vicente: close the body’s eyes to vanity, bind the appetite for ease, and take one faithful step.

–

Other thoughts:

While the parts where Devil and Angel played tug of war with the Soul was filled with self reflection, I didn’t love the ending because it didn’t feel like it investigated real inner conflict. The last stretch of the play is all the saints and doctors of the Church describing Christ’s sacrifice in layered imagery.

I used GPT 5 as a teacher through this. I would paste a stanza, try my own paraphrase, and get feedback on where I missed a word, tone, or structure. Over time, I asked less for summaries and more for guidance on how to spot interjections, contrasts, or archaic phrasing myself. I’m still far from an expert (Prof Egan’s class taught me that there’s nothing like taking a full course) but this gave me confidence to approach other works I’ve always wanted to read (e.g. Dante).

Some notes from reading more medieval work:

• Syntax – medieval english flips word order. Spotting “if… yet” or “though… still” clauses

• Spotting tone – “Ah” or “O” signals lament; Contrast structures mark grief, etc.

• Decoding symbols – “tree” as cross, “inn” as the Church, “banquet” as false pleasure

• Mapping the Devil’s masks: sometimes a flatterer, sometimes a pragmatist, sometimes a mocker, sometimes a whisperer of despair

Each second, each face, each laugh, each ache. It doesn’t just shape who I am. It is who I am. But not even in a cumulative way. Not like pieces making a whole. No. Each vivid moment is its own complete world. Its own still-burning star. The same as now. The same as this moment, as I breathe, as I think. Just another point in the match. Just another breaking wave.

And maybe that’s it. Maybe the trick to life is realizing the match isn’t won or lost. Points don’t carry weight unless you assign them meaning. Presence isn’t about the outcome. It’s about being vivid, fully inside the color of right now. Until you can do that, you’re only watching your life from a distance. Skimming the surface. Because everything that was—the people, the dinners, the late nights, the music, the ache of change. It’s all still here. It’s alive when you’re in it. When you remember it through presence, not nostalgia. Not clinging.

That video: it’s not just a recap. It’s a tribute. A pulse. Every frame set to a beat. The way it all syncs (faces, memories, movement to sound) makes it impossible to pause. It forces you to feel it all at once. A wave like a flood. A reel of living. And the end, those photos flashing past is the final roll of film before the lights go out. If there’s anything that plays in my head when I go, it won’t be words. It’ll be that. A b-roll of soul.

Maybe this sounds too sentimental, or cliche, or like something someone would say at 2am with their heart too open. But I don’t care. It’s what’s real. It’s what’s now.

And at the center of all of it are people. Some stay forever, some pass through. No one can be there for every frame. Not even family. People come in sprints. Some long, like those in childhood. Some brief but intense.

And this is what I’ve come to know: the moments won’t wait. They won’t freeze. And the person you are in them. You won’t wait either. That version of you… how you laugh, how you care, how you sit across from someone… that version will fade unless you’re in it fully.

Don’t hold back. Live vividly. Surrender to it. That’s the only way this thing works. Not by controlling it, or planning it, or even understanding it. But by giving yourself over.

When Breath Becomes Air is a meditation on purpose, identity, and the edge of life—written by a man who, faced with death, chose not to flinch. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon with a philosopher’s soul, did not merely confront terminal cancer; he made of it a mirror, and asked it the deepest questions. What does it mean to live? To matter? To remain yourself as everything—ambition, health, future—falls away?

This is not a tragedy. Though marked by grief, the story carries light. It reveals how one can live meaningfully not in spite of death, but because of it.

What makes Paul’s journey unforgettable is not just his brilliance, but his evolving sense of self. As cancer redefined his limits, he continually reasserted who he was—not by clinging to old versions of himself, but by shaping new ones. Identity, for Paul, was not fixed. It flowed: through literature, through surgery, through love. Each transformation was an act of becoming.

He was frail, but not weak. Uncertain, but not aimless. Still, but not stagnant. There is a quiet force in this book—the kind that does not shout, but stays with you.

Paul had been on a meteoric trajectory, poised to lead in one of medicine’s most elite fields. Then, in the space of a single scan, the future he had trained for disappeared. Most of us delay the existential questions. Paul had to confront them head-on: Who am I now? What does a meaningful life look like when time is short? But these questions didn’t defeat him. They revealed him.

He was a polymath who saw no contradiction in wielding both a scalpel and a pen. For Paul, surgery was just as much moral responsibility as technical excellence. He wrote that when something has weight, it has gravity—and you are drawn to it. That is what a calling feels like. You don’t choose it. It claims you.

And perhaps the most profound part of his story is his relationship with his wife, Lucy. Illness can break people apart. But Paul and Lucy chose to draw closer. Through struggle, they deepened their connection. As Confucius taught, when one relationship deepens, all others can too. Their love became a lens through which Paul felt the world more fully, and opened himself to its beauty and pain.

Book clubbing this (with Wyatt, Steven, Anya, Eddie, Ritvik) was a new experience. It reminded me that we all hunger not just for careers, but for callings. Not just for time, but for meaning. That love and purpose are not things we find only in triumph, but more often in surrender—in choosing to stay, to be present, to face the hardest things with eyes open.

When Breath Becomes Air is not a manual for dying. It’s a guide for living—bravely, honestly, and with grace. A well-lived life, it teaches, is not one free of hardship. It is one that remains committed to meaning, even in the face of deep loss.

10/10

(Thank you Aayush for your copy of the book. So glad we went to the sauna that day.)

Selections:

Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining?

—

I don't believe in the wisdom of children, nor in the wisdom of the old. There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living. We are never so wise as when we live in this moment.

—

Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.

—

“Which is worse, being born too early or waiting too long to deliver?”

“Judgement call.”

What a call to make.

—

This is how 99% of people select their jobs: pay, work environment, hours. But that’s the point. Putting lifestyle first is how you find a job—not a calling.

—

I had started in this career, in part, to pursue death: to grasp it, uncloak it, and see it eye-to-eye, unblinking.

Neurosurgery attracted me as much for its intertwining of brain and consciousness as for its intertwining of life and death. I had thought that a life spent in the space between the two would grant me not merely a stage for compassionate action but an elevation of my own being: getting as far away from petty materialism, from self-important trivia, getting right there, to the heart of the matter, to truly life-and-death decisions and strug-gles... surely a kind of transcendence would be found there?

But in residency, something else was gradually un-folding. In the midst of this endless barrage of head injuries, I began to suspect that being so close to the fiery light of such moments only blinded me to their nature, like trying to learn astronomy by staring directly at the sun. I was not yet with patients in their pivotal moments, I was merely at those pivotal moments. I observed a lot of suffering; worse, I became inured to it.

—

He'd assess the abdomen, then ask for my prognosis on a patient's cognitive function. "Well, he could still be a senator," I once replied, "but only from a small state." Jeff laughed, and from that moment on, state population became our barometer for head-injury severity.

"Is he a Wyoming or a California?" Jeff would ask, trying to determine how intensive his care plan should be.

Or I'd say, "Jeff, I know his blood pressure is labile, but I gotta get him to the OR or he's gonna go from Washington to Idaho can you get him stabilized?"

—

For amid that unique suffering invoked by severe brain damage, the suffering often felt more by families than by patients, it is not merely the physicians who do not see the full significance. The families who gather around their beloved-their beloved whose sheared heads contained battered brains do not usually recognize the full significance, either. They see the past, the accumulation of memories, the freshly felt love, all represented by the body before them. I see the possible fu-tures, the breathing machines connected through a surgical opening in the neck, the pasty liquid dripping in through a hole in the belly, the possible long, painful, and only partial recovery—or, sometimes more likely, no return at all of the person they remember. In these mo-ments, I acted not, as I most often did, as death's enemy, but as its ambassador.

—

Had I been more religious in my youth, I might have become a pastor, for it was the pastoral role I’d sought.

—

By this point, I had learned a couple of basic rules. First, detailed statistics are for research halls, not hospital rooms. The standard statistic, the Kaplan-Meier curve, measures the number of patients surviving over time. It is the metric by which we gauge progress, by which we understand the ferocity of a disease. For glioblastoma, the curve drops sharply until only about 5 percent of patients are alive at two years. Second, it is important to be accurate, but you must always leave some room for hope. Rather than say-ing, "Median survival is eleven months" or "You have a ninety-five percent chance of being dead in two years," I'd say, "Most patients live many months to a couple of years." This was, to me, a more honest description. The problem is that you can't tell an individual patient where she sits on the curve: Will she die in six months or sixty?

I came to believe that it is irresponsible to be more precise than you can be accurate. Those apocryphal doctors who gave specific numbers ("The doctor told me I had six months to live"): Who were they, I wondered, and who taught them statistics?

—

One of the early meanings of patient is “one who endures hardship without complaint.”

—

In residency, there's a saying: The days are long, but the years are short.

—

I could see that there were two strategies to cutting the time short, perhaps best exemplified by the tortoise and the hare. The hare moves as fast as possible, hands a blur, instruments clattering, falling to the floor; the skin slips open like a curtain, the skull flap is on the tray before the bone dust settles. As a result, the opening might need to be expanded a centimeter here or there because it's not optimally placed. The tortoise, on the other hand, proceeds deliberately, with no wasted movements, measuring twice, cutting once. No step of the operation needs revisiting; everything moves in a precise, orderly fashion. If the hare makes too many minor missteps and has to keep adjusting, the tortoise wins. If the tortoise spends too much time planning each step, the hare wins.

—

You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

—

My life has been building potential, potential that would now go unrealized.

—

Therein was the paradox: like a runner crossing the finish line only to collapse, without that duty to care for the ill pushing me forward, I became an invalid

—

Planning a life together, unaware, never suspecting their own fragility

—

It occurred to me that my relationship with statistics changed as soon as I became one.

—

If the weight of mortality does not grow lighter, does it at least get more familiar?

—

Once I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, I began to view the world through two perspectives; I was starting to see death as both doctor and patient. As a doctor, I knew not to declare "Cancer is a battle I'm going to win!" or ask "Why me?" (Answer: Why notme?) I knew a lot about medical care, complications, and treatment algorithms. I quickly learned from my oncologist and my own study that stage IV lung cancer today was a disease whose story might be changing, like AIDS in the late 1980s: still a rapidly fatal illness but with emerging therapies that were, for the first time, providing years of

life.

While being trained as a physician and scientist had helped me process the data and accept the limits of what that data could reveal about my prognosis, it didn't help me as a patient. It didn't tell Lucy and me whether we should go ahead and have a child, or what it meant to nurture a new life while mine faded. Nor did it tell me whether to fight for my career, to reclaim the ambitions I had single-mindedly pursued for so long, but without the surety of the time to complete them.

Like my own patients, I had to face my mortality and try to understand what made my life worth living and I needed Emma's help to do so. Torn between being a doctor and being a patient, delving into medical science and turning back to literature for answers, I struggled, while facing my own death, to rebuild my old life or perhaps find a new one.

—

Darwin and Nietzche agreed on one thing: the defining characteristic of the organism is striving.

—

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death… Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.

—

Moral duty has weight, things that have weight have gravity, and so the duty to bear mortal responsibility pulled me back into the operating room.

—

The way forward seemed obvious, if only I knew how many months of years I had left. Tell me three months, I’d spend time with family. Tell me one year, I’d write a book. Give me ten years, I’d get back to treating diseases. The truth that you lived one day at a time didn’t help: What was I suppose to do with that day?

—

The physicians duty is not to starve off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can back up and face, and make sense of. their own existence.

—

Emma hadn’t given me back my old identity. She’d protected my ability to forge a new one.

—

I was neither angry nor scared. It simply was. It was a fact about the world, like the distance from the sun to the earth.

—

WICOS: Who Is The Captain Of the Ship?

—

Time for me is now double-edged: every day brings me further from the low of my last relapse but closer to the next recurrence and, eventually, death. Perhaps later than I think, but certainly sooner than I desire.

There are, I imagine, two responses to that realization.

The most obvious might be an impulse to frantic activity: to "live life to its fullest," to travel, to dine, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions. Part of the cruelty of cancer, though, is not only that it limits your time; it also limits your energy, vastly reducing the amount you can squeeze into a day. It is a tired hare who now races. And even if I had the energy, I prefer a more tortoiselike approach. I plod, I ponder. Some days, I simply persist.

—

If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all? It must: the days have shortened considerably.

—

Medical training is relentlessly future-oriented, all about delayed gratification; you're always thinking about what you'll be doing five years down the line. But now I don't know what I'll be doing five years down the line. I may be dead. I may not be. I may be healthy. I may be writing.

I don't know. And so it's not all that useful to spend time thinking about the future-that is, beyond lunch.

—

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.

—

There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.

That message is simple:

When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man's days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.

—

We each joked to close friends that the secret to saving a relationship is for one person to become terminally ill. Conversely, we knew that one trick to managing a terminal illness is to be deeply in love to be vulnerable, kind, generous, grateful.

—

When Paul told me, immediately after his diagnosis, to remarry after he died, it exemplified the way he would, throughout his illness, work hard to secure my future.

He was fiercely committed to ensuring the best for me, in our finances, my career, what motherhood would mean. At the same time, I worked hard to secure his present, to make his remaining time the best it could be, tracking and managing every symptom and aspect of his medical care the most important doctoring role of my life while supporting his ambitions, listening to his whispered fears as we embraced in the safety of our darkened bedroom, witnessing, acknowledging, accept-ing, comforting.

—

We all inhabit different selves in space and time.

—

Frail but never weak.

—

This book offers an inside look at the events leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and how the Biden administration responded, not only to that conflict but also to the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

Some key highlights:

• Biden had to deal with tough tradeoffs under the lingering influence of Trump’s presidency, which still affected his administration

• He faced a right-wing Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu while other Middle Eastern countries urged humanitarian relief, all in the midst of a proxy conflict with Iran and the challenge of fighting a decentralized force like Hamas

• The massive scope of US intelligence is highlighted, making it crucial for the president not to make empty threats

• Balancing the war in Ukraine meant not cornering Putin so severely that he might consider using nuclear weapons

• The book underscores the risk of US isolationism by showing the conflicting sentiments within the Trump and Biden administrations

In a quiet field of the American Midwest, wandering pilot Richard Bach lands his biplane and discovers Donald Shimoda, a self-exiled messiah in the humble guise of a traveling barnstormer. Together, they journey among barns and small-town backwaters, where Shimoda’s miracles and cryptic lessons from the mystical Messiah’s Handbook challenge everything Richard believes about freedom, reality, and the deeper meaning of life.

By no means is this realistic—it’s full of absurd miracles, magic, and a self-proclaimed messiah—but it still delivers a central message: you can do what you want! It’s a short, humorous nudge that reminds us we have the agency to escape—or solve—our problems.

You can do what you want.

But that message isn’t confined to fiction. Arham and I keep repeating it the whole day last on Sunday, Feb 23.

My mentor shocked me by saying how I wasn’t working very hard (despite knowing the hours involved with these post-grad jobs). It was the loss of agency. He told me how he started his first business by scouting on the weekends and asking someone to buy their store. He figured out the financing (he was broke) and the rest along the way.

Why? Because you can do what you want.

Though not exactly my idol, Trump used to refuse to pay government fines on his property in his early days, apparently deciding they’d just keep returning otherwise.

Again, it boils down to the same principle: you can do what you want. We do have agency!

Because you can do what you want.

Selections:

• There is no problem so big that it cannot be run away from.

  • You are quoting Snoopy the Dog, I believe?” “I’ll quote the truth wherever I find it, thank you.

• Your friends will know you better in the first minute you meet than your acquaintances will know you in a thousand years.

• The best way to avoid responsibility is to say, “I’ve got responsibilities.”

• Don’t turn away from possible futures before you’re certain you don’t have anything to learn from them.

• There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts.

• I didn’t quite know why, but reading that eased my confusions. I read it over until I knew it with my eyes closed.

• The people of Troy were no more stunned by the miracle of the Travel Air’s flight than I would have been had some town bell rung at noon that hadn’t rung for sixty years… they didn’t know that it was impossible for what was happening to happen.

• It was a problem, all right, and I needed its gift, but I still didn’t know what it meant.

• And quitting, was suddenly glad, all at once happy that I was where I was and knew what I knew even though it wasn’t the answer to all existence or even a few illusions.

• I had stopped thinking about the problems of the messiah; there was no way I could figure who he was or what he meant, and so I stopped trying and I guess that’s what made me happy.

• The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.

• feeling like a prehistoric ape that cannot understand a wheel is turning before its very eyes.

• If you learn what this world is, how it works, you automatically start getting miracles, what will be called miracles. But of course nothing is miraculous. Learn what the magician knows and it’s not magic anymore.

• Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.

• You do everything for a reason, Don?” “Sometimes.

• A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed, was what the handbook had to say. It feels an impulsion… this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.

• You are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.

• It is easy to forget our times of knowing, to think they’ve been dreams or old miracles, one time. Nothing good is a miracle, nothing lovely is a dream.” “The world is a dream, you say, and it’s lovely, sometimes. Sunset. Clouds. Sky.” “No. The image is a dream. The beauty is real. Can you see the difference?

• The world is your exercise-book, the pages on which you do your sums. It is not reality, although you can express reality there if you wish. You are also free to write nonsense, or lies, or to tear the pages.

• The original sin is to limit the Is. Don’t.

• Do you think that maybe if you say impossible over and over again a thousand times that suddenly hard things will come easy for you?

• Argue for your limitations and you get to keep them

• You’re sure of that. You live in the same world, do you, as… a stockbroker, shall we say? Your life has just been all tumbled and changed, I presume, by the new SEC policy - mandatory review of portfolios with shareholder investment loss more than fifty percent? You live in the same world as a tournament chess player, do you? With the New York Open going on this week, Petrosian and Fischer and Browne in Manhattan for a halfmillion-dollar purse, what are you doing in a hayfield in Maitland, Ohio? You with your 1929 Fleet biplane landed on a farm field, with your major life priorities farmers’ permission, people who want ten-minute airplane rides, Kinner aircraft engine maintenance and mortal fear of hailstorms… how many people do you think live in your world? You say four billion people live in your world? Are you standing way down there on the ground and telling me that four billion people do not live in four billion separate worlds, are you going to put that across on me?

