Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan (RS) is an author, olive oil maker, and internet tinkerer. I could point to any number of amazing pieces he’s written around the internet, but there are two that stick out most for their effect on me personally: Stock and flow from his Snarkmarket days laid out a simple framework for thinking about the different types of content on the web and Writing with the machine encouraged me to spend some time playing with neural networks. Thanks Robin! - Noah (NRB) Tell us about yourself.I'm Robin Sloan, a fiction writer who also spends a lot of time—maybe too much—fashioning odd-shaped internet projects. I wrote the novels Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and, more recently, Sourdough.Describe your media diet. I suspect that a large portion of it is familiar to WITI readers—Twitter, the Washington Post, the Economist, etc.—so I'll focus on the parts that might be different.I subscribe to a LOT of email newsletters. They all flow to a special email address, which lets me filter them into a folder in Gmail. Some insta-reads are: The Prepared, about manufacturing and supply chains in the 21st century; Anne Trubek's Notes from a Small Press, possibly the world's best chronicle of the ongoing operations of a small media business; Dan Cohen's Humane Ingenuity, on technology that "helps rather than hurts human understanding"; Craig Mod's roving Roden; Friend of WITI Edith Zimmerman's winning Drawing Links; and Evangeline Garreau's wonderful May I Recommend, which she sends **using an email platform she coded herself**. Next level.But! And! I do read things not delivered via email, too. So, I'll add that, of all the newspapers I read or skim, it is the FT's coverage of the pandemic that I've found most illuminating and essential. This has been a legitimate surprise to me! And it's what finally tipped me over the edge, after all these years; I'm now a paying subscriber.Finally: without planning to, I have ended up subscribing to… quite a lot… of video streaming services. Besides the predictable ones, there's Crunchyroll for animation and the Criterion Channel for schmancy stuff. But my favorite is Mubi. Their model is elegant: every day, a new movie is added to the rotation, reliably indie and/or arty and/or obscure. The new movie pushes all the others down the line, and after a month, it disappears off the bottom, no longer available. I suspect that ephemerality is what makes Mubi possible—they're paying less for these fleeting licenses—and I'm inspired by both the creativity of their business model AND the quality of their selections.What’s the last great book you read?I recently reread Sea of Poppies, a novel by Amitav Ghosh that is basically… perfect? What I mean is, it does what a novel is supposed to do. It's rich, rollicking, captivating, morally serious; a bit magical, a bit spooky; oh, and, this book palpably LOVES words—the tangle & surprise of languages intermingled. The book includes a glossary at the back. It's wonderful. The events of the novel unfold in the run-up to the First Opium War, and I'm convinced that everything about our modern world—everything—is prefigured on these pages.What are you reading now?Agents of Empire by Noel Malcolm, which has a dizzying subtitle: Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits, and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World. This is serious academic history, so it's slow going in parts, but as a picture of the time and place—a Europe of city-states and princedoms, the Ottoman Empire the most powerful force on the planet—I have found it totally revelatory and thrilling. I think it would appeal to many readers of WITI.What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?I don't read too many periodicals in print; when I do, I am generally a front-to-back, straight-through reader, which I realize is a little noob-ish.Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?Omar Rizwan is a terrific, subtle, funny thinker on the history and culture of computing; he uses Twitter better—more humanely—than anyone I've ever encountered. If I had to whittle my following list down to four or five people, Omar would be one of them.The artist Elisabeth Nicula's deep relationship with her backyard birds is one of the very best storylines on the entire internet, and her recent essay about one of those birds (whose name is Frank) is wonderful.What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? Oh, easy: BoopSnoop, the app I made to communicate with my family :)Plane or train?TRAIN, FOREVER AND EVERWhat is one place everyone should visit? Well, thinking about trains makes me think about Fresno, which is usually where I'm headed when I'm on a train. I don't know if EVERYONE should visit California's San Joaquin Valley… but I think residents of California probably should. It's alternatingly bleak and beautiful, webbed with infrastructure, strangely familiar and deeply weird at the same time. An interesting, important region.Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into. Lately I've been reading a lot of fairy tales, and thinking about their construction—that inimitable voice. In the introduction to his recent translation of Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, the great Philip Pullman quotes the poet James Merrill:I yearned for the kind of unseasoned telling foundIn legends, fairy tales, a tone licked cleanOver the centuries by mild old tongues,Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.I've found myself thinking about that line a lot, and wondering if that voice is even available to 21st-century writers. "Serene, anonymous." Wonderful.Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Robin (RS)—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 Monday Media Diet with Robin Sloan

