Anita Schillhorn van Veen

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI and has a couple of other WITIs under her belt (Climate Tourism & Utopias). She’s an independent strategy consultant with Frame Strategy, based in LA and New York. You can follow her on Twitter here.Anita here. My nine-year-old niece recently informed me that her favorite diamond was the Sancy, the second-most valuable diamond in the world. Besides learning that she has expensive tastes, it also sent me down a rabbit hole of precious stones. Top of my list of questions, unsurprisingly, was what is the most valuable diamond in the world? The answer is the Koh-I-Noor, a massive stone that some say was mined 5,000 years ago in India, and has since been traded amongst empires, kingdoms, and colonizers until it landed in the collection of British crown jewels. (Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother rocking the Koh-I-Noor in the royal crown, with and without arches. Source: Order of Splendor)(The Koh-I-Noor diamond at the top of the Peacock Throne, a symbol of power in the Mughal Empire. This miniature painting is from 1850 and is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, another Mughal treasure that sits in London. Source: Hindu History)Anita Anand and William Dalrymple have written a colorful history of the precious artifact, examining the intricacies of ownership in their book, The Koh-I-Noor: History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond. The story of the Koh-I-Noor is the story of power, with the Mughal Empire, the Persians, the Afghans and the British juggling ownership of the stone and influence in the region over centuries.The Koh-I-Noor is in the collection of the British crown, but its history is far from over. The stone’s ownership continues to be disputed. That the Koh-I-Noor sits with the British Crown Jewels today is a thorn in British-India relations, and India continues efforts to reclaim it. The prevalent opinion there is that the gem was stolen and should be returned to its rightful owner, although one Indian solicitor-general recently sided with the UK and claimed it was a gift. Why is this interesting?The trade and plunder of the Koh-I-Noor maps to the shift of power structures throughout centuries. The Koh-I-Noor is a glittering reminder of the colonial legacy of the destruction wrought by the British colonies. Besides India, Pakistan and even the Taliban have also laid claim to the famous diamond. Pre-colonial ownership does not map neatly to post-colonial national borders. And that, in large part, is because colonialism resulted in new nations, new geopolitical borders, and redrawn maps.Gems are just the tip of the iceberg. In the wake of decolonization, deciding the rightful ownership of cultural artifacts is made more complicated by entangled histories. In the last 20 years or so, there’s been a movement of countries seeking to reclaim their artifacts from the Western institutions that house them, and of those institutions divesting of cultural artifacts. Ninety percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is outside of Africa. Emmanuel Macron made history when he visited West Africa in 2017 and promised to return France’s share. There’s a counter movement that questions whether a modern nation can lay claim to an ancient object from a dead culture. Defenders of the museums’ stance champion the idea of a universal history, and see countries seeking repatriation as having nationalist agendas that don’t serve the common good, or rather, the common good as defined by the institutions in power. James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, who of course benefits from keeping ancient artifacts in his institution, argues:Cultural property is a political construct: whatever one sovereign authority claims it to be. Cultural property is presumed to have a special meaning to the powers that claim it...It is central to their identity...But is that possibly true of antiquities? Antiquities are often from cultures no longer extant or of a kind very different from the modern, national culture claiming them. What is the relationship between, say, modern Egypt and the antiquities that were part of the land’s Pharaonic past?However, considering the artifact in light of its historical context should include the story of how it got to be where it is, whether through colonial trading, plunder, or the black market. It’s also exclusionary. If an Indian artifact is with the British Crown Jewels, or a West African artifact is in the Louvre, it only invites people who can afford to visit to be a part of experiencing it. Tess Davis, a lawyer with the Antiquities Coalition, says:Colonialism is alive and well in the art world. So-called leaders in the field still justify retaining plunder in order to fill their ‘universal museums’ where patrons can view encyclopaedic collections from all over the world. A noble idea, in theory, but in practice, a western luxury. The citizens of New York, London, and Paris may benefit, but those of Phnom Penh? Never.The idea of a dominant power having full control over the world’s history no longer holds water. Decolonization has evolved from the political and geographical act of a colonized nation reclaiming power to a growing movement that considers the colonial hand in everything from artifacts in museums, to the literary canon, to holiday meals. Diamonds have been witness to power changing hands forever, and it's unlikely that this will end. Equally as unlikely to end are the conversations about how we reckon with these custodial changes and the forces that drove them. (ASVV)Map of the Day:Speaking of history and power, I love this map of ancient Roman trade routes by Sasha Trubetskoy, spanning from Egypt to England and Morocco to the Middle East. Another document that destabilizes the idea that power structures are fixed in history. (ASVV)Quick Links:The new era of social media ticket scalpers borrow from sneakerhead commercial culture. (ASVV)An MLM cryptocurrency queen cleans up and disappears. If the article doesn’t sate your appetite for rich villains, there’s a BBC podcast on this story as well. (ASVV)20 Games Every Creative Thinker Should Play from our friends at Article Group (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)PS - Noah here. I’ve started a new company and we are looking for a sr. backend engineer to join the team. If you are one of those or know anyone who is great, please share. Dinner’s on me at a restaurant of your choice if you help us find someone.Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Diamond Edition

