Notes, 2025-05-19

One of the things I'm working on right now — this might or might not be evident from the outside, I'm not sure — is giving myself the space to actually write essays, rather than simply collecting and then disseminating snippets of information. This is a significant shift, and one that I do not always find easy. It's hard, in particular, to accept the fact that essays take more time to develop and often need to simmer for a while before they're ready to serve. The upshot, I think, is that fleshing out an essay results in a large amount of snippet-collection: tabs that you open, think about for a while, and then ultimately set aside. Or, maybe you decide to disseminate them after all ;)

SCOPE CREEP.

• Here’s a very short article on the use of crooks (naturally occurring pieces of wood, whose grain bends drastically due to its location on the tree) in traditional wooden shipbuilding. I also recommend this oldie-but-goodie episode of the Tally Ho project, in which Leo visits a sawmill in Georgia to cut (remarkably curvy) slabs of live oak.
• A 2017 profile of Two Dollar Steve, a bankruptcy lawyer who is weirdly fond of handing out two dollar bills to everyone, including Drake, Bill Clinton, and Barbara Streisand. I have it on good authority that not everyone he handed a two dollar bill to appreciated the gesture.
• The SOW Members' Reading Group is now reading Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation by Silvia Lindtner. Join us today and take 20% off your Membership with offer code READMORE.

In Noah Smith’s newsletter, a sort of two-part economic history of Brazil, written by Pedro Franco de Campos Pinto, concentrating on the free trade zone of Manaus (which I’ve written about previously) and on the government-subsidized development of the aerospace manufacturer Embraer.