Robin Sloan (RS) is an author, olive oil maker, and internet tinkerer. I could point to any number of amazing pieces he’s written around the internet, but there are two that stick out most for their effect on me personally: Stock and flow from his Snarkmarket days laid out a simple framework for thinking about the different types of content on the web and Writing with the machine encouraged me to spend some time playing with neural networks. He wrote up his Monday Media Diet in May. - Noah (NRB) Robin here. In Anita Schillhorn van Veen’s terrific dispatch on autonomous zones and Amsterdam’s tradition of squatting, she wrote:Perhaps the temporary part is intrinsic.This reminded me of a project I saw in Amsterdam a couple of years ago—one that has never left my mind.While I was visiting, Ben Cerveny invited my friends and I on a boat ride. (Ben has long served as a vital bridge between Amsterdam and the Bay Area.) We went zipping through the canals in his little boat, out of the city’s scenic inner rings and into the funkier reaches of Amsterdam North, to arrive finally at a place that felt like Neverland.This was De Ceuvel, a ramshackle creative hub built on a small polluted island. The deal was this: the island was destined for development—condos, probably—but before that could happen, the soil had to be cleaned, a process that would be undertaken by phyto-remediating grass and last about a decade. For that period, the island would be handed over to a creative organization and supported with a substantial subsidy. The group behind De Ceuvel won the opportunity and was granted a ten-year lease. This was in 2012.Today, a beautiful boardwalk winds through the tall grass, linking a collection of studios and offices built from the shells of old houseboats.Tell me this doesn't sound dreamy:The houseboats were acquired for (almost) nothing as it was cheaper for former houseboat residents to give us their boat than it was to pay for their removal. We were even offered more boats than we needed! After choosing the most unique boats, the future tenants renovated them themselves on the NDSM-wharf. Here, the existing features were strengthened and expanded. Many tenants chose to raise their roofs or lower their floors. Many of the walls were stripped. After the coarse renovations, the boats were lifted onto De Ceuvel one-by-one with an enormous crane.The centerpiece is Cafe De Ceuvel, a beautiful bar and restaurant with sprawling outdoor seating. In classic Amsterdam style, it is most easily reached by boat and by bicycle.I reached De Ceuvel by boat, of course, and, as I was leaping to the dock, my bicycle key slipped out of my pocket. So, it was there, in the (only partially?) polluted water, that I took my first dip in the canals of Amsterdam, holding my breath and feeling around on the bottom. I found my lost key, then dried out in Neverland.Why is this interesting?The policy supporting De Ceuvel is a direct evolution of—almost homage to—the rich culture of squatting described by Anita Schillhorn van Veen in last week’s WITI.The City of Amsterdam’s Bureau Broedplaatsen (“breeding grounds”) was formed in 2000 to invest in (this is a delicious phrase) “subcultural infrastructure.” The bureau now offers a step-by-step plan to help people organize a group like the one that built De Ceuvel. There are about 60 of them in Amsterdam today.It would be easy to criticize the Bureau Broedplaatsen as a kind of neoliberal co-option of the energy behind squatting—a way of lacquering properties with the sheen of art and innovation before offering them up to the machine of development. And there’s probably something to that criticism!But subsidized, time-limited creative "occupations" like these do not preclude the possibility of "real" squatting. Here’s the Bureau Broedplaatsen’s directory of unsubsidized, long-term vrijplaatsen: “free places.”The ticking clock feels, to me, not restrictive but generative. Ten years is a long time! Maybe it’s even the RIGHT amount of time. There’s something liberating about projects with an expiration date. When 2022 rolls around, the minds that built De Ceuvel won't expire along with it. No, they’ll still be circulating in Amsterdam. Maybe they’ll find a new island and start again, putting to work everything they've learned.It’s a bit boring to enthuse endlessly about how Amsterdam is doing it right, but… damn! Amsterdam is doing