I've long wished that online mapping services were far richer and higher-density. They elide so much detail today! We have gloriously high-DPI screens... I want to wallow in cartographic filigree. AI of course now makes this possible: bayatlas.vercel.app

The small Memorial to Heroic Self-Sacrifice in London's Postman's Park is quite moving: an assembly of earnest Arts and Crafts tiles commemorating people who died saving the lives of others. George Watts, the creator, in 1887: "My proposal, as you know, is plainly this: that the memory of the deeds of heroism constantly recurring in our everyday life should be perpetuated and honoured as such deeds should, for they illustrate the character of our people as a nation of great acts." And elsewhere: "It is a great pity that they should only receive the recognition of a newspaper paragraph, and be forgotten next day." I'm often struck by how figures in this period across many countries seem solemnly concerned with the character of the nation.

Some data we recently assembled on entrepreneurship/compute in Europe: eudata.vercel.app. We hope that one of the useful roles that Stripe can play is in collecting and publishing empirical data pertaining to entrepreneurship and industry in Europe. There's growing appetite to get Europe on a better footing, and cross-sectional comparisons can often shine light on where opportunities lie. If you're interested in this kind of thing, we publish more at stripeeconomics.substack.com.

I don't think your views are consistent with the views of most founders.

Here is San Francisco's current Hall of Justice, as an aside:

I only recently learned that this pedestrian bridge sits where San Francisco's first Hall of Justice did. Before/after below. I submit this in my evidence packet to anyone who maintains that nothing has gone wrong.

Someone asked me recently why I’ve become interested in aesthetics after having spent most of my life more interested in STEM-adjacent topics. I hadn’t really considered the question consciously before, but I’m certainly thinking about aesthetics more than I used to. I think it’s a confluence of things: • Many things today are ugly and far uglier than they used to be or need to be. Once you see this, it’s kinda hard to stop perceiving it. (Early twentieth century phone boxes versus modern phone boxes; old water fountains versus new water fountains; etc.) As someone with a naively meliorist assumption that most things should be getting better rather than worse, it’s all a bit perplexing: why did we stop doing things nicely? Is it a choice? Was there a malevolent spell cast upon us? This vein led me to think more about modernism and why much of art became more intentionally "challenging", grotesque, opposed to prettiness, rebarbative, dissonant, etc. Can or should anything be done about this? Is this just how things ought to be? • Relatedly, much of modernism involved a kind of explicit repudiation of cultural continuity and represented a schism with prior practices. This is maybe most evident in American architecture, where the International Style exhibition in 1932 initiated the displacement of a rich tapestry of prior styles. This cultural break seems important and interesting to me, and I suspect that the rejection had important consequences outside of the aesthetic domain. Samuel Hughes has been exploring this question in his recent writing at @WorksInProgMag; @RuxandraTeslo is also pulling on this thread. Elaine Scarry wrote about how beauty inspires creation. If so, the inverse may also be true: ugliness inhibits it. • It’s clearly the case that changes in the aesthetic domain can at least inspire progress in other places. Petrarch helped set some of the preconditions for the Renaissance which in turn fostered the scientific revolution and Enlightenment. Things like World Fairs (the 1851 Fair at the Crystal Palace recorded 6 million admissions when the population was 21 million) reflect the popular interdependency that used to exist between aesthetics and material development. • @tedgioia and others have written about stuck culture and how so many domains seem to have ceased to straightforwardly advance in the way that they did up until the nineties or thereabouts. This is obviously peculiar and interesting. What changed, and what does it mean? Is it about the internet and fragmentation? Is it about a loss of supply? Is it just about having reached the zenith of various mediums? • I’m generally interested in markets and the dynamics of creation. In aesthetics broadly, I find the reflexivity between supply- and demand-side factors to be very thought-provoking. There’s a natural desire to view satisfaction of individual preferences as the yardstick to measure market success, but things get interesting and even a bit unsettling when we start to think about how the supply might start to shape the demand. I often think about this in the context of food. Why is food so much worse in Germany than many of its neighbors? Germany certainly doesn’t have less material ability to produce good food; indeed, Germany is richer than the countries around it. There’s probably something about German food supply chains that is impoverished relative to France and Italy, but the Germans themselves don’t seem too upset about it. It just seems that the Germans are stuck in an objectively worse market equilibrium than their neighbors: the food is bad and they’ve gotten used to it. The obvious question then is where else these kinds of reflexive patterns apply, and where else we’re stuck in some objectively inferior equilibrium, even if preferences are in some superficial sense being sated. • While this is an extremely banal and obvious point, I hadn’t until recently thought much about or internalized how much one can study reasonably objective things ("the status of women in society", say) through artwork. (Thanks to @_alice_evans for opening my eyes here.) In this vein, I’m pretty excited about the possibilities over the coming years in computational art analysis. I want something that’s conceptually similar to Google Ngram timelines but for the visual arts. • We've always tried to do things well at Stripe. I've come to see that attempting to do them beautifully is often a helpful way to break out of standard practices and to do something with greater novelty and in a way that might have other benefits besides. (Also, excellent people want to do great work because it is intrinsically satisfying. Explicitly allowing aesthetic considerations to carry weight avoids having to justify every assessment with some kind of torturous empiricism.) • In his Nobel Lecture, Solzhenitsyn said that, among the Platonic virtues of goodness, truth, and beauty, that beauty is special, for it possesses a unique kind of irrefutability. He notes that arguments, writing, and philosophical systems can all be predicated on misapprehensions, but that “a true work of art carries its verification within itself.” He proceeds to observe that when goodness and truth are threatened, the “ever surprising shoots of beauty will still force their way through.” There is a lot of specious and motivated reasoning in the world today and plenty of questionable value systems. I don’t think that beauty directly reflects any definitive trait, but I’m intrigued by the idea that it can be a marker of deeper metaphysical coherence.

