Late on in his writing career a bestselling author created James A Micheners Writers Handbook. Now the stuff of thrift shops and the ‘for sale’ trolley in your local library, Michener was a bestselling author for over four decades. His paperback books were the size of doorstops, yet were sold in every airport for holiday reading.
At the end of the first Gulf War, George W. Bush quoted one of Michener’s short stories in a celebration of the allied military effort. If you have ever watched the musical South Pacific, that was an adaption of Michener’s first book ‘Tales of the South Pacific‘. Ten of his works were adapted for film by Hollywood and there were a further five TV series or ‘mini-series’.
Michener died in 1993, but during his life time his books sold an estimated 75 million copies worldwide. There was a distinctive Michener fingerprint to his books:
Geography was at the route of everything, the setting was the hero of his books
Deep research: Michener would research the culture, history and geology of the setting
A common narrative rhythm to his writing
Despite running to 1,000+ pages, Michener’s books were easy to read
The writer’s handbook
James A Micheners Writers Handbook talks through the process that Michener went through in writing a couple of his works. He talks about using a cut-and-paste methodology, where he physically cut and pasted in paragraphs on to typed sheets. He discusses the move from hot metal typesetting to phototypesetting and its effect on the editorial process.
Michener’s career saw him move his writing process from mechanical typewriter to word processor and he discusses how this became beneficial to his writing style.
Michener shows the feedback that he received from the publisher, the editor and even legal review – laying open how once the original draft is submitted to the publisher, creating a novel then becomes a team sport. And that’s even before marketing gets involved.
This is all laid out including photographs of original manuscript pages and proofing copies in a coffee table book.
Creating an easy-to-read books was deceptively hard work. The refining process that Michener went through reminded me of creating propositions for a creative brief in my day job.
At the back of the book is his advice for future writers in terms of paths to getting published. He admitted that getting published had become much harder for a number of reasons:
The opportunities to showcase your writing had diminished due to the demise of short story publications
Publishers now relied on agents to filter manuscripts on their behalf
Writing courses were considered a par for the course
Michener recommended a number of careers to kickstart a writing career including working in public relations rather than journalism – which surprised me
James A Micheners Writers Handbook won’t tell you how to create great stories, but it is a lesson in writing as a multi-stage process of creation, followed by refinement and further simplification of the language. Michener’s idea of simplification is still far more advanced than we write for today in business, in advertising copy or culture.
The book itself is a bit of a curate’s egg. I would recommend it, but not too sure about who I should recommend it to. More on the book here.
Enquire Within tends to appear in book collections for people of a certain age, or, where the book collector has inherited part of their collection. Spending time on the family farm in Ireland during my childhood, I used to see a copy of an early 20th century vintage sit next to a dog-eared copy of Old Moore’s Almanac (not to be mistaken for a separate UK publication: Old Moore’s Almanack), Old Moore’s was used for deciding what to plant in the garden besides potatoes.
During the bank holiday weekend, staying with my parents, emergency works on a water main managed to take out the broadband and electricity along their road. I went back though my Dad’s boxes of books and leafed through my parents copy of Enquire Within. My Dad thinks he had received the copy as a gift from a the owner of a second hand book store in Birkenhead market right after he had moved into the first house that my parents had bought. But he can’t be certain. Given that the outer gloss paper wrap around the hardback inner cover uses a font that looks similar to Eurostile and the price is in decimal – I guess it’s from the early to mid-1970s.
Enquire Within could be thought of as a primer for everyday life. Topics included how to play a variety of card games, basic first aid, the basics on taxation and education with the addresses of the UK government departments responsible. There was a travel section with a few paragraphs on every western European country, which had been written by the Financial Times travel correspondent. The gardening section went into much more depth explaining what a hardy annual and hardy perennial were, alongside the correct way to build a compost heap, how to dig drills and prune roses.
At the back there is an exhaustive list of children’s names together with their meanings.
Enquire Within and the origins of the web
What I didn’t find out until later on was that Tim Berners-Lee was partly inspired to create a predecessor to what would become the world wide web by a Victorian vintage copy of Enquire Within that was in his parents house when he was growing up. The system was called ENQUIRE and seemed to be similar conceptually to HyperCard or a Wiki. The World Wide Web came out of Berners-Lee’s efforts to integrate disparate systems including ENQUIRE together to facilitate better collaboration between CERN research projects.