it right! Here in the Bay Area, creative possibility feels deeply attenuated by the raw cost of space; I think that’s true in many big cities around the U.S. A network of subsidized “breeding grounds” set up in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, with studios and offices available for just a couple hundred dollars a month… it would be transformative.You can still build your gleaming condos, your luxe biotech office; just wait ten years. Give the artists some time to dream, some room to breathe. (RS)River of the Day:Speaking of responses to WITI’s, Allison Keiley was kind enough to point us to the amazing Meander project from Robert Hodgin. As Robert explains on his site, “My all-time favorite map-based data visualization was created in 1944. Harold Fisk, working with the US Army Corp. of Engineers, mapped the length of the Mississippi River. What sets his visualization apart from others is that he maps the river through time, and manages to do so in a way that is both beautiful and surprisingly effective. I want to pay homage to his series of maps by creating my own system for procedurally generating maps of meandering rivers.” (NRB)Quick Links:Read everything Nikole Hannah-Jones writes. Her latest from this weekend’s NYT Magazine on reparations is excellent. (NRB)Latest from Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal: A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic (NRB)Ben Westhoff on the birth of the Beastie Boys (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Robin (RS)—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 Breeding Grounds Edition

Robin Sloan (RS) is a novelist, olive oil maker, and internet tinkerer. He contributed his Monday Media Diet in May and in June wrote a WITI that, like this one, was a "reply" to a previous edition. - Noah (NRB) Robin here. Colin's WITI on mushroom leather mentioned its maker, Bolt Threads, which is familiar to me; I walk past its office nearly every day on my walk to the post office in Emeryville, California, a skinny town mashed between Oakland and Berkeley, bellied up to the bay.Like Colin, I've been following Bolt Threads with interest. Last year I emailed them, asking if they offered samples of their mushroom leather; I'd made my own travel bag from Dyneema (a DIY rip-off of this beauty from Outlier) and figured some mushroom details would make it even more futuristic. The company's reply was friendly but firm: no, all of our mycelium is for Adidas.Here's a sampling of what else I see walking in this compact neighborhood:Old houses, new condosCafes, small breweries, the East Bay's finest new sushi shopthe headquarters of the intrepid Center for Investigative ReportingSo far, so good; this could be a lively sliver of any city in America. Ah, but then I see:INNA Jam, the celebrated jam kitchenGasket Specialties, Inc., a cavernous factoryRoller Press, a printer specializing in blank notebooks, wonderfulClif Bar, huge, with its built-in daycare and garden, a bit utopianTcho Chocolate, venting sweet fumes onto the sidewalkThe San Francisco Suspender Factory, where you can watch the workers on their suspender-making machines through tall glass windowsEdward Köehn, Co., a precision machine shopCoulter Forge… an actual forgeA long line of biotech labs, including Finless Food, where they are working on cell-cultured fish (and it's perhaps not a coincidence that this is just a couple of blocks from Bolt Threads)Many more pleasantly cryptic facilities with names like "New Logic Research"Of course, there is also, at the start and end of my post office loop, the bright yellow shipping container that serves as Fat Gold's logistics hub. Both of our neighbors are houses—just regular houses—but across the street, it's a sprawling, worker-owned solar panel installation concern.There's no question that the neighborhood's beating heart is the Geo. M. Martin Company, which occupies several large brick buildings on Emeryville's northern edge. Martin is one of those unglamorous but very successful intermediate manufacturers: it designs, assembles, and installs the complicated, expensive machines that other companies use to produce… wait for it… corrugated cardboard boxes.Geo. M. Martin operates a small fleet of factory carts, like miniature flatbed trucks with grippy smooth wheels; every day, they shuttle between those buildings, zipping across the road or down the sidewalk. You'll be biking along the greenway—of course there's a greenway—and ahead you'll hear a polite toot-toot and spot one of the carts, yellow or orange, trundling through. Bicycle riders, stroller pushers, dog walkers, factory workers—we all share the space.There is, additionally, an old-fashioned steam whistle that blows at 7:30, 10:30, and 3:30; its hollow, appealing note is audible across the neighborhood.Why is this interesting?More places used to look and feel like this. A hundred years ago, every American city had manufacturing mixed in; today, nearly all of it is either relocated or gone. I'm grateful that the vicissitudes of history marbled these activities together here in my neighborhood, and