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI and has a few other WITIs under her belt (Climate Tourism, Utopias, and Diamonds). She’s an independent strategy consultant with Frame Strategy, based in LA and New York. You can follow her on Twitter here.Anita here. As we rounded the corner of a new year, I spent a lot of time resolving to be more productive, more connected, more self-caring. One of the conclusions I came to is that all of these resolutions rest on one foundation: a more organized home. Not only do my husband and I like to entertain, cook, and (try to) keep our lives sorted at home, I also spend plenty of working hours at my kitchen table, and keeping the homefront in order is paramount to productivity in other areas. The time committed to this exercise in organization often erodes the time I want to commit to bigger things. Enter technology. We have a Dyson, a Roomba, an Instant Pot, a Zojirushi rice cooker, a temperature-controlled electric kettle for my morning pourover, a Vitamix blender, and cabinets full of other contraptions that claim to make life a little easier. Not only that, we have a cleaning lady that comes a couple of times a month, our gardening is taken care of by the super, and my husband and I are committed to sharing housework equally. Yet finding the time to make resolutions, much less complete them, is a challenge.Derek Thompson at The Atlantic tackled this phenomenon recently by exploring why Americans still feel like they have no time, even with the glut of technology solutions for time-saving. The crux of his argument is this:Americans tend to use new productivity and technology to buy a better life rather than to enjoy more downtime in inferior conditions. And when material concerns are mostly met, Americans fixate on their status and class, and that of their children, and work tirelessly to preserve and grow it.Why is this interesting?Thompson focuses his story on unpacking America’s history with time-saving technologies, and in the course of his argument, he elides “Americans” with “housewives” over and over again. Per the piece: Housework hours finally fell only when women joined the labor force en masse. Since the 1960s, the share of women in the workforce has increased by about 50 percent. In that time, the typical adult woman has decreased her housework hours by about one-third, according to analysis by the economist Valerie Ramey. That is, the one thing that finally reduced labor in the home was … labor outside of the home.This is part of the argument that Betty Friedan made in her landmark book The Feminine Mystique in 1963. She studied women who worked as housewives (here I’m being deliberate about separating gender from work identity) in comparison to women who worked in professional spheres, and found that women who worked outside the home completed the same amount of home tasks in less time than those who worked in the home. In reference to the number of hours it takes to keep house, she writes: When you look at it this way, the double deception of the feminine mystique becomes quite apparent: 1. The more a woman is deprived of function in society at the level of her own ability, the more her housework, mother-work, wife-work, will expand—and the more she will resist finishing her housework or mother-work, and being without any function at all. (Evidently human nature also abhors a vacuum, even in women.) 2. The time required to do the housework for any given woman varies inversely with the challenge of the other work to which she is committed. Without any outside interests, a woman is virtually forced to devote her every moment to the trivia of keeping house.First Edition of Betty Friedan’s world-changing book The Feminine Mystique. Source: Burnside Rare BooksI’m surprised Thompson didn’t reference Betty Friedan in his article; after all, her book is a famous turning point for the “housewife,” and sparked second-wave feminism by articulating the malaise that many women felt in relation to this limited role in society. Friedan made the same argument as Thompson, and thereby catalyzed women to seek professional fulfillment. I imagine Friedan and Thompson would further agree on another point he makes: That, as Thompson puts it, “a lot of modern overwork is class and status maintenance.” The crux of what Friedan argues is that women in the 1950s and early 1960s had to fulfill the status of what women were supposed to want—a beautiful home, perfect children, a happy husband. A woman’s entire status was wrapped up in the perfection of home, which was defined by the media of the day, magazines. Not to say that the men of the day did not want that status as well; they were just not on the hook for making it happen.Today isn’t so different. Mommy bloggers, celebrity families, and social media perpetuate images of a perfect home life, or even more so, a perfect home-career balance. Thompson tells us that the increase in time-saving technology fuels more focus on status maintenance, and the standards of status continue to rise as we get more intimate glimpses of people’s lives on social media. This balance still often falls on the shoulders of women to maintain.  Even as women take on more professionally, they continue to manage the bulk of unpaid housework, and those that can afford it come to rely on the even more invisible labor of domestic workers.A holiday tweet by comedian Rachel McCartney,  shared with me by fellow WITI writer, Perry Hewitt.We’ve just come through the holidays, peak season for showing off social status, and a time that the American Psychological Association says is more stressful for women. Festive decor, perfect meals, generous gifts for well-groomed children, and family portrait holiday cards are all primarily fueled by women’s labor. So as we start to use the Air Fryers and Alexas that we got under the tree, it’s worthwhile to note that the latest technologies don’t necessarily herald innovation on the homefront. (ASVV)Extinction of the Day:The Chinese paddlefish, one of the world's largest fish, has gone extinct due to “overfishing and a degraded habitat.” (CJN) Quick Links:Texas Monthly on The Art of Racing Pigeons (NRB)What Kevin Kelly is reading (NRB)A primer on the current strife in the romance writer’s community (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Feminine Mystique Edition