This video on money laundering is as much of interest for the phenomenon of quality documentaries on YouTube as it is for recycling known truths about HSBC.
The Forrester Wave™: Commerce Search And Product Discovery, Q3 2023, Surfaces The Challenges Of AI Unchecked – Don’t let buzzwords distract you from what your customers — and your business — need. Vendors often use their own terminology, especially in a market that hasn’t had a Forrester Wave evaluation in place already. One will talk about how extremely relevant their results are, while another will scoff at “relevancy” as outdated methodology. You’ll hear semantic, vector, hybrid, ML, AI, and all sorts of branded names for products and functions
Security
The Cheap Radio Hack That Disrupted Poland’s Railway System | WIRED – the ability to send the command has been described in Polish radio and train forums and on YouTube for years. “Everybody could do this. Even teenagers trolling. The frequencies are known. The tones are known. The equipment is cheap. – This reminds me of the blue boxes used for phone phreaking decades ago.
Adobe’s AI diversity auditor | Patent Drop – is seeking to patent a system for “diversity auditing” using computer vision. Essentially, this system uses facial detection and image classification to break down photos of employees and slot them into categories based on certain physical traits and characteristics. Adobe’s system looks through several images and detects faces in each one, then classifies each face based on a predicted “sensitive attribute” relating to “protected classes of individuals,” such as race, age or gender. For example, Adobe noted, this system may classify images from a company’s website, then compare its predictions to a “comparison population.”
Technology
Mexico’s Microchip Advantage | Foreign Affairs – there are significant hurdles to making Mexico a bigger player in supply chains for chips and advanced technologies. The country lacks its Asian rivals’ existing networks of high-technology firms. Until now, investments in the sphere have been sparse. To change this situation, Mexican political and business leaders need a clearer strategy for attracting semiconductor investment. The dividends, both for Mexican industry and for U.S. supply chain security, could be significant. Today’s large-scale shift away from China-focused assembly operations offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a more fully integrated North American semiconductor and electronics supply chain. Despite the United States’ major involvement in many segments of the chip industry, there is at present hardly any semiconductor packaging or assembly in the country and very little anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. The United States maintains a leading role in R&D-intensive segments of the semiconductor industry, including chip design and manufacturing equipment. The CHIPS Act is intended to increase the amount of chip fabrication in the United States. Yet neither the United States nor any country in the Western Hemisphere plays a major role in the final stages of the chip manufacturing process—assembly, testing, and packaging (ATP)—in which semiconductors are tested and assembled into sophisticated packages. The Western Hemisphere also does relatively little assembly of advanced electronic systems that require a lot of chips, such as consumer electronics.
The Apple Wonderlust event happened on September 12, 2023. The events timing fitted in with the two Apple events a year that we have grown to expect:
Worldwide Developers Conference – in June.
Autumn event in September / October.
Unlike when I started buying Apple products these events are no longer hosted at external conference centres but at Apple’s own conference centre as part of its campus. For the past decade and a half Apple hasn’t participated at wider trade shows, in the same way that the likes of Samsung or Microsoft would at CES.
Apple Inc.
Apple events from the late 1990s onwards built their reputation for being great live performances by Steve Jobs and the management team. COVID-19 seems to have allowed Apple to move to a pre-recorded keynote that the media and general public watch together either in person or streamed online, followed by the media being allowed to get hands on with the products.
This allows for a polished event presentation, all-be-it one that might be out of touch with its audience. More on that later.
Is wonderlust even a word?
A quick look at dictionaries offline and online kept bringing up results for wonderlust – the hankering to travel. That was until I hit Urban Dictionary that categorised wonderlust this way:
the desire to be in a constant state of wonder Joe had a serious case of wonderlust: he was bored of anything ordinary.
There were other definitions, but I think that they were outside the scope of where Apple wanted to go.
TL;DR
If you’ve bought an Apple product in the past three years there weren’t any ‘must buy’ products showcased in the Wonderlust event. Your iPhone and Apple Watch will still be good enough and benefit from this years upgraded OS. If you have a device over three years old then upgrading to the new products is worth considering.
Apple still hasn’t jumped on the folding screen bandwagon that Samsung has. Given that we don’t see question-and-answer sessions that Steve Jobs sometimes indulged us with we don’t know the definitive ‘why’ yet.
