Hello and welcome. This newsletter is 2673 words (~12 minute read).

Contents:

Big Problems

Welcome Back

The Vexillologists

The Vandals

Scaffolding

Revision

7 Things I've Consumed

Big Problems

In the novel Drayton & Mackenzie,  Drayton and Mackenzie graduate from Oxford (at the top and bottom of their class, respectively), become McKinsey consultants, and then quit to start a new company. Their company is trying to create electricity from the movement of the tides off the coast of Scotland, with the ultimate goals of generating all energy for the UK and producing enough hydrogen to power a rocket ship. These goals are treated seriously; the book does not treat them with irony or derision. Challenges facing the company provide the propulsive force of the novel: will they find enough funding? Will the tech work? Do they have the right talent and the right business model?

That’s kind of unusual, actually. Writing about his novel’s reception earlier this year, the author, Alexander Starritt, quoted a critic who complained that the aim of the novel is unclear. His response is that well of course it would be, if you don’t see business growth as a valid goal to depict in art. Other reviews claimed it was a satire of late-stage capitalism, which was not the author’s intention (nor was it the result). To these critics, “It was simply inconceivable that a novel about business would be anything other than an attack.” 

It’s true that satire is the normal way by which business is depicted in pop culture. If I’m thinking about a business running a rocket launch, I’m thinking about Succession. If I’m thinking about credit default swaps, or really any macroeconomics at all, I’m thinking about The Big Short. So it’s counterintuitive to think of business as a reasonable means to accomplish anything of value, especially if you’re an artist of any kind. You’d be crossing the aisle. And that’s what Starritt does.

I thought this novel was great. I was inspired by the boys’ ambition. I appreciated that their decisions had weight that carried beyond their own lives. Moving the world’s supply of electricity off coal and into water is a Big Goal that attempts to solve a Big Problem. Drayton & Mackenzie reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s quote about Middlemarch, that it “is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.”

***

Another Big Problem is this: who will build and maintain the physical things society needs built and maintained?

The US faces a shortage of workers in the skilled trades. Lightcast, the world’s most trusted provider of labor market intelligence and my employer, has been working on that problem. One quarter of workers currently in the skilled trades are over 55, which means they will retire soon, with fewer young people in line to replace them. Decreased supply, increased costs, etc., etc. 

Perhaps if workers understood how much money they could make, especially without the burden of student loans, they would be more inclined to take trades jobs. That’s been our focus at work; in our latest research, we looked specifically at skilled trades jobs, what their earning potential was, and how organizations might go about getting more people into them.

My favorite thing about that piece was something clever my coworker Hannah did. We had been stuck for a while, because we knew that many tradespeople eventually start their own business, but that pathway had been hard to see, because you can’t look at the entire occupation of “CEO” and say that’s where the enterprising plumbers end up. 

What Hannah was able to do was partition off the workers with the title CEO who also had skills related to the trades. If your path was Director > VP > SVP > CEO, you wouldn’t be on that list, but if your path was HVAC > CEO, you would. It was a neat piece of work. (Average salary for trades CEOs is $210k.) Hopefully, the thinking went, America’s youth would be more inclined to pick up a hammer if they saw the dollar signs at the end of the road.

On the other hand, Jesse Smith (a contractor with a background in carpentry and HVAC), offers a counterpoint in Asterisk magazine, which is this: stop telling people to go into the trades! They will hurt themselves, first and foremost! It’s us—white-collar workers who are insulated from risk—who think going into the trades is a good idea. We’ve never lost six months of work, or a finger, to a dangerous machine. Few of us even know someone who has. 

“When I think about my teenage son or daughter working in construction, my mind often goes to The Accident,” he writes. “I picture my daughter, who’s three years younger than I was at the time, wheeling to The Beer Store in a Workers’ Comp rental wheelchair.” 

Also, and more relevant to the Lightcast argument, the comparison between a generic white-collar job (like “Marketing Associate”) and a trades job like “Electrician” is a false one. The jobs for fully-fledged electricians, with autonomy and high rates, are rare, and already respected in the community. Go down to the IBEW hall and ask the guys there how they got their jobs, Smith says, and they’ll describe a slow winnowing process, aided by the right connections. These jobs are hard to get! Smith compares getting one to making partner at McKinsey. So if you’re talking to someone right out of high school and say “Well why don’t you just become an electrician?” you might as well ask “Why don’t you just get an office job that pays $250k?” It’s a great idea, but a difficult path. You’ll need to be smart, and hardworking, and still also lucky.

