Longreads + Open Thread

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Longreads

• In Vox, Alexander Sorondo writes about a phenomenon I've thought about a few times: the short shelf life of tell-all political memoirs. These always get heavily hyped, but they run into a three-part problem: if they reveal that the politician in question behaves the same way behind closed doors as they do in TV, they're just offering more datapoints confirming a preexisting view; if they humanize their subject, it's what fans already believed and what opponents don't much care about; and if they reveal something truly scandalous, it's part of the news cycle before most readers buy their copy. Perhaps the real function of these books is to provide a periodic reminder that a lot of political news ultimately doesn't matter much. Pick up a current events bestseller from a decade ago, and ask yourself: how much of what this book talked about ended up mattering? And of the things that didn't, how many felt, at the time, like they were the most important story in the world?
• Another great Nilay Patel interview in The Verge, this time with Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings (parent company of Booking, Priceline, Kayak, Opentable, Agoda, and many others. There's a lot here about running a diversified company and about where synergy does and doesn't exist, but the most interesting bits are about the economics of intermediaries. Booking is connecting existing demand for travel to existing hotels and flights, so in principle it's always an option for each side to disintermediate Booking itself. And yet, they're surviving in regulatory environments where they can't require hotels to offer the same pricing for direct bookings. One reason Fogel talks about is that there's a long tail of travel—he gives the example of a small Swiss hotel that a) would be happy to do business with tourists from China, but b) can't justify the cost of 24-hour Chinese language customer support, or of adding Alipay and WeChat Pay. That’s a service that will be provided by third-party platforms rather than independent hotels for a long, long time.
• In 404 Media, Jason Koebler dives into the world of AI-generated social media slop. An unavoidable feature of big platforms is that they create an incentive to discover and then exploit consumer demand, and some of that demand turns out to be for heartstring-tugging AI-generated photos of orphans, military veterans, etc. Some of this is a temporary feature of the cultural immune system: anyone who was using email in the 90s had to get used to glurge, and we all collectively enforced a norm that it shouldn't be mindlessly forwarded around.
• Brian Potter's Construction Physics has an excellent history of California's switch from fastest-growing US state to one of the most growth-skeptical ones. It's a series of individually defensible decisions: California grew fast, which led to higher incomes but also more pollution, so they started getting more careful about allowing new property development; population growth that outstripped housing supply meant that home prices and thus property taxes rose, so they capped those taxes; the state's financial constraints meant that they had to carefully consider every expense, and politicians found that immediate social services were a more reliable vote-getter than long-term infrastructure. And the result is expensive dysfunction, which is balanced against some incredibly productive industries that generate just enough tax revenue to keep the system going. Part of what makes this such a difficult problem is that any solution makes some constituencies worse off, and those constituencies vote.
• Fernando Borretti has an opinionated piece on programming languages. As an aside, it makes a lot of sense that programmers would be an unusually opinionated bunch about their work: if you're comparing Turing-equivalent languages, anything you can do in one is, in principle, doable in any other. Choosing a language or set of languages to get good at necessarily means investing some sunk cost of time into getting good at a language, while languages affect how you think about the whole process (depending on which one you choose, you might think of programming as exercising careful control over discrete elements of a machine's hardware, or about writing neat little proofs that happen to be executable). The piece also highlights an interesting coordination problem: everyone has an incentive to keep using whatever tooling roughly works, and it's hard to convince people to switch. The result is that some languages have a more fragmented and illegible set of libraries than they really should.
• In Capital Gains this week, we're covering the topical issue of carry trades. Why does a naive strategy like "borrow in low-yielding currencies, lend in higher-yielding ones" tend to work? And what makes it blow up?
• In this week's episode of The Riff, I'm joined by Omar Shams to talk about how AI changes the org chart, why it's good for one-person companies and million-person companies, and why more computing power hasn't made it any easier to plan economies. Listen with Twitter/Spotify/Apple/YouTube.

Open Thread

• Drop in any links or comments of interest to Diff readers.
• Per the first link, political tell-all memoirs are usually disposable. Are there any that turn out, a generation later, to be uniquely interesting? Samuel Pepys probably counts.

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