• If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats.

• Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully.

• Richard, in being so fierce toward my vampire, you were doing what you wanted to do, even though you thought it was going to hurt somebody else. He even told you he’d be hurt if…” “He was going to suck my blood!” “Which is what we do to anyone when we say we’ll be hurt if they don’t live our way.

• I had always believed that we are free to do as we please only if we don’t hurt another, and this didn’t fit. There was something missing. “The thing that puzzles you,” he said, “is an accepted saying that happens to be impossible. The phrase is hurt somebody else. We choose, ourselves, to be hurt or not to be hurt, no matter what. Us who decides. Nobody else. My vampire told you he’d be hurt if you didn’t let him? That’s his decision to be hurt, that’s his choice. What you do about it is your decision, your choice: give him blood; ignore him; tie him up; drive a stake of holly through his heart. If he doesn’t want the holly stake, he’s free to resist, in whatever way he wants. It goes on and on, choices, choices.” “When you look at it that way…” “Listen,” he said, “it’s important. We are all. Free. To do. Whatever. We want. To do.

• Every person, all the events oft your life are there because you have drawn them there. What you choose to do with them is up to you.

• Well, Richard, we’re magnets, aren’t we? Not magnets. We’re iron, wrapped in copper wire, and whenever we want to magnetize ourselves we can. Pour our inner voltage through the wire, we can attract whatever we want to attract. A magnet is not anxious about how it works. It is itself, and by its nature it draws some things and leaves others untouched.” I ate a potato chip and frowned at him. “You left out one thing. How do I do it?” “You don’t do anything. Cosmic law, remember? Like attracts like. Just be who you are, calm and clear and bright. Automatically, as we shine who we are, asking ourselves every minute is this what I really want to do, doing it only when we answer yes, automatically that turns away those who have nothing to learn from who we are and attracts those who do, and from whom we have to learn, as well.” “But that takes a lot of faith, and meanwhile you get pretty lonely.” He looked at me strangely over his hamburger. “Humbug on faith. Takes zero faith. What it takes is imagination.

• Just your imagination? Of course it’s your imagination! This world is your imagination, have you forgotten? Where your thinking is, there is your experience; As a man thinks, so is he; That which I feared is come upon me; Think and grow rich: Creative visualization for fun and profit; How to find friends by being who you are. Your imagining doesn’t change the Is one whit, doesn’t affect reality at all. But we are talking about Warner Brothers worlds, MGM lifetimes, and every second of those are illusions and imaginations. All dreams with the symbols we waking dreamers conjure for ourselves.

• If you dreamed about airplanes, what would that mean to you?” “Well, freedom. Airplane dreams are escape and flight and setting myself free.” “How clear do you want it? The dream awake is the same: your will to be free of all things that tie you back - routine, authority, boredom, gravity. What you haven’t realized is that you’re already free, and you always have been. If you had half the sesame seeds of this… you’re already supreme lord of your magician’s life. Only imagination! What are you saying?

• If you want to be with what you’re magnetizing, you have to put yourself in the picture, too.

• Responsible is Able to Respond, able to answer for the way we choose to live.

• Here is a test to find whether your mission on earth is finished: If you’re alive, it isn’t.

• In order to live free and happily, you must sacrifice boredom. It is not always an easy sacrifice.

• Don’t be dismayed at good-byes. A farewell is necessary before you can meet again. And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.

• The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.

• Everything in this book may be wrong.

• There was a Master come unto the earth, born in the holy land of Indiana,

“To understand today’s politics, one must always begin with yesterday’s economics.”

Our political present was forged in the shadow of post–World War II divisions, where rival superpowers shaped not just borders and economies, but the very destinies of newly independent nations. The West championed capitalism and liberal democracy; the Soviet Union advanced communism; and a third path emerged for those who sought non-alignment. Many smaller countries, like Jamaica, found themselves pulled into the orbit of one bloc or another.

Yet scale often determined the degree of autonomy. Large non-aligned nations like Brazil, India, China, and Iran were able to carve out unique paths, drawing on national identity, cultural consciousness, or the vision of transformative leaders to resist external pressure. By contrast, smaller states were frequently swept up by more powerful interests, their agency curtailed by economic dependencies and geopolitical intrigue.

Michael Manley’s Jamaica: Struggle in the Periphery shows what this dynamic looks like on a smaller stage. Jamaica’s postcolonial hurdles ran deep—a nation economically reliant on bauxite and tourism, burdened by an uneducated and impoverished majority, and plagued by crime often exacerbated by foreign meddling. Lacking the sheer mass of bigger nations, Jamaica could not avoid the gravitational pull of the superpowers. A comparison with Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, which started with similar colonial legacies yet found a path to rapid development, underscores how leadership and strategy can produce starkly divergent outcomes.

In the first half of his book, Manley details Jamaica’s colonial roots and the socioeconomic constraints that followed. In the second, he presents his vision for self-governance, critiques prevailing economic systems, and grapples with IMF negotiations and outside efforts to undermine Jamaican independence. Manley’s broader commentary on democracy, socialism, and the complexities of leadership illuminates how challenging it is for smaller nations to assert themselves—economically, culturally, and ideologically—amid the pressures of a world shaped by “yesterday’s economics.”

Although Manley’s legacy is debated, his insights capture the broader struggle of countries on the periphery to transcend the historical burdens left behind by empires and superpowers.

I’d be curious to read the recollections of today’s leaders as they navigate a world with multiple superpowers and far more multilateral institutions.

Thank you, Ritvik, for another great recommendation.

Selections & Notes:

• The liberated spirit cannot exist on a diet of freedom alone

• By the time Norman Manley came to make his speech in 1968 and talked of economic independence as a task of the generation of leadership that was to succeed him, he did so against the background of a growing recognition that political independence confers no magic of its own other than the benefits to the national psyche. He, the most rational of patriots, as far back as 1961 had come to realise that no national aspirations were likely to be realised in Jamaica or elsewhere in the Third World unless and until their economies could be modified and restructured.

• The economic lens:

  • The industrial revolution, which was financed by slave labor, eventually made the opportunity cost of slavery (food, housing, putting down rebellions) too high.

  • This is what Griffin talks about in Babel.

    • The indigenous population of Jamaica, the Arawak Indians, had been quickly wiped out.

    • The plight of the middle class (half white, half black) is a cornerstone of Babel’s plot.

• Constantly knocking at the door of social and economic acceptance, it was a class driven by the desire to get inside the citadel of privilege.

  • But they also knew and identified with the side abjected to literal or economic slavery.

• Marcus Mosiah Garvey sowed the seeds of black liberation.

  • He never experiences the changes in his lifetime.

  • He traveled to Jamaica, US, and England.

• Jamaica went from self-government as a crown colony to independence in 1962.

• The National Heroes together symbolise the critical elements of struggle in Jamaica’s history.

  • Nanny was the slave who took to arms and won freedom for the Maroons by black military prowess in the mountains of Jamaica.

  • Sam Sharpe symbolised the unquenchable thirst for freedom of slaves after more than a century in bondage.

  • Paul Bogle died for the right of the people to own land and George William Gordon joined him on the gallows symbolising the capacity of men to champion worthy causes at the behest of conscience alone.

  • Marcus Mosiah Garvey was the messenger of black equality and racial pride.

  • William Alexander Bustamante symbolised the struggle of the workers for recognition at the workplace.

  • Norman Manley was the great patriot and political thinker, the symbol of Jamaica’s nationalism, the intellectual who understood the nature of political power and who, together with his cousin, established the modern political system.

• More than any part of the Third World, the Caribbean was entirely a product of the colonial process.

• There never was any attempt to produce what was needed but only to produce what someone else needed. Trade did not involve a calculated exchange involving surpluses but the importation of virtually everything that was needed and the export of virtually everything that was produced. Finally, the surplus which a group normally uses to increase its production was largely exported in the form of profit to the centre of colonial power. Hence, at every single level of importance, the natural economic process was diverted, thwarted, frustrated and ultimately destroyed.

• The Puerto Rican Model

  • Industrialization by invitation 

• Jamaica employed the economic components of the Puerto Rican Model, and although statistical markers of development were increasing, most were still unemployed, malnourished, and uneducated.

• Where there is general hope of relief from poverty it will be endured with fortitude as people patiently await their turn for better things to come. However, if it is clear that the great majority will never have the better things that are so visibly there for the few, deep and dangerous divisions and frustrations emerge in the society.

• The model failed because they imported both the machinery and raw materials. The percentage of imports grew more than exports, which meant more dependency.

• Throughout all of this the common threads of purpose were: reducing dependence of the economy as a whole, reducing dependence on foreign ownership, reducing the degree of control of the local oligarchy, widening the degree of social control over the economy through direct state activity, and widening the participation of the people at large in beneficial economic activity.

• We were clear that we would never expropriate property, but would make acquisition in the public interest on a basis of fair compensation.

• Did not believe in a pure free enterprise model of economic development and, consequently, saw the private sector as having a particular place and filling a particular role. But we did want that place to be permanent, and the role to be dynamic. Communicating this intention was another matter. But that was the intention. In fact, we were to bend over backward time and time again to help the private sector and to reassure its members of the sincerity of our commitment to their role. However, we were to discover that a certain type of private sector man approaches society on an all-or-nothing basis. There must either be the appearance of a complete commitment to their kind of system or they become suspicious and uncooperative. The economy was to suffer considerably from the refusal of this element in the private sector to take advantage of the many incentives offered to stimulate increased production.

• In 1972, Jamaica only got wages and $25M per year for the exploitation of their bauxite/aluminum industry. A $550M US investment employed 10K people there; comparatively, sugarcane employed 60K people.

• Aluminum is a ‘soft’ product; oil is ‘hard.’

  • Outright nationalization would have been a bad tactic.

• Key objectives with aluminum:

  • (1) Tie taxation to an index that reflected inflationary factors.

  • (2) Develop local managerial and technical skills.

  • (3) Coordinate negotiation strategies by unionizing.

• At the time, most Jamaican children were literally and legally bastards.

  • Unemployment led to concubinage, and they weren’t allowed to vote because of it either.

• It is astonishing the extent to which the education systems of post-colonial societies are actually counterproductive unless radically reorganized.

• The key question: How to create a prosperous country, where the people share in the prosperity and create a genuinely independent nation?

• How to detribalize politics, where the people would be literally happy if things went badly for the country under the ‘other’ party, since that indicated victory for ‘their’ party at the next election.

• How to remove the spoils systems, where handouts would be given to the strong party supporters?

• In the end, supporters of the two parties tended to become more like members of opposing armies than citizens with different views about their country.

• The parliamentary system can be like a building without a foundation. The political parties cannot be a complete foundation because they divide the society in too many ways at too many levels.

• It is causes that justify all struggle and all real causes are difficult.

• Jamaica chose the non-aligned movement whilst making it clear they weren’t part of an anti-US campaign.

• Jamaica’s experience in colonialism was multiplied a hundred-fold throughout the developing world. As time passed, it would cost more and more to buy machinery, or tractors, or automobiles by comparison with the prices fetched for sugar, cotton, sisal, coffee, copper, and the rest. More and more production of these primary commodities would be needed to maintain the same level of imports and hence the same standard of living.

• When countries processed their own commodities (cocoa or cotton), developed countries would create high tariffs or freight rates, making the product uncompetitive.

• Proposals for change are labelled communistic. An historical coincidence between the emergence of plural democracy, the recognition of human rights, and the underlining of personal liberty, on the one hand, and the capitalist system, on the other, is emphasized. It is implied that there is a natural link between these things, and that to change any one of them is to undermine them all.

• To be part of an empire, as distinct from its centre, is to be part of the periphery. Imperialism had made us all peripheral. It may be true that before imperialism we did not amount to all that much as measured by the values that European nations proclaim. But little as we may have been, we were ourselves and certainly not peripheral to an external, foreign system. Here, of course, one does not speak of particular areas which may have been suffering from recent conquest by a neighbouring group as was often the case in Africa. Nor is there any suggestion that what we now call the Third World was the scene of some sort of idyllic, splendid, simple past, each of us in a ‘simple state of natural liberty’. Far from it. Rather, the point is that now some two-thirds of mankind have been reduced to a peripheral status in political, economic, and even social terms. It is the degree, the scale, the ruthlessness, and the completeness of the exploitation which marks this imperialism, that sets this apart.

• Three major objectives:

  • (1) Avoid East/West polarization.

  • (2) Increase attention by the Third World to questions of economic strategy and strengthen negotiation with developed countries.

  • (3) Cooperation with other Third World countries.

• “The challenge of foreign policy was to make the term ‘Third World’ the badge of a cause rather than the description of a sad condition. It represented a positive assertion of a new sense of what international relations could be about.”

• Campaign slogan: “Better Must Come.”

• The National Housing Trust (adapted from a Mexican model):

  • Workers and employers put up a compulsory 2% for a housing construction fund. When houses were built, they were distributed by drawing lots among all contributors within a certain radius.

  • Random selection ensured no political favors.

  • Putting the cash to direct housing absorbed inflationary pressures from millions of cash collected.

  • Upward mobility but little downward empathy.

• Colonial oligarchies love the colony as long as it is indisputably theirs. When there is doubt, they revert to the metropolis, as if following a prior historical attachment. Rather than stay, they migrate.

• American values came not through war, but media.

• Hollywood represented not only entertainment but propaganda — it was hard to tell where it ended or began.

• The three-piece suit worn in the tropics is a valuable support for the heavy textile industries of the developed countries, but incredibly inappropriate for the tropics. We changed the rules and made tropical dress acceptable in protocol. Whereas our predecessors in office had banned much of the protest music of the ghetto, we opened the doors and, on the contrary, worked to assist in the promotion of the cultural energy of the ghetto as expressed in reggae music. Malcolm X was forbidden reading. We opened those doors also.

• For every step taken, there was a group which claimed Communist intent.

• Touch a man’s pocketbook and you will pull the first trigger for his political acts.

• Inflation benefited the global North. Jamaica locked in prices for their raw material equivalent to the inflated final product (aluminum).

• Danger lurks everywhere for the regimes which stand firmly against imperialism, and for a different configuration of power in the world. They are threatened by internal sabotage and external pressure. They cannot count on the solidarity of some of their neighbours. The survival of each is affected by the solidarity of the group. The margins are as fine as the dangers are real. It is in this context that we must understand the survival of a progressive Angola in 1975.

• Sides had been taken. The battle lines were drawn. By now propaganda was perceived as truth and truth as propaganda, depending on who was listening.

• We were reluctant. A State of Emergency signals to the outside world that you are in crisis. It is damaging to the tourist industry and investment prospects and generally involves the tacit admission that the normal democratic process has failed. In any event, we were warned that we were in no condition to impose a State of Emergency. Although large criminal gangs were operating all over Kingston, criminal intelligence was such that a State of Emergency would scarcely have helped. When asked the question: “Do you know whom to detain and where to find them, were you to possess these powers?”, the answer of the security chiefs was an emphatic, if regretful, “no”! It was thereupon suggested that there should be a complete overhaul of our methods in the field of criminal intelligence as part of a precautionary preparation.

• Destabilisation describes a situation where some source either inside or outside a country — or perhaps two sources working in concert, one outside and one inside — set out to create a situation of instability and panic by design.

  • CIA was likely in Jamaica, not ‘crime,’ but destabilization.

• After the meeting, there had been a row between Duncan and an officer of the Reserve Battalion of the Army. The officer had struck Duncan while the latter was requesting protection for a group of PNP supporters returning from a meeting. They had to pass through a hostile group of JLP trouble-makers. Things were tense, and I was urged to come to Old Harbour before they got out of hand. I duly arrived and began questioning the officer, a captain, about the incident. Suddenly he turned his back and strutted away. In a flash, his men surrounded me. There must have been ten or twelve of them. There was the rattle of rifles readied to fire. I hesitated for a moment and then decided this was a situation which could not accommodate two bosses. I walked straight at one of the men, doubtless looking as angry as I felt. It was his turn to hesitate. The moment before he lowered his rifle and stepped aside seemed interminable. The others followed suit.

• If I could, I wanted the party to see the election result not as an occasion for either rejoicing or recrimination, but as a challenge to work and effort.

• The combination of oil prices and world inflation. Jamaica is 97% dependent on oil for energy. In addition, it is a surprisingly big user of energy per capita for a Third World country. This is so because of the substantial growth in manufacturing which had taken place during the previous thirty years. Ironically, the situation had been exacerbated by a decision of purest folly taken by the sugar industry a few years before. Most of Jamaica’s sugar factories used to burn the sugar cane waste, bagasse, to supply the energy for the sugar factories. This involved quite a labour force since the bagasse had to be stored and shovelled into furnaces. Needless to say, bagasse workers were a fractious, not to say militant group. Bagasse dust is a miserable business, particularly when facing the heat of a furnace into which it is being shovelled. Many are the days I had spent as a trade unionist arguing for respiratory masks and premium pay for these groups. In due course, the sugar manufacturers were seduced by the low price of oil and the prospect of no more bagasse workers. At a stroke, and at the cost of an investment which is best forgotten, they converted the entire industry to oil-burning furnaces. At the time, the foreign exchange needed to pay for all the new equipment was bad enough. So was the loss of more than 1,000 jobs. However, all that was to pale into insignificance beside the implications of $11.00 a barrel oil, which was soon to become $14.00, $21.00, $28.00, and now $36.00 a barrel. By such means does the Puerto Rican model flatter to deceive.

• The monetarist demand management approach of the IMF was designed by the representatives and planners of developed capitalist economies for the typical ailments of those economies. The left pointed out that there was not a single case where these prescriptions cured a Third World economy. On the contrary, there were a number of cases where economies had remained sick, but democratic government had died. To them, reliance upon an IMF programme for adjustment and recovery meant delivering Jamaica into a trap. Once in the trap, they argued, the Jamaican economy would not recover but merely stagger deeper and deeper into the very position of dependence from which we were pledged to extricate it. In the meantime, the democratic socialist process would be the most probable casualty of the exercise.