The problem is that we still need electricians, and construction managers, and people in factories making solar panels. We need them more than partners in consulting firms. But it’s not clear how we’re going to make that happen. It's a Big Problem.

***

This is a big problem in the United States and the West, I should say. Not everybody has it. 

Breakneck, by Dan Wang, is a book based on one simple, appealing thesis: the United States is a society of lawyers, and China is a nation of engineers. We prize liberty and process and can’t get anything done. They don’t care about any of that and they’ve built the world’s best infrastructure, both domestically and abroad. This results-oriented ideology also produced the Great Leap Forward and the one-child policy, so, you know, pros and cons. 

Part of what makes that book so good is that I can summarize it that quickly. Wang’s point is that both can learn from each other. The United States needs to build, and quit with the red tape that only benefits the administrative class, and China, for its part, should uh stop committing human rights violations all the time. This was helpful in helping me frame the question of who does what jobs: obviously you could just make someone be a plumber or build EVs or whatever, but that’s not the society I want to live in, personally. I’d rather have the United States’ misalignment than China’s restrictiveness. I want to choose whether to build houses or not. 

And me personally, I’m not going to. Right now I have a job that lets me stay safe and comfortable and still provide for my family. That’s very good for me, but it’s not how highways get built. Like the need for clean energy, this is a Big Problem. And to be entirely honest, reading Drayton & Mackenzie made me feel like maybe I could help solve it, because look at those guys, they’re just some blokes, but they started working on tidal energy and really got somewhere. 

Here’s as far as I’ve gotten: the misalignment between what people need from work and what society needs from work is a cultural and values problem more than it’s an economic problem. So that’s a start, but it raises a difficult question: how do you change someone’s values?

Welcome Back

It’s good to be writing a newsletter again after a month off. That essay above is almost twice as long as the 777-word essays I wrote from February to August in this newsletter. The sections below will be longer or shorter than the 77-word fragments I was writing below them. It was good for me to work within those constraints, and it feels great to not work within them anymore. 

I read a good blog post of writing advice a few weeks back, and one section was called “Disciplines to do on a mountaintop for 30 years.” Learn some good habits (no passive voice, no adverbs) and practice them like a cloistered monk, and then when you come back down from the mountain, you can do whatever you want. Seven months isn’t thirty years, but I feel like that discipline was helpful practice to help me express my ideas succinctly. 

I don’t have a plan for the format or content for this new set of seven newsletters. If all goes according to plan, I will publish three before my first child is born and four afterward. That is not a situation that will reward rigidity. I’ll commit to writing seven newsletters and reserve the right to stretch that definition in whatever way I deem appropriate.

Similarly, you may notice that the online edition of this newsletter is being hosted on my personal website, not a new HTML page I had to redeploy on GitHub every time. We've also returned to the Season 1 branding with the Sony/Honda lettering—it was good and didn't need to be changed! Now that I'm approaching an era with far less free time for hobbies, some will get cut. The experiments in design are gone. The newsletter stays. 

The Vexillologists

Tulsa, Oklahoma, has one of the best city flags in the United States. This is my personal opinion, and it has been affirmed by the North American Vexillological Association (vexillology is the study of flags). In 2022, the NAVA ranked every American city flag that had been updated since 2015, and we were number one at the top. Norman, Oklahoma, another town I lived in for a long time, is fourth. Great job everyone and especially Tim!

But the NAVA also ranked the worst 25 flags, which had some bangers. Look at Woodland, Mississippi, and Oolitic, Indiana:

And my personal favorite: NITRO, WEST VIRGINIA. 

Note the styling of “World War 1,” when almost everyone uses either “I” or “One.” Note also there is a town in West Virginia named “Nitro.” This flag kicks ass. 

I found these flags in a blog post called “Good design is ruining American flags,” by Ned Donovan at Works In Progress. He notes that these flags all seem to lead back to one man: Roman Mars, host of the podcast 99% Invisible, who recorded an episode on vexillology in 2010 and a similar TED Talk in 2015. His message has been heard by millions, and you can see the results above. 

