Synthesis #7: 💯 interesting stuff on leading, learning, and living better

As historian Chris Rasmussen writes in Carnival in the Countryside, a study of the Iowa State Fair, “the uneasiness or outright antipathy that some agriculturalists, journalists, and fairgoers felt toward entertainments was not merely a cranky outburst against the prospect that someone might actually have fun at the fair.” Instead, it was about identity and what a community ought to stand for. “As Iowans debated the respective place of agriculture and entertainments at the fair between the 1850s and the turn of the twentieth century,” Rasmussen writes, “they were implicitly discussing the future of their state.”

But through growth in almost all segments, Big Tech has eclipsed Big Oil and other major industry groups to comprise the most valuable publicly-traded companies in the world. By continuing to grow, these companies have strengthened the financial position of their billionaire founders and led the tech-heavy NASDAQ to new record highs.

While a bigger garden and spare bedroom soon cease to be novel, every day’s commute is a little bit different, meaning we can never get quite used to it. There is a direct linear downwards relationship between commute time and life satisfaction, but there’s no linear upwards correlation between house size and life satisfaction. As Montgomery says, “The problem is, we consistently make decisions that suggest we are not so good at distinguishing between ephemeral and lasting pleasures. We keep getting it wrong.”

What does a bay leaf taste like? Nothing. What does a bay leaf smell like? Nothing. What does a bay leaf look like? A leaf. How does a bay leaf behave? It behaves as a leaf would, if you took a leaf from the tree outside of your apartment building and put it into your soup.

The panpsychist argues that consciousness did not emerge at some point during evolution. Rather, it’s always associated with matter and vice versa – they’re two sides of the same coin. But the large majority of the mind associated with the various types of matter in our universe is extremely rudimentary. An electron or an atom, for example, enjoys just a tiny amount of consciousness. But as matter becomes more interconnected and rich, so does the mind, and vice versa, according to this way of thinking.

Despite setting a realistic schedule and blocking time to work on your newsletter, life happens—and you may miss an edition of your newsletter. Don’t beat yourself up. It’s better to send the newsletter a bit late than to not send it at all. And in certain circumstances, it’s also fine to make the choice of skipping an edition. Just be transparent with your readers.

Local officials rerouted the elaborate designs of freeway engineers — often at considerable expense — to destroy thousands of homes in racially diverse communities. As detailed by Gilbert Estrada in “If You Build It, They Will Move,” mixed-race Boyle Heights was gutted by freeways. Despite a mandate to avoid parks at all costs, planners put lanes through the middle of Hollenbeck Park while spending millions to reroute around a park in the white suburb of San Dimas. Dozens of Boyle Heights homes were destroyed just to give white suburban shoppers easier freeway access to a Sears department store.