It's been interesting and puzzling to witness the problems with accuracy in UK economic statistics over the past few years. (See the links in the next tweet for more.) It seems that the Office for National Statistics, ONS, now struggles to effectively measure basic figures such as employment, trade, and inflation. This resulted in a quite scathing government report published last summer, where Robert Devereux, a former permanent secretary, concluded that "most of the well-publicised problems with core economic statistics are the consequence of ONS’s own performance." There's a lot of discussion about the travails facing the UK these days (including this big piece in The Atlantic a few weeks ago[1]), and the problems with the ONS feel like an unsettling microcosm of diffuse decline in broader institutional competence. Anyhow: at Stripe, we became curious about the UK's published entrepreneurship data. While we observe a boom in many parts of the world, official figures don't show a similar increase in the UK. In the latest Stripe Economics post, we dug into the data, and, as far as we can tell, the official figures are probably misleading. The good and the bad news (mostly good, I think!) is that the UK is almost certainly witnessing an unmeasured boom in entrepreneurship: stripeeconomics.com/p/is-the… UK-specific issues aside, I suspect that this measurement question is illustrative of forthcoming econometric challenges. Keeping the world's macro indicators up-to-date in response to the faster-than-usual changes wrought by AI will be both increasingly difficult and increasingly important in the coming years. [1] theatlantic.com/magazine/202…

I've been enjoying Victoria Whitworth's new work, The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma. I've actually never seen the Book of Kells in person, somewhat to my embarrassment. I've been doing some reading about the origins of Christianity this year, however, and I figured I should know something about the most famous Irish manuscript. (Perhaps the most famous manuscript, full stop.) Reading the book, I was struck by how much the contents have suffered over the past ~1200 years (enduring everything from water damage to reckless malfeasance in attempted nineteenth century restoration), and I wondered whether AI could help give a sense for how the work might originally have appeared. I downloaded the Internet Archive's PDF and asked my friendly neighborhood agent to use gpt-image-2 to render each page the way it imagines it might have originally appeared. Remarkably, this all worked with a single prompt, with the agent spinning up 48 workers, since each page took a minute or two. (I'm sure that someone wiser than me could prompt the model better, ensuring somewhat more historical accuracy in color restoration and so forth. There is no gold leaf in the Book of Kells!) This part of the project went from conception to completion before I'd finished my morning coffee. I then wanted some easy way to view the results online, so I asked Stripe Projects (projects.dev) to host the result on Vercel. That also worked in basically a single prompt: bookofkells.vercel.app. I also figured that people might want an easy way to download the full PDF of updated images, but it's a large (~200MB) file, so I decided that I should charge $0.10 to cover bandwidth costs using @MPP. I asked my agent to set this up, and it basically worked smoothly, though I had to tell it what MPP is (I guess it's not yet in the pretrain) and also manually set up the Cloudflare account that actually hosts the PDF and configure the API key. (Vercel seemingly has a 100MB limit.) The purchases now show up in my Stripe account alongside all other activity. The site now has a ready-made agent prompt for anyone who wants to download the whole thing. I'm guessing that we'll see a lot more UIs like this in the future. I remain pretty intrigued by the intersection of agents, micropayments, and stablecoins. I don't know much about managing crypto wallets from the CLI, but now AI can do that for me, while Stripe seamlessly handles turning it all back into fiat. So what is the moral of the story? • Whitworth's book is very good, and you should buy it. • The Internet Archive continues to be wonderful and a civilizational treasure. • While there are rough edges, setting up third-party services via the CLI now basically works. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have bothered with any of this if I couldn't have outsourced almost all of the work to AI. • The image models have gotten very good. • There will probably continue to be all kinds of interesting applications of AI to history. (The Vesuvius Challenge of course being a shining pioneer.) • These days, I often find myself building single-use sites for things I'm learning or for books I'm reading. I think this is a cool new category of software.