even more grateful that history failed to separate them out again.It isn't by chance. Emeryville's industrial zone followed the direction set by the 1993 plan for West Berkeley, its neighbor to the north, aimed at preserving the area's manufacturing base—a counterbalance, inscribed in policy, to the commercial gravity of services and retail.I've lived in other neighborhoods that were pleasantly jumbled, but never with quite so many neighbors who were making things in a serious way. I am here to report to you: it's fantastic! A layer of tangible energy; a set of unique resources. On a walk to the post office, I stopped in at Gasket Specialties to inquire about some custom seals for our olive oil drums. We got them, and they work great.The realtors have tried to dub this nexus NOBE, for North Oakland-Berkeley-Emeryville, but it hasn't caught on. People don't really call it anything. I think the neighborhood pizza spot, just around the corner from the Geo. M. Martin buildings, suggests the best alternative. It is called Rotten City Pizza, for the famous (possibly apocryphal) phrase from Earl Warren, who during Prohibition might have dubbed Emeryville "the rottenest city on the Pacific Coast."I like the name, but not because it's accurate, of course; just the opposite. Last summer, in a two-week serial story published in Bay Area newspapers, I fictionalized Emeryville lightly:Annabel Scheme kept an office in Rotten City. The locals love to call it that, insisting endlessly on their neighborhood’s sinister character; in fact, it’s utterly sweet, a mix of old houses and new condos, espresso bars and metalworking shops, all of it softened by trees: plum and palm and ginkgo.I'm writing this at my dining table, and outside the nearest window, across the back alley, there's a small warehouse. Every morning they open the big roll-up door and begin to pull shipments out on pallets, and the chirp of the forklift mingles with the chirp of the birds. I love it here. (RS)Quick Links:Mark Bowden on the hard yards of American Special Operations (CJN)When should you consider yourself fully vaccinated? (CJN) Times reporting on US/China policy (CJN)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Robin (RS)—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 Manufacturing Edition

Robin Sloan (RS) is an author, olive oil maker, and internet tinkerer. I could point to any number of amazing pieces he’s written around the internet, but there are two that stick out most for their effect on me personally: Stock and flow from his Snarkmarket days laid out a simple framework for thinking about the different types of content on the web and Writing with the machine encouraged me to spend some time playing with neural networks. Thanks Robin! - Noah (NRB) Robin here. I loved Noah's WITI on scenius; it's an idea I believe in, one that's been important to me. Reading about it, and Brian Eno, reminded me of a media artifact I discovered a couple of years ago—one I still think about often.Back in 2019, I was mailing out a lot of zines, each in a batch of about 2,000. This required that I apply a wafer seal and a shipping label to each one; it took basically an entire day, peeling & sticking, peeling & sticking.Preparing one of the zines on a rainy morning in my little media lab (it's in the neighborhood described in this WITI) I decided to listen to an old radio program I'd bookmarked at some point. It was an interview in 1980 of Brian Eno by radio host Charles Amirkhanian for his show Ode to Gravity on the Berkeley station KPFA, now preserved on the Internet Archive.The interview ran for about two hours, and I loved it, but there were still more labels to stick—a LOT more—so I went scrounging for related material.Clicking around in the Internet Archive, I found a recording of KPFA's broadcast event in 1988 called "Brian Eno Day": a tour of Eno's catalog at that time, playbacks of old appearances (including the one from 1980), fresh interviews for the occasion—Eno was there in the studio, live, all day—and calls from Bay Area listeners.It was twelve hours of audio!Why is this interesting?I didn't listen to the whole twelve hours, of course, but I did play several of the archived blocks all the way through, and something about the liveness of the broadcast, the looseness and practicality of it—complete with pleas to donate!