Anita here. Unless you’re on the harrowing frontlines as a doctor or delivery person, chances are that you’ve lived your professional, social, and personal life under one roof for the past month or so.Whether that roof sits atop a Drake-like megamansion or a Manhattan studio apartment, we’re all living under the rules of 21st-century quarantine. Don't leave the house except for essential purchases like food or medicine, or in some states, weed. Cover up if you have to go out, donning mask and gloves to protect yourself from the virus that could give you anything from a mild cough to deadly lung failure. Stay inside, sew masks, watch Netflix, teach your kids, and work on maintaining your sanity.As uniquely devastating as this moment feels, we're not the first to experience mass quarantine. The word quarantine itself originated from the 14th century pandemic of the Black Death, an awful bacterial disease known as the bubonic plague that wiped out at least 50 million people across Europe and Asia. The prevailing medical philosophy in the Middle Ages had more to do with bloodletting and humors than bacteria and hygiene, but it was quickly diagnosed that breathing the same “corrupted air” as someone with the plague could be a death sentence. The various city-states that now make up Italy responded with an unprecedented set of public health measures. Venice kept visiting ships offshore for 30 days (a trentino), a period that was later increased to 40 days, or quaranto—the origin of the term “quarantine”. By the 15th century, municipalities in Italy created plague boards that communicated with each other to coordinate public health efforts around diseases, locking down citizens, livestock, and goods to prevent the spread of infection. Since then, quarantines have been a powerful tool to contain epidemics.In 1918, the world was smacked with a very similar pandemic, known as the Spanish flu. The response to that virus was hauntingly familiar—complete with empty streets, closed schools, home-made masks, and an overwhelmed medical system.Noah Y. Kim dug up writings from the 1918 epidemic and quarantine for The Atlantic and wrote:Reading through newspaper articles and diaries written during the 1918 influenza pandemic, I felt an eerie flash of recognition. The dark jokes, anxious gossip, and breathless speculation reminded me of scrolling through Twitter over the past few weeks, watching people wrestle with life under quarantine by memeing through the crisis. Seattle Times Front Page in October 2018, Courtesy Seattle TimesLike today, the quarantine had its critics and procrastinators. Philadelphia defiantly continued with a big public parade in the face of the pandemic and suffered the consequences.  Courtesy New York TimesAlthough economic harm is one of the main criticisms of extended quarantine, the 1918 flu demonstrates that there was a longer-term positive economic impact of quarantining early. According to a study by the Federal Reserve and MIT, cities that were less aggressive saw a “sharp and persistent decline in economic activity,’ whereas those that were engaged in quarantine earlier and more aggressively were able to bounce back more quickly. The Roaring Twenties, right after the Spanish Flu, was an era of great economic expansion.Laura Spinney notes in her 2018 book Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World that the Spanish flu made starkly clear an epidemic’s impact on a national level, and subsequently influenced the rise in nationalized health care in Europe and the systematization of collecting health data.Why is this interesting?In looking back at the history of quarantine, I gain comfort knowing that we are not an anomaly. If we learn from our history, we will grow better from it. But the 1918 flu and quarantine was buried in history by two world wars and a depression, and nearly forgotten—despite killing more people than World War I. I did a quick Google Trends search, and this past month is the first time that searches for the Spanish Flu (red) has surpassed searches for World War I (blue). Even the Black Death, a pandemic from seven hundred years ago, was more searched than the Spanish flu—until now.It’s not hard to understand why we’ve forgotten this historical moment. Overshadowed by the dramas of two world wars, the Spanish flu warrants barely a mention on the Wikipedia American history page. The Smithsonian notes that there’s little literature about the 1918 flu. Wikipedia lists almost 200 World War I movies, whereas my Internet sleuthing only dug up a handful of films about the 1918 flu. An invisible virus doesn’t lend itself to the kind of visual displays of courage that make movies like last year’s 1917 a blockbuster. With little collective historical memory of the Spanish flu, it’s no wonder we experience this moment as unique and unprecedented. It’s as if we have never been through this type of global trauma before. Laura Spinney writes, “The Spanish flu is remembered personally, not collectively. Not as a historical disaster, but as millions of discrete, private tragedies.” Not only was the pandemic overshadowed by war, but the very nature of quarantine and illness is also of isolation, and there were few avenues for people to connect and create an aggregate experience.And so one can’t help but wonder which path our historical memory will take this time. In contrast to 1918, we have countless ways to connect with each other in quarantine and document what we’re going through, and we’re not in the midst of world war. While there’s no denying the radical shifts in technology that allow us to capture this moment, you also don’t have to look back more than a few years, or even months, to see how easily we move on from momentous news cycles. If history teaches us one thing it’s that we aren’t the ones who decide how it will be written a century from now. But if we can properly memorialize the pains of this pandemic—the illness, the isolation, the successes, and the failures—we can be more effective in bringing history to bear on the future. (ASVV)Chart of the Day:A century ago this is how disease charts were drawn, on graph paper. What surprises me about this one is the mortality rate of single women under 45 is so much lower than married women under the age of 45. (ASVV)Courtesy New York TimesQuick Links:Simon Schama with some beautifully written historical counts of living through prior pandemics (ASVV)For another take on functioning in limited spaces, Gimlet Media’s 2018 podcast The Habitat chronicles a group of would-be astronauts simulating life on Mars in a tiny bunker cut off from the rest of the world. (ASVV)McNally interviewed in Vanity Fair (CJN) Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV)Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Quarantine Edition