New from Stripe Economics: The Age of the Solopreneur stripeeconomics.com/p/the-ag…

I asked Claude about the air conditioning debate in Europe, and it really didn’t pull any punches.

A very kind endorsement of @WorksInProgMag from the peerless and inspiring @kevin2kelly. recomendo.com/p/works-in-pro… You can (and should!) subscribe over at worksinprogress.co/print.

I just visited Paris. The city seemed to be in particularly radiant shape this time. • It got me thinking about how many of the nicest built environments in the world standardize materials rather than form. Jerusalem's stone regulation makes it much prettier than Tel Aviv. Similarly, rules in the Charleston, the Cotswolds, and Sea Ranch leave a lot of flexibility in shape, but tightly restrict materials in a way that yields cohesion. In Paris's case, there are of course also some rules around form, but the consistency of the limestone (and zinc) is very pleasant. • I hadn’t before internalized that central Paris is unique for the fraction of its building stock that is traditional. There are of course some modern buildings, such as Centre Pompidou and the new facade at La Samaritaine, but they are rare and typically dramatic. Most pleasant old cities (such as London) contain more of a mixture. • Relatedly, is Haussmannian Paris the finest example of the central planning that Scott decries? "By 1870 one-fifth of the streets in central Paris were his creation." And is the late 19th century the last time you could have done this well, immediately before the corruptions of modernism? I guess Chicago was later, but Paris certainly comes close. • From a book I picked up: In a letter of 1886 to the Ministry of Public Works, Charles Garnier, architect of the neo-Baroque Paris Opéra, wrote, “The Metropolitan Railroad, in the eyes of most Parisians, will only be excused if it rejects absolutely all industrial character so as to be completely a work of art. Paris must not be made into a factory, it must stay a museum.” Are there elites anywhere in the world today who would reject something in the physical world unless it was a work of art? One artist recently commented to me that late 19th century France had the most educated visual culture among its elites in human history. This observation struck me a few times as I traveled around. • I am curious what those who defend modern architecture say about central Paris. Do they think that one could in principle have a place built of modern architecture that people would find as attractive and that would bring joy to so many? Do they think that such a place exists in actuality today? If not, why not? Or is the goal of having somewhere pretty and attractive in their eyes itself ignoble and saccharine? To me Paris feels like a challenge of the whole project. • Walking past the Louvre at night, I was struck by its austerity and severity. It made me reflect on how Parisians in 1700 might have felt as they took it in, and the subjugation that has been associated with social structures of prior eras. (Maybe this is on my mind partly as a result of reading Charles Taylor.) It made me wonder if I should be slightly more sympathetic to modernism for embodying a sense of individual freedom and joy. The Hilma af Klint exhibition at the Grand Palais was quite a contrast. • Perhaps heretical, but Notre Dame is just not especially impressive as a cathedral, especially inside, though the restoration seems to have been excellently done, and is a terrific achievement. Overall, Lincoln cathedral (say) is much more attractive in my view. Maybe I need to read Hugo to appreciate it better. (Hugo apparently was responsible for much of the resurgence of interest in Gothic architecture. A good example, I guess, of art driving life.) • The Renoir exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay was interesting for its emphasis on egalitarian and open relations between men and women, not something observed everywhere in the world at the time. "At the same time delicate and modest – neither moralising nor Dionysian." I thought of @_alice_evans and her work. • There are now so many bikes in Paris. It means you have to pay very active attention as a pedestrian, but is overall a big improvement. Rue de Rivoli is now dominated by the pleasant whirr of bicycles. I mostly got around this way. • The Musée Quai Branly is very interesting – it’s the best tour of the world in a single compressed space that I know of. Most of the works are not impressive as such, but the concentrated breadth is great. The Ethiopian illustrated Gospels were very charming. • Maybe my imagination, but there seemed to me to be a third fewer brasseries than on prior trips. Overall, the food was good, but not better than what you get at good restaurants in the US. The median in Paris is definitely still better, though. • The Matisse exhibition at the Grand Palais was pleasant. It mostly reminded me of the observation that it is difficult to rank artists but easy to rank the work of a given artist. The Blue Nudes and The Sheaf are just very obviously among Matisse’s best work. • The Michelangelo x Rodin exhibition at the Louvre was excellent, most of all for making clear how direct the artistic lineage is. Given the 300 year interlude, we should probably be more optimistic about the prospects for revival of the best of the visual arts. I hadn't before realized that Michelangelo's career spanned 74 years. It’s easy to focus on youth and prodigious genius, but maybe enduring genius should be more central. May we all aim to be useful and productive for a large majority of a century! In this vein, David Hockney, RIP, also just cleared the 70 year career mark. • The Louvre is quite hot; far hotter than an American museum would be. Presumably because of EU/French air conditioning laws? (26 degree regulatory minima, supposedly.) • Overall, central Paris feels like it's in very good shape. Things are generally quite clean and well-maintained. Not too much graffiti (though some buildings, such as the Louvre, are very overdue for power washing.) Nowhere felt unsafe. (Given that it’s been ruled continuously by socialists since 2001, one wonders why it has fared better than many coastal cities in America. The LLMs claim that it's because much of the funding is central and because the police report centrally, not to the mayor.) Overall, is central Paris the greatest single artistic achievement in the world? That is what I came away wondering. Pictured: Ethiopian prayer scroll; Iranian qalamkari; Renoir; af Klint.

