Jared Shurin's Blog, page 6

A world of singles

I recently read Erving Goffman’s Relations in Public (1971). Goffman is the dude when it comes to ‘micro-sociology’ - ‘studies of face-to-face communication and related rituals of social interaction’ - the sociology of everyday life.

Relations in Public (which does not, sadly, have anything to do with the discipline of public relations) is about how we interact with other people in public settings. The whole book is peak overthinking, aided and abetted by Goffman’s slightly-snarky tone of voice a...

A romantic challenge

I hope you’re having a very happy holiday! We’re sitting down to procedurally-generated Netflix movies, last-minute grocery deliveries, and panic about bin collection. I hope you’re doing the same!

My friends, who are very bad influences, have suggested that perhaps my newsletter would be more frequent (and more interesting) if I tackled another one of my reading challenges.

In the past (wavy flashback hands):

I read all the winners of the Edgar Awards for Best Debut Mystery and tried to come up wi...

Creature Report

I’m ahead of the curve! Twitter’s incipient demise seems to be creating a second wave of the newsletter boom.

For new folks, these emails are unstructured, very occasional, and unrepentantly rambling. I waffle on about obscure books to bore people from the strategy world, and hand-wave esoteric strategy to really bore the book people.

The Venn of Waffle.

Some highlights (such as they are): Why Alien 3 is better than Aliens, reading every ‘Best First Novel’ chosen by the Mystery Writers of America...

Losing

Credit: John Rooney/Associated Press

I have lost so many pitches.

So many. 

For those that aren’t in advertising, most pitches aren’t glamorous, Mad Men dramatics. For every down-to-the-wire battle for an international airline, there are six lacklustre skirmishes for oven-cleaner. And probably twenty written proposals simply fired into the void.

All losses aren’t equal.

One example. We had four meetings with the potential client. We showed our credentials, took a brief, presented a pilot campaign, g...

I want my hat back.

I have a lot of baseball caps, but I don’t actually wear many of them. Special occasions might earn a special hat, but for my daily routine, I rotate between two caps - both for the Kansas City Royals. One is the traditional blue, the other is a jazzy ‘all black’ variant (purchased, randomly, from a German eBayer).

The hat is just, well, always there. It is my ‘thing’. My mental picture of me is wearing a Royals cap. Hell, when I was screwing around with Fiverr earlier this year, the 8bit avatar...

Solutions and other problems

Solutionism, a term popularized by Evgeny Morozov to describe “an intellectual pathology” that defines problems on the basis of one’s capacity for solving them. Morozov argued that Silicon Valley’s software engineers recast “all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized — if only the right algorithms are in place!” For Morozov, solutionist thinking has displaced a centr...

Friends and noses

This is it. Benjamin Skanke.

The long-term impact of Covid - on our friends and our noses. Plus, recapping recent cameo appearances on misinformation, Amazon, and branding.

What has Covid done to our friendships?

This article describes the surprisingly difficult process of making friends as an adult. It boils down into optimism and perseverance. Keep showing up, stop assuming the worst, and say hi. There are also some practical tips on opening conversations. If this feels a little twee, well, it ...

Johari exercise for publishing brands

The Johari window is a psychological technique first developed in the 1950s. As devised, it is a useful workshop tool to help increase interpersonal awareness. (Here’s an online version.)

The individual describes themself by selecting adjectives from a list. These selections are then compared and contrasted with selections made by others. By analysing the gaps, the individual learns how they are perceived.

Mapping results of a Johari window exercise.

This workshop has has also been frequently adap...

The ecology of the mallrat

“Becoming a jungle: the Rolling Acres Mall” by Johnny Joo.

Like many others of my generation and geography, I spent a lot of time as a kid hanging around in shopping malls.

It was a ‘safe space’. Literally: it was pretty safe. My parents could drop me off, knowing that I’d be in a public, vaguely-guarded space, with a limited amount of criminal damage I could cause or be caused.

The mall was just the right size for me. Fundamentally, 85% of a mall was blah. Clothing stores for middle aged women. S...

Vision and generosity

It took me a while, but I’ve finally wrapped up The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin, the (rather spectacular) new biography by Jonathan Phillips.

As well as being an excellent, and often very entertaining, examination of what Saladin accomplished (a lot), Phillips also tries to get under the skin of how Saladin succeeded. What combination of aptitude, context, and plain ol’ luck led to Saladin’s unprecedented success?

Phillips’ approach makes Sultan Saladin an excellent companion volume to J...