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI and has a few other WITIs under her belt (Climate Tourism & Utopias). She’s an independent strategy consultant with Frame Strategy, based in LA and New York, and writes her own newsletter, which you can read here.Anita here. In the early 2000s, I lived in Amsterdam, a city with a history of embracing counter-culture and bucking the status quo. While there, I fell in love with squatter culture. In the US this might conjure a vision of down-and-out punks squatting abandoned buildings, like in Penelope Spheeris’s 1983 film Suburbia. But in Amsterdam, it meant something wholly different.The laws were so protective of tenants that if you kept a piece of furniture in a building for a certain amount of time, it was enough to prove occupancy and stay there, rent-free. So, fueled by a philosophy of anarchy, anti-government rule, and pro-communal rule, Amsterdam’s squat movement was born. In uninhabited schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings, squatters built a culture antithetical to what they saw as the capitalist system. Squats offered free or low-cost housing and community for teachers, artists, refugees, and others. There were restaurants that served low-cost meals to everyone from food critics to the homeless. There were film theaters that showed radical documentaries and old movies. There were venues where bands played, DJs spun, and people like me ran literary events. There were radio stations and television studios, and there was even a squatted sauna, which was a clean, cheap, warm escape from the rainy Amsterdam winters. As Amsterdam has become absorbed into the European Union, some of its edge has been sanded away by regulations, with squatting named as a criminal offense in 2010. And as it’s become wealthier, the punk ethic that was the lifeblood of the squat movement has faded.The Snake building in the center of Amsterdam, squatted since 1983, was converted into luxury apartments in 2016. Photo Credit: What’s Up with AmsterdamWhy is this interesting?Many squatters revered the controversial Hakim Bey, an anarchist philosopher/poet, and an early acolyte of Timothy Leary and Sufi Islam. He defines these spaces as temporary autonomous zones, or TAZ: Must we wait until the entire world is freed of political control before even one of us can claim to know freedom? ….The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination).The idea of an autonomous zone has regained attention because of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), otherwise known as Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP). Since early June, protesters have built a community over 6 blocks of Seattle’s central Capitol Hill neighborhood. Police abandoned a station in the midst of Black Lives Matters protests, and protesters converted the station to a community center. Hundreds of protesters have been staying in the zone, with stalls and businesses offering food and aid to protesters. There are medics, film screenings, and bands. There’s even an Eater review. Protesters in Capitol Hill shifted the name from calling the area an Autonomous Zone to calling it the Capitol HIll Organized Protest (CHOP). This shift is an intentional move away from the TAZ concept, which implies an area outside of existing power structures, and towards the concept of protest in order to change the existing power structures. Organizers called out the “block-party” atmosphere as antithetical to their goals as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. And more recently, there have been several shootings in the area, with little detail about what transpired. With violence detracting from the intent of the protest, the zone’s status is uncertain.Entrance to CHAZ, an autonomous zone in Seattle, by CNNWhile CHOP/CHAZ is the most recent example, we’ve seen TAZ-inspired spaces pop up throughout America and the world over. One of the early founders of Burning Man, Kevin Evans, was deeply influenced by Hakim Bey’s TAZ theory to create temporary spaces with communal rule. The Occupy movement created makeshift towns to house, feed, and support protest against Wall Street. Outside the US you have spaces like Exarcheia, the Athens autonomous zone born after the 2008 riots in Greece, and the older and probably most well known Christiania, Copenhagen’s 40+-year-old city-state within a city where European laws don’t apply. Christiania has even gone so far as to experiment with its own currency.The desire for autonomous zones predates Hakim Bey’s anarchist vision, and expands beyond the idea of a stateless world. In the Seattle area alone, Jeva Lange uncovers a history of exercises in autonomy stretching back to the late 1800s. I’ve written before about utopic societies built on the dream of a freer culture that always seems to disintegrate due to internal strife or rule-making.Perhaps the temporary part is intrinsic. Gibran Rivera, an organizer, says it this way: We can only fight for freedom if we’ve had a taste of it. A TAZ generates the experience of liberation. We feel a freedom that is but a temporary state, it is not permanent, but it grounds us in the very future that we are working to create.(ASVV)Podcast of the Day:Planet Money interviews Dr. Lisa Cook, who researched innovation and safety by examining violence towards African Americans in relation to African American patent filings. She discovers that segregation, starting in 1896, and the bombing of Black Wall Street in 1921 have had long-lasting chilling effects on innovation. (ASVV)Quick LinksA British Museum offers postcards of its most famous works - with face masks (ASVV)May the llamas save us from Coronavirus (ASVV)The future of Slack (CJN) Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Autonomous Zone Edition

