Hey now, it’s book time!
Tabula Rasa: Volume 1 by John McPhee, read by John McPhee.
How this book came to me: I was looking for an audiobook to follow Ian Frazier’s Hogs Wild, which I read recently. I considered re-reading Travels in Siberia, which I loved and think of often, but decided to try something new; there was nothing of note by Ian Frazier in my library’s catalog, so I moved to an adjacent author, John McPhee. I’ve read a decent amount of McPhee’s writing, from Levels of the Game to Waiting for a Ship to Draft No. 4, but I’ve somehow missed a few of the big ones, and upon finding Coming Into the Country on my library’s shelf, I borrowed and started listening to it.
But Nelson Munger’s reading felt a little old fashioned, and my progress stalled. So I searched again and found Tabula Rasa, which appeared to continue the themes in Draft No. 4. This appearance was not an accident, and I enjoyed Tabula Rasa as well.
What to say about Tabula Rasa? It is only the first volume of McPhee’s memoirs, a designation that McPhee suggests is intended to keep him alive long enough to publish a second volume. It is relentlessly funny while at the same time being totally serious and (in McPhee’s own reading) mostly deadpan. I’m not sure precisely what it taught me, but I do find McPhee’s own story (born in Princeton, educated at Princeton, now teaches at Princeton while not writing for the New Yorker) to be a pointedly twentieth-century one. That said, McPhee remains endearing and manages to sit somewhat askew from the people he writes about. And through Tabula Rasa, I felt as if I were sitting askew with him.
Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman, read by Grover Gardner.
I’m not totally sure what to make of this book. Short and playful, it is a work of fiction which riffs on the bizarre and mind-bending ideas underpinning the theories of relativity and quantum physics. It purports to be a collection of dreams, dreamed by Einstein himself, during a period of time in which we imagine that his head would have been swirling with complex and confusing thoughts. I’m not totally sure what the dream-stories say about Einstein’s theories per se. But I was struck by one of them in particular, in which a world is imagined where people live only twenty-four hours. If a person were born in the morning, their entire early life would be lived in daylight, and they might face large cognitive and emotional hurdles at dusk. The world goes black, and suddenly all the skills they have developed in the daylight become irrelevant. Do they adapt? Do they stagnate? Do they give up? This is, of course, something that happens in our world, though in place of daylight and dark we face unprecedented war, or unprecedented peace, or changes in technology or a death in the family or the predictable yet punishing changes that occur inside one’s own body.
Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet by Tim Hwang, read by Matt Godfrey.
I listened to (and read in print) this book for the SOW Members’ Reading Group, for which it has been nominated a couple times and finally won out recently. I’ve had it on my shelf for at least a year or two, and though Tim is a friend I had never, alas, made the time to read it.
Tim’s core argument is that the internet is largely funded by advertising, and as a result its structure is largely dictated by the needs of advertisers, and ALSO that internet advertising is just kind of broken. His worry, I think, is that the bubble in internet advertising might pop, and that such a pop might lead to large-scale failure across the internet — which is, it should be noted, a place that he feels protective of. In all of these points I agree with him, and through the conversations we had in the Reading Group (including a chat with Tim when we finished the book), I reflected a bit on my own role as an internet publisher and the way in which my own business, career, and life have been shaped by advertising.
Today, about 88% of my income comes from individual subscriptions (Members and Supporters of SOW); the remaining 12% comes from advertisers (the sponsors whose logos, and infrequent text ads, appear in SOW). This is a dramatic shift from the way it was two or three years ago, when more like 70% of my revenue came from advertisers and a significant portion of the rest came from job posts (which are also, in effect, ads). I am not totally pleased with this transition; sure, the total number of dollars I receive from individual subscriptions has increased since I went full-time on SOW, but the decline I’ve seen in advertising has been much more dramatic. In other words, I’ve lost much more money from decreased ad revenue than I have from increased subscriptions.
But I’m also not totally displeased with this either, and in net I’m happier now with my business than I have been at really any other point. Sure, I’m making less money, but also my incentive structure is more clearly oriented towards producing good content and I do believe that the content I’m producing is better now than it was four years ago. Furthermore, individual subscribers are for the most part more pleasant to do business with.
These tradeoffs aren’t really present in Subprime Attention Crisis, and from our conversation with Tim it wasn’t completely clear how much hope he has as a result of the rise of subscription-based content models like Ghost (which SOW runs on) and Substack (which Tim subsequently worked at after publishing the book). Regardless, it was interesting to consider my corner of the world that Tim wrote about, and I’m glad that I seem to have avoided catastrophe in my own career by setting up non-advertising revenue models in parallel to the (lucrative and kind of addictive) ad business that SOW grew to prominence with.