• IMF demand management is predicated on two basic factors which are supposed to provide a particular result. The two factors are devaluation, which reduces the demand for imports by making them expensive, while stimulating exports by making them comparatively competitive, and a compression of local demand by reducing government expenditure or increasing taxation, or both, so as to leave less spending money in the economy. Tight wage controls are imposed to ensure that both factors are effective. With less spending money in the economy, the producer finds he can sell less on the local market and so is driven to make up his lost markets through exports. This is the ‘stick’ of the process. The ‘carrot’ of the process is that the devaluation has made his product more competitive overseas and so helps provide the opportunity for the market which he is driven to seek. This is all well and good where you have a developed economy with substantial industrial, manufacturing, and agricultural productive capacity in place. The medicine is then applied where this productive machine is not being fully utilised because the basic economic equations have gone out of kilter. If local costs, for example, have made exports uncompetitive, the system earns less. Where there has been a lot of surplus demand in the economy bringing in imports for its satisfaction, the system spends more. There would be a cumulative effect upon the country’s reserves of foreign exchange because of increased expenditure upon imports. In due course, this would lead to a balance of payments crisis, which would then be solved by the IMF demand management prescription. For this prescription to work, two conditions should be present. Firstly, there must exist a productive capacity which can respond to the challenge and the opportunity which the medicine provides. Secondly, it is important for the society to have in place a system of social welfare which can shield the population from the worst effects of the medicine when it is first applied and before its benefits can begin to be felt. IMF medicine may produce temporary unemployment in the distributive trades that are accustomed to handling large volumes.

• Now, let us consider the situation of the average Third World country. To begin with, one can assume that this type of economy is not blessed with a sophisticated productive apparatus in manufacturing and agriculture already in place and merely awaiting the right stimuli to produce. On the contrary, it is of the very nature of the Third World condition that development is what is needed and, by the same token, what is lacking. In the absence of developed factors of production, the stimulus of IMF medicine cannot apply by definition because there is little for it to work on. In the average Third World country, the problem is not the search for markets for, say, a sophisticated wheat farmer already capable of high levels of productivity. The problem is how to get a simple peasant hillside farmer to become an efficient producer in the first place; how to find the capital with which to help him terrace his hillside; how to find the money for the extension services to ensure that he is trained in the use of fertilisers and followed up, at first, to ensure that he applies the right ones at the right times in the right amounts; how to find the capital to provide him with some modicum of the modern machinery which is a key to agricultural productivity. The problems, therefore, are structural and fundamental. The right demand climate can provide the framework within which production increases, but it cannot, as it is assumed to do in a developed country, create the increased productive capacity. The basic premise of an IMF formula, therefore, is misconceived in the Third World situation. Given the need for the development of productive capability, typical two- or three-year IMF agreements simply miss the point of the Third World dilemma. One sees, therefore, a situation in which the population is subjected to severe pressure in pursuit of benefits that are unattainable. To compound the crisis, however, this social pressure is applied in a society which probably does not have the kind of social welfare system which can protect its people from the worst initial consequences of the medicine. Therefore, people are hurt in a situation where they enjoy no safety net and for gains which cannot materialise.

• The IMF was created by the capitalist countries after World War II. It is designed to apply capitalist techniques and to serve the ends of those who created it originally. For developing economies, this kind of short-term, sharp, demand management approach is inappropriate. What is needed is that the whole analysis should begin at a different point. The fact of the foreign exchange shortage is not the correct point of departure. That is to be found much earlier in the process by an examination of the structural deficiencies of the particular economy. The approach should therefore begin with a plan for the development of the necessary productive capability. There should be no attempt to impose upon the client economy a particular type of economic model. If the country wishes to pursue a capitalist path — well and good. If they wish to pursue a socialist path — well and good. If theirs is a mixed economy option, so be it. Whichever the model, the search must be for the development of a productive capability that exploits the natural advantages of the society and aims for the most rapid development of its production for home needs and for trade. Clearly, this contemplates development planning of seven to ten years’ duration at least. The second essential involves the provision of foreign exchange on a consistent and reliable basis over the period. Particular attention must be given to the foreign exchange that is needed early, upfront: an economy cannot recover under a plan which begins to stumble and gasp for air at the very first hurdle because there is not enough oxygen for the system at the start. Thirdly, great care has to be taken with demand management itself lest the social shocks to which the population in the ailing economy is subject are greater than it can bear. In short, we need a genuine international institution, controlled internationally and flexible enough to assist different types of economies. There has been an attempt to spread a canard to the effect that Third World countries do not want to manage their economies. Excepting corrupt regimes or the governments of deranged despots, this is just stupid. We never questioned IMF insistence on strict financial controls. We tried to apply these ourselves and were glad of their assistance in devising better methods. The quarrels were about strategies, time-spans, capacity to endure, levels of shock, maintenance of foreign exchange flows, relative roles for private and public sectors.

• I certainly spent many hours at the time considering resigning either on behalf of the government or personally. In the end, I rejected both and stayed on. It may have been my biggest personal mistake. If plural democracy is to work, it must rest upon two acts of self-restraint, firstly on the part of those who hold power, and secondly on the part of those who seek it. No constitution can provide for this. Rather, it must flow from an understanding of the delicate human balances that must be preserved. Power needs to be used; but a judgment has always to be exercised concerning the limits which must be imposed upon its use. Oppositions must oppose, but must likewise exercise judgment about the degree and the manner of that opposition. The Reichstag fire was a brilliant political tactic. Granada and its revolutionary government came up for inevitable mention. I said that I thought it was a serious mistake for the US to behave with hostility to Maurice Bishop’s government, which could only drive him to react correspondingly. I reminded them that external pressure upon any revolutionary government forces the radicalization of the internal process. Surely the wiser course was to hold out the hand of friendship.

• I suggested that a friend can advise moderation with some hope of response. An enemy can demand what he likes with no hope of attention.

• I realized that we represented an enigma to many US policy-makers. The ‘hawks’ could simply dismiss us as crypto-communist surrogates of Moscow via Havana and conclude that we must be removed forthwith. To the more sophisticated exponents of US foreign policy, the ‘doves’ of the liberal establishment, it could not have been that simple. We were obviously democratic. One could pick any day at random and know that there was the fullest freedom of speech and press. Our human rights record was untarnished. We had never so much as threatened, much less expropriated, a dollar’s worth of US property, or anyone else’s for that matter. We had a vigorous opposition which had operated without let or hindrance even during the State of Emergency. From the point of view of the classic liberal, the credentials were impeccable. Yet the position was frankly anti-imperialist, aggressively non-aligned, openly trying to maintain good relations with Latin America, with Western Europe, and with Washington and Ottawa; but equally with Moscow and Havana. Now it seemed to me that only an election announced with a lead time of approximately eight months could create the conditions in which one could hope to confront the people with a choice which they might understand. Such a decision would have to include a choice between a future with the IMF and all which that implied, this being the JLP alternative; and a future without the IMF and all which that implied, the PNP alternative. Whatever the outcome, I was convinced that the whole country had to make the choice.

• The JLP obviously had big money to spend. Their advertising campaign was massive and had gone for years. They seemed to have more cars and jeeps than they knew what to do with. For months, the opposition had claimed that they were raising this money from Jamaican migrants in various parts of North America. There is no doubt that they held fund-raising meetings. There is also no doubt that they had developed very close relations with some of the most right-wing elements in the US political system. Seaga’s close relations with reactionary figures, such as Congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia, were notorious. Making every allowance for what the JLP could raise from the local oligarchy and the overseas migrant population, it is simply not on the cards that they could have raised money by ordinary means to match the level of their expenditure. They obviously had a godfather or godfathers somewhere in the international system. Two clear patterns can be distinguished. First, we have the case where domination is used to guarantee the transfer of wealth from one set of people to another. Second, the case where domination is exercised to protect national borders, to ensure the absence of hostile governments who threaten security. If the second happens without an actual process of economic exploitation, then clearly we have a distinct kind of domination. Both forms may involve political, cultural, and psychological consequences that are utterly objectionable, but I believe it dangerous to confuse them. Therefore, I prefer to use the word imperialism to describe the first form of domination and hegemony to describe the second. Imperialism thus describes a situation in which domination and exploitation are both present; hegemony, one in which domination exists for purposes other than economic exploitation

• On a general level, political awareness needs to be raised throughout society. Otherwise political movements become the mirrors of popular confusion rather than the mobilisers of change.

If ignorance is bliss, then Jamaica Kincaid’s mission is to open your eyes. Thank you, Ritvik, for this beautiful recommendation.

It was a timely read. I immersed myself in A Small Place while in Jamaica: sipping coffee at a Starbucks in Montego Bay and reclining on a beach bed on Seven Mile Beach in Negril. Perhaps if I weren’t there solely to visit Ritvik, that would be ironic. Maybe it still is.

I’ll start with style, then move on to content—there’s beauty in both.

Kincaid is a phenomenal writer. Her sentences pack a punch. For example:

The papers of the slavetrading family from Barbuda (the Codringtons), the records of their traffic in human lives, were being auctioned. The government of Antigua made a bid for them. Someone else made a larger bid. He was the foreigner. His bid was the successful bid. He then made a gift of these papers to the people of Antigua. And what does it mean, the records of one set of enemies, bought by another enemy, given to the people who have been their victims as a gift?

Kincaid could have said: “A foreigner outbid the government of Antigua for papers from a slave trading family—ironically, he then gifted them to the descendants of the enslaved.” Instead, we get a beautiful series of sentences, each layering on top of the previous one, until the final point lands with biting irony.

The beginning of the book is written in the second person (“you”):

You will be surprised, then, to see that most likely the person driving this brand-new car filled with the wrong gas lives in a house that, in comparison, is far beneath the status of the car; and if you were to ask why you would be told that the banks are encouraged by the government to make loans available for cars, but loans for houses not so easily available; and if you ask again why, you will be told that the two main car dealerships in Antigua are owned in part or outright by ministers in government.

The story walks through the assumed experience of vacationing in Antigua. With every confusing thought a tourist might brush aside, Kincaid opens Pandora’s box, unveiling the grim realities beneath the tourist trap. She doesn’t let you see only one side of the story.

After all, the darker histories complete the picture: why certain mansions exist, why the library was demolished and never restored, why expensive Japanese cars are subsidized more than housing, why those same cars sound terrible, why Antiguans aren’t allowed on their own beaches except as servants, and why a country club for white people still exists. Each of these injustices fuels Kincaid’s tragic, urgent anger.

I can easily see this adapted as a short film: The tourist moves through the island in one continuous shot, but just as they are about to move on, the director forces us to linger on each detail. The tourist notices a broken library on Main Street, and instead of passing by, the film whisks us back in time—maybe through CGI—to reveal how it was destroyed and why it was never rebuilt. Every new detail connects back to the original scene, illustrating how the neglect is woven into the island’s fabric.

A Small Place opens eyes. It reveals the deep-seated resentment and desperation of a people exploited by outsiders, by their own, and by themselves again. It does so deftly with beautiful writing. It forces perspective—even when it’s more comfortable to look away.

Selections:

• The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: A tourist is an ugly human being

• Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, it's because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were the commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this is so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of. As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any com-fort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you

• Again, Antigua is a small place, a small island. It is nine miles wide by twelve miles long. It was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493. Not too long after, it was settled by human rubbish from Europe, who used enslaved but noble and exalted human beings from Africa (all masters of every stripe are rubbish, and all slaves of every stripe are noble and exalted; there can be no question about this) to satisfy their desire for wealth and power, to feel better about their own miserable existence, so that they could be less lonely and empty—a European disease. Eventually, the masters left, in a kind of way; eventually, the slaves were freed, in a kind of way. The people in Antigua now, the people who really think of themselves as Antiguans (and the people who would immediately come to your mind when you think about what Antiguans might be like; I mean, supposing you were to think about it), are the descendants of those noble and exalted people, the slaves. Of course, the whole thing is, once you cease to be a master, once you throw off your master's yoke, you are no longer human rubbish, you are just a human being, and all the things that adds up to. So, too, with the slaves. Once they are no longer slaves, once they are free, they are no longer noble and exalted; they are just human beings.

• The library building was damaged. This was in 1974, and soon after that a sign was placed on the front of the building saying, “THIS BUILDING WAS DAMAGED IN THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1974. REPAIRS ARE PENDING.” The sign hangs there, and hangs there more than a decade later, with its unfulfilled promise of repair

  • This was a really crisp segway to describe a hospital and use that to reflect a national conscious

• You must not wonder what exactly happened to the contents of your lavatory when you flushed it

• You make a leap from being that nice blob just sitting like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it

• When the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.

• I believe they gave scholarships to one or two bright people each year so they could go overseas and study; I believe they gave money to children's charities; these things must have made them seem to themselves very big and good, but to us there they were, pigs living in that sty (the Mill Reef Club)

• And might not knowing why they are the way they are, why they do the things they do, why they live the way they live and in the place they live, why the things that happened to them happened, lead these people to a different relationship with the world, a more demanding relationship, a relationship in which they are not victims all the time of every bad idea that flits across the mind of the world? And might not knowing why they are the way they are and why they do the things they do put in their proper place everyday and event, so that exceptional amounts of energy aren't expended on the trivial, while the substantial and the important are assembled (artfully) into a picture story ("He did this and then he did that")? I look at this place (Antigua), I look at these people (Antiguans), and I cannot tell whether I was brought up by, and so come from, children, eternal innocents, or artists who have not yet found eminence in a world too stupid to understand, or lunatics who have made their own lunatic asylum, or an exquisite combination of all three.

Or do fuzzy people gravitate toward things that reflect their essence?

Autumn is the season of fuzzy people—not cold enough to be a house cat, but not warm enough to leave home without colorful socks and puffy sweaters. It’s a time for coffee shops with wood accents, warm candlelight, and hues that match the leaves.

You can spot a fuzzy person by what they wear. A black t-shirt and black Lululemon pants scream California summer—a world without seasons. That’s not New York; that’s a fly-in, fly-out type of person.

We attract homebodies in this cafe. Some wear over-ear headphones; others have wireless earbuds from the last decade. Style here is agnostic of price—you spend $6.50 on a coconut-cardamom latte or a maple-cinnamon cappuccino if you’re feeling seasonal.

A man walks by with a baby in a well-knit blue carrier under a brown overcoat. He’s a kangaroo, the baby bouncing with excitement at the fall breeze on Bedford Street—wide-eyed, pampered, and loved. The whole world is dilated. When was the last time you looked at the world with a baby’s eyes, thrilled by the vibrancy of new colors?

Sometimes I just want to feel things. The straw of my chair is crisp and coarse. The cushion is rough but plush. The marble on the table cool and soothing. I want to touch her fluffy blue sweater and feel its fuzz. I want to dip my hand in his ice water and recall my last cold plunge. I want to chew the ice and think of iron deficiency. I want my foot to ache in tall boots. I want to feel what it’s like to have smooth, shoulder-length hair.

Can a ghost who feels every person’s sensations retain any part of its original self? Can it hold dual consciousness—two independent thoughts, living in unison? Does the fuzziness of a person transfer, by mere proximity, to an unfuzzy being who feels it so deeply?

Music personified.

The book is a rare opportunity to hear Music narrate a story. He has a character in mind – his name is Frankie Presto. Music tells the story of a life, giving way to lessons about all lives. 

What I’ll remember most about this book is how it expressed ‘love’ and demonstrated living a life that’s uniquely your own.

Anya and Jun, we should have a book club session on it sometime.

I listened to this primarily on subways, uber’s, and long bike-rides away from the city in metro NYC suburbia. Unlike my normal style, I don’t have a list of long quotes that I collected. Here’s a few that I found from online to remember this book by:

• You cannot unplay your notes. Time, like music, is indelible that way.

• Truth is light. Lies are shadows. Music is both.

• At a certain point, your life is more about your legacy to your kids than anything else.

• What would you give to remember everything? I have this power. I absorb your memories; when you hear me, you relive them. A first dance. A wedding. The song that played when you got the big news. No other talent gives your

• A teacher’s shadow can hover for life.

• Man searches for courage in drink, but it is not courage that he finds, it is fear that he loses. A drunken man may step off a cliff. That does not make him brave, just forgetful.

• I have said that music allows for quick creation. But it is nothing compared with what you humans can destroy in a single conversation.

• A song inside a cage is never a song. It is a plea

• But you cannot change your past, no matter how you craft your future.

• You cannot write if you do not read,” the blind man said. “You cannot eat if you do not chew. And you cannot play if you do not”—he grabbed for the boy’s hand—“listen.”

• The greatest thing, you’ll ever learn Is just to love, and be loved in return.

• “Remember this, Francisco,” he said. “The secret is not to make your music louder, but to make the world quieter.”

• “Silence enhances music. What you do not play can sweeten what you do. But it is not the same with words. What you do not say can haunt you.”

• “You will never know all there is to know. You will learn until your final days. Then you will inspire someone else. This is what an artist does.”

• EVERYONE JOINS A BAND IN THIS LIFE. You are born into your first one. Your mother plays the lead. She shares the stage with your father and siblings. Or perhaps your father is absent, an empty stool under a spotlight. But he is still a founding member, and if he surfaces one day, you will have to make room for him. As life goes on, you will join other bands, some through friendship, some through romance, some through neighborhoods, school, an army. Maybe you will all dress the same, or laugh at your own private vocabulary. Maybe you will flop on couches backstage, or share a boardroom table, or crowd around a galley inside a ship. But in each band you join, you will play a distinct part, and it will affect you as much as you affect it. And, as is usually the fate with bands, most of them will break up—through distance, differences, divorce, or death.

• “Everyone joins a band in this life. One way or another, the band breaks up.”

• “And, as is usually the fate with bands, most of them will break up—through distance, differences, divorce, or death.”

• “Lágrima”—“Teardrop”

Thanks, Adam, for maintaining a blog with consistently great recommendations whenever your rating is above 7/10. You consistently find books that are bang for buck: dense, rooted in first principles, and filled with illustrative examples.