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI and has a few other WITIs under her belt (Climate Tourism & Utopias). She runs strategy at ad agency McKinney’s Los Angeles market, and writes her own newsletter, which you can read here.Anita here. My parents live in Carderock Springs, a suburb on the outskirts of Bethesda, Maryland. I spent my high school years here, in a woodsy cul-de-sac about 30 minutes from the center of Washington, DC. Our house is one of six models of subtle modernism built in the 1960s: clean lines, large windows, vaulted ceilings, and plenty of skylights. In my teenage years, I never considered it remarkable, but I was wrong—in 2008, long after I left, the neighborhood became a national historical landmark. I dug into the history of the neighborhood to understand why this little suburban enclave warranted such acclaim. Prior to Carderock Springs, the area was a mix of the rich—a preeminent quarry owner aptly named Lilly Stone had her mansion here—and the not-rich—freed slaves set up a neighborhood around a church built on land bought by former slave Sarah Gibson. As Washington DC grew, so did interest in suburban living outside the Beltway. Built between 1962 and 1967, Carderock Springs catered to the burgeoning middle class who sought fresh air and good design. Carderock’s developer, Edmund Bennett, had already built smaller subdivisions and poured all of his learnings into this new, modernist take on suburban living. It was designed to be a “visual community,” embedded in a forested topography. Rather than bulldoze the area for cookie-cutter lots, Bennett built his plan around large trees and natural land formations, and the houses are set at different angles on uniquely shaped lots nestled behind rocks and trees, which gives a sense of personalization as well as wooded privacy. There are no utility cords as all utilities are underground, and there’s no on-street parking, two subtle but impactful ways that the neighborhood maintains its connection to nature.  Why is this interesting?What really struck me was the marketing techniques used to drum up interest in the new neighborhood. Much of Carderock was built based on market research of what the “typical” suburban family desired, mainly outdoor space, privacy, and modernity. Bennett also did his fair share of comparative research, traveling around the US, Mexico, and Europe to explore planned communities.The initial round of homes he built were called “applied research models,'' where he tested new materials and designs, and then opened them to the public to get their feedback, much like a beta test. The staging of the home models was in keeping with the vibe that Bennett wanted; one model was staged with furniture by George Nakashima, who came in to approve the set-up, adding an esteemed modernist brand to the neighborhood. Bennett published a newsletter for the neighborhood; rather than choose a straightforward title, he branded it Esoterica. There’s even a set of brand guidelines, so to speak: a widely shared architectural vision statement with pillars around enhancing the growth of the hardwood forest, respecting the simplicity of the building, and extending the modern tradition.It’s been quite a joy to dig into the history of the home where I spent my teen years, how my Nirvana posters hung on the walls of historic home, and that the wooded trails I took to sneak out to my hyper-local boyfriend’s house were part of a vision for a new way of living. (ASVV)____Partner Post: WITI x BrightlandAs we near the holiday season, may we suggest gifting Brightland? Regular WITI readers will know we have been fans since launch. The brand was founded by Aishwarya Iyer (see our MMD with her here) with a distinctive aesthetic and strong vision to show people the benefits of real, quality olive oil. The brand has rolled out a range of new products, each designed to be front and center in your kitchen and with your cooking. The Essential Capsule is a perfect introduction and a perfect gift. It features Brightland’s core products, the now-classic AWAKE and ALIVE olive oils, as well as PARASOL, a raw champagne vinegar, and RAPTURE, a raw balsamic vinegar, double fermented with California zinfandel. In addition to gifting for your family and loved ones, you can also grab a subscription for yourself. Just like last time, they are kindly offering WITI readers 10% off of the Essential Capsule, with the code WITIESSENTIAL.____Election of the Day:Los Angeles’ KCRW radio station hosts an annual tortilla tournament that gets reported with as much fervor as a general Presidential election. This year’s winner in an uncontested vote was HomeState’s flour tortillas. (ASVV)Quick LinksPalm Springs apparently has the largest collection of modernist homes in America, and it’s being celebrated online at Modernism week in February. (ASVV)Very looking forward to heading home and indulging in Vogue’s Harry Styles cover story. Digital is here. (ASVV)The Middle East envisions post-Covid architecture. (ASVV)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

Why is this interesting? - The Suburbs Edition

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI and has a few other WITIs under her belt (Climate Tourism & Utopias). She writes her own newsletter, which you can read here. -Colin (CJN)Anita here. Some people say Los Angeles has no seasons. After three years here, I beg to differ. In the early summer, marine layers of fog cloud the skies, while in the late summer, the sun burns hot and desert plants dry up and turn inward, preserving their life force for when the cool arrives again—an inverse to plants that die off in the winter cold. From January onwards, different plants burst forth with blooms: magnolias and acacias, succulents with their awkward chunky blossoms, California lilacs, architectural passion fruit flowers, and of course the California state flower, the poppy, creating endless fields of orange in good years. One plant that flowers beautifully but is actually quite beastly is the ice plant. In March and April, it peppers beach areas with white and purple blooms the size of a small human hand. They’re stunning in bloom, and even when the flowers don’t freckle ice plant fields, the plant itself is quite handsome, with bold succulent leaves of about six inches, that grow into lush mats. It was initially introduced to California to prevent erosion, and as a fast-growing ornamental ground cover, and was planted widely in the 1930s by the California Conservation Corps.The ice plant, or Carpobrotus edulis, is native to South Africa, where it lives a natural life cycle in a robust ecosystem including tortoises, antelopes, baboons, and porcupines. In Los Angeles, we’re woefully short of those kinds of predators. And so the ice plant grows unabashed, taking over empty lots and sand dunes, where it chokes out native flora, and thereby starves native fauna. It’s also been found to increase the erosion it was intended to prevent, with shallow root systems and heavy leaves that easily tear up the very dunes it was meant to stabilize. Why is this interesting?According to the United States Geographical Survey, the ice plant is one of 65,000 non-indigenous invasive species that cost the US economy over $100 billion. The introduction of new species to solve a challenge has led to many a horror story, from killer algae to zebra mussels. But the idea of a pre-invasive Eden can also be misleading. According to a piece from the Yale School