I remember listening to the episode in high school, and I loved it. When I read that post, I tried to name all of the “Five Principles of Flag Design” from memory:

1. Simple enough a child can draw it

2. No writing

3. Three colors max

4. Legible at a distance

The only one I had to look up was “Be Distinctive.” And, as Donovan correctly notes, this is where the “best” flags fail by their own criteria—they’re all blue with a star! He writes: “Stand a man from Tulsa in front of the winning twenty and he could not find his own.” I can, of course, but the point is well taken. 

The Vandals

At my beloved University of Idaho, the athletic department commissioned Emma Cuddy, a senior majoring in studio art and design, to paint a whole oil painting for every one of the Vandals’ football games this season. Brilliant concept. These two are for Cal Poly (the Mustangs) and Utah (which are the Utes, but Cuddy had the good idea to just set the Great Salt Lake on fire).

Personally, my favorite so far is the poster for Montana State, because we’re finally getting serious, the implication is that “we’re going to kill the Bobcats in gladiatorial combat.” 

And buddy, they did. With no time left, Idaho was down 27-34 against the reigning Big Sky champions, but they scored a touchdown and got the two-point conversion to earn their first win of the season, breaking Montana State’s 19-game win streak. They’re calling it the “Miracle in Moscow.” 

Scaffolding

In the very first Septology, two years ago today, I talked about going to Denver and buying a book by Lev Grossman (The Bright Sword). Well, I did it again: I went to Denver and bought a book by Lev Grossman. This one is called Codex, and it’s about an investment banker who finds himself searching for a lost medieval manuscript. It’s a fun little caper. It’s fall in New York and our guy Edward finds himself in huge old apartments and mysterious library archives. It’s not bad.

But it’s not great, either. I can tell that this is Grossman’s early work, and something in him really wanted to write The Magicians, a fantasy series that came later, his biggest hit, or The Bright Sword, an Arthurian romance, but he couldn’t yet. He was still learning. This got him there, and that’s good.

In my MFA, a useful metaphor we often used was scaffolding. Often, there would be a section of an essay that did not need to be there, so it should be taken out, but we acknowledged that you, our classmate the author, needed to write that section in order to figure out your ideas or get it out of your system or whatever else. You needed to build it, just like you needed to build the rest of the work, but it’s not part of the final product. Scaffolding. 

Revision

Also while reading Codex, I saw some overlap with Robin Sloan’s novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, which came out 11 years later.  They share many core themes: the importance of books as physical objects, digital media as a means to understand the world better, a mysterious old person with tricks up their sleeve. I heard about Grossman from Sloan’s newsletter. It’s not hard to imagine the connection.

I was thinking about Penumbra because Sloan recently released an all-new, all-different edition. The novel expanded upon a short story, and this summer he released a new short story version. It’s now set in the 2020s, not the 2010s, and where the original book held up the Google campus as the pinnacle of technology and innovation, now it’s a frontier AI model. Characters have new haircuts and new jobs but similar relationships. The main plot remains, with an appealing Charles Xavier/Magneto relationship that’s been drawn out further.

This is a move you see more often in film, a complete remake of the same material, updated for the current day, but it’s rare in print. I didn’t know you could do that, which is often the mark of something creative and exciting. (I felt the same thing in Drayton & Mackenzie when Starritt gave Ben Bernanke, chair of the Federal Reserve in 2008, a whole chapter to himself.) 

The new edition of Penumbra is print-only and came in the mail. On its cover is the logo of the Penumbra’s bookstore, a book with both hands open, which I think is a beautiful and evocative image. I scanned it and recreated it as the cover of my e-reader. 

7 Things I've Consumed

1. Digger (Movie, dir. Iñárritu)

2. Still Coming Down (Album, Wild Pink)

3. Lost Weekend (Album, Phoebe Bridgers)

4. Adults (TV show)

5. “Forty-One Things God Invented” (Poem, Ben Bar)

6. Three Body Problem (Novel, Cixin Liu, trans. Ken Liu)

7. Metal Gear Solid (video game for PlayStation 1)

That’s all for this month. See you again November 7, which is a Saturday. 

From Tulsa,