In Anatomy of the State Murray N. Rothbard argues that the State is inherently a coercive entity, sustaining itself through force and ideological manipulation rather than genuinely representing the will of the people. He outlines how the State preserves and expands its power at the expense of social and economic freedoms, framing itself in opposition to pure capitalism, which he sees as a social good driven by mutually beneficial exchanges. However, history shows that unchecked capitalism can be just as exploitative, as evidenced by the brutal excesses of industrialization.

Through my own research, I’ve arrived at many of the same conclusions as Rothbard, cultivating a healthy distrust of unchecked power and its ability to spiral out of control—whether in the form of a bloated state bureaucracy, the rapacious nature of unrestrained industry, or the dangers of a leftist social justice movement driven by resentment from colonialism. To prevent such extremes, there must be checks and balances between the state, private capital (markets), and individuals exercising their rights.

Visionary leaders like Lee Kuan Yew and Deng Xiaoping managed to transcend factionalism, economic self-interest, and absolute notions of freedom, using each element in the right measure to build societies that far surpassed their origins. This nuanced use of power contrasts sharply with the value capture often practiced by figures like LBJ and Robert Moses, as detailed in Robert Caro’s life work, which reveals the nature of political power in 20th-century America. In contrast, Henry Kissinger's Leadership examines leaders who adeptly harnessed state power to create real societal progress, showcasing a rare but essential alignment of governance and genuine public benefit.

Outline:

I played around with using an PDF reader LLM extension to generate 3 quotes to illustrate the main point of each chapter. I thought it did quite well:

1. Introduction

   1. Main Point: The State is often misidentified as a necessary social institution, rather than a coercive entity.

   2. "The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism."

   3. "The State cannot be perceived as a mere collective of people working toward common good."

   4. "It is crucial to define what the State is and what it is not."

2. What the State Is Not

   1. Main Point: The State is erroneously viewed as a representative of society and the public will”

   2. If 'we are the government,' then anything a government does to an individual is... 'voluntary' on the part of the individual concerned."

   3. “This ideological camouflage obscures the reality of political life."

   4. "Government actions are not collective decisions but rather coercive impositions."

3. What the State Is

   1. Main Point: The State maintains a monopoly on coercion and force within a defined territory.

   2. "The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence."

   3. "Unlike other institutions, the State obtains its revenue through coercion."

   4. "It is the only entity that uses and threatens violence to sustain itself."

4. How the State Preserves Itself

   1. Main Point: The State relies on the ideological support of its citizens to maintain control.

   2. "The chief task of the rulers is always to secure the active or resigned acceptance of the majority of the citizens."

   3. "Intellectuals play a vital role in shaping public opinion."

   4. "Ideology is a critical tool to garner support and maintain legitimacy."

5. How the State Transcends Its Limits

   1. Main Point: The State continuously extends its power despite efforts to check it.

   2. "Every single such theory has... lost its original purpose, and come to act merely as a springboard to Power."

   3. "The concept of parliamentary democracy has been transformed into a tool for greater central authority."

   4. "Many checks have been turned into legitimizing devices for State actions."

6. What the State Fears

   1. Main Point: The State fears threats to its power and existence, such as revolutions or external wars.

   2. "The death of a State can come about in two major ways: (a) through conquest by another State, or (b) through revolutionary overthrow by its own subjects."

   3. "War enhances State power under the guise of national security."

   4. "The State must rally public support to maintain its rule during crises."

7. How States Relate to One Another

   1. Main Point: States naturally compete for power and territory, leading to conflicts.

   2. "The natural tendency of a State is to expand its power through conquest."

   3. "Only one set of rulers can obtain a monopoly of coercion over any given territorial area at any one time."

   4. "Inter-State relations are marked by a constant threat of war."

8. History as a Race Between State Power and Social Power

   1. Main Point: The struggle between productive social power and predatory State power shapes human history.

   2. "The history of mankind, particularly its economic history, may be considered as a contest between... creative productivity and coercive exploitation."

   3. "Social power is man’s cooperative transformation of nature’s resources."

   4. “State power is the coercive seizure of the fruits of society for the benefit of rulers."

9. Conclusion

   1. Main Point: Historical attempts to limit State power have failed, requiring new approaches.

   2. "The problem of the State is evidently as far from solution as ever."

   3. "None of the numerous forms of government has succeeded in restraining State power.”

   4. "The creation of independent centers of intellectual inquiry must become a priority."

Thanks, Anya, for recommending this book. You’re a true stock-picker among fiction.

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi, published in 1975, unfolds a gripping narrative through an interview between a psychiatrist and Firdaus, a woman on death row in Egypt for her alleged crimes. Firdaus' actions seem to be an inevitable response to a society that offers no respect to women, reducing them to the roles of either a wife or a prostitute.

This book evokes a core theme from The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, where Teresa, trapped in a marriage with a serial cheater, endures out-of-body experiences and unsettling dreams. These dreams symbolize her existence as just another body among her husband’s desires, a mere object in a relentless line.

The writing in both novels captures an overwhelming lack of control, painting vivid pictures of being caught in the unforgiving currents of an ocean, under the constant gaze of watchful eyes. Firdaus describes her body much like Teresa does—as an object for men to possess, a commodity whose price rises throughout her life. This price is measured not just in money, but in the guise of affection and love, which Firdaus comes to see as mere disguises for lust.

In this world, men dominate, and women bend to their whims—beaten by husbands, seduced by bosses, bought for sexual gratification, and controlled by pimps or even other women who serve men. Firdaus is a body sold for “worthless straw,” while she herself never abandoned, never traded, always remained. 

Yet, Firdaus does not remain passive. Her journey is one of losing and regaining power, culminating in her decision to kill the pimp and refuse the prince's money, asserting her final act of defiance. Just as in the lament of the abandoned: “I abandoned ye not on the high seas / Yet on the dry land thou hast left me,” Firdaus confronts her betrayal and subjugation. To truly be free, she must either embrace death or the complete destruction of the oppressive society around her. Her story is one of breaking free from the chains that bind her, choosing death over a life lived in chains.

I hope for nothing I want for nothing I fear nothing I am free.

Selections:

• I abandoned ye not on the high seas / Yet on the dry land thou hast left me. / I bartered thee not for shining gold / Yet for worthless straw thou didst sell me / O my long night / O mine eyes. Oh.

• ‘Do you prefer oranges or tangerines?’

• I looked into his eyes. They clearly said, ‘You’re a poor, miserable employee, unworthy of esteem, running after a bus to catch it. I’ll take you in my car because your female body has aroused me. It is an honour for you to be desired by a respected official like myself. And who knows, maybe some day in the future, I can help you to get a rise before the others.’

• I came to realize that a female employee is more afraid of losing her job than a prostitute is of losing her life. An employee is scared of losing her job and becoming a prostitute because she does not understand that the prostitute’s life is in fact better than hers. And so she pays the price of her illusory fears with her life, her health, her body, and her mind. She pays the highest price for things of the lowest value.

• I now knew that all of us were prostitutes who sold themselves at varying prices, and that an expensive prostitute was better than a cheap one.

• When I was a prostitute I never gave anything for nothing, but always took something in return. But in love I gave my body and my soul, my mind and all the effort I could muster, freely. I never asked for anything, gave everything I had, abandoned myself totally, dropped all my weapons, lowered all my defenses, and bared my flesh.

• My virtue, like the virtue of all those who are poor, could never be considered a quality, or an asset, but rather was looked upon as a kind of stupidity, or simple-mindedness, to be despised even more than depravity or vice.

• A successful prostitute was better than a misled saint. All women are victims of deception. Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows.

• I hope for nothing I want for nothing I fear nothing I am free.

• Revolutionary men with principles were not really different from the rest. They used their cleverness to get, in return for principles, what other men buy with their money. Revolution for them is like sex for us. Something to be abused. Something to be sold.

• Men force women to sell their bodies at a price, and that the lowest paid body is that of a wife. All women are prostitutes of one kind or another. Because I was intelligent I preferred to be a free prostitute, rather than an enslaved wife. Every time I gave my body I charged the highest price.

From July 17 to July 29, I took on the life of a Buddhist monk. Many friends have asked me about this experience, but it’s difficult to convey the depth of what I went through and its impact on me in a brief phone conversation. I truly believe it was one of the best decisions I've ever made, and I’m especially grateful I could do it at 21, knowing the long-term benefits of such a practice and how rare it is to carve out 10 days (plus travel time) from life. This long-form piece is my attempt to break it all down.

The Mentality Going In

Earlier this year, I watched in awe as my roommates, who had never run more than a few miles in their lives, completed a half-marathon. The discipline and mental rigor they displayed in running 13 miles left me astonished. Having never run more than 4 miles myself, the idea of running over three times that distance seemed impossible—a clear “yeah… no” moment for me. However, as I stood at the finish line on race day, watching runner after runner cross it with smiles, greeted by friends and family, I was deeply moved. I knew then that I had to take on this challenge, regardless of the pace.

Months later, I not only completed the half-marathon but exceeded all my previous expectations. I went from being an anorexic hermit crab, afraid to grow into a new shell, to someone who believed in the power of incremental and compounding effort. The mental challenge was exhilarating, and I relished every bit of it.

One day, I went on a run with a professor of mine who held “running office hours.” My intention was to stick with him for 5 miles, but we ended up running 14 instead. He was an ex-Israeli military officer, and I was fascinated by his stories of building mental toughness and his belief that endurance is what separates the strong from the weak. Intrigued by his mindset, I asked him over lunch what he thought the mental equivalent of a marathon was. Without hesitation, he mentioned the 10-day meditation courses he had heard about, though he had never done one himself. This wasn’t my first time hearing about these courses; I knew a couple of people who had done them during breaks or gap semesters. With 3 months off during the summer before starting work, I immediately reached out and decided that this had to be my top priority.

As I reflected on these experiences, I realized they were more than just physical feats; they were part of a larger journey of confronting my fears and insecurities. For years, the feeling of failure had loomed over my consciousness. Despite convincing myself that I had always failed upwards in my startup endeavors and tennis journey, I knew this bred a deep-rooted insecurity. Although I had received a return offer at Insight, I knew in my heart that it wasn’t a mark of success but just entry-level permission to start on a path that would require far more intensity. The half-marathon and the run with my professor were steps towards proving to myself that I could push beyond my limits. Now, I’m determined to continue this journey—not just to be successful, but to become an undeniably true hard worker, improving my odds of achieving the goals I set for myself.

I once read that there are five types of hard work: Outthinking (a better strategy, a shortcut), Pure Effort (working longer, intensity), Opportunistic (positioning yourself to take advantage of change), Consistency (doing average things for longer), and Focus (saying no to distractions). Each of these requires a different type of dedication. If an experience can truly enrich you with all five of these traits, then it deserves top priority on the bucket list.

I was craving a way to prove myself to myself. The half-marathon was my first test. The meditation would be the next. I found myself yearning, not just for success, but for the transformation that comes from chasing “it”—the elusive essence of what it means to truly push beyond who I was and step into who I could become.

As the seed is, so the fruit will be. 

With every action, we water the seed of our future, yet many of us spend our lives running on a treadmill that only accelerates, until the inevitable crash leaves us shattered, counting our blessings if we manage to escape with just a few bruises.

When was the last time you paused to examine the seed you’re nurturing? Introspection is rare, and rarer still is the courage to act on those reflections.

Were you ever taught to truly see yourself, to embrace the reality of your being? Making lasting, habit-level changes is like carefully tending to a garden—it’s difficult, yet it yields the most meaningful fruits of all.

Breakdown of the technique

There are three parts to this technique, each building on the last. Shila (morality), Samadhi (concentration, the development of tranquility), and Panna (wisdom - the development of insight).

Shila

For the duration of the course, you take a vow of complete silence and adherence to 5 precepts.

1. To abstain from killing any living creature

2. To abstain from stealing

3. To abstain from sexual misconduct

4. To abstain from false speech

5. To abstain from intoxicants.

These are practical steps required to clear the mind of distractions. While they are on your mind, you cannot properly focus on developing your own concentration.

Samadhi: Day 1 and 2

The first two days are dedicated to a simple yet profound task: finding your natural breath (through the technique of ānāpāna-sati). The goal is to train the mind to focus on a single object and resist distractions—two essential qualities for developing concentration.

Natural respiration is chosen because it serves as a bridge between your conscious and unconscious mind, constantly occurring whether you’re awake or asleep. By observing it, we tune into our natural state and take the first step towards connecting with our true selves.

As a scaffold, you’re allowed to take a few intentional deep breaths at the start or when your mind begins to wander; however, there are no chants, mental images, or manifestations to artificially focus you—this is a non-sectarian practice, after all.

Gradually, the periods of forgetfulness shorten, and the periods of sustained awareness—samādhi—lengthen. Little by little, the breath changes, becoming softer, more regular, light, and shallow instead of hard and deep. At times, it may seem as though breathing has stopped altogether. In reality, as the mind calms, the body follows suit, slowing down metabolism so that less oxygen is required.

These are two incredibly frustrating days. I sat on a mat in a position that, after 10 minutes, felt more painful than any plank. My only task was to breathe and battle the relentless distractions that flooded my mind.

I discovered that if I classified my thoughts the moment I became aware of them, I could more easily come to peace with them and return to my breath. I labeled each thought on a 2x2 matrix: based in the past or future, pleasant or unpleasant.

“Ah, this mind just had a pleasant memory from the past. Now let it return to its task.”

“Ah, this mind just had a pleasant thought about something that could be in the future. Now let it return to its task.”

And so, over dozens of hours, I learned a few vital lessons:

• How to concentrate without relying on crutches that could be harmful in the long run.

• How to mechanically bring myself back from inevitable distractions.

• How to accept my wandering mind and move on quickly, forgiving myself and returning with calmness.

A habit of a lifetime is not changed in just a few hours. There is much monotonous work to be done in the first few days to ensure real progress later on. The effort was enough to make the following days fruitful, allowing me to scaffold up to the other advanced parts of the technique. Yet, I knew I had only just begun to scratch the surface of Samadhi, like a child who has just learned the basic rules and form of a sport—grasping the fundamentals but still far from mastering the art.

Samadhi: Day 3

On the third day, the focus shifts to developing physical awareness, achieved through the process of making smaller and smaller circles of attention.

You begin by observing the sensations in the small area beneath your nose and above your upper lip. Whether it’s heat, cold, or a subtle vibration—sensation is sensation. This area is specifically chosen because, having attuned yourself to your natural breath, you can now sense the cool air as you inhale and the warmth as you exhale. The exhalation creates a natural, automatic sensation, providing a scaffold for deepening your awareness.

I found myself able to observe how frustration would stir within me—manifesting as small sensations of sweat or subtle trembling. Before these feelings could escalate into actions like leaving the meditation hall for a ‘break’ or clenching my fists in anger, I was able to recognize the mental disturbance and gently return to a faint sense of calm.

Panna: Day 4

After spending dozens of hours observing the sensations within the nose and the small triangular area beneath it, your mind has likely developed a basic awareness of sensation. On the fourth day, this awareness begins to expand. You start to explore various parts of your body, from the scalp to the toes, feeling each and every sensation that arises. You may also notice areas that remain blind to your awareness.

At this stage, you’re reminded that what truly matters is not the depth of your awareness, but the equanimity of your mind. Awareness will grow with time and effort, but your first task is to cultivate equanimity when the inevitable frustrations arise—such as encountering a blind spot with no sensations. The practice is not about perfection, but about maintaining a steady mind in the face of challenge.

Panna: Days 5-9

As the journey continues, you refine the practice of feeling sensations without reacting to them.

Sensations come in all forms—pleasant and unpleasant. They might manifest as intense vibrations, tingles, or even the eerie sensation of insects crawling across your skin. But your task is clear: you must not react. You must remember “anitya,” the understanding that this too shall pass, and that all sensations are impermanent.

It is during these days that you begin to gain an experiential understanding of equanimity. Each sensation arises and fades with varying lengths and intensities, but your role is to observe them with objective awareness, resisting the urge to create craving or aversion. This is the essence of the practice—to witness without attachment, to experience without reaction, and to find stillness in the midst of constant change.

Daily schedule

As you can see, lots of meditating. I’ll be honest, the “meditate in your room” often turned into an extended nap. Hopefully that won’t happen the second time around.

Reflections: A Few Weeks After

My meditation practice has continued sporadically, perhaps four or five times a week. While it’s recommended to meditate for an hour every morning and evening, I find myself realistically doing 30 minutes most days. At one point, I temporarily lost the ability to sense subtle sensations and had to restart the entire process. Ten days of intense practice can establish a benchmark for what ‘excellence’ feels like, but it is far from enough to imbue that quality deep within. Only consistency can do that.

In the weeks following the meditation, I found it difficult to maintain equanimity. Traveling with family proved to be a significant mental challenge—I love them dearly, but they are the ones who test my calm the most. On top of that, I often felt anxious about falling behind in preparing for my upcoming job—there was so much finance and engineering knowledge I could have gained, but I chose to pursue other side quests instead. While I don’t regret those choices, the rush of everyday concerns made it increasingly difficult to hold onto the compassion and equanimity I had begun to develop.

Yet, I’m glad I took the first step. If I can commit to meditating an hour each day in New York City, I would be incredibly satisfied. The stress of professional life will be greater than ever before, and I hope to let the compounding effects of mental fortitude begin on Day 1. I believe in the outcome of this practice, but before I return for another 10-day session, I must cultivate my own samadhi, because that is something no one else can teach me.

This experience has given me the gift of solitude and focus. It’s not perfect—loneliness and restlessness creep in when it stretches beyond a few days—but I see a clear trend in how I treat my time, my resistance to trivial chatter, and my need to fix things around me. 

In my interactions with others, I find I have less to say. I’d like to believe that my natural curiosity hasn’t waned, but rather that my capacity for indulging in non-fruitful moments has significantly diminished. I notice that it’s harder for me to engage in conversations centered around trivial matters. Initially, this worried me, and I tried to fill the silence with empty chatter to cope. But I could feel my mind and body resisting it.