of the Environment: Simply trying to eradicate all exotic species can be costly... and can even harm native species. Introduced cats were eradicated from Maquarie Island off the coast of Australia, after having driven two of the island’s bird species extinct. But with the cats gone, an introduced population of rabbits exploded, devouring the native plants.Scott Carroll, a conservation biologist at the University of California, Davis, is a proponent of ‘conciliation biology,’ which recognizes that the introduction of a new species already alters the environment and spurs evolution. Any changes that are made to the environment should be less about restoring it to the prior state and more about finding the right equilibrium with the new species—“a managed coexistence of native with nonnative (species).” There may be a lesson here as we learn to live with the coronavirus, or even with new weather patterns induced by climate change. As we calibrate our world to new threats, the idea of a “managed coexistence” feels more realistic than seeking to return to some idyllic world of the past. (ASVV)Movie of the Day:I had totally forgotten that Kermit got into advertising after getting amnesia in the Muppets Take Manhattan. (NRB)Quick Links:The miracle of the commons (NRB)@SubstackTooLong just tweets out word counts for popular Substacks (NRB)Hospitality and positive impact (CJN)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Invasive Species Edition

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI and director of strategy at ad agency McKinney in Los Angeles. She writes her own newsletter, which you can read here.Anita here. One of my favorite parks in Los Angeles is Kenneth Hahn State Park. Compared to its famous cousins Griffith Park and Runyon Canyon, it’s a lesser-known bit of greenery with a Japanese garden and two little lakes packed with fish and birds. On clear days, it has endless views in every direction—deep into the mountains to the east and all the way to the sea in the west. It also has something more surprising for a state park—views of Inglewood Oil Field, the largest contiguous urban oil field in the US.The view of oil drills in the Inglewood Oil Fields from San Diego TribuneFrom several vantage points, you can see hundreds of small pumpjacks nodding lazily against a backdrop of city scape and even the Pacific Ocean. They drape over the hills, extracting around 3 million barrels of oil per year. Their slow movement is hypnotizing and almost picturesque. Dating back to 1924, they’re one of the last vestiges of the industry that fueled Los Angeles’s early growth.We don’t often think of resource extraction as an urban endeavor. Cities have become hotbeds of knowledge work, and in Los Angeles especially, fame and creativity have been its most well-known industry, from the birth of Hollywood to the Instagram stars posing on the beaches to the infamous TikTok houses that now draw starry-eyed youth from all over the world. But before Hollywood’s visionaries and glamor transformed the city, early-1900s Los Angeles was an oil boomtown.This image from 1932 shows a cityscape of drilling right over my current home near Venice Beach, now one of Los Angeles’s most visited beaches and tourist destinations. Source: https://www.westland.net/venicehistory/articles/oil.htm Why is this interesting?The Inglewood Oil Fields have become a symbol of many issues related to oil and natural gas today. While the rest of LA gave itself over to commercial and residential real estate, the place that keeps pumping—with all of its health concerns and environmental concerns. The fields are not only adjacent to a state park, they’re also smack in the middle of a number of popular neighborhoods: Culver City, Baldwin Hills, Ladera Heights, and more. According to the Los Angeles Times, 350,000 Angelenos live within 600 feet of an oil or natural gas well, which is the distance at which people start to be exposed to degraded air. The paper has an interactive map for locals to find if they live in such a danger zone. Residents in areas near urban oil fields have complained about increased risks of cancer, reduced lung function, and asthma.Because of their location, the Inglewood Oil Fields have become a symbol of environmental injustice. An NRDC report from 2014 says that ninety-two percent of the people who live within a mile of oil and gas developments in California are people of color. Many of the neighborhoods near the Inglewood oil field are affluent Black communities, and yet, according to the  Los Angeles Public Health Department, “residents in these predominantly Black communities suffer disproportionately from the effects of disparate standards and lax regulatory controls on polluting industries." Locals have been concerned about the public health and environmental implications of the fields. Just this year the Los Angeles Public Health Department has committed to doing a study on the health impacts. From an environmental perspective, local groups worry about toxic chemicals, methane escape, spoiled aquifers, and increased seismic activity.There’s change on the horizon and this legacy of Los Angeles is on its way out. Los Angeles is in a constant state of flux; today’s Instagram and TikTok stars pose and ham it up where oil drills once stood. Once the supplier of much of America’s oil and gas, LA is now one of the top cities that purchase Teslas. California is looking at drilling buffers, a 2500-ft zone between any drilling and any new oil fields—a regulation that’s in place in more conservative states like Texas and  Louisiana. Culver City, where 10% of the Inglewood oil fields are, has recently decided to wind down drilling and the state has implemented a fracking ban by 2024—exactly 100 years after the first oil prospector tapped into the rivers of black gold in the Inglewood. (ASVV)Energy source of the dayIn one of LA’s more famous parks, you’ll also find an energy source - the Griffith Observatory has a Tesla coil in a cage that’s a joy to visit. Quick Links:Inglewood is not the only place that extracts oil, but it’s the most visible. There are also all kinds of strange buildings in Los Angeles that disguise drilling sites, including shopping malls, golf courses, and synagogues.  (ASVV) New electric vehicle brand Rivian has opened its first experience space in Los Angeles, a few blocks from former oil fields. (ASVV)[Sponsored link: Atlas Bars are GMO-free and keto-friendly with 15 grams of protein and just a gram of sugar. We’ve tried Atlas and they are very good. Use this link (code WITI20) for WITI readers to get 20 percent off. Get started with the sample pack.]WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.The state of global banking. Thus far, banks have escaped the worst of the pandemic’s economic impact—they didn’t witness any abnormal losses, major capital calls, or “white knight” acquisitions, as in the last financial crisis. There were plenty of effects on the financial-services industry, though: the acceleration of digital banking, the rise of remote work, and the growing importance of sustainability were marked trends. Get a read on the landscape and what can make a difference for long-term performance in the latest edition of McKinsey’s Global Banking Annual Review. --Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Urban Oil Fields Edition