Every time I fly to New York, I'm struck by how many trees there are in the densely-populated areas around the city. (Coming from the West Coast, one arrives over the Garden State, and the suitability of the sobriquet is quite apparent from the air.) It feels like this degree of tree cover in highly populated areas is atypical (the environs of places like Paris, London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Tokyo, etc., look very different), so I asked the LLM to investigate. It found GHSL 2020 population and ESA WorldCover 2021 10m land-cover data, and concluded that New York is in fact quite unusual. As far as I can tell, it's because of some combination of: * A very favorable climate. (Trees grow quickly without irrigation.) * Marginal farmland. (Readily outcompeted by the Midwest in the 19th century.) * Together yielding reforestation before the advent of suburbs. * And a preference for development patterns that include trees. (Japan's climate is very hospitable, but one sees far fewer trees in the populated areas around the major cities -- forest and habitation are more disjoint.)

Detroit impressions: • The downtown is full of beautiful buildings. All of them seem to have been built specifically in the 1920s. I guess that is after the city had accumulated enough auto wealth but before the twin hits of Modernism and the Depression. (I hadn't known that the GM Renaissance Center, built as a revitalization project, was at the time the largest private development in US history, and also at the time the world's tallest hotel. It may be large, but it is not pretty.) The downtown is surprisingly depopulated -- both the streets and the sidewalks feel empty. That said, it didn't feel at all unsafe. There are lots of great homes in the suburbs. • The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation is amazing, and it's worth visiting Detroit for it alone. Among many (many) other things, it contains the oldest known surviving steam engine in the world, the actual Montgomery bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, a deconstructed Model T, a deconstructed Eames Chair, and many great cars, agricultural equipment, locomotives, industrial specimens, and more. (They have the Lincoln Continental that JFK was riding in when assassinated -- which, apparently, was returned to service and used by several subsequent presidents.) • The museum made me wonder why American car design peaked in the mid-60s. (This fact is very evident at the museum.) The LLMs blame the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. (Not quite wtfhappenedin1971.com, but close.) • Good food exists but it is hard to find. • The Heidelberg Project also exists and is unique. • We stayed at the Dearborn Inn, which is wonderful, and contains cottages modeled after the homes of significant American figures. Dearborn (and Hamtramck) are now predominantly Muslim, apparently for reasons that go back a century to Henry Ford's $5 wage. Dearborn felt noticeably prosperous (we stopped for coffee at a fancy Japanese cheesecake cafe); Hamtramck did not. • Michigan.gov says that the Hispanic population of Michigan is just 6%. Coming from California, the absence is very striking. • The Detroit Institute of Arts is remarkable, particularly the room with the American landscapes and the section with the Dutch masters (especially The Visitation). An obvious question is why there is nothing quite like it in the Bay Area given how much richer the latter is than Detroit ever was -- we techies are just so uncultured by comparison. The Diego Rivera murals are amazing (and quite strange; you can see why they were controversial). • Detroit is full of historic plaques -- they are truly everywhere. This is presumably due in part to the fact that Detroit has a lot of history, but it still has many more than places with comparable historical depth. Some research suggests that it might be related to generous tax credits for historic preservation. Whether or not that is true, Detroit persuades me that other places should engage in more plaquemaxxing. • I recommend a visit! You overall leave with some sense for how exciting America must have felt in the early 20th century.

Other images of the lobby.

Spotted in the lobby of the Guardian Building in Detroit. Compared to today's more common "financial services", "financial service" is quite evocatively different. The Guardian Building was built for the Union Trust Company in 1929 and I think it is my favorite of the Detroit skyscrapers. The lobby is quite strikingly weird -- a good reminder of how strange a lot of 1920s aesthetics were.

I think this reflects our confused spiritual relationship with our own past. We feel a strong and intuitive affinity for what we used to build, while our contemporary frameworks consider such buildings misguided and "immoral". The mind says massing prohibitions and setbacks; the heart says beautiful masonry, higgeldy-piggeldy layouts, and Victorians. Rather than resolve the tension, we designate large fractions of our city ontologically confused, simultaneously protected and illegal; sanctified and condemned.

Thank you to everyone who joined us at Stripe Sessions this year! More than 10,000 attendees for the first time. We had a ton of fun putting everything together and are very proud to support everything that you are building.

Stripe Atlas just hit 100,000 all-time incorporations. Q1 2026 is +130% Y/Y.

We just launched the @Link CLI: github.com/stripe/link-cli. Tell your friendly neighborhood agent about it -- agents can use the Link CLI to create single-use credentials that you get to synchronously approve each time. I asked Claude to buy itself a gift. It chose HTTPZine on Gumroad.

Though there's also this chart from the thread!

piped.video/watch?v=qvueKtEk… Highly recommend this podcast on the question

I think the YIMBY movement employs an inadvertently dishonest sleight-of-hand in talking about "Paris-scale density". Well, fine, if we're talking about Paris-style building, I'm all for it, and likely voters would be too (as they have been in the past). But what is actually on offer is quite different: they wisely interpret calls for "Paris-scale density" as something more like "Sejong City-scale density".

There is a hypothesis that birth order effects (on things like income and educational attainment) are in part respiratory pathogen effects: younger kids get more of them from their older siblings. This cool recent paper uses Danish administrative data to argue that this is true and a pretty large part of the story. (They claim 70% of the birth order effect on long-run wages.) Other work has previously shown that severe infections matter for long-run outcomes, and it's well-established that birth order matters, but I haven't until now seen anyone convincingly show that standard respiratory pathogens impose long-term costs on infant siblings. nber.org/system/files/workin…

Congratulations to Alex and the whole team at MSL. As a sucker for all things speedy (patrickcollison.com/fast), I thought this was an impressive chart:

I was recently in Nashville. At the state museum, I learned that Nashville's Union Station was designed by an Irish-American who had no formal architectural training. Agree above houses aren't majestic, but seeing Union Station was a helpful reminder of how much worse things could be if didn't have architecture experts overseeing things. (cc @RuxandraTeslo also.)

Have wanted something like this for ages — it looks great.

I gave OpenClaw an export of my Apple Health data and asked it for some interesting analysis of heart rate vs travel data. It figured out that it could approximate my location from workout GPS annotations plus time zone stamps from other logged datapoints and then produced a bunch of interesting charts.