For better or worse, the urge to fix the world around me has diminished. Each person finds their own path to understanding spirituality and the roots of their joy and suffering. Some, it seems, are content to skim the surface and don’t feel a true calling to get to the bottom of their self. A friend once told me a story about his mother, who converted to Catholicism simply because she liked the aesthetics of the cross and enjoyed the social gatherings on Sundays. He also said she knew little about Jesus or the Bible, which was not very surprising. Many are content with adhering to traditions, rites, and rituals without delving into the deeper ‘why’ behind them.

When I saw these traits in my own extended family when I went to India, it initially vexed me. In fact, despite all my meditation training, I allowed myself to react to it. I needed some time away to rediscover my sense of compassion and come back to it with less of a reaction. When I encounter people who seem uninterested in exploring their own physical and emotional awareness (again, this is not meant to be mixed up with spirituality or religion, though there is certainly overlap) I can’t help but feel a sense of indifference. A better, wiser version of myself will no doubt be more sympathetic, understanding that it’s simply not in everyone’s nature to seek self-knowledge.

Some other takeaways:

• Recognize trivial quarrels and don’t react. Stay still, breathe through them, let them dissipate.

• All virtuous people display certain traits. Admire those traits, not the rites and rituals. You don’t need to be Christian/Muslim to admire Jesus/Mohammed.

• Do not react. Equanimity is the measure; awareness comes with effort and time, as well as with better morality and better concentration

• Make choices with compassion in mind. Hard choices (big stick) only after analyzing your reaction. Speak softly and carry a big stick, with compassion.

  • Hard choices are like a parent using force to hold their child back from a snake they want to play with. 

• Stop giving food for your reactions and they will naturally die.

• Nobody can fault someone who preaches only what he practices. Similarly, do not speak about what other people should do before leading the way yourself.

• When filled with compassion, you are naturally happy. You make choices for the good of others. No malice.

• All love is self-centered unless it is a truly one-way street. It’s hard because being entirely ‘egoless’ seems down-right impossible for 99% of us that haven’t committed to becoming monks. True love is egoless. I’m not sure most of us may ever experience that, despite experiencing the different flavor of love that we may talk about in regards to our significant other, children, parents/siblings, and friends. 

• 100% of my happiness is my own choice

• Four types of individuals: those who move from darkness to darkness (living in misery, blaming others, and perpetuating negativity), from brightness to darkness (enjoying current success but becoming arrogant and planting seeds of future suffering), from darkness to brightness (enduring hardship with wisdom, responding with love and compassion, and thus creating a brighter future), and from brightness to brightness (Once beyond the ego, one is driven fully by compassion and serves society).

Memories

Popcorn. “1 fruit each.” Tanginess: orange. Saltiness: soup & seaweed. PB&J. Dates. Kimchi. 15-minute bell. Damma hall. ~100 second walk. Meditation mat. Small cushion. Wooden floor chair. Back support. Plush big cushion. Thin big cushion. Meditation cells. Face damma hall. 1 male master. 1 assistant-male teacher. 2 female masters. 

Umbrella holders. Yellow umbrellas. Fake wood floors over concrete. 

Cicadas. Oasis. Chirping birds. Sound of silence. Sound of nature. “Lee” tree leaves. Sunshower. Morning fog. Violet flowers. Bees. Ants. Worms. Millipedes. Frogs.“Garden of Jinan” – like Eden. 9-10-11 “Peaks of Jinan” Valley. Hand wash clothes. Air dry. Laundry to pass time. Bidet. Broken fan. Open window. Joe’s gait. Attachable sunglass lenses. Self-conscious of my rustling. Self-conscious of my speed of eating. Beard. Boredom. Humidity. 5-minute planks.

Babel was a fun read which made me reflect on the complexities of power, justice, and the ethical dilemmas tied to colonialism and economic development. I found myself questioning how violence and exploitation have shaped society and how they continue to do so today. Further introspection probably requires reading into the approaches and emotional identities tied to the revolutions led by Malcom X and MLK/Gandhi. 

Thanks to Wyatt for reading and discussing this with me. Mayhaps we will find an adamic language and that we may soon be past the inhumanities of unfree “free markets.” 

Some brief reflections:

• The novel presented an ideological struggle, challenging my logical side by revealing the brutal colonial history and the necessity for violent upheaval to disrupt the system. Colonialists only react when their profits are threatened.

• Silver is the essential resource enabling Western society to function. If you replaced “silver” with any other critical resource, history might reflect a similar story as portrayed in Babel. Considering the harsh conditions of silver workers, coal might have had a comparable impact.

• After reading The Prize by Daniel Yergin, I’ve come to see that empires are intrinsically tied to industry. Free markets aren’t genuinely free when people are trapped in inhumane conditions without alternative opportunities.

• But is an empire inherently bad? Economics isn’t wrong, but it’s often too theoretical to address immediate human suffering. In the short term, colonialism and economic feudalism (as described in Confessions of an Economic Hitman) cause immense harm and widen disparities. Yet, history shows that, over time, the standard of living can rise, allowing the impoverished to gain wealth and influence rapidly.

• This is relevant to what’s happening in Africa, South America, and other regions where corporations exploit resources under private military protection, destroying cultures and labeling resistance as terrorism. It’s understandable that these nations feel enraged.

• Unlike Ramy, Robin, and Victoire, I wasn’t forced to serve an empire. My family chose to come to America, seeking a better life as part of a brain drain by the U.S. I was born an American, a unique identity compared to the characters.

• However, America has many flaws it doesn’t readily acknowledge. It’s held back by its past, unable to move on due to its grieving population, yet it rushes through issues needing more than just words to resolve.

• I believe violent revolution is only justified in the context of non-violent resistance as advocated by Gandhi, MLK, and Buddha. Would I have left with Chakravarty, or chosen not to sacrifice myself and instead leave like Victoire?

• I wish Robin had channeled his vengeance and anger more constructively. Victoire was admirable for her empathy, while Robin, though daring, was weak and remorseful at the first sign of suffering. Despite the hardships of Babel, couldn’t he have grasped basic economics? Lovell’s arguments weren’t that hard to contest or debate.

• Is violence an inherent part of human nature, necessary to advance our interests against unsatisfactory opponents at a national level? This is what America and Russia essentially did to maintain their views of efficiency and righteousness.

• Judging America is difficult because its key decisions often intersected morality and the necessity to remain dominant, leading in different directions. Those in power exhibited both ruthless behavior (like selling drugs to fund wars) and true moral integrity (like Carter).

• On writing style: The narrative was easy to follow, and I could pick up where I left off. The book was highly listenable via Audible, with well-timed quotes from both ancient and modern classics. The research into various languages was impressively thorough.

• As Jun mentioned: Knowing what I know now and feeling the same way, what would I have done if I had been part of coal industrialization?

Selections:

‘If you can see?’ The woman raised her voice and overenunciated herevery syllable, as if Robin had difficulty hearing. (This had happened often to Robin on the Countess of Harcourt; he could never understand why people treated those who couldn’t understand English as if they were deaf.)

Whenever the English see me, they try to determine what kind of story they know me from,’ Ramy said. ‘Either I’m a dirty thieving lascar, or I’m a servant in some nabob’s house. And I realized in Yorkshire that it’s easier if they think I’m a Mughal prince.’ ‘I’ve always just tried to blend in,’ said Robin.‘But that’s impossible for me,’ said Ramy. ‘I have to play a part. Back inCalcutta, we all tell the story of Sake Dean Mahomed, the first Muslim fromBengal to become a rich man in England. He has a white Irish wife. He ownsproperty in London. And you know how he did it? He opened a restaurant,which failed; and then he tried to be hired as a butler or valet, which alsofailed. And then he had the brilliant idea of opening a shampoo house in Brighton.’ Ramy chuckled. ‘Come and get your healing vapours! Bemassaged with Indian oils! It cures asthma and rheumatism; it heals paralysis. Of course, we don’t believe that at home. But all Dean Mahomed had to do was give himself some medical credentials, convince the world of thismagical Oriental cure, and then he had them eating out of the palm of his hand. So what does that tell you, Birdie? If they’re going to tell stories aboutyou, use it to your advantage. The English are never going to think I’m posh,but if I fit into their fantasy, then they’ll at least think I’m royalty.’That marked the difference between them. Ever since his arrival in London, Robin had tried to keep his head down and assimilate, to play down his otherness. He thought the more unremarkable he seemed, the less attentionhe would draw. But Ramy, who had no choice but to stand out, had decidedhe might as well dazzle. He was bold to the extreme

‘Colin’s very concerned with status.’

He didn’t question thislogic, he simply acted. It felt like falling into a dream, like stepping into aplay where he already knew his lines, though everything else was a mystery.This was an illusion with its own internal logic, and for some reason hecouldn’t quite name, he didn’t want to break it.

They were men atOxford; they were not Oxford men

‘But Britain is the only place where I’ve ever seen silver bars in wideuse,’ said Robin. ‘They’re not nearly so popular in Canton, or, I’ve heard, inCalcutta. And it strikes me – I don’t know, it seems a bit strange that the

British are the only ones who get to use them when the Chinese and Indiansare contributing the crucial components of their functioning.’‘But that’s simple economics,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘It takes a greatdeal of cash to purchase what we create. The British happen to be able to afford it. We have deals with Chinese and Indian merchants too, but they’reoften less able to pay the export fees.’‘But we have silver bars in charities and hospitals and orphanages here,’said Robin. ‘We have bars that can help people who need them most. None of that exists anywhere else in the world.’

It’s just that – well, it onlyseems fair there ought to be some kind of exchange.’ He was regretting now that he’d drunk so much. He felt loose, vulnerable. Too passionate for what should have been an intellectual discussion. ‘We take their languages, their ways of seeing and describing the world. We ought to give them something inreturn.’‘But language,’ said Professor Lovell, ‘is not like a commercial good,like tea or silks, to be bought and paid for. Language is an infinite resource.And if we learn it, if we use it – who are we stealing from?’ There was some logic in this, but the conclusion still made Robin uncomfortable. Surely things were not so simple; surely this still maskedsome unfair coercion or exploitation. But he could not formulate an objection, could not figure out where the fault in the argument lay.‘The Qing Emperor has one of the largest silver reserves in the world,’said Professor Lovell. ‘He has plenty of scholars. He even has linguists who understand English. So why doesn’t he fill his court with silver bars? Why isit that the Chinese, rich as their language is, have no grammars of their own?’‘It could be they don’t have the resources to get started,’ said Robin.‘Then why should we just hand them to them?’ ‘But that’s not the point – the point is that they need it, so why doesn’tBabel send scholars abroad on exchange programmes? Why don’t we teach

them how it’s done?’‘Could be that all nations hoard their most precious resources.’ ‘Or that you’re hoarding knowledge that should be freely shared,’ saidRobin. ‘Because if language is free, if knowledge is free, then why are all theGrammaticas under lock and key in the tower? Why don’t we ever host foreign scholars, or send scholars to help open translation centres elsewhere in the world?’‘Because as the Royal Institute of Translation, we serve the interests ofthe Crown.’‘That seems fundamentally unjust.’‘Is that what you believe?’ A cold edge crept into Professor Lovell’svoice. ‘Robin Swift, do you think what we do here is fundamentally unjust?’ ‘I only want to know,’ said Robin, ‘why silver could not save mymother.’There was a brief silence.‘Well, I’m sorry about your mother.’ Professor Lovell picked up his knifeand began cutting into his steak. He seemed flustered, discomfited. ‘But theAsiatic Cholera was a product of Canton’s poor public hygiene, not the unequal distribution of bars. And anyhow, there’s no silver match-pair thatcan bring back the dead—’ ‘What excuse is that?’ Robin set down his glass. He was properly drunknow, and that made him combative. ‘You had the bars – they’re easy to make,you told me so yourself – so why—’‘For God’s sake,’ snapped Professor Lovell. ‘She was only just awoman.’

But what he felt was not as simple as revolutionary flame. What he felt in hisheart was not conviction so much as doubt, resentment, and a deep confusion.He hated this place. He loved it. He resented how it treated him. He still wanted to be a part of it – because it felt so good to be a part of it, to speakto its professors as an intellectual equal, to be in on the great game.

Quot linguas quis callet, tot homines valet. The more languages you speak, the more men you are worth.

Philip Wright, told Robin at a faculty dinnerthat the first-year cohort was largely international only because of departmental politics. ‘The board of undergraduate studies is always fighting over whether to prioritize European languages, or other . . . more exoticlanguages. Chakravarti and Lovell have been making a stink aboutdiversifying the student body for years. They didn’t like that my cohort are all Classicists. I assume they were overcorrecting with you.’Robin tried to be polite. ‘I’m not sure why that’s such a bad thing.’‘Well, it’s not a bad thing per se, but it does mean spots taken away fromequally qualified candidates who passed the entrance exams.’ ‘I didn’t take any entrance exams,’ said Robin.‘Precisely.’ Philip sniffed, and did not say another word to Robin for the entire evening.

departmental

Your tutors had you read Varro, didn’t they? He describes a glirarium in the Res Rustica.† It’s quite an elegant contraption. You make a jar, only it’sperforated with holes so the dormice can breathe, and the surfaces arepolished so smooth that escape is impossible. You put food in the hollows,and you make sure there are some ledges and walkways so the dormice don’tget too bored. Most importantly, you keep it dark, so the dormice alwaysthink it’s time to hibernate. All they do is sleep and fatten themselves up.’

We’re trapped in asymbiotic relationship with the levers of power. We need their silver. We need their tools. And, loath as we are to admit it, we benefit from theirresearch.’

‘Translating poetry is forthose who haven’t the creative fire themselves. They can only seek residual fame cribbing off the work of others.’ Robin scoffed. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’‘You wouldn’t know,’ said Pendennis. ‘You’re not a poet.’ ‘Actually—’ Robin fidgeted with the stem of his glass for a moment, thendecided to keep talking. ‘I think translation can be much harder than original composition in many ways. The poet is free to say whatever he likes, you see – he can choose from any number of linguistic tricks in the language he’scomposing in. Word choice, word order, sound – they all matter, and withoutany one of them the whole thing falls apart. That’s why Shelley writes thattranslating poetry is about as wise as casting a violet into a crucible. † So thetranslator needs to be translator, literary critic, and poet all at once – he must read the original well enough to understand all the machinery at play, toconvey its meaning with as much accuracy as possible, then rearrange thetranslated meaning into an aesthetically pleasing structure in the target language that, by his judgment, matches the original. The poet runsuntrammelled across the meadow. The translator dances in shackles.’ By the end of this spiel Pendennis and his friends were staring at him, slack-jawed and bemused, as if they weren’t sure what to make of him. ‘Dancing in shackles,’ Woolcombe said after a pause. ‘That’s lovely.’ ‘But I’m not a poet,’ Robin said, a bit more viciously than he’d intended.‘So really what do I know?’

The truth of this encounter hit him with such clarity that he nearly laughed out loud. They were not appraising him for membership. They were trying toimpress him – and by impressing him, to display their own superiority, toprove that to be a Babbler was not as good as being one of Elton Pendennis’sfriends.But Robin was not impressed. Was this the pinnacle of Oxford society? This? He felt a profuse pity for them – these boys who considered themselves aesthetes, who thought their lives were as rarefied as the examined life could be

This still seems to be an insecure conclusion of the problem. Not an acceptance, but him possessing his own hurtful superiority complex on them

‘You say it like it’s a resource,’ said Ramy.‘Well, certainly. Language is a resource just like gold and silver. Peoplehave fought and died over those Grammaticas.’‘But that’s absurd,’ said Letty. ‘Language is just words, just thoughts –you can’t constrain the use of a language.’‘Can’t you?’ asked Anthony. ‘Do you know the official punishment inChina for teaching Mandarin to a foreigner is death?’Letty turned to Robin. ‘Is that true?’ ‘I think it is,’ said Robin. ‘Professor Chakravarti told me the same thing.The Qing government are – they’re scared. They’re scared of the outside.’‘You see?’ asked Anthony. ‘Languages aren’t just made of words.They’re modes of looking at the world. They’re the keys to civilization. Andthat’s knowledge worth killing for.’

Robin took Sanskrit with Professor Chakravarti, who began their first lesson by scolding Robin for having no knowledge of the language to begin with. ‘They should teach Sanskrit to China scholars from the beginning. Sanskrit came to China by way of Buddhist texts, and this caused a veritable explosion of linguistic innovation, as Buddhism introduced dozens of concepts that Chinese had no easy word for. Nun, or bhiksunī in Sanskrit, became ni.* Nirvana became nièpán. † Core Chinese concepts like hell, consciousness, and calamity come from Sanskrit. You can’t begin to understand Chinese today without also understanding Buddhism, which means understanding Sanskrit. It’s like trying to understand multiplication before you know how to draw numbers.’

Latin, translation theory, etymology, focus languages, and a new research language – it was an absurdly heavy class load, especially when each professor assigned coursework as if none of the other courses existed. The faculty was utterly unsympathetic. ‘The Germans have this lovely word, Sitzfleisch,’ Professor Playfair said pleasantly when Ramy protested that they had over forty hours of reading a week. ‘Translated literally, it means “sitting meat”. Which all goes to say, sometimes you need simply to sit on your bottom and get things done.’

Sitzfleisch

Sitzfleisch,’

When the new cohort – no girls, and four baby-faced boys – had appeared at Babel that fall, they’d given them scarcely any attention. They had, without consciously intending to, become just like the upperclassmen they had so envied during their first term. What they’d perceived as snobbery and haughtiness, it turned out, was only exhaustion. Older students had no intention of bullying newer ones. They simply didn’t have the time. They became what they’d aspired to be since their first year – aloof, brilliant, and fatigued to the bone. They were miserable. They slept and ate too little, read too much, and fell completely out of touch with matters outside Oxford or Babel. They ignored the life of the world; they lived only the life of the mind. They adored it.