The meh moments
There was more to criticise in this Apple events than other recent ones.
USB-C as a benefit
The reality is that in order for Apple to sell in the European Union it has had to move the iPhone and AirPods to a USB-C connection, away from the the Lightning connector. Apple tried to play this off as an improvement that they’d made to their phones, but the reality is that it was a change forced upon Apple.
Cringeworthy ESG update
Part of the pre-recorded content was a skit where Mother Nature turns up at Apple HQ for a meeting with the team about improvements in their environmental record. The problem was that the film was out of touch with the audience and has been roundly criticised.
For five minutes, we had the same thing over and over. It might be about materials one moment and packaging the next, but it was a single gag stretched out too far.
It was stretched so thin that you could see the thinking behind it. Every single element was good by itself, and no one would cut anything.
But the result is that every single element was undermined by the repetition. And instead of Apple showing it was better than just sell-sell-sell videos, the result was that the sketch felt like padding in an event that’s like drinking tech data from a fire hose.
I do think it went on too long — the whole segment (sketch plus details) in fact was just 10 minutes long, not 20. But seemingly everyone, including me, felt like it lasted 20 minutes, which is never a good sign.
Recycled materials usage. There were also claims made about leather usage, but these only applied to Hermés straps sold within Apple’s own retail channels.
Taking plastic out of packaging. Apple has been minimising packaging by taking items out of the box (iPhone earphones, iPhone charger being two high profile examples). But now it’s taking plastic out of packaging as well. Its able to do this due to control of all aspects of its manufacturing process and packaging re-engineering. This is also pleasing to Apple shareholders. Given that Apple’s packaging is bought at scale, decreased materials usage and size means less risk of damage and reduced cost of manufacture & transport – any increased cost in design and packaging development will be amortised across millions of units. You see a similar benefit in Apple’s product materials as well such as aluminium laptop chassis.
Carbon offset for energy used not only in the manufacture of Apple Watch, but also throughout their expected life.
A move towards more ocean freight to reduce logistics carbon footprint, compared to air travel. This will have had a direct impact on the flexibility and responsiveness of Apple’s global supply chain, particularly custom specified products like non-standard MacBook Pro configurations.
Apple still has a lot of problems however and here are three of the biggest:
With the exception of the Apple Pro, Mac models can no longer be upgraded, which reduces reparability and product life.
AirPods can’t be repaired, only thrown away. This is a problem for the wireless earbud category in general, but Apple are a leading player in the market and can set the the tone in the market through innovation.
The very nature of Apple’s business could be considered to drive excessive consumption. In sharp contrast, one of the traditional reasons why one owned a Mac was that you got a computer that was useful for longer. I am currently using a couple of Apple Thunderbolt displays that are between 8 and 12 years old. Prior to the iPhone I was using Macs that may have been eight years old by the time that i parted company with them.
Incremental product improvements
The announcements would have felt like tweaks for consumers. Apple Watches got more powerful processors for the first time. The iPhone Pro titanium frame would marginally reduce the weight of the handset. Apple has previously used titanium in laptops between 2001 and 2003, so the material isn’t completely new to the brand. The camera can create video and photography with depth for the Apple Vision Pro. Camera performance with darker skin tones has been improved to match Google Pixel driven innovation. But battery life is ‘about the same’ as previous generations.
Many of the software improvements including live stickers are likely to be be in the iOS upgrade available to previous generations of phones.
Ok, so what if anything was interesting about the event?
There were three things that while they wouldn’t make me want to go out and buy a new device are still important developments, based on the direction that they are taking Apple products.
Service integration
Apple iPhone is moving beyond emergency satellite text services to breakdown care via satellite as well. It’s interesting that Apple is continuing to go beyond cellular. It is starting to look like the kind of differentiation Vertu used to enjoy with its single button concierge service. It supports the viewpoint that Apple is a luxury adjacent, if not luxury brand.
Mechanical engineering on the iPhone camera
Apple has managed to cram in a lens with an equivalent focal length of 77mm into the iPhone 15 Pro through a novel prismatic lens design. The device also uses a similar mechanism design to that used on Pentax DSLRs to compensate for device shake. The titanium frame probably provides additional rigidity for this system to work to its full potential. However the weight loss of the device might drive increased shake so there is a careful calibration in choices that the engineering team made.
