W. David Marx

W. David Marx (WDM) is a pal and the Tokyo-based author of one of my favorite books: Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. It is, on its surface, a dissection of how Ivy League style took Tokyo by storm and shows how certain obsessive tastemakers, with an eye for both style and detail, shaped modern Japanese culture. It also serves as a thoughtful study in on the hidden currents behind how trends happen. (CJN) W. David Marx here. The Internet puts it very succinctly: “All dogs are good boys.” Dogs have been with us for a few-dozen millennia, and they’ve managed to stay useful no matter the stage of civilization: barking at intruders, fighting bears, retrieving sticks, winning likes for their owners on Instagram.In this great era of scientific progress, we’ve of course dug into the canine DNA to explain why “doggos” are such great “frens.” But whatever evolutionary biology can teach us about why dogs like us, we also need to ask: Why do we like them? The truth is that our attitudes towards dogs have changed drastically over the last two hundred years, as documented in Michael Worboys, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton’s fascinating 2018 academic history of dog breeds, The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain. In the United Kingdom at the beginning of the 19th century, a “good” dog was an effective companion in hunting, the kind who would run off and retrieve dead animals and not recoil from the sound of a shotgun blast. In other words, good dogs were functional. Then started high-class “dog shows,” which required standardized criteria for judging one dog to be superior to others. Here began the formal concept of “dog breed,” but more importantly, “conformation” — how closely an individual dog conforms to the right shape, size, and details of each breed. There used to be loose categories of dogs, such as “retrievers” and “setters,” but as the 19th century progressed, these became capital-letter breeds almost like commercial brands: Golden Retrievers, Irish Setters, etc. This process also required saying goodbye to aberrant varieties of dogs that didn’t meet the new human-invented standards; the Newfoundland once came in white-and-black, but these started to disappear once the dog authorities decided that all good Newfies should only be jet black. After this point, “good” dogs were those that adhered to the breed standards, with the really good ones descending from the noble heredity of famed dog show winners. By the 1860s, the dog community would divide the species Canis lupus familiaris into two types: the righteous, well-bred “dog” and the wretched “dawg.” (And no surprise, these also mapped to socioeconomic lines, with the word “dawg” reflecting a working-class Cockney pronunciation.) “A dog,” explained an editorial in The Field, “is a genuine Newfoundland, a retriever, a foxhound, pointer, a setter, a terrier, a spaniel, or a mastiff; a ‘dawg’ may be any of these or none of these, for he may be a monstrosity or a mongrel.”This also led to the flawed assumption that “pure” breeding created better dog performance in sporting. England’s obsession with conformation caused a major inbreeding problem, crippling dogs with a host of genetic issues. Why is this interesting?In showing that modern dog breeds are "both material and cultural inventions,” the authors offer a clear example of how social and cultural processes change the ways humans find value in things. Dogs became explicit status markers, cherished for their aesthetic properties, “heritage,” and alignment to authoritative standards rather than ability to fetch dead fowl from the bushes or simply being happy and healthy. Readers of this newsletter are surely aware that most cultural value is created in social interactions rather than in the innate properties of things (see Exhibit A: “fashion”), but the 19th century creation of dog breeds in Britain also demonstrates that these cultural processes become so hidden over time that we just accept the valuations as a natural part of life. So, of course, a purebred Bernese Mountain Dog, with its beautiful black, brown, and white coat, is more “valuable” than a good-natured, spritely mutt, despite the fact that Berners have a long list of health issues and only live 7-10 years. (Although they’re really good at pulling carts.)The Invention of the Modern Dog provides specific insights into how social structures changed humans’ attitudes towards dogs, but also, illustrates the degree to which history is such an effective tool for deconstructing almost everything to find the social structures hidden as “natural” parts of life. (WDM)Chart of the Day:Goldendoodles are a dog breed that dates from 1969 and whose official name only first appeared in 1992. The chart shows that 2011 was the year that Goldendoodles really took off in the U.S. These new breeds are often called “designer dogs,” which is funny now that we know our current conception of breeds is only about two hundred years old. But the novelty and “designer” element are maybe why we shouldn’t be surprised that Goldendoodles achieved notoriety as “the Kardashians of the New York dog park scene.” (WDM)Quick Links:One more Google Trend: we’d think The Doge kicked off the Shiba Inu trend, but it seems like Shiba Inu Puppy Cam was the first major moment for this Japanese breed in America. Slate looks at what happened next. (WDM).Times book essay on why there are so many books about dogs. (NRB)Dogs get famous on Instagram, which then opens an ethical question about what to do when they get old, sick, and less photogenic. (WDM)Linguistics in action: The origins of “DogSpeak” (WDM)I have very fond memories of Dog City (clip) from the short-lived Jim Henson Hour. (NRB)Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & David (WDM)

Why is this interesting? - The Dog Edition