Not only was Greg not fired from Stripe, but John and I threw him a farewell party at our home, with everyone from Stripe invited. It involved a lot of freshly-squeezed juice (this being one of his primary koding fuels). Our small apartment was bursting at the seams.

New: @Microsoft is launching a shopping experience inside @Copilot, powered by @Stripe. Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI. We're eager to rethink every part of the existing commerce and financial stack.

Stripe is partnering with @Instacart to enable direct checkout in ChatGPT. This new AI commerce experience is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) that we launched with @OpenAI a few months ago. Behind the scenes, it uses @Stripe Shared Payment Tokens to securely handle payment credentials. Live today on web! (Mobile soon.)

With some slight prompt modifications.

Asking LLMs to plot subjective things now yields quite interesting results.

I asked Gemini 3 to make an interactive web page summarizing 10 breakthroughs in genetics over the past 15 years. Result: gemini.google.com/share/ee1d… Pretty cool IMO.

Came across this summary that pulls together some of the recent findings on the links between commonplace (including ostensibly "harmless") pathogens and long-term harm to human health. The war on infectious diseases is far from over!

Today I had lunch with twelve young Irish people -- a wonderful bunch in their early 20s working on rockets, biotech, software/AI, etc. I enquired about whether any were planning on leaving Ireland over the next 3 years. All hands but one went up. I asked the holdout why he was staying; he clarified that he was also going to leave, just not in the next three years. Mobility is a wonderful thing, but it feels worrisome if everyone in such a group concludes that they ought to emigrate. This desire seems to generalize. A 2023 study suggested that more young people want to leave Ireland than any other EU country.

Ireland, UK, US, Australia respectively. In each case, very large increase post-pandemic.

An interesting trend we're noticing at Stripe: US startups are pulling ahead of their peers elsewhere. These charts show averaged revenue growth for software startups in each location. US startups typically grow somewhat faster than those elsewhere. However, since mid-2023, US companies have accelerated a lot. Interestingly, this is not just because of AI startups: if we strip those out, there's still a big divergence. Our leading hypothesis is that US startups (even those that aren't AI companies as such) are adopting new technologies (AI, stablecoins, etc.) faster than companies elsewhere. (This pattern of faster adoption among US companies was also seen with the internet itself.) Whatever the cause, the pattern is striking. [Methodological note: this pattern appears to hold beyond Europe as well.]

Excellent piece by @collision on some of Ireland’s most acute challenges: irishtimes.com/life-style/pe….

There used to be a fountain at the center of the Civic Center Plaza in SF. It was removed in 2003 because: > It's become an intolerable situation, and we don't have additional resources to continually clean it," said Alex Mamak, a spokesman for the Department of Public Works. Department crews clean out human filth and hypodermic needles every morning, only to find a new mess the next morning, Mamak said. This makes me want a new ranking of cities: ornamental fountains per capita. That is, those with the affinity for beauty to construct them, and with the social trust and dignity to sustain them.