—was totally transporting. My main workspace is windowless, except for a skylight; it was a rainy day; I was applying shipping labels to paper zines: there was nothing in my little bubble of experience to insist I *wasn't* actually in the year 1988.It honestly felt like I had traveled back in time. The fact that Eno and the KPFA hosts and all the callers were referencing cities and streets just a few miles away from where I was sitting was part of it, of course; I'm not sure I would have had the same impression if I'd been listening in Detroit.The callers were exemplars of eternal Bay Area types: cerebral, mystical, pretentious, self-regarding, a bit "too much" all around… and, as an aside, they really did speak a little differently back in 1988: listening across the decades helped me hear it.Their voices were ghostly in my little lab.The final hour of the program, in which everyone behind the microphones was palpably tired and overheated and loopy, with the callers playing along, disintegrating into silliness, was for me the highlight—just totally entertaining and alive.Finally, Eno declares that, for the remainder of the broadcast, all of his statements will be lies.This odd recording was one of the most memorable things I've ever listened to, mostly because it was such a surprise. Three cheers for Ode to Gravity, KPFA, the Internet Archive, and rainy days.Idea of the Day:Hadn’t run into the idea of Lizardman’s Constant before yesterday. It’s great. (NRB)Quite Interesting @qikipediaLizardman’s Constant is an idea proposed by Scott Alexander that each poll always has about 4% weird answers. In one poll, 4% of Americans said that reptilian people do control our world and, in another 4% answered ‘Yes’ to the question ‘Have you ever been decapitated?’1:00 PM ∙ Apr 15, 20201,658Likes350RetweetsQuick Links: Inside an abandoned airport terminal where everything still works (CJN)Dead startup toys (CJN)Best US airlines of 2021 (CJN)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Robin (RS)—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 Eno Day Edition

Robin Sloan (RS) is an author, olive oil maker, and internet tinkerer. I could point to any number of amazing pieces he’s written around the internet, but there are two that stick out most for their effect on me personally: Stock and flow from his Snarkmarket days laid out a simple framework for thinking about the different types of content on the web and Writing with the machine encouraged me to spend some time playing with neural networks. Thanks Robin! - Noah (NRB) Robin here. The other day, I was listening to Spotify’s recommendations, after the platform’s algorithmic radio station had picked up where my short playlist left off. An interesting track came on; its whompy brass reminded me faintly of Too Many Zooz.Nice sound, I thought. I wonder what else this artist has produced … The answer was: virtually nothing. “Danni Richardson” appeared to be one of those artists with just a handful of tracks available on Spotify, of which this one, titled Romilda Gebbia, was by far the standout hit, with 91,000 plays.I don’t mind these one-hit wonders at all. For years, the artist M. T. Hadley offered just two perfect songs on Spotify. He seemed to ask: “Aren’t these enough?” They absolutely were.Oh, well, I thought. Back to the algorithmic radio station.Except: the next track was the same. I don’t mean that it was Romilda Gebbia again. This one was nominally different: Veneranda Caputa, by Brett Byrne. But its core was unmistakable, barely hidden beneath the veneer of different timings and different timbres.Both tracks a mere 45 seconds long , I should add— more vibes than songs.That’s very weird, I thought, still unaware of the spectral zone I was entering.Because the next track was the same. And the next! AND THE NEXT!I’ve collected these tracks in a playlist so you can listen for yourself, and hear the strange repetition. There are far more versions than the ten I’ve pinned here — definitely dozens, possibly hundreds — and Spotify’s algorithm will obediently deliver them to you in the Recommended section, down below the playlist.In all of them, you can detect the underlying composition, its essential elements: call that Romilda Prime.Why is this interesting?This discovery is interesting because it offers a glimpse of something otherwise unseeable, misted across the vastness of a digital platform. A lot of things in 21st-century media are like this.There are plenty of fascinating questions to ponder, about the productions and economics and intent of these variations, but/and I find myself returning to the way I found them: the spectacle of Spotify’s algorithm plunging into an absolute rut.I’ve never seen the recommendations settle so quickly into such a deep groove; once the algorithm got the taste of Romilda Prime in its mouth, there was no getting it out. Is that a matter of chance? Maybe our mystery producer has spun this wheel many times, and it’s only with Romilda Prime that they hit the jackpot. They found a sound that is perfectly seductive, not to humans, necessarily, but to the one listener who counts most: the algorithm.Like a lot of things in 21st-century media, I both love this and hate it.I love it, because it’s so strange, so dizzying, and — credit where due–because our mystery producer is truly going with the grain of the medium, in a way that no one merely “making albums” does, at all. What could be more 21st century, more “liquid modernity”, than releasing your music as a haze of variations into the swirling currents of the algorithm?I hate it, because of course it troubles every intuition I have about what it means to be an artist — the very idea of authorship! There’s a cynicism to the specific execution here, too. I can easily imagine another version of this project that uses interesting track titles and generative album art, so