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI, director of strategy at ad agency McKinney in Los Angeles, and on the leadership team of Ladies Who Strategize. She writes her own newsletter on marketing and culture, which you can read here.Anita here. I recently visited Charleston, South Carolina, one of those American cities that wears its history on its sleeve. Everything from the food to the architecture bears the stamp of a storied past. Built in the 1600s by loyalists to King Charles and populated by British colonizers coming up from the Caribbean, Charleston’s city center is practically a museum of residential housing styles with influences from everywhere. One of the more remarkable features of local architecture is a house called the Charleston single: a style that originated in the 1700s and was designed specifically for the South’s brutally humid weather.Why is this interesting? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.As opposed to most homes, which are built parallel to the street, Charleston singles sit perpendicular. The side of the house faces the road, positioned below a two-story porch that Charlestonians call piazzas. The porches shade the house’s traditional front door and windows from the hot sun, and always face the south and the west to capture the breezes coming off the shores of the little peninsula. Some blocks with rows of these houses look gap-toothed, with the piazzas all lined up and facing the same direction. Others have piazzas facing large gated gardens full of shade trees and cooling greenery. A curious observer peeking through the gates might spot fountains or swimming pools in lush semi-tropical gardens or little groves of South Carolina’s signature palmettos.A series of Charleston singles, where the side of the house hosts the main entrance shaded by a patio area.If you were to have a friend at one of these homes, you shouldn’t pay a visit unless the door facing the street is open, inviting you in. Called the hospitality or privacy door, this sits at the juncture of the piazza and the rest of the world. Our colorful tour guide claimed that 18th-century dwellers, who in polite society dressed in wool suits and hoop skirts, would undress and sit on the piazzas in their skivvies, catching the cool air with the privacy door closed, and only open it to visitors when they were decent. The hospitality door facing the street, and the piazzas on the side of a Charleston single at the delightful Delaney Oyster Bar. Why is this interesting?All of these architectural details are designed to mitigate the inescapably sticky Southern weather. Before air conditioning units and rotating fans, Charleston’s early architects used breeze direction, shade, and privacy to offer residents relief from the heat.As we settle into a life with more extreme and unexpected turns of weather, architects are rethinking how buildings can adapt to these shifts. From Rethinking the Future:With an approach from a genuinely sustainable perspective to create buildings that respond directly to their unique place, the process begins with climate data rather than architectural sketches. By addressing the questions such as “Determining the sun’s position in the sky at a given time and season?”, “How much rain falls on the site each season?” and “What effect will the wind have on the building keeping in mind the occupant’s comfort?” the building should be adaptive to changing environmental conditions to meet its functional requirement and to provide comfort. In many ways, we’re coming full circle. Before our reliance on technology to heat and cool our homes, builders were much more cognizant of designing for the environment in which the home existed. Maybe we can borrow concepts of the past and build spaces that make better use of their surroundings rather than ones that are sealed off from the world in which they live. (ASVV)Quick Links:First Street is a property risk assessment tool for heat, flood and other pending environmental doom (ASVV)Lumpers vs Splitters (NRB)Honeybees let out a ‘whoop’ when they bump into each other (NRB)—WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Author Talks: Don’t skip the ‘soft stuff’. No more Ping-Pong breaks or office happy hours? No matter. Melissa Daimler shares how workplace culture can still thrive without an office. Read here.—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).Why is this interesting? is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Charleston Singles Edition

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI and has a few other WITIs under her belt (Climate Tourism & Utopias). She’s a proud Dutch citizen who runs strategy at ad agency McKinney’s Los Angeles market, and writes her own newsletter, which you can read here.Anita here. Winters in the Netherlands are typically mild. There’s more rain than snow, and it can get quite dreary. But every once in a while, when temperatures drop low enough for long enough, there’s an event that gets the whole nation onto their feet: the Elfstedentocht. This endless word means “eleven city tour,” and is a 120-mile long ice skating race along the river and canal system that connects eleven lowland historic hamlets in the northern province of Friesland. In order for the Elfstedentocht to occur, there must be a cold spell that’s powerful enough to freeze ice at least 6 inches deep; this is thick enough to support thousands of adults on speed skates for hours on end. Along the tour route, there are local icemasters that ceremoniously bore into the ice to measure its thickness. Once deemed safe, the Royal Elfstedentocht Association announces the tour and within 48 hours, tens of thousands sign up to participate. Similar to marathons and other endurance events, most are eager amateurs—along with about 300 are professionals looking for glory. Locals, families, and press crowd the bridges and sidelines to cheer on the skaters with music, flags, and signs.The first tour happened in 1909, and in the last 123 years, weather conditions have only been freezing enough to hold the tour 15 times. As the temperature drops in the Netherlands “elfstedentochtkoorts,” or Eleven City Tour fever, heats up, with speculation and rumor of whether this will be the year. More often than not it doesn’t. The most recent tour was 1997. WITI Classifieds:We are experimenting with running some weekly classifieds in WITI. If you’re interested in running an ad, you can purchase one through this form. If you buy this week, we’ll throw an extra week in for free on any ad. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line.Why is your family interesting? With Storyworth, record their stories one weekly email at a time, and gift them a beautiful printed book. Get $10 off Storyworth.Exhibit B. Books: true crime told and sold Shop the 12 Days Of ExMas sale nowMy father participated in the tour of 1963, and recalls starting in the dark in Friesland’s capital city of Leeuwarden, scrambling on the ice with crowds of keen participants on the narrow canals, and warming up at stands set up along the route serving hot anise-seed milk. The legendary race haunts the memories of every Dutch person. People are always ready; we grow up ice-skating, hitting canals, rivers and lakes as soon as it’s possible. Speedskating is our national sport. To participate in an Elfstedentocht is a generational honor.Why Is This Interesting? It’s now been 25 years since the last race, and some speculate that 1997 was the last year of the Elfstedentocht. To put it in context, 1997 is the year the Millennium Development goals were formed, aiming towards poverty reduction, equality, and sustainability. It was a time we talked about prevention of climate change rather than living with it. In spite of recent headlines about ice cold weather, on average temperatures are rising, with less of the long cold snaps that are needed to get 6 inches of ice. Source: https://dutchreview.com/culture/society/why-the-netherlands-will-never-have-an-elfstedentocht-eleven-cities-tour-again/2012 looked promising with a ten-day freezing streak, but after months of hype and discussion between the association, the national government, and meteorologists, it was deemed unsafe. Although the tours were always few and far between, no one considered that 1997 might be the last year. With a European energy crisis in full effect this year, a mild winter will be welcomed in the Netherlands and across Europe, and this may not be the year to pray for the extra days of cold. But the idea of a future without this epic bit of cultural heritage is a tough pill to swallow. (ASVV).Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email from Noah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing (it’s free!).

The Elfstedentocht Edition

Anita Schillhorn van Veen (ASVV) is a friend of WITI and has a few other WITIs under her belt (Climate Tourism & Utopias). She’s a proud Dutch citizen who runs strategy at ad agency McKinney’s Los Angeles market, and writes her own newsletter, which you can read here.Anita here. This is the city where I first fell in love with sherry. I once considered sherry as a drink for old aunties, a thick syrup poured from delicate crystal carafes after dinner. But the Jerez area of Spain, and especially El Puerto De Santa Maria, taught me about the wide array of sherries, from the bracing pale fino that’s served ice cold in small glasses in the afternoon, to the oxidized amontillados and olorossos that turn nutty and caramelly, almost umami, in their flavors, to the rarer palo cortado, an accident turned into a delicacy. The city is ancient, name-checked in the Odyssey as Menesthi, adopted by the Moors as Alicante, and finally taken over by the Catholics and given its baptismally long name of El Puerto De Santa Maria, El Puerto for short. Besides being strewn with legend, it lives on its sherry heritage. The town is covered in fat palm trees and low yellow buildings dating to the 1600s, and has beautiful Mediterranean beaches, bull fights, and other markers of Southern Spain. Sherry is its beating heart. The sherry houses are called Bodegas, and El Puerto is peppered with them. I visited Bodega Gutierrez Colosía, where sherry barrels were stacked and housed in dark, damp and spacious arched room that smelled faintly of yeast and vanilla. We learned about the solera system, a method of distillation built on gravity, barrels and the local yeast that covers the distilled liquid with flor, the magical carpet that protects it from oxygen. Heady with knowledge and sherry, I went to the Bodega Osborn after, to enjoy wisps of jamon iberico accompanied by Osborn’s fino, the ultimate combination of southern SpainAir is like Dropbox if Dropbox didn't suck. They made this film about creative directors, and it's unhinged:Air will save you time and endless frustration.Try Air (for free!)Image viaBut that’s not what drew me to El Puerto de Santa Maria in the first place. That’s Aponiente, The Menu-esque restaurant that sits in a canal that opens to the sea. It’s rife with the flourishes of Michelin stars—meticulous service, unique dishes, a visit from the chef to your table. But what makes this restaurant really special is the vision of chef Ángel León. Dedicated to the sea and all that it gives, a marine biologist comes to your table and discusses the marine environment for some of the dishes. A little detour takes you from your table to a dark room where you are poured a cocktail with aqua fluorescence from algae; not only a glow-in-the-dark party trick, there’s a partnership with a medical school to see how food-safe acqua fluorescence can be used in medical procedures. Now León is seeking to grow edible grains from seagrass, not only to augment his menu but also to protect and create value around an important and often overlooked part of the marine ecosystem. What I love about El Puerto de Santa Maria is that it houses history, myth and innovation without giving in to the global tourism trade that often turns the past or the future into cheap facsimiles of itself. It’s a reminder that a city doesn’t have to be world famous to offer a world of experience. (ASVV) —Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Anita (ASVV)—Why is this interesting? is a daily email fromNoah Brier & Colin Nagy (and friends!) about interesting things. If you’ve enjoyed this edition, please consider forwarding it to a friend. If you’re reading it for the first time, consider subscribing.