After Titan, I decided to stick with the theme of oil entrepreneurs, and at the same time rectify an important omission in my US civics education. I happened to read Moby Dick alongside Shakespeare, specifically Richard II, and it's clear that Melville was quite directly inspired. “So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense”, “the greater idiot ever scolds the lesser”, “I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though.” I would have guessed Shakespeare if asked to speculate on the origin of many of the apothegms that Melville casually scatters. With hamartic compulsion, Ahab is obviously a tragic figure in the mold of Lear or Hamlet, and the Pequod serves as a kind of stage (complete with directions as prelude to many chapters). Soliloquies abound. Melville is a post-industrial revolution author, though, writing from the other side of modernity’s threshold. Where Shakespeare’s preoccupation is in human relations and the psyche, Melville recognizes that we are in a time of discovery and change, and he is just as intently interested in society, the economy, biology, and the wider planet. Even when telling the history of a country, Shakespeare’s worlds are small; Melville’s, despite being substantially hemmed to a boat, is somehow large. Maybe Shakespeare in some way captured all there was to be captured at the time; if so, in Melville we can see how much larger humanity has become: industry, trade networks, energy, science, anthropology, firms with multinational labour, knowable continents beyond great seas. It’s well known, or at least widely speculated, that VC economics are based on those of the whaling industry. As such, we presumably ought to reflect on Ahab as Silicon Valley hero: the cetacean anticipates the unicorn. Ahab recruits, he strategizes, he inspires, he exhorts, and he fully adheres to the doctrine that the captain’s fate must remain inexorably coupled with the ship’s. The most important imperative for a founder, of course, is to identify the right goals; here Ahab, in his fulminating single-mindedness, falls short. Much lore valorizes those who persist in dogged pursuit of their original mission no matter the impediments and the haters. Was Melville the first to illustrate this archetype? He doesn’t seem fully persuaded of its merits, however. Moby Dick perhaps serves to show that the founder’s zeal can exist in excess, and that, while no doubt flawed and liable to error, the signals provided by the market are a helpful check on frail human reason. Ahab himself reflects in a moment of self-awareness: “Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege.” Do we think? We assuredly imagine so, but maybe we should all listen to Starbuck: “I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.” One should sometimes sell to Google, shut the company down, go try anew. — The 19th century Anglosphere is the time of the cathedralesque Victorian pumping stations, of Dickens, of Turner, of Romanesque Revival, Gothic Revival, Beaux-Arts. When @culturaltutor (check out his new documentary!) calls for a retvrn, it is to the nineteenth century more than any other. And at the same time, it is the century of the full-throated destruction of California’s redwood forests, previously one of the great majesties of the planet. It is the century of the slaughter of the American bison (tens of millions to fewer than a thousand) and of the elimination of the passenger pigeon (extinct by the early 20th century). Our post-60s culture is incapable of designing an appealing government building, but it does feel a revulsion at the unbridled extirpation of a species or of an ecosystem. “Just be more Victorian” does not feel like the right blanket prescription. The 19th century seems to have been possessed by the imperative to both forge and to debase grandeur; some kind of dialectic between the awesome and the awful. Did they merely happen to coincide or were they actually linked? Moby Dick is a novel about the counterpoise. It is unsparing in its description of the realities: “At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.” And yet the next chapter breezily (is that the point?) commences: “The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity.” Ishmael