On-device machine learning
The Apple Watch had redesigned silicon to move machine learning from the cloud or iPhone device on to the Watch itself. This improves response time, but also points to a move of taking large language model systems and neural networks out of the cloud and on to the device. Given that the watch also features ultra wideband wireless connectivity, it’s an especially interesting choice decoupling the watch from the iPhone.
I had this copy of Deluxe on my shelf for a while and finally managed got round to reading it. Deluxe – how luxury lost its lustre was written by Dana Thomas. Dana knows the subject that she’s talking about.
Dana Thomas
Dana Thomas is a Paris-based journalist who covered the fashion industry. Thomas started her journalistic career writing for the ‘style’ section of The Washington Post. For a decade and a half Thomas was a cultural and fashion correspondent for Newsweek in Paris. She has contributed to The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Architectural Digest. Deluxe is one of three books that she has written, the other is Fashionopolis, which focuses on the fast fashion industry and Gods and Kings covered the career of fashion designers Alexander McQueen and John Galliano.
Deluxe – How Luxury Lost its Lustre
In the introduction starts with a scatter gun approach. She bemoans Gucci and Burberry factory seconds on sale in China, revealing the global supply chain used by luxury brands now. She also criticises that luxury goods are used as currency by some sex workers from compensated dating to ‘returning gifts’ and pocketing the difference minus a restocking fee.
I get the sense that Thomas would like to see these companies remain small ‘secrets’ only known by a cosmopolitan cognoscenti, obviously including herself. What my younger peers would call ‘gatekeeping’ in a derogatory way.
Parasite singles
Most of Thomas’ ire focuses on Louis Vuitton early on. She describes Bernard Arnaud in unflattering terms and makes the globalisation of the brand sound like a mix of a happy accident and opportunity. Along the way she critiques the weakness of Japanese society’s love for luxury goods down to subtle social signalling and ‘parasite singles’ – young women living at home with their parents who spend their disposable income on luxury goods.
(The reality is that could be young people with a job in Spain or Italy either as east Asians and Southern Europeans tend to only move out of home to marry or to follow work or education.)
Japanese tourists took their luxury shopping abroad, taking advantage of duty-free shopping. It’s no coincidence that LVMH owns DFS (Duty Free Shopping) outlets across America and the Pacific rim. Some of the lessons that DFS and LVMH learned selling to Japanese luxury buyers, such last late closing, you can still see in showrooms across the Asia Pacific region.
Jumping from Japanese duty free shoppers in Hawaii, Thomas moves on to the connection between a generation of Italian designers and Hollywood. Richard Gere’s star power was as much down to his styling making him look the part by Giorgio Armani as it was to his considerable acting prowess.
From Hollywood, the book delves into the perfume operations of the design houses. It highlights how perfume formulation moved from being an in-house activity for design houses to being outsourced to a few specialists companies who work with a ‘creative brief’.
Quality issues
The area where I can agree most with Thomas is around the decline in quality of luxury goods. Deluxe approaches this from the different tactics that luxury companies have used to conceal their use of Chinese factories. However as Apple has shown, made in China doesn’t necessarily mean cheap or poorly made. Indeed, a decade and a half after Deluxe was written, we’re seeing local luxury brands displacing international luxury brands in the Chinese market for several reasons, usually explained using the term ‘guo chao‘.
Thomas estimates that there at least four factories in China who manufacture most of the luxury industry’s handbags and leather goods – alongside private label brands for department stores and supermarkets. I was surprised that even back in 2004, manufacturing in China only saved 30 percent of the bill of materials.
The book goes on to cover the cost cutting that has gone into luxury products, from clothes with cheap stitching, skipped tailoring such as no lining in jackets and dresses. Thomas highlights that these changes happened to allow luxury to go mass market. Luxury then followed customers out of the office or the salon into all aspects of their life including sportswear and ‘streetwear’. What my friend Jeremy calls the ‘Supremification’ of luxury.
The reliance on the mass market bought about two challenges in Thomas’ eyes:
Counterfeit products that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing by experts
Rockier finances for the large luxury corporates who are no longer sheltered from economic cycles by the continued spending of ultra high net worth individuals.
The future
Thomas left us with two parts to what we saw the future of luxury looking like:
The continued pursuit of emerging markets with India replacing China due to demographics.
The new luxury of industry specialists spinning off and creating new houses, because they were jaded with the existing business practices and structures. The book highlights Tom Ford; who recently gave up his label and sold it on in November 2022 to cosmetics business Estée Lauder and fellow fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna.