W. David Marx is a longstanding friend of WITI and our man in Tokyo. He wrote a very good tweet thread about the cultural history of Japanese fashion magazines and we had him edit it for WITI. This is just one of the great anecdotes from his amazing book, Ametora. David here. One of the most distinctive features of Japanese magazines is their similarity to catalogs. Rather than long articles, essays, or celebrity profiles, most of the pages just feature dozens of products laid out along with prices, retailer information, including the store address and phone number. The origin of this format, which began in the mid-1970s, oddly, was not the Sears catalog but the American Sixties counterculture.The direct inspiration for this catalog format was the Whole Earth Catalog — Stewart Brand’s hyper-saturated guide to the tools necessary for self-sustainable communities, published from 1968-1972. (Steve Jobs called WEC “Google in paperback form.")The Japanese illustrator Yasuhiko Kobayashi and editor Jirō Ishikawa were in New York in '69 to do reportage on youth culture, when they came upon the Whole Earth Catalog inside the Doubleday bookstore. Kobayashi couldn't figure out what the WEC *was* or what it was trying to achieve, but he was intrigued and brought a copy back to Japan.After puzzling over the Whole Earth Catalog for years, Kobayashi and Ishikawa finally decided to make a "Japanese version." But instead of doing a semi-philosophical manifesto about sustainability and human civilization, they just made theirs a mock mail-order catalog of American-made products: clothing, outdoor supplies, tools etc.In order to create the magazine, they traveled to the U.S. and took photos of three thousand different objects: Madison Avenue repp ties, Pendleton knockabout cardigans, Jeff Ho’s Zephyr Production surfboards, and the generic shovels, rakes, plows, screwdrivers, and pliers that sat in suburban garages.They called the resulting 274-page catalog Made in USA, and it drowned readers in product shots. The mook (magazine+book) also included a fifty-six-page reprint of the 1974-1975 Hudson’s Camping Headquarters mailer. It was a runaway smash hit and sold 150,000 copies.Bolstered by the success of Made in USA, the same team went on to found Popeye Magazine, focused on California youth culture rather than the previous “heavy duty” mountain-y aesthetic. But they again adapted the same catalog design from the Whole Earth Catalog. Popeye's instant success then made the "catalog magazine" format the hot design convention for all consumer goods magazines.Advertisers loved the catalog format because it directly pushed their products to consumers as legitimized purchases. Consumers loved it because they could learn about hundreds of "legitimate" products and shop for them before even setting foot in a store. Products in Japan often sell out as soon as magazines hit the shelf, as kids will call up the store and reserve what they see before they can visit the shop.Not only did Made in USA and Popeye create the dominant conventions of Japanese magazine design, but much later these magazines inspired the American magazine Complex (which took direct inspiration from Popeye-clone Hot Dog Press), and arguably, the product focus of fashion blogs like Hypebeast also borrowed a lot from Japanese magazines. And all of this rampant materialism starts with the very anti-materialistic Whole Earth Catalog. (DM) (Kobayashi and Ishikawa in 2019)—WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Quantum computing advances. One example, a research center in Japan made a breakthrough in entangling qubits (a basic unit of information in quantum) that could make large-scale quantum computers possible. Investment’s pouring in, start-ups are proliferating—but what does it mean for your organization? A new report,  gives you intel on how to start strategizing.Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & David (DM) —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 Japanese Fashion Mag Edition

W. David Marx (WDM) is a pal and the Tokyo-based author of one of my favorite books, Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. His new book Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change is a comprehensive look at how status creates most cultural phenomenon. We did a longer, book-specific interview with him in August, but I also wanted to see what was on his reading list. Have a good week -Colin (CJN) Tell us about yourself.My name is W. David Marx, and I am the author of two books: Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change (Viking Books, 2022) and Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style (Basic Books, 2015). I grew up in the American South, but now live in Tokyo.  Describe your media diet. Despite living in Japan for almost two decades, I still spend an excessive amount of time trying to follow U.S. political news. To reduce my anxiety, I decided to curb this habit a bit in 2021, and my weekly political podcast consumption is now limited to Brooks and Capehart on PBS Newshour. Otherwise I get my daily news from Twitter, which I read in backwards-chronological order, because I don’t trust the algorithmic setting to show me everything. But with the time zone difference, I often wake up to everyone making jokes about news events from a few hours prior, and I have to scroll down for a while until I can piece together what is being mocked. Even when Twitter provides my main links, my reading tends to cluster around the usual: The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Magazine (especially Vulture), and Vox’s The Goods.I am a bit overwhelmed by newsletters because they arrive into an already overflowing inbox, but I try to read Benedict Evans, Garbage Day, Blackbird Spyplane, and Dirt (which I sometimes write for). I enjoy balancing those with more personal newsletters from Craig Mod, The Melt by Jason Diamond, A Continuous Lean, and