is not just ambivalent in the aftermath of the suffering; he is more impressed. How Melville himself felt about the industry is not made clear, but I see no particular reason to doubt his enthusiasm. He did, after all, himself work as a whaler. (Take that, MFA-ification of the novelist.) So, the question: does the psychological impulse that undergirds a Victorian desire to monumentalize and to elevate—the self-confidence and the narcissism—somehow also beget the attendant cruelty? Eureka’s Carson Mansion, one of the extravagant high points of American architecture of the period, was built by the clearcutting local lumber magnate. As far as I can tell, the presence of injury isn’t just incidental. Walt Whitman, who surely embodies the late 19th century’s numinous aspiration as well as anyone, hymns in Song of the Redwood Tree to the “crackling blows of axes, sounding musically, driven by strong arms” yielding “the falling trunk and limbs, the crash, the muffled shriek, the groan”. Rather than be appalled (or at least discomfited), he is enraptured: “I see the Genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal, Clearing the ground for broad Humanity, the true America”. The true America! Now, there’s an obvious alternate view. Maybe all cultures are just imbued at the outset with malignity and blindness, with Victorian progress simply uneven. Perhaps their advancement in the aesthetic domain was simply not yet matched in the moral domain. But Melville, Whitman, Kipling, and others make me suspect that there is in fact a connection. In Gast’s American Progress, the bison are being driven into the darkness. As with all Nietzschean tendencies, spiritual self-regard is double-edged. — I hadn't previously know anything about the economics of whaling. Moby Dick was published in 1851. (Melville was, remarkably, just 31.) As with Liar’s Poker, he captured a sector in its heyday: whaling reached its peak in 1845, whereupon declining whale populations started to constrain. Oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, and domestic petroleum extraction surpassed oil derived from the whaling industry pretty much immediately. By 1870, US whaling had declined by about 75%. (The decline also accelerated by the Norwegian invention and adoption of the explosive harpoon, rendering US fleets less competitive.) Whale oil was never the US’s primary energy source or source of oil and never amounted to even 1% of US GDP. Camphene (from alcohol) was the main lamp fuel, with annual production more than tenfold greater than peak whale oil. Lard oil, tallow, and vegetable oils were also used. Our whaling was in this sense a luxury undertaking: whale oil smelled better and burned more cleanly. While American whale oil use declined precipitously in the 19th century, it did not abate entirely. I had no idea that sperm oil was widely-employed until relatively recently. Wikipedia: “Prior to 1972, over 30 million lb (14 million kg) of sperm whale oil was used annually in lubricants because of its exceptional lubricity and heat stability. In 1972, the sperm whale was listed as an Endangered Species. The following year, the US Congress amended the Endangered Species Act, outlawing the killing of whales and the use of their oil. The loss of sperm oil had a profound impact in the automotive industry, where for example, transmission failures rose from under 1 million in 1972 to over 8 million by 1975.” One of the two last whaling stations in the US was active in the San Francisco Bay until 1971. “The station’s boats hauled in an average of 175 finbacks, humpbacks, and sperm whales a year.” It seems that the Western Pacific gray whale and the North Atlantic right whale may not survive the already-imposed population declines. While we rue the safetyism, proceduralism, and risk-aversion that took hold in our culture starting in the 60s (of all years, it is noteworthy that the last whaling station closed in 1971…), and see that cultural turn as a fulcrum for our whole world, whaling is perhaps as good example as any of its necessity: we were in fact careering towards acts of annihilation. — I listened to much of the book, and thought the narration by William Hootkins was just fantastic.