In summary
Dana Thomas’ Deluxe is a book of its time in the early to mid 2000s. Thomas clearly has some bias’ due to history with some of the protagonists, which is worthwhile bearing in mind. The historical part of the book is useful; but the luxury industry has moved on and in some ways the problems are now much worse. With those provisos in mind, I can recommend the book as a background read on the luxury sector.
It says something about the time that we live in that digital abortion clinics is a normal phrase and that publications like Wired have to have rank the clinics on patient data security. Disclaimer: I lean pro-choice in my beliefs as I don’t have to make the kind of choices that many women have to. Secondly, the second order consequences of high risk procedures done the black market create new moral and ethical dilemmas.
Dystopian vibes
Matt M – Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex
Five years ago, if you had said digital abortion clinics to me it would have brought to mind the darker recesses of the cyberpunk realms created in novels by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, or the Ghost In The Shell series of manga and anime created by Shirow Masamune.
The reality is more banal and horrifying all at the same time.
How we got here
Legal and regulatory environment
Family planning clinics that provide terminations have been under regulatory attack since the US Supreme Court ruling on Roe vs. Wade gave American women access to abortion in 1973. Roe vs Wade was challenged repeatedly in court and upheld in rulings given afterwards. Some of these rulings narrowed the definition of what procedures could be conducted and when they could be conducted. In June 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe vs Wade with its finding on Dobbs vs Jackson Women’s Health Organisation. Abortion was no longer considered a constitutional right, which then meant pregnancy terminations became governed by a myriad of state laws both for, and against abortions.
Some states went as far as to provide a legal shelter for their medical staff against legal measures out of state.
Pharmaceuticals
Historically, medicinal herbs and drugs used to induce an abortion risked causing kidney and liver damage. But we now have drugs available that can provide a much safer alternative. It’s these drugs that the digital abortion clinics rely on. The two most common are:
Misoprostol was developed in 1973. It’s used to induce abortions, but also has other uses including the prevention and treatment of both stomach ulcers and some forms of postpartum bleeding. It can also be used to induce labour during pregnancy.
Mifepristone developed in 1980, is typically used to induce abortions in conjunction with Misoprostol. It is also used on its own to treat high blood sugar levels in patients who also have hypercortisolism.
Femtech
Femtech as a term has only been around since 2016, but investment in the area of women’s health related technology has been growing over a decade. A few things were driving this. The personal nature of smartphones as a device. The explosion in software tools that allowed you to write apps and the availability of wireless technology stacks that hardware easier to connect. Finally, countries like the US started working on data privacy standards in the health space which were very important.
2016 saw Nurx get funding for it to provide in-app ordering for birth control pills. So prescribing abortion inducing medications is a logical next step, in order to give women full control of their reproductive capabilities.
Telehealth
COVID-19 accelerated the normalisation of digitally mediated health services including telehealth consultations and digital abortion services are now exception. If a woman chooses to have an abortion, it’s a big decision and the popular apps covered by Wired seemed to have a wide variance of user experience / provision of care.
These clinics operate in different ways—some provide live video visits with doctors and nurse practitioners, while others offer asynchronous counseling—but many have experienced a record number of patient orders (and increased VC funding) over the past year.
Poli K. (August 21, 2023) The Most Popular Digital Abortion Clinics, Ranked by Data Privacy. United States: Wired magazine
Security issues
Those software tools that allowed apps to be written easily often included API calls that enable privacy infringing tracking. For instance, a byproduct of the software tools used to make LGBTQI dating app Grindr’s locative nature risked exposing precise location data of gay men. Which is of concern in more socially conservative environments. Women using some digital abortion clinics face similar challenges.
In US states, where the politicians thought that Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was a how-to guide, rather than a societal warning; prosecutions in abortion related cases are using mobile data and search history.
Wired worked with the University of Texas privacy lab to grade the post popular digital abortion clinics on the degree of risk they posed to their patients.
The results were concerning and these problems can’t be mitigated through the use of a VPN or in-app settings.
Third-party data app sharing and data collection were used by the likes of Palantir to aid targeting people of interest in the global war on terror (G-WAT in security circles), and could be used in a similar way against women, if the state government were so inclined.
The Wired article that inspired this post here. More health-related content here.
