7x7: Titan of Industry

Last week my boss asked me to explain Substack. Septology is not a Substack newsletter but this is the water I swim in; every day I receive e-mails. Substack is the most popular platform in the world for personal newsletters, and I am subscribed to 74. The type of writing that would be on blogs 15 or 20 years ago is in newsletters now.

But as to an explanation, there isn’t much to say: newsletters are as diverse as books. What makes a good one? he asked.

That’s almost up there with “To be or not to be,” man, that’s a very difficult question. What makes good writing good? What makes good writers good?

I’ve been in my head about it. When I was still in school, I felt like I understood what good writing was. I was reading so much of it, and all of us were producing so much work, that I didn’t feel the need to pause and look around and ask those questions. But now it’s been five years since I was in a classroom, and some of that clarity has faded.

Looking through my Substack subscriptions helps show me. Some writers are good because they provide information that nobody else has, whether that’s research or an inside scoop. Some writers are good because they have really good taste, they have a really good nose for what’s worth sharing—not unique information, but a unique collection of information. Some writers are at organizing information and producing sentences and paragraphs that sound good together. Some writers are good because they have good opinions, they provide analysis that adds to my understanding of the world. Some writers lead interesting lives and I’m interested in reading about those.

Maybe we can say, then, that the three overall categories would be subject matter, quality of thought, and quality of craft. When we say “That’s a good piece of writing,” it could be any of those.

You need all three. One can be weaker than the others and that’s fine. If you’re great at one and terrible at the others, you’re on thin ice.

Journalism may be the exception: if you happen to do know that a civilian was added to a group chat discussing top-secret war plans, then you can write that down and it’ll be news. That’s a good story no matter what. I don’t need to know about the US position in Yemen to click on that, and you don’t need to write it with beautiful sentences.

I was not a very good journalist, in part because the Secretary of Defense never added me to any group chats, and in part I think I’m best at the third of those categories, writing well-crafted sentences. Out of our three options, technical excellence is least useful in a newsletter context. It’s very good skill for some things, like my job where economists give me data and I write articles about them. But you don’t subscribe to a newsletter because it’s been edited really well. It’s got to be about something.

I said earlier that at school, we were producing too much work to worry about why. Forgetting the question and producing the work might be a good solution.

On with the show.

Two book recommendations. Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard is about a futuristic office park, and the narrator moves in with his wife, who is replacing the campus doctor, who went on a mass shooting spree. The narrator pokes around and becomes suspicious of the official corporate story. I’m not done yet, but I like how this is a capitalist critique without being so on-the-nose, it may be about how wealth corrupts, but that isn’t the plot. The narrator isn’t walking around thinking about how evil corporations are, he’s solving a mystery. Propulsive, engaging, I’m having a great time.

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood is on the opposite end of most spectrums. It’s a short, diaristic novel about a woman who leaves it all behind to be a nun in rural Australia, and she doesn’t even have Christian faith, really, she just learns to forgive and work hard and enjoy the quiet.

I remember once getting the LEGO catalog at home, and after I had gotten my fill of the Knights Kingdom and Alpha Team and Orient Expedition (starring Johnny Thunder), I would get to the back and the sets not designed for children, where I saw a huge Maersk container ship (set #10152). Usually I knew the brands in the LEGO catalog; there were sets from the NBA and Ferrari and Spider-Man and Star Wars, cornerstones of culture. So my assumption was that Maersk was one of these: I would need to know about international logistics firms like Maersk or Mattson or Hapag-Lloyd when I grew up and went to middle school.

That had not been the case until recently. Here’s the shipping news:

Roughly 5% of world GDP passes through the Panama Canal every year, but there’s been a drought, so it’s been trickier to get ships through it. The canal has addressed this problem in several ways, and two of these solutions include the railroad, 47 miles of track running parallel to the canal.

1. Ships will dock at one end of the canal, unload all their cargo, send it on ahead, and then the boat will pass through the canal faster, lighter, and be charged less money for the privilege.

2. One company has two loads on two different shis, one moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and another vice-versa. Instead of sending both boats through the canal, you could park one on either side, and have them trade shipments via the railroad. Useful!

The Panama Canal itself was owned and operated by the United States from its construction in 1914 all the way through 1999, and now it’s Panamanian. But the railroad has still been run by Kansas City Southern, a US railroad company, until last week, when it was bought by Maersk.

Maersk is a Danish company, incidentally. Denmark’s biggest news recently was when the US said they wanted Greenland, which belongs to Denmark, and Denmark said no. At around the same time the United States said it wanted Greenland, it also said it wanted the Panama Canal back. So this whole sequence is a neat bit of gamesmanship by Denmark: not only will I not give you this property, in fact I am going to buy one of yours. I hope we still have an international economy in a few months so that they can benefit.

Also in shipping news: I’ve started a book called The Pacific Circuit, which is two things, it’s a history of containerization and the transformation of trans-Pacific logistics in the second half of the 20th century, and it’s also about the specific impact way this international phenomenon transformed Oakland, California.

I like Oakland. I like what the author, Alexis Madrigal, said about how it’s a focused picture of the whole Bay Area: “If something awesome is happening in San Francisco—the weather, or the creativity of the population—Oakland is concentrating that same stuff. Like, there’s some cool anarchist types in San Francisco? We have cooler, more anarchist types.”

But the logistics part moves me more. Tell me about the economic levers that were pulled to develop Asian manufacturing for the benefit of the American consumer. Tell me how the boats adapted to the standardization of the shipping container. I’m ready. I’ve been ready since I was nine years old, reading the LEGO catalog on the living room floor.

I’ve been doing this when I stop for a coffee at QuikTrip // All about the most important website in science (good article, great photos) // Lapham’s Quarterly got bought // Why is everyone reading Lonesome Dove? (Maybe everyone got good taste?) // Movie trivia battle game, I’ve spent hours and hours on it // Ethel Cain quote that has helped me much more than I expected // been using a shortcuts app called Raycast, hasn’t changed my life but made it a little easier // Birkenstock had a beautiful West Coast office // Frank Lloyd Wright house for sale near me (at 36th and Lewis) if you’ve got $3.5 million you’re not using // Investment bank tried to sound cool and everyone got embarrassed // This story about an investment fund collapsing is a few years old, but new to me; my favorite detail is when, running out of money, the firm accidentally sent one of its lenders $470 million // 

And it would be a mistake not to recommend my favorite Substack newsletters:

N.B.

My beloved Florida Gators men’s basketball team plays for the championship tonight. I chose them to win, but regardless, my sister has already won our family tournament and its trophy, “The Golden Bracket.” Congratulations to Cate.

Maybe you were thinking there would be some kind of forgiveness/Biblical message, for issue 7x7. Read Matthew 18 again—when your brother sins against you, you don't forgive him seven times, but seventy times seven. "7x7" never comes up in the scriptures. If you really want some forgiveness content, you'll have to wait until issue 70x7, which will be sent July 2030. 

Thanks for reading. That's all from Tulsa. See you May 7, which is a Wednesday. 

From Tulsa,