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Read a few interesting posts on the Faroe Islands recently. My trip report from a very brief visit a few months ago. -- The landscape is improbably three-dimensional and rough-hewn: rugged, jutted, serrated, cragged. In being fully denuded – the peaty soil, the Atlantic winds, the centuries of overgrazing – it feels like an exaggerated, hyperreal version of the west of Ireland. It also reminds of a Patagonia stripped of the Andean backdrop. Torshavn now boasts numerous excellent restaurants. It is a town of only 14,000 people: what’s going on? As far as I can tell, this is fully a story of cultural contingency: in 2011, “chef Leif Sørensen ended up essentially inventing Faroese haute cuisine all by himself”, opening the restaurant Koks. This is in a tradition of Norsemen defining new gastronomic cultures through force of will. In 2004, Claus Meyer and Rene Redzepi organized the Nordic Kitchen Symposium (supported by the government, it is interesting to note) and put forth the Nordic Kitchen Manifesto, setting in motion the forces that rendered Copenhagen the culinary capital it is today. Little of note grows in the Faroes. They raise sheep; most of the rest they scavenge from the sea. Fermented lamb is a specialty. I ate it. I would not call it bad, but I won't rush to consume it again. Over dinner, I chatted with a young couple from Liechtenstein. (Liechtenstein being the only other comparably-sized country in Europe, this seemed appropriate.) The woman worked as a diplomat in Brussels. She told me that the city was often unsafe and that there were many places she couldn’t go. That concept felt a far cry from Torshavn. Her boyfriend mentioned the heatwave back home; I asked about their thoughts on air conditioning. “It’s too energy intensive… one has to consider the greater good.” I point out that California’s abundant air conditioning is mainly powered by solar. “Yes, but still… it’s not good to use so much energy.” My optimism about Europe was not enhanced. There are a lot of undersea tunnels in the Faroes, connecting the islands, with plenty of additional projects underway. As a Californian, these are a mystical luxury. How can a nation of 55,000 people (Petaluma has more), and poorer per capita than my home state, possibly afford them? Per-unit length costs appear to be almost 30x lower than California’s. For example, the 11km Eysturoyartunnilin opened in 2020, and was evidently constructed for $14M per km. The bookstore contains many Faroese-language works. Approximately 200 new books are published each year; one for every 275 people. Ireland’s annual production is one for every 2,000 people or so. What does one learn from the Faroes? It feels clearly to the betterment of the world that they exist. Some of this is in the natural splendor, but some is also in seeing what a micro-nation is capable of. Are the Faroes an example of how clearly-defined polities are a bottleneck for the advancement of the world? To the extent that cultures establish the preconditions for anything, and to the extent that appreciation for and consumption of humanity’s creations are among the most durable sources of welfare, should we want more Faroes? Do the Faroes, with isolation enforced by maritime tyranny, hint at what is lost in global integration? Did Patrick Leigh Fermor encounter a new Faroe Islands every day? There were around 27 different languages spoken in France in 1900. How does one like the Faroes and like globalization?