She seemed bewitched as she observed the print, as if she’d seen actual magic. ‘It’s us. Frozen in time, captured in a moment we’ll never get back as long as we live. It’s wonderful.’ Robin, too, thought the photograph looked strange, though he did not say so aloud. All of their expressions were artificial, masks of faint discomfort. The camera had distorted and flattened the spirit that bound them, and the invisible warmth and camaraderie between them appeared now like a stilted, forced closeness. Photography, he thought, was also a kind of translation, and they had all come out the poorer for it.

‘I can’t predict how every encounter will shake out,’ Griffin clarified. ‘But I do know this. The wealth of Britain depends on coercive extraction. And as Britain grows, only two options remain: either her mechanisms of coercion become vastly more brutal, or she collapses. The former’s more likely. But it might bring about the latter.’ ‘It’s such an uneven fight, though,’ Robin said helplessly. ‘You on one side, the whole of the Empire on the other.’ ‘Only if you think the Empire is inevitable,’ said Griffin. ‘But it’s not. Take this current moment. We are just at the tail end of a great crisis in the Atlantic, after the monarchic empires have fallen one after the other. Britain and France lost in America, and then they went to war against each other to nobody’s benefit. Now we’re watching a new consolidation of power, that’s true – Britain got Bengal, it got Dutch Java and the Cape Colony – and if it gets what it wants in China, if it can reverse this trade imbalance, it’s going to be unstoppable. ‘But nothing’s written in stone – or even silver, as it were. So much rests on these contingencies, and it’s at these tipping points where we can push and pull. Where individual choices, where even the smallest of resistance armies make a difference. Take Barbados, for example. Take Jamaica. We sent bars there to the revolts—’ ‘Those slave revolts were crushed,’ said Robin. ‘But slavery’s been abolished, hasn’t it?’ said Griffin. ‘At least in British territories. No – I’m not saying everything’s good and fixed, and I’m not saying we can fully take the credit for British legislation; I’m sure the abolitionists would take umbrage at that. But I am saying that if you think the 1833 Act passed because of the moral sensibilities of the British, you’re wrong. They passed that bill because they couldn’t keep absorbing the losses.’ He waved a hand, gesturing at an invisible map. ‘It’s junctures like that where we have control. If we push in the right spots – if we create losses where the Empire can’t stand to suffer them – then we’ve moved things to the breaking point. Then the future becomes fluid, and change is possible. History isn’t a premade tapestry that we’ve got to suffer, a closed world with no exit. We can form it. Make it. We just have to choose to make it.’ ‘You really believe that,’ said Robin, amazed. Griffin’s faith astounded him. For Robin, such abstract reasoning was a reason to divest from the world, to retreat into the safety of dead languages and books. For Griffin, it was a rallying call. ‘I have to,’ said Griffin. ‘Otherwise, you’re right. Otherwise we’ve got nothing.’

Something had seemed to break between them all – no, break was perhaps too strong a word, for they still clung to each other with the force of people who had no one else. But their bond had twisted in a decidedly hurtful direction. They still spent nearly all their waking moments together, but they dreaded each other’s company. Everything was an unintended slight or deliberate offence – if Robin complained about Sanskrit, it was insensitive to the fact that Professor Harding kept insisting Sanskrit was one of Ramy’s languages when it wasn’t; if Ramy was pleased he and Professor Harding had finally agreed on a research direction, it was a callous remark to Victoire, who had got nowhere with Professor Leblanc. They used to find solace in their solidarity, but now they saw each other only as reminders of their own misery.

In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly toavoid doing what I knew to be wrong.’CHARLES DICKENS

Soinstead of using their wits to learn a skill that might actually be useful,they’ve decided to whine about it on our front steps. Those protests outside aren’t anything new, you know. There’s a sickness in this country.’ ProfessorLovell spoke now with a sudden, nasty vehemence. ‘It started with the Luddites – some idiot workers in Nottingham who thought they’d rather smash machinery than adapt to progress – and it’s spread across England since. There are people all over the country who’d rather see us dead. It’s not just Babel that gets attacked like this; no, we don’t even see the worst ofit, since our security’s better than most. Up north, those men are pulling offarson, they’re stoning building owners, they’re throwing acid on factorymanagers. They can’t seem to stop smashing looms in Lancashire. No, this isn’t the first time our faculty have received death threats, it’s only the firsttime they’ve dared to come as far south as Oxford.’

Professor Lovell scoffed. ‘Never. I look at those men, and I think of the vast differences between us. I am where I am because I believe in knowledge and scientific progress, and I have used them to my advantage. They arewhere they are because they have stubbornly refused to move forward withthe future. Men like that don’t scare me. Men like that make me laugh.’

He didn’twant to dwell on all the things they represented – the fact that for all of hisprofessed allegiance to revolution, for his commitment to equality and tohelping those who were without, he had no experience of true poverty at all.He’d seen hard times in Canton, but he had never not known where his nextmeal might come from or where he would sleep at night. He had never looked at his family and wondered what it might take to keep them alive. Forall his identification with the poor orphan Oliver Twist, for all his bitter self-pity, the fact remained that since the day he had set foot in England, he hadnot once gone to sleep hungry.

At last, Griffin shook his head and said, ‘You’re lost, brother. You’re aship adrift, searching for familiar shores. I understand what it is you want. I sought it too. But there is no homeland. It’s gone.’ He paused beside Robin on his way to the door. His fingers landed on Robin’s shoulder, squeezed sohard they hurt. ‘But realize this, brother. You fly no one’s flag. You’re free toseek your own harbour. And you can do so much more than tread water.

Mountains will be in labour, the birth will be a single laughable little mouse.HORACE, Ars Poetica, trans. E.C. Wickham

Balderdash’, he would drawl slowly, ‘is a word which used to refer to the cursed concoction created by barkeeps when they’d nearly run out of everydrink at the end of the night. Ale, wine, cider, milk – they’d dump it all in and hope their patrons wouldn’t mind, since after all the goal was simply to getdrunk. But this is Oxford University, not the Turf Tavern after midnight, and we are in need of something slightly more illuminating than getting sloshed.Would you like to try again?’

the Babel faculty madeavailable a set of silver bars for examinees to use as study aids. These barswere engraved with a match-pair using the English word meticulous and itsLatin forerunner metus, meaning ‘fear, dread’. The modern usage of meticulous had arisen just a few decades before in France, with theconnotation of being fearful of making a mistake. The effect of the bars wasto induce a chilling anxiety whenever the user erred in their work.

Stress had the unique ability to wipe students’ minds clear of things they had been studying for years. During the fourth-year exams last year, one examinee was rumoured to have become so paranoid that he declared not only that he could not finish the exam but that he was lying about being fluent in French at all. (He was in fact a native speaker.)They all thought they were immune to this particular folly until one day, aweek before exams, Letty suddenly broke down crying and declared sheknew not a word of German, not a single word, that she was a fraud and her entire career at Babel had been based on pretence. None of them understood this rant until much later, for she had indeed delivered it in German.

In fact, all the strange, ill-defined awfulness oftheir third year had evaporated with the news that they’d passed their exams. Letty no longer grated on Robin’s nerves, and Ramy no longer made Letty scowl every time he opened his mouth.To be fair, their fights were tabled rather than resolved. They had not really confronted the reasons why they’d fallen out, but they were all willingto blame it on stress. There would be a time when they had to face up their very real differences, when they would hash things out instead of always changing the subject, but for now they were content to enjoy the summer andto remember again what it was like to love one another. For these, truly, were the last of the golden days. That summer felt all themore precious because they all knew it couldn’t last, that such delights were only so because of the endless, exhausting nights that had earned them. Soonyear four would start, then graduating exams, and then work. None of themknew what life might look like after that, but surely they could not remain a cohort forever. Surely, eventually, they had to leave the city of dreamingspires; had to take up their respective posts and repay all that Babel had given them. But the future, vague as it was frightening, was easily ignored fornow; it paled so against the brilliance of the present.

Robin had always beenwilling, in theory, to give only some things up for a revolution he halfwaybelieved in. He was fine with resistance as long as it didn’t hurt him. And the contradiction was fine, as long as he didn’t think too hard about it, or looktoo closely. But spelled out like this, in such bleak terms, it seemed inarguable that far from being a revolutionary, Robin, in fact, had noconvictions whatsoever.

He did notknow that impressing a white man could be as dangerous as provoking one.

Over the middle of the table was suspended an immense fan made of a cloth sail stretched over a wooden frame, which was kept in constant motionby a coolie servant who pulled and slackened it without pause throughout the dinner service. Robin found it quite distracting – he felt an odd pang of guilt every time he met the servant’s eyes – but the other residents of the factory seemed to find the coolie invisible.

‘There are no other exports,’ said Mr Baylis. ‘None that matter.’ ‘It just seems that the Chinese have a rather good point,’ Robin saidhelplessly. ‘Given it’s such a harmful drug.’‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Mr Baylis smiled a wide, practised smile.‘Smoking opium is the safest and most gentleman-like speculation I am awareof.’This was such an obvious lie that Robin blinked at him, astounded. ‘The Chinese memorandums call it one of the greatest vices ever to plague theircountry.’‘Oh, opium’s not as harmful as all that,’ said Reverend Gützlaff. ‘Indeed,it’s prescribed as laudanum in Britain all the time. Little old ladies regularlyuse it to go to sleep. It’s no more a vice than tobacco or brandy. I oftenrecommend it to members of my congregation.’‘But isn’t pipe opium a great deal stronger?’ Ramy cut in. ‘It reallydoesn’t seem like sleep aids are the issue here.’ ‘That’s missing the point,’ said Mr Baylis with a touch of impatience.‘The point is free trade between nations. We’re all liberals, aren’t we? Thereshould be no restrictions between those who have goods and those who want to purchase them. That’s justice.’ ‘A curious defence,’ said Ramy, ‘to justify a vice with virtue.’ Mr Baylis scoffed. ‘Oh, the Qing Emperor doesn’t care about vices. He’s stingy about his silver, that’s all. But trade only works when there’s give and take, and currently we’re sitting at a deficit. There’s nothing we have that

those Chinamen want, apparently, except opium. They can’t get enough of the stuff. They’ll pay anything for it. And if I had my way, every man, woman, and child in this country would be puffing opium smoke until they couldn’tthink straight.’He concluded by slamming his hand against the table. The noise was perhaps louder than he intended; it cracked like a gunshot. Victoire and Lettyflinched back. Ramy looked too amazed to reply. ‘But that’s cruel,’ said Robin. ‘That’s – that’s terribly cruel.’ ‘It’s their free choice, isn’t it?’ Mr Baylis said

This stuff changed everything, he said. This corrected the trade deficit. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever forget what I saw.’ He rested his elbows against the bridge and sighed. ‘Rows and rows of flowers. A whole ocean of them. They’re such bright scarlet that the fields look wrong, like the land itself is bleeding. It’s all grown in the countryside. Then it gets packed and transported to Calcutta, where it’s handed off to private merchants who bring it straight here. The two most popular opium brands here are called Patna and Malwa. Both regions in India. From my home straight to yours, Birdie. Isn’t that funny?’ Ramy glanced sideways at him. ‘The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.’ Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract – just categories of use, exchange, and value – until it wasn’t; until you realized the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain. ‘It’s sick,’ he whispered. ‘It’s sick, it’s so sick . . .’ ‘But it’s all just trade,’ said Ramy. ‘Everyone benefits; everyone profits, even if it’s only one country that profits a good deal more. Continuous gains that’s the logic, isn’t it? So why would we ever try to break out? The point is, Birdie, I think I understand why you didn’t see. Almost no one does.’ Free trade. This was always the British line of argument – free trade, free competition, an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it? What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power to secure maritime access? When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes, and administer civil and criminal justice?

he had no idea how to convey what he meant, and all he could grasp at were memories, passing references. ‘Did you ever read Gulliver’s Travels? I read it all the time, when I lived here – I read it so often I nearly memorized it. And there’s this chapter where Gulliver winds up on a land ruled by horses, who call themselves the Houyhnhnms, and where the humans are all savage, idiot slaves called Yahoos. They’re swapped. And Gulliver gets so used to living with his Houyhnhnm master, gets so convinced of Houyhnhnm superiority, that when he gets home, he’s horrified by his fellow humans. He thinks they’re imbeciles. He can’t stand to be around them. And that’s how this . . . that’s . . .’ Robin rocked back and forth over the bridge. He felt like no matter how hard he breathed, he could not get enough air. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

The origins of the word anger were tied closely to physical suffering. Anger was first an ‘affliction’, as meant by the Old Icelandic angr, and then a ‘painful, cruel, narrow’ state, as meant by the Old English enge, which in turn came from the Latin angor, which meant ‘strangling, anguish, distress’. Anger was a chokehold. Anger did not empower you. It sat on your chest; it squeezed your ribs until you felt trapped, suffocated, out of options. Anger simmered, then exploded. Anger was constriction, and the consequent rage a desperate attempt to breathe. And rage, of course, came from madness.

It took him a moment to realize what it was that grated on him, and when he did, it would bother him constantly, now and thereafter; it would seem a great paradox, the fact that after everything they had told Letty, all the pain they had shared, she was the one who needed comfort.

‘Nice comes from the Latin word for ‘stupid’,’* said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.’

Your ranks are what, a couple dozen? At most? And you’re going to take on the entire British Army?’ ‘Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong,’ said Griffin. ‘The thing about violence, see, is that the Empire has a lot more to lose than we do. Violence disrupts the extractive economy. You wreak havoc on one supply line, and there’s a dip in prices across the Atlantic. Their entire system of trade is high-strung and vulnerable to shocks because they’ve made it thus, because the rapacious greed of capitalism is punishing. It’s why slave revolts succeed. They can’t fire on their own source of labour – it’d be like killing their own golden geese.

‘Violence shows them how much we’re willing to give up,’ said Griffin. ‘Violence is the only language they understand, because their system of extraction is inherently violent. Violence shocks the system. And the system cannot survive the shock. You have no idea what you’re capable of, truly. You can’t imagine how the world might shift unless you pull the trigger.’ Griffin pointed at the middle birch. ‘Pull the trigger, kid.’

She translated gökatta to “rising at dawn”, only in Swedish, gökatta has the particular meaning of waking up early to listen to the birds sing.

Anthony laughed gently. ‘Do you think abolition was a matter of ethics? No, abolition gained popularity because the British, after losing America, decided that India was going to be their new golden goose. But cotton, indigo, and sugar from India weren’t going to dominate the market unless France could be edged out, and France would not be edged out, you see, as long as the British slave trade was making the West Indies so very profitable for them.’ ‘But—’ ‘But nothing. The abolitionist movement you know is a load of pomp. Rhetoric only. Pitt first raised the motion because he saw the need to cut off the slave trade to France. And Parliament got on board with the abolitionists because they were so very afraid of Black insurrection in the West Indies.’ ‘So you think it’s purely risk and economics.’ ‘Well, not necessarily. You brother likes to argue that the Jamaican slave revolt, failed though it was, is what impelled the British to legislate abolition. He’s right, but only half right. See, the revolt won British sympathy because the leaders were part of the Baptist church, and when it failed, proslavery whites in Jamaica started destroying chapels and threatening missionaries. Those Baptists went back to England and drummed up support on the grounds of religion, not natural rights. My point being, abolition happened because white people found reasons to care – whether those be economic or religious. You just have to make them think they came up with the idea themselves. You can’t appeal to their inner goodness. I have never met an Englishman I trusted to do the right thing out of sympathy.’

The Greeks loved parricide, Mr Chester had been fond of saying; they loved it for its infinite narrative potential, its invocations of legacy, pride, honour, and dominance. They loved the way it struck every possible emotion because it so deviously inverted the most basic tenet of human existence. One being creates another, moulds and influences it in its own image. The son becomes, then replaces, the father; Kronos destroys Ouranos, Zeus destroys Kronos and, eventually, becomes him. But Robin had never envied his father, never wanted anything of his except his recognition, and he hated to see himself reflected in that cold, dead face. No, not dead – reanimated, haunting; Professor Lovell leered at him, and behind him, opium burned on Canton’s shores, hot and booming and sweet.

And I alone am left of all that lived, Pent in this narrow, horrible conviction. THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES, Death’s Jest-Book

She held grammar rules the way other women held grudges.

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence. FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox

And that, the key to Griffin’s theory of violence, was why they might win. They’d finally worked it out. It was why Griffin and Anthony had been so confident in their struggle, why they were convinced the colonies could take on the Empire. Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited. And like those sugar fields, like those markets, like those bodies of unwilling labour, Babel was an asset. Britain needed Chinese, needed Arabic and Sanskrit and all the languages of colonized territories to function. Britain could not hurt Babel without hurting itself. And so Babel alone, an asset denied, could grind the Empire to a halt.

The blood vials of all but the eight scholars who’d remained within the tower had been smashed against the bricks, doused with oil poured from unused lamps, and set aflame. This was not strictly necessary; all that mattered was that the vials were removed from the tower – but Robin and Victoire had insisted on ceremony. They had learned from Professor Playfair the importance of performance, and this macabre display was a statement, a warning.

The seed ye sow, another reaps; The wealth ye find, another keeps; The robes ye weave, another wears; The arms ye forge, another bears. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ‘Song to the Men of England’

‘This is how Babel was designed to work,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘We made the city as reliant on the Institute as possible. We designed bars to last for only several weeks instead of months, because maintenance appointments bring in money. This is the cost of inflating prices and artificially creating demand. It all works beautifully, until it doesn’t.’

‘It’s very embarrassing,’ Victoire observed one afternoon over tea, ‘how much it all depends on Oxford, in the end. You’d think they would have known better than to put all their eggs in one basket.’ ‘Well, it’s just so funny,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘Technically, those supplementary stations do exist, precisely to alleviate such a crisis of dependence. Cambridge, for example, has been trying to establish a rival programme for years. But Oxford wouldn’t share any resources.’ ‘Because of scarcity?’ Robin asked. ‘Because of jealousy and avarice,’ said Professor Craft. ‘Scarcity’s never been an issue.* We simply don’t like the Cambridge scholars. Nasty little upstarts, thinking they can make it on their own.’ ‘No one goes to Cambridge unless they can’t find a job here,’ Professor Chakravarti said. ‘Sad.’ Robin cast them an amazed look. ‘Are you telling me this country’s going to fall because of academic territoriality?’ ‘Well, yes.’ Professor Craft lifted her teacup to her lips. ‘It’s Oxford, what did you expect?’