David Coggins’ The Contender to name a few.I try hard to limit my internet reading to small bursts in the morning and evening, and use my train time, afternoon breaks, and bedtime to read physical books. Some of this is that I have a very hard time reading longform on computer screens, but also internet-based short media formats are not very good for engaging with more complicated ideas. What’s the last great book you read?When writing Status and Culture, I read a very specific set of books about the mechanisms of society and culture, and the last mind-blowing one I squeaked in before deadline was Leonard B Meyer’s Music, the Arts, and Ideas from 1967 which uses information theory to explain what our brains are doing when they listen to music. Aesthetics are so complicated that we tend to think they’re “magical” and maybe even irrational, but Meyer does a good job of explaining the concrete, logic-based underpinnings (and why our brains could never absorb serial composition like we did classical Western harmony). What are you reading now?I generally read two or three books simultaneously (one non-fiction for research, one fiction in my 14-year project of going through the most famous 20th century novels in chronological order, and maybe a lighter one “for fun”), but I ended up starting a few very long books this year that have made me want to simultaneously dip in and out of other things. This has resulted in me having major page-debt to Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, Richard Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, Jean Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death, Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Benjamin Nathans’s Beyond the Pale on Eastern European Jews in the 19th century, and the upcoming book Merchants of Style by Natasha Degen on art and fashion post-Warhol. I’m going to try hard not to start any new books this year until I finish these up.What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?I tend to quickly go through from cover to cover to see what’s included, and then I go back to read whatever looked most interesting.Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?We are in a golden age of smart writing on contemporary pop culture and how it works, and I’m a big fan of Amanda Mull (The Atlantic), Rebecca Jennings (VOX), Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker), and Ryan Broderick and Allegra Rosenberg (Garbage Day) to name a few, but I feel like they’re quite popular, so maybe I’m not suggesting anything new here.I also recommend people return to mid-century nonfiction and cultural theory, as these books are always more subtle and complicated than how they are summarized in passing. And writers like Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell, and Arthur Danto predicted our current cultural moment better than you’d imagine. I also recommend reading books that posit theories you don’t agree with. I strongly believe that aesthetics are fully social constructs and not related to evolutionary psychology, but I thought David Rothenberg’s Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Beauty was very interesting and gave me a deeper perspective on the entire subject. What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone? BPMTap, an extremely primitive app where you tap out rhythms and you get the beats per minute. I am not sure the code has been changed in a decade, but it gets the job done.Plane or train?Train, most definitely, but in Japan it’s often more expensive to take the high-speed shinkansen than fly. What is one place everyone should visit? I think Kobe is Japan’s most underappreciated city. It’s extremely compact, so you can get anywhere in town within about 15 minutes, and there’s a nice breeze in the summer that flows between the harbor and mountains. Kobe has preserved its many majestic historical buildings much better than Tokyo, and there is a relaxed vibrancy that I haven’t felt in the other Japanese cities. Tokyo often feels like it’s dominated by out-of-towners and tourists, whereas Kobe restaurants and bars seem to be exclusively filled with locals. If you’re new to Japan, Kobe’s appeal may not be very obvious, but it’s a great place to check out for a day trip if you’re in Osaka or Kyoto. Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into. My paternal great-grandfather Max moved from Minsk to rural Louisiana in the early 20th century. He came to America with no siblings, and said almost nothing about his background to his children. I had spent the last decade trying to figure out his origins through DNA matches and making very little progress, when someone pointed me to a tranche of translated Belarussian records online. These helped me make a major breakthrough that suggests Max was the grandson of the top Talmudic authority in Minsk during the mid-19th century. (I know it’s very common to fall into these delusions of grandeur in family histories, but the DNA, circumstantial, and record-based evidence all point to this direction quite clearly.) With genealogical research, it’s easy to go extremely deep into rabbit holes, because the entire exercise is searching for needles in haystacks, and when you run out of haystacks, you start getting tempted to do things like learning to read 18th century Lithuanian handwriting… (WDM)—WITI x McKinsey:An ongoing partnership where we highlight interesting McKinsey research, writing, and data.Life in the 2030s. The pandemic showed us that we are capable of adapting to rapid change, and at this rate, there could be more innovation in the next ten years than in any other decade in modern history. From outer space to shopping, wellness, and even video entertainment—change is coming, so be prepared. —Thanks for reading,Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN) & David (WDM) —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!).