that groping around for the hidden “prime” might feel more like piecing together a puzzle, less like leafing through junk mail. (RS)List of the Day: In a way, this is simply the musical version of a phenomenon that’s common across the food delivery services. Here’s a picture snapped in my neighborhood:Quick Links: My bandmate Jesse Solomon Clark and I are trying to go with the grain of the 21st century in a different way, connecting my AI tinkering to his compositional skill. (RS)A few years ago I wrote a bit about Spotify and genre. (NRB)Errol Morris on Nathan Fielder and The Rehearsal (NRB)—WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.How and where to work next. Selling, general, and administrative functions are integral to your organization’s success. What’s the best place for those people to work? Read here to see how the future of work will take shape. —Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Robin (RS) —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 Spotify Weirdness Edition

Robin Sloan (RS) is an author, olive oil maker, and internet tinkerer. He recently wrote about Spotify Weirdness and we’re exciting to have him back again this week. - Noah (NRB)Robin here. I missed Scott Stedman's Murder Mystery Edition the first time it was circulated, so I was glad to read it on Thursday. I enjoyed Scott's taxonomy of forms at the newsletter's conclusion, but it was missing one—the one that I happen to know well.I only learned about the rules of classic detective fiction in a roundabout way: through my appreciation of the Japanese genre called shin honkaku, or "new orthodox."Share Why is this interesting?It's a genre that's both new and old: "new" because it's separated from the origins of detective fiction by a century; "old" because its flourishing is now decades in the past. Pillars of the genre like The Decagon House Murders and The 8 Mansion Murders were published in 1987 and 1989, respectively. For me, this timing lends the work an appealing atemporality.Of course, it helps that they are utterly abstract. This is the nature of shin honkaku, whose writers began with the rules of orthodox detective fiction (enumerated in Scott's edition) and pushed them to their utter extremes.The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji is a representative example. In the book's introduction, Japanese mystery writer Shimada Shoji writes:As a result, [Ayatsuji’s] characters act almost like robots, their thoughts depicted only minimally through repetitive phrases. The narration shows no interest in sophisticated writing or a sense of art and is focused solely on telling the story. To readers who were used to American and British detective fiction, The Decagon House Murders was a shock. It was as if they were looking at the raw building plans of a novel.If that doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement: you haven't read any shin honkaku yet.Why is this interesting?All I can report is that I have been entranced by this genre. I generally believe modern fiction—including its televisual variants—has become too uniformly "psychoanalytic." While there's a place for great interior stories, not EVERY novel and TV show ought to anchor its action in psychology; in personal history; in "character." But it has become almost obligatory. The skeleton key that unlocks a modern story is never found in a vault or an envelope; rather, it is always waiting in the fissures of a character's mind. Psychodrama as payoff.Shin honkaku formed in reaction to this triumph of realism—psychological and social—in mystery writing around the world. Nobody's complaining about realistic mysteries, of course. That's the evolution that gave us noir, and everything that followed. We love that stuff!But nothing in art is inevitable or necessary, and realism is not the only evolutionary step available to detective fiction. The writers of the shin honkaku genre sat down to write old-fashioned detective stories; what they produced, paradoxically, was wildly experimental.These days—and by "these days," I mean the last 70 years or so—so much storytelling in every medium runs "hot." Sometimes, I like a cooler story; sometimes even ice cold; and they don't come any colder than shin honkaku. These novels are schematics that speak; math problems that dance; puzzles presented raw—and they are as captivating, even hypnotic, as anything you've ever read.Detective fiction has many rules, but fiction in general has only one: you can do anything, as long as you pull it off. (RS)Quick Links:How Far Can a Cat Fall and Survive? (NRB)History of The Marcels, or how a Saber Watchdog is born (NRB)Game Changers: How Videogames Trained a Generation of Athletes (NRB)—WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Freelance, side hustles, and gigs: Independent work is booming, the American Opportunity Survey shows. For these workers and society, the upsides and drawbacks are all part of the gig. Don’t miss this new report.—Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & Robin (RS)—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!).Subscribe now