He had fully converted now to Griffin’s theory of violence, that the oppressor would never sit down at the negotiating table when they still thought they had nothing to lose. No; things had to get bloody. Until now, all threats had been hypothetical. London had to suffer to learn.

‘I think we all got good at choosing not to think about certain things.’ She seemed not to hear him. She stared out of the window at the green below, where the strikers’ protest grounds had been turned into what looked like a military camp. ‘My first patented match-pair improved the efficiency of equipment at a mine in Tyneshire,’ she said. ‘It kept coal-laden trolleys firmly on their tracks. The mine owners were so impressed they invited me up for a visit, and of course I went; I was so excited about contributing something to the country. I remember being shocked at all the little children in the pits. When I asked, the miners said that they were completely safe, and that helping out in the mines kept them from trouble when their parents were at work.’ She took a shaky breath. ‘Later they told me that the silver-work made the trolleys impossible to move off the tracks, even when there were people in the way. There was an accident. One little boy lost both his legs. They stopped using the match-pair when they couldn’t figure out a workaround, but I didn’t give it a second thought. By then I’d received my fellowship. I had a professorship in sight, and I’d moved on to other, bigger projects. I didn’t think about it. I simply didn’t think about it, for years, and years and years.’ She turned back towards him. Her eyes were wet. ‘Only it builds up, doesn’t it? It doesn’t just disappear. And one day you start prodding at what you’ve suppressed. And it’s a mass of black rot, and it’s endless, horrifying, and you can’t look away.’

Egypt would suffer her ten plagues.

‘But that’s precisely the devil’s trick,’ Robin insisted. ‘This is how colonialism works. It convinces us that the fallout from resistance is entirely our fault, that the immoral choice is resistance itself rather than the circumstances that demanded it.’ ‘Even so, there are lines you can’t cross.’ ‘Lines? If we play by the rules, then they’ve already won—’ ‘You’re trying to win by punishing the city,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘That means the whole city, everyone in it – men, women, children. There are sick children who can’t get their medicine. There are whole families with no income and no source of food. This is more than an inconvenience to them, it’s a death threat.’ ‘I know,’ said Robin, frustrated. ‘That’s the point.’ They glared at each other, and Robin thought he understood now the way that Griffin had once looked at him. This was a failure of nerve. A refusal to push things to the limit. Violence was the only thing that brought the colonizer to the table; violence was the only option. The gun was right there, lying on the table, waiting for them to pick it up. Why were they so afraid to even look at it? Professor Chakravarti stood. ‘I can’t follow you down this path.’

invoking hatred might be good. Hatred might force respect. Hatred might force the British to look them in the eyes and see not an object, but a person. Violence shocks the system, Griffin had told him. And the system cannot survive the shock. ‘Oderint dum metuant,’ he said.* ‘That’s our path to victory.’ ‘That’s Caligula,’ said Professor Chakravarti. ‘You’re invoking Caligula?’ ‘Caligula got his way.’ ‘Caligula was assassinated.’ Robin shrugged, wholly unbothered. ‘You know,’ said Professor Chakravarti, ‘you know, one of the most commonly misunderstood Sanskrit concepts is ahimsa. Nonviolence.’ ‘I don’t need a lecture, sir,’ said Robin, but Professor Chakravarti spoke over him. ‘Many think ahimsa means absolute pacifism, and that the Indian people are therefore a sheepish, submissive people who will bend the knee to anything. But in the Bhagavad Gita, exceptions are made for a dharma yuddha. A righteous war. A war in which violence is applied as the last resort, a war fought not for selfish gain or personal motives but from a commitment to a greater cause.’ He shook his head. ‘This is how I have justified this strike, Mr Swift. But what you’re doing here is not self-defence; it has trespassed into malice. Your violence is personal, it is vindictive, and this I cannot support.’

‘They’re not your motherlands,’ said Letty. ‘They don’t have to be.’ ‘They do have to be,’ said Victoire. ‘Because we’ll never be British. How can you still not understand? That identity is foreclosed to us. We are foreign because this nation has marked us so, and as long as we’re punished daily for our ties to our homelands, we might as well defend them. No, Letty, we can’t maintain this fantasy. The only one who can do that is you.’

‘Did you ever read that poem the abolitionists love? That one by Bicknell and Day. It’s called The Dying Negro.’ Robin had read it, in fact, in an abolitionist pamphlet he’d picked up in London. He’d found it striking; he still remembered it in detail. It described the story of an African man who, facing the prospects of capture and return to slavery, killed himself instead.* Robin had found it romantic and moving at the time, but now, seeing Victoire’s expression, he realized it was anything but. ‘I did,’ he said. ‘It was – tragic.’ ‘We have to die to get their pity,’ said Victoire. ‘We have to die for them to find us noble. Our deaths are thus great acts of rebellion, a wretched lament that highlights their inhumanity. Our deaths become their battle cry.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways – I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows. PLATO, Apology, trans. Benjamin Jowett

For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No; a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.

‘It’s so odd,’ Robin said. Back then they’d already passed the point of honesty; they spoke to one another unfiltered, unafraid of the consequences. ‘It’s like I’ve known you forever.’ ‘Me too,’ Ramy said. ‘And that makes no sense,’ said Robin, drunk already, though there was no alcohol in the cordial. ‘Because I’ve known you for less than a day, and yet . . .’ ‘I think,’ said Ramy, ‘it’s because when I speak, you listen.’ ‘Because you’re fascinating.’ ‘Because you’re a good translator.’ Ramy leaned back on his elbows. ‘That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.’

Victoire Desgraves has always been good at surviving. The key, she has learned, is refusing to look back. Even as she races north on horseback through the Cotswolds, head bent against the whipping branches, some part of her wants to be in the tower, with her friends, feeling the walls come down around them. If they must die, she wants them to be buried together. But survival demands severing the cord. Survival demands she look only to the future.

Letty, she knows, cannot allow her to roam free. Even the idea of Victoire is a threat. It threatens the core of her very being. It is proof that she is, and always was, wrong. She won’t let herself grieve that friendship, as true and terrible and abusive as it was. There will come a time for grief. There will come many nights on the voyage when the sadness is so great it threatens to tear her apart; when she regrets her decision to live; when she curses Robin for placing this burden on her, because he was right: he was not being brave, he was not choosing sacrifice. Death is seductive. Victoire resists. She cannot weep now. She must keep moving. She must run, as fast as she can, without knowing what is on the other side. She has no illusions about what she will encounter. She knows she will face immeasurable cruelty. She knows her greatest obstacle will be cold indifference, born of a bone-deep investment in an economic system that privileges some and crushes others.

Anthony called victory an inevitability. Anthony believed the material contradictions of England would tear it apart, that their movement would succeed because the revels of the Empire were simply unsustainable. This, he argued, was why they had a chance. Victoire knows better. Victory is not assured. Victory may be in the portents, but it must be urged there by violence, by suffering, by martyrs, by blood. Victory is wrought by ingenuity, persistence, and sacrifice. Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right. She cannot know what shape that struggle will take.

Victory is a game of inches, of historical contingencies where everything goes right because they have made it go right.

‘Mande mwen yon ti kou ankò ma di ou,’ she’d told Anthony once, when he’d first asked her what she thought of Hermes, if she thought they might succeed. He’d tried his best to parse Kreyôl with what he knew of French, then he’d given up. ‘What’s that mean?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Victoire. ‘At least, we say it when we don’t know the answer, or don’t care to share the answer.’ ‘And what’s it literally mean?’ She’d winked at him. ‘Ask me a little later, and I’ll tell you.’

a debate between the Orientalists,including Sir Horace Wilson, who favoured teaching Sanskrit and Arabic to Indian students, and the Anglicists, including Mr Trevelyan, who believed Indian students of promise ought to be taught English.This debate would come down firmly on the side of the Anglicists, best represented by Lord Thomas Macaulay’s infamous February 1835 ‘Minute on Education’: ‘We must at present do our best to form aclass who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons Indianin blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.

slavery continued in India under the East India Company for a long time after. Indeed, slavery in India was specifically exempt from the Slave Emancipation Act of 1833. Despite early abolitionists’ belief that India under the EIC was a country of free labour, the EIC was complicit in, directly profited from, and in many cases encouraged a range of types of bondage, including forced plantation labour, domestic labour, and indentured servitude. The refusal to call such practices slavery simply because they did not match precisely the transatlantic plantation model of slavery was a profound act of semantic blindness. But the British, after all, were astoundingly good at holding contradictions in their head. Sir William Jones, a virulent abolitionist, at the same time admitted of his own household, ‘I have slaves that I rescued from death and misery, but consider them as servants.’

The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford’s good graces, and who now held the nation hostage. Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quintessentially English institution. But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning ‘house slave’; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals – the vulgar cants, as it were – had infiltrated English until they became proper. And the English vernacular could not properly be called domestic either, because English etymology had roots all over the world. Almanacs and algebra came from Arabic; pyjamas from Sanskrit, ketchup from Chinese, and paddies from Malay. It was only when elite England’s way of life was threatened that the true English, whoever they were, attempted to excise all that had made them.

Samin Nosrat combines chemistry with a cookbook writing style to describe the first principles of cooking. As the title suggests, good food can be broken down into 4 component parts: Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat. I’ve found these four features to be an incredibly useful structure to think about the incredible foods I’ve been able to eat throughout my summer in Asia.

At the end of the day, only so much learning can be done via a description. Once I’m done traveling, it’ll be time to start experimenting. I also haven’t read the “Heat” part yet, but maybe sometime soon.

Selections:

• The primary role that salt plays in cooking is to amplify flavor.

• Add it in the right amount, at the right time, in the right form.

• Measure salts by weight rather than by volume.

• Iodine.

• Table salt also often contains anticaking agents to prevent clumps from forming, or dextrose, a form of sugar, to stabilize the iodine.

• If you’ve only got table salt at home, go get yourself some kosher or sea salt right away.

• Kosher Salt contains no additives, it tastes very pure.

• Gradual, monitored evaporation that can take up to five years.

• Fleur de sel—literally, “flower of salt”—is harvested from the surface of special sea salt beds in western France.

• Delightful texture, so use them in ways that allow them to stand out.

• Enjoy the way they crunch in your mouth.

• Refined granular sea salt is produced by rapidly boiling down ocean water in a closed vacuum.

• Keep two kinds of salt on hand: an inexpensive one such as bulk-bin sea salt or kosher salt for everyday cooking, and a special salt with a pleasant texture for garnishing food at the last moment.

• Five tastes: saltiness, sourness, bitterness, sweetness, and umami, or savoriness.

• Aroma involves our noses sensing any of thousands of various chemical compounds.

• Flavor lies at the intersection of taste, aroma, and sensory elements including texture, sound, appearance, and temperature.

• Salt also unlocks many aromatic compounds in foods.

• Salt also reduces our perception of bitterness, with the secondary effect of emphasizing other flavors present in bitter dishes.

• Salt enhances sweetness while reducing bitterness in foods that are both bitter and sweet.

• Anything that heightens flavor is a seasoning.

• Food shouldn’t be salty, it should be salted.

• Tasting and adjusting.

• Salt use must be carefully considered at every point in the cooking process.

• In food, the movement of water across a cell wall from the saltier side to the less salty side is called osmosis.

• Diffusion is the often slower process of salt moving from a saltier environment to a less salty one until it’s evenly distributed throughout.

• Since diffusion is a slow process, seasoning in advance gives salt plenty of time to diffuse evenly throughout meat. This is how to season meat from within.

• Time, not amount, is the crucial variable.

• When an unseasoned protein is heated, it denatures: the coil tightens, squeezing water molecules out of the protein matrix, leaving the meat dry and tough if overcooked.

• By disrupting protein structure, salt prevents the coil from densely coagulating, or clumping, when heated, so more of the water molecules remain bound.

• You have a greater margin of error for overcooking.

• Brine is a highly concentrated solution of salt in water.

• The chicken salted in advance will fall off the bone as you begin to butcher it, while the other half, though moist, won’t begin to compare in tenderness.

• Aim to season meat the day before cooking when possible.

• The larger, denser, or more sinewy the piece of meat, the earlier you should salt it.

• The colder the meat and surrounding environment are, the longer it will take the salt to do its work, so when time is limited, leave meat on the counter once you season it (but for no longer than two hours), rather than returning it to the fridge.

• If you’ve salted some meat but realize you won’t be able to get to it for several days, freeze it until you’re ready to cook it. Tightly wrapped, it’ll keep for up to two months.

• Seafood degrades when salted too early, yielding a tough, dry, or chewy result.

• About fifteen minutes.

• Salt requires water to dissolve, so it won’t dissolve in pure fat.

• Lean meat has a slightly higher water (and protein) content—and thus, greater capacity for salt absorption—than fattier cuts of meat, so cuts with a big fat cap, such as pork loin or rib eye, will not absorb salt evenly.

• Eggs absorb salt easily; salt makes eggs coagulate, or retain water to stay moist and tender.

• An undigestible carbohydrate called pectin.

• Salt assists in weakening pectin.

• Season vegetables with large, watery cells—tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplant, for example—in advance of grilling or roasting to allow salt the time to do its work.

• Osmosis will also cause some water loss, so pat the vegetables dry before cooking.

• Usually 15 minutes before cooking is sufficient.

• Mushrooms are about 80 percent water.

• To preserve the texture of mushrooms, wait to add salt until they’ve just begun to brown in the pan.

• The most common reason for tough beans and grains, then, is undercooking. The solution for most: keep simmering!

• Since a long cooking time gives salt a chance to diffuse evenly throughout, the water for boiling grains such as rice, farro, or quinoa can be salted less aggressively than the water for blanching vegetables.

• Salt aids in strengthening gluten, the protein that makes dough chewy and elastic.

• Properly seasoned cooking water encourages food to retain its nutrients.

• Because of diffusion and osmosis, if the water is more highly seasoned and more mineral rich, it will absorb some salt from the water as they cook, seasoning themselves from the inside out.

• Beans also remain more vibrantly colored because the salt balance will keep magnesium in the beans’ chlorophyll molecules from leaching out.

• Keep a pot boiling on the stove for too long, though, and water will evaporate.

• Salt meats that are going to be cooked in water, like any meats, in advance, but season the cooking liquids for stews, braises, and poached meats conservatively.

• Time, temperature, and water.

• Ask yourself, “How can I season this from within?”

• Heat stimulates salt diffusion. Salt will always diffuse more quickly at room temperature than in the fridge.

• You should be able to fit all five fingers into your salt bowl and easily grab a palmful of salt.

• My general ratios for measuring salt are simple: 1 percent salt by weight for meats, vegetables, and grains, and 2 percent salinity for water for blanching vegetables and pasta.

• Lightly grasping the salt in your upturned palm, letting it shower down with a wag of the wrist. This grasp—not the hovering pinch I was used to—was the way to distribute salt, flour, or anything else granular, evenly and efficiently over a large surface.

• Salt is a mineral and an essential nutrient.

• Pepper, on the other hand, is a spice.

• It doesn’t make any more sense to automatically season everything with pepper than it would to add cumin or za’atar to every dish you cook.

• Tellicherry peppercorns, which ripen on the vine longer than other varieties, and therefore develop more flavor.

• Spices, like coffee, always taste better when ground just before use. Flavor is locked within them in the form of aromatic oils, which are released upon grinding, and again upon heating.

• Purchase whole spices whenever you can.

• Just as you’d never leave flour, butter, eggs, or cream unseasoned in a savory dish, so should you never leave them unseasoned in a dessert.

• Refrain from adding salt crystals until you’re sure that you’ve added the right amount of everything else.

• Take a moment to think about where that salt should come from.

• Sometimes, food that seems salty isn’t actually oversalted; it just needs to be balanced with some acid or fat.

• Foods cooked in liquid, such as beans or braises, can often be salvaged if the salty cooking liquid is discarded.

• Adopt the mantra Stir, taste, adjust. Make salt the first thing you notice as you taste and the last thing you adjust before serving a dish.

• When? How much? In what form?

• Some of the best versions were made with rancid olive oil.

• Food can only ever be as delicious as the fat with which it’s cooked.

• Where olive oil comes from has a huge effect on how it tastes—oil from hot, dry hilly areas is spicy, while oil from coastal climates with milder weather is correspondingly milder in flavor.

• Fat is also one of the four elemental building blocks of all foods, along with water, protein, and carbohydrates.

• Fat plays three distinct roles in the kitchen: as a main ingredient, as a cooking medium, and, like salt, as seasoning.

• As a main ingredient, fat is a source both of rich flavor and of a particular desired texture.

• The amount of cream and egg yolks in an ice cream determine just how smooth and decadent it’ll be (hint: the more cream and eggs, the creamier the result).

• As a cooking medium, cooking fats can be heated to extreme temperatures, allowing the surface temperature of foods cooked in them to climb to astonishing heights as well.

• Any fat you heat to cook food can be described as a medium.

• As a seasoning, fat adjusts flavor or enriches the texture of a dish just before serving.

• Will this fat bind various ingredients together? If so, this is a main ingredient. Does this fat play a textural role? For flaky, creamy, and light textures, fat plays the role of main ingredient, while for crisp textures, it’s a cooking medium. For tender textures, fat can play either role. Will this fat be heated and used to cook the food? If so, this is a cooking medium. Does this fat play a flavor role? If it’s added at the outset, it’s a main ingredient. If it’s used to adjust flavor or texture at the end of cooking the dish as a garnish, it’s a seasoning.

• Boiling point of water (212°F at sea level).

• The facilitation of surface browning, which typically does not begin at temperatures below 230°F.

• Browning will introduce entirely new flavors, including nuttiness, sweetness, meatiness, earthiness, and savoriness (umami).

• Color has little to do with the quality of olive oil, and it offers no clues to whether an olive oil is rancid. Instead,

•  use your nose and palate: does the olive oil smell like a box of crayons, candle wax, or the oil floating on top of an old jar of peanut butter?

• Olive oil will go rancid about twelve to fourteen months after it’s been pressed, so don’t save it for a special occasion, thinking it will improve over time like a fine wine!

• Use everyday olive oils for general cookery and finishing olive oils for applications where you really want to let the flavor of the olive oil stand out: in salad dressings, spooned over fish tartare, in herb salsas, or in olive oil cakes. Purchase and use flavored olive oils with caution.

• An exception: olive oils marked agrumato are made using a traditional technique of milling whole citrus fruit with the olives at the time of the first press.

• The Kirkland Signature Organic Extra Virgin Oil from Costco, which regularly scores well on independently administered quality analyses.

• Store it somewhere reliably cool and dark.

• Store olive oil in a dark glass bottle or metal can to keep light out.

• Salted and unsalted, and cultured butters are best as is.

• Use unsalted butter when cooking and baking, and add your own salt to taste.

• Unlike oil, butter is not pure fat—it also contains water, milk protein, and whey solids, which provide much of its flavor.

• Gently heat unsalted butter until those solids brown and you get brown butter, which is nutty and sweet.

• Melt unsalted butter gently over sustained low heat to clarify it. The whey proteins will rise to the top of the clear, yellow fat, and other milk proteins will fall to the bottom. The water will evaporate, leaving behind 100 percent fat.

• Carefully strain the rest of the butter through cheesecloth to yield clarified butter, which is an excellent medium for high-heat cooking.

• With the solids removed, the butter doesn’t burn.

• Indian ghee is simply clarified butter that’s been cooked at a higher temperature, allowing the milk solids to brown and lend the finished fat a sweeter flavor.

• Almost every culture relies on a neutral-tasting seed or nut oil, because cooks don’t always want fat to flavor a dish. Peanut oil, expeller-pressed canola oil, and grapeseed oil are all good choices as cooking fats precisely because they don’t taste like anything. Since they have high smoke points, these oils can also withstand the high temperatures required to crisp and brown foods.

• Coconut oil is also the rare vegetable oil that’s solid at room temperature.

• (Cook’s tip: Both skin and hair readily absorb coconut oil, so it makes for a fantastic luxury treatment whenever you’re feeling dry!)

• Most aromatic molecules are repelled by water, so in meat they’re predominantly found in an animal’s fat. As a result, any animal’s fat will taste much more distinctly of that animal than its lean meat—beef fat tastes beefier than steak.

• Beef, when solid, is called suet. Liquid, it’s called tallow.

• Pork, when solid, is called pork fat. Liquid, it’s called lard.

• Barding is the term for covering lean meat with slices of pork belly—either smoked and called bacon, cured and called pancetta, or left unadulterated—to protect it from the dry heat of roasting.

• Larding refers to the act of threading pieces of fat through a lean piece of meat with a long, thick needle.

• Some fat ends up within a muscle. This is the more prized kind of fat—what we call marbling when we look at a steak. As a well-marbled steak cooks, the fat will melt, making the meat juicier from within.

• That’s why, for example, chicken thighs taste more chickeny than the leaner breast meat.

• Though lumps of fat might not be so tasty on the plate, you can remove them from the meat and melt them down, then use the rendered fat as a cooking medium.

• Which fats we use primarily affect flavor, but how we use them will determine texture.

• For food to become crisp, the water trapped in its cells must evaporate. Water evaporates as it boils, so the surface temperature of the ingredient must climb beyond the boiling point of 212°F. To achieve this effect on the entire surface of the food, it needs to be in direct, even contact with a heat source, such as a pan at temperatures well beyond water’s boiling point.

• In order to get even contact between the food and the pan, we need a medium: fat.

• Say a recipe asks you to cook two diced onions in two tablespoons of olive oil. In a small pan that might be enough to coat the bottom but in a larger pan with greater surface area it probably isn’t.

• Make sure that the bottom of the pan is coated with fat when sautéing, or that oil comes halfway up the sides of the food when shallow-frying.

• Heating Oil Properly: Preheat the pan to reduce the amount of time fat spends in direct contact with the hot metal, minimizing opportunity for it to deteriorate.

• Exceptions to the preheating rule exist: butter and garlic. Both will burn if the pan is too hot, so you must heat them gently.

• Test the pan with a drop of water. If it crackles a little bit before evaporating—it doesn’t have to be a violent sound—then the pan is ready.

• The sound of a delicate sizzle upon addition of the food.

• Intermuscular and subcutaneous fats—the lumpy bits between the muscles and the layer of fat just beneath the skin—can be cut into small pieces, placed in a pan with a minimal amount of water, rendered, or cooked over gentle heat until all the water has evaporated.

• This transforms solid fat into a liquid that can be used as a cooking medium.

• Strain it into a glass jar and store it in the fridge. It’ll keep for up to six months.

• The smoke point of a fat is the temperature at which it decomposes and transforms into a visible, noxious gas.

• Pure, refined vegetable oils such as grapeseed, canola, and peanut begin to smoke around 400°F, making them an ideal choice for high-heat applications such as deep- or stir-frying.

• Impure fats don’t do as well at extreme heats; the sediment in unfiltered olive oil and the milk solids in butter will begin to reach their smoke point, or burn, at about 350°F, making them well suited for applications where a very high temperature isn’t needed and their flavors can shine, such as oil-poaching, simple vegetable sautés, pan-frying fish or meat.

• Achieving Crispness: Preheat the pan, then preheat the fat. Avoid putting more than a single layer of food into the pan, which will cause the temperature to drop drastically and steam to condense and make food soggy.

• Cooking in fat that’s insufficiently hot will cause food to absorb the oil.

• If the fat is too hot, the outer surface of the food will brown and become crisp before the center has a chance to cook through.

• The goal with all cooking is to achieve your desired result on the outside and inside of an ingredient at the same time.

• Allow hot, crisp foods to cool off in a single layer.

• Pop it into a hot oven for a few minutes to reheat it before serving.

• An emulsion happens when two liquids that normally don’t like to mix together or dissolve give up and join together.

• An emulsion is a temporary peace treaty between fat and water.

• When an emulsion breaks, the fat and water molecules begin to coalesce back into their own troops.

• An emulsifier is like a third link in the chain, a mediator attracting and uniting two formerly hostile parties.

• Mayonnaise is an oil-in-water emulsion made by slowly whisking tiny droplets of oil into an egg yolk, which itself is a natural emulsion of fat and water.

• Yolk contains lecithin, an emulsifier with one end that likes fat and another that likes water.

• With vigorous whisking, lecithin connects the minuscule amount of water innate to a yolk to the oil droplets and surrounds tiny air bubbles.

• Butter as “coagulated sunlight” is the only animal fat made without killing an animal.

• Butter retains its solid form from freezing temperatures (32°F) until it melts (90°F).

• Butter sauce: Temperature is crucial with butter-water emulsions. The key is to start with a warm pan and cold butter. For a simple pan sauce, after removing a steak, fish filet, or pork chop from the pan, tip out any excess fat. Place the pan back over the heat and add just enough liquid—water, stock, or wine—to coat the bottom. Using a wooden spoon, scrape any delicious crusty bits into the sauce and bring it to a boil. Then, for each serving, add 2 tablespoons of very cold butter into the pan and swirl over medium-high heat, letting the butter melt into the liquid. Don’t let the pan get so hot that the butter sizzles; as long as there is enough water in the sauce, you’ll be fine. Once you see the sauce begin to thicken, turn off the flame and let the butter finish melting over residual heat, but don’t stop swirling. Taste for salt and, if needed, add a squeeze of lemon or splash of wine. Spoon over the food and serve immediately.

• Some emulsions will naturally break with time, and others will break if fat and water are combined too quickly, but the most common way to ruin one is to allow its temperature to swing.

• First, as soon as you suspect that you are on shaky ground, stop adding fat. If the emulsion isn’t thickening and the tines of the whisk aren’t leaving visible tracks, then for heaven’s sake stop adding oil! Sometimes, all that’s called for at this point is a good strong whisking to bring things back together.

• Two proteins in wheat—glutenin and gliadin—comprise gluten.

• When you combine wheat flour and liquid

•  to make dough or batter, these proteins link up with one another into long chains. As dough is kneaded or batter is mixed, the chains develop into strong, extensive webs or the gluten network. The expansion of these webs is called gluten development, and it’s what makes a dough chewy and elastic.

• Shortening: The gluten strands remain short instead of lengthening.

• Four main variables will determine the texture of any baked good: fat, water, yeast, and how much the dough or batter is kneaded or worked.

• Short doughs are the epitome of tenderness, crumbling and melting in your mouth.

• These recipes call for very soft or even melted butter, in order to encourage this now fluid fat to quickly coat individual flour particles, preventing gluten webs from forming.

• Flaky doughs break apart into flakes when you take a bite.

• They create crusts sturdy enough to hold up to a mile-high pile of apples or juicy summer fruits, but delicate enough to produce thin, uneven flakes when sliced.

• The fat must be very cold so that some of it can remain in distinct pieces.

• When you slide the pie into a hot oven, the cold pieces of butter, entrapped air, and steam from the water released by the butter, all push apart the layers of dough to create flakes.

• The flakiest pastries are made with laminated doughs.

• In laminated doughs, a flaky dough is wrapped around a large slab of butter. This dough-and-butter sandwich is rolled out and then folded back upon itself in a process called a turn.

• Pastry chefs’ compulsion to keep everything cold: they work on cool marble countertops and freeze their mixer bowls and metal tools.

• The remarkable capacity to entrap air when whipped allows fat to act as a leavening, or raising, agent in cakes and transform liquid cream into billowy clouds.

• Layering fats.

• The best way to correct overly fatty food is to rebalance the dish.

• Add more food to increase total volume, add more acid, water it down, or add starchy or dense ingredients. If possible, chill the dish, let the fat come to the surface and solidify, then skim it off. Alternately, lift food out of a very greasy pan and dab it on a clean towel, leaving the fat behind.

• The reason why everyone spoons so much cranberry sauce over everything at Thanksgiving is that on most tables, it’s just about the only form of acid available.

• The true value of acid is not its pucker, but rather, balance.

• Acid grants the palate relief, and makes food more appealing by offering contrast.

• Acid is salt’s alter ego. While salt enhances flavors, acid balances them.

• Any substance that registers below 7 on the pH scale is an acid.

• A much handier acid sensor—a tongue. Anything that tastes sour is a source of acid.

• Lemon juice, vinegar, or wine.

• Anything fermented, from cheese and sourdough bread to coffee and chocolate, will lend a pleasant tang to your food, as will most fruits.

• The tomato.

• Acid makes our mouths water the most. When we eat anything sour, our mouths flood with saliva to balance out the acidity, as it’s dangerous for our teeth.

• While the salt threshold is absolute, acid balance is relative.

• Even the same cheese, aged for different lengths of time, will taste more acidic and complex in flavor, which is why we call a young cheddar mild and an aged one sharp.

• Not only the location of a tree but the location of an orange on a tree will affect flavor.

• Vinegars.

• Citrus.

• Lemon.

• Lime.

• Never use, though, is bottled citrus juice.

• Pickles.

• Cultured dairy products.

• Acid dulls vibrant greens, so wait until the last possible moment to dress salads.

• On the other hand, acid keeps reds and purples vivid.

• Raw fruits and vegetables that are susceptible to oxidation will retain their natural color if coated with a little acid or kept in water mixed with a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar until they are ready to cook or eat.

• Anything containing cellulose or pectin, including legumes, fruits, and vegetables, will cook much more slowly in the presence of acid.

• While ten to fifteen minutes of simmering in water is enough to soften carrots into baby food, they’ll still be somewhat firm after an hour of stewing in red wine.

• The acid in tomatoes explains why those pesky onions float to the top of a pot of sauce or soup and stay there, never getting soft, even after hours of cooking. To prevent this crunchy mishap, cook onions until they’re tender before adding any tomatoes, wine, or vinegar to the pot.

• When cooking beans or any legumes, including the chickpeas for hummus, a pinch of baking soda will gently nudge the bean water away from acidity toward alkalinity, ensuring tenderness. And, just like those onions, cook legumes until they are completely tender before adding anything acidic.

• Boiling dilutes the relatively acidic liquid contained in vegetable cells, so it will generally yield more tender vegetables than roasting will.

• Acid also encourages bonds between pectin groups—the gelling agent in fruit—so that they can trap water to help set jam or jelly.

• Acid is required when using chemical leavenings such as baking soda or baking powder. Visualize the baking soda and vinegar volcanoes of your elementary school science projects. Just like that, but on a much smaller scale, acid reacts with baking soda to release carbon dioxide bubbles to leaven baked goods.

• Under normal conditions, strands of egg proteins unravel and tighten when heated. As they do, the strands squeeze out water, causing eggs to toughen and dry out. Acid draws egg proteins together before they can unravel, which inhibits them from joining too closely. A few secret drops of lemon juice will produce creamier, more tender scrambled eggs. For perfect poached eggs, add a capful of vinegar into boiling water to help speed up coagulation of the white and strengthen the outer texture, while preserving the runny yolk.

• Acid aids in stabilizing whipped egg whites by encouraging more, finer air pockets, helping to increase the volume of the egg white foam.

• Dairy proteins called casein will coagulate, or curdle, with the addition of acid.

• With the exception of butter and heavy cream, which are very low in protein, dairy should only be added to acidic dishes at the last minute.

• When acid comes into contact with the coils, they unfold and unwind. This process is called denaturation.

• These denatured proteins then begin to bump into each other and coagulate, reconnecting into an intimate network.

• If food continues to sit in acid—the protein network will continue to tighten, squeezing water out of the protein altogether, resulting in tough, dry food, much like an overcooked steak.

• Acid also helps break down collagen, the main structural protein found in tough cuts of meat.

• Two easy ways to produce acid in food as we cook.

• The fast method? Browning foods.

• The chemical reaction involved in browning sugars is called caramelization.

• The chemical reaction involved in browning meats, seafood, vegetables, baked goods, or just about anything else is called the Maillard reaction.

• As it caramelizes, a single sugar molecule will develop into hundreds of new and different compounds, including some acids.

• Caramel is acidic!

• The other, much slower, method for producing acid in the kitchen is fermentation, where, in addition to many other flavor-producing processes, carbohydrates transform into carbon dioxide and acids or alcohols using yeasts, bacteria, or a combination thereof.

• According to Chad Robertson, of Tartine Bakery in San Francisco, who lets his dough rise for more than thirty hours, slow fermentation “improves the flavor, in large part because more sugars are available to caramelize during the baking. The loaves brown faster and the crust gets darker.”

• A single dish can often benefit from several forms of acid: think of this as layering acids as you cook.

• Some acids should be worked into dishes from the start.

• Cooking acids include tomatoes, white wine, beer, and mirin.

• They can be extraordinarily subtle; while their presence may go undetected, their absence is sharply felt.

• Macerate, from Latin, “to soften,” refers to the process whereby ingredients soak in some form of acid—usually vinegar or citrus juice—to soften their harshness.

• Garnishing acids are used to finish a dish.

• When you can, use the same kind of acid for cooking and garnishing.

• This kind of layering offers multiple tastes of the same ingredient.

• And then there are times when a single form of acid isn’t enough to accomplish its task. Feta cheese, tomato, olives, and red wine vinegar offer four distinct forms of acid in a Greek salad.

• Sauce, and in fact most condiments, are sources of both acid and salt, they offer a pretty surefire way to improve flavor.

• Umami is, in fact, the result of flavor compounds called glutamates.

• MSG.

• Two foods most abundant in naturally occurring glutamates are Parmesan and tomato ketchup.

• All five of our basic tastes are activated with a single bite.

• Salted Caramel Sauce has never gone out of fashion. And it never will.

• Roasted carrots, cauliflower, and broccoli—or anything that’s developed sweetness from browning—will always appreciate a squeeze of lemon or touch of vinegar.

• A salad should relieve your palate and leave it clean after rich, muddy foods.

• Stand up to the other intense flavors.

• Though each dish, on its own, should always be balanced in Salt, Fat, and Acid, there is also the larger picture to consider—a good meal should also be balanced.

• Since the human body can’t produce certain essential forms of salt, fat, and acid, our palates have evolved to seek these three elements.

• Play to each element’s strengths: use Salt to enhance, Fat to carry, and Acid to balance flavor. Now, with the knowledge of how they affect various foods, add each to a dish at the right time in order to season it from within. Add salt

•  early to a pot of beans, but acid late. Season meat for a braise in advance, then start it off on the heat with a dose of cooking acid. When it’s done and rich in flavor, lighten it with a garnishing acid.

• Write a letter to your favorite restaurant professing your love and beg for an apprenticeship. Skip culinary school; spend a fraction of the cost of tuition traveling the world instead.

• The best cooks looked at the food, not the heat source.

• Heat’s sensory cues, including sizzles, spatters, crackles, steam, bubbles, aromas, and browning, are often more important than a thermometer.

• Apply heat at the right level, and at the right rate, so that the surface of a food and its interior are done cooking at the same time.

• Know what you’re after.

• Think about your goals in the kitchen in terms of flavors and textures.

• For example, if you want to end up with a bowl of flavorful, snowy white mashed potatoes, then think about the last step: mashing potatoes with butter and sour cream, and tasting and adjusting for salt. To get there, you’ll need to simmer the potatoes in salted water until they’re tender. To get there, you’ll need to peel and cut the potatoes. There’s your recipe.

• For something more complicated—say, crispy pan-fried potatoes—you’ll want to end with a golden-brown crust and a tender interior. So the last step will be frying in hot fat to achieve crispness. To get there, make sure the potatoes are tender inside—simmer them in salted water. To get there, peel and cut them. There’s another recipe.

• As food is heated, the molecules within it begin to speed up, colliding with each other as they go.

• And the chemical reactions initiated by heat affect the flavor and texture of food.