On Thanks and Other Things I Think
Reflections after my favorite holiday… (Issue #144)
Thanksgiving is the most important holiday on my father’s side of the family and has been for decades. Long ago, we also marked it as the wedding anniversary of my grandparents, Edith and Martin Berens. La Profesora observed that this year would have been their 89th.
As we always do (except for COVID and the year we lived in Norway), we traveled down to Los Angeles, where my parents and our extended family live. One difference is that now our daughter lives here also.
It’s such a family-focused and travel-intensive time that I’m always startled and grateful to receive and reply to messages from friends and colleagues that they appreciate my presence in their lives. I’ve already made a “Who are you thankful for in your life? Tell them!” reminder for next year.
I don’t have a big main topic this week, but here are some shorter thoughts, goodies, and things worth your attention…
Family as the Ship of Theseus
For some irksome reason, the old philosophical question about the Ship of Theseus has come to new life as a business cliché. Type “Ship of Theseus and business” into your favorite search engine, and you’ll find numberless (yawn… whoops, sorry… started to drift off there) articles about organizations as Ships of Theseus.
If you’re so lucky that you haven’t run into this cliché, it asks whether at the end of hundreds of years of maintenance and restoration—in which every part of a ship has eventually been replaced—a ship is still the same ship? Answer: who cares outside of Philosophy Departments? It’s a dull thought experiment about the persistence of identity across time.
I’m of a sufficient age that Thanksgiving now has as many absences as presences. The Berens Family has had a rough handful of years marked by the deaths of my cousin Meredith’s father Larry, the death of Sandy (the mother of my cousins Steffi, David, Michael, Lilly, and Scott), the death of my brother Evan, and just two weeks ago the death of Russ, my father’s brother and father to the cousins who lost Sandy less than two years ago.
Although there was a somber cast to the gathering at David and Meredith’s this year, seeing family meant even more than usual. We avoided political conversation because as many of us were satisfied with the results of the recent election as were disappointed. Instead, we focused on what brought us together.
It was also a joy to see the next generation at the so-called kids’ table. Most of them are young adults now, ranging from 19 to 24, having spirited and obscure conversations of their own. We also had Scott’s much younger children (aged five and two), hanging closer to their grownups.
There’s no question that this is still the Berens Family, even though the cast of characters keeps changing. Family identity across time requires just two things: co-presence and attention. It’s a muscle that you have to exercise, not a thing like a ship that you repair.
What is the measure of a life well lived?
The Beatles got a part of it right in “The End” from Abbey Road: “and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” It’s a trenchant diagnostic, but I think it doesn’t get to the question of what defines a good life.
One answer—and I’m eager to get the thoughts of Dispatch readers on this—is whether a person has added more positive than negative energy to the world over the course of a life. I’m not talking about the social impact of one’s work or art or passions because that’s not a fair metric for most of us. Instead, I’m talking about things that do not scale: on a daily basis over the decades, has a person added more happiness than sadness?
This can happen in little ways. For example, I love to make cashiers laugh at checkout lines because I believe that it’s important to interact with people in more than just transactional ways. It’s also why I introduce myself to servers at restaurants and clerks in stores, particularly when those people wear name tags. I do not think it’s fair that I should know that the person helping me is Tim if he has no idea that my name is Brad. (This causes some consternation for my kids, but they are accustomed to rolling their eyes.)
What do you think?
Walmart and DEI
From the Department of Disappointment… Walmart has followed other corporations and rolled back its DEI efforts. (You can get CBS News coverage here and NPR/AP coverage here.) This reveals two things.
First, the world’s biggest retailer and the biggest employer in the US got into the DEI business for the wrong reasons, probably a post George Floyd “we have do something about this!” Corp Comm impulse.
Second, it shows that Walmart doesn’t understand that organizations benefit from diversity in ways that go way beyond the political. Diverse businesses are more profitable, more innovative, grow faster, and make better decisions than monoculture businesses. There is a very large body of research that shows this, which you can find summarized by Perplexity.ai here.
This is not a liberal versus conservative issue.
Walmart is far from alone, many advertising agencies are doing the same thing, per Ad Age ($), as have Ford, Harley Davidson, Molson Coors, Lowe’s, Tractor Supply, John Deere, Caterpillar, and Brown Forman (maker of Jack Daniels).
I hope that the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index tracks the profits of these businesses after they’ve backed away from DEI, because the research strongly suggests that we’ll see them decline.
Other things…
This one frame cartoon of Moby Dick and the Roadrunner sitting together at a bar made me laugh.
I’m a big fan of Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, and so I enjoyed this Wired profile of her. I’m also excited about the forthcoming AppleTV+ adaptation.
It’s from back in 2020, but this Atlantic piece from its “Dear Therapist” column—“I Was the Other Woman: I know I sound naive, but this wasn’t like a 'normal' affair—was thoughtful and interesting.
AI and Hollywood
Even though both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes seemed to result in significant agreements about the place of AI in the entertainment business, that hasn’t stopped two big startups.
Peter Chernin’s North Road and Andreessen Horowitz have invested in Promise, a new studio focused on using Generative AI to accelerate production of movie and TV shows.
And Asteria wants to become “the Pixar of AI” per The Ankler ($). According to actress Natasha Lyonne, who is working with Asteria on an AI-powered project, “if done correctly, it could open doors for visionaries to see their films realized in ways previously only accessible to very few gatekeepers.”
That’s great for filmmakers, but what about all the below the line folks who used to make decent livings building sets, scouting locations, making costumes, and creating special effects? (See my friend Rishad Tobaccowala’s recent post about the value of people for an adjacent and pointed commentary.)
On the other hand, this is hardly a new story. Back in the 1990s, Babylon 5, one of my all-time favorite shows was both a) the first one-hour drama to have a story unfold over several seasons (rather than having each episode end tidily), and b) the first show to use CGI to create incredible special effects (space ships, stations, battles, and more) instead of the old way, which used models (like the original Starship Enterprise that was recently found after 45 years).
I didn’t mind when Babylon 5 innovated storytelling with technology back then, so is it hypocritical of me to worry now?
Still more…
John Cleese talking about his mother on The Graham Norton Show was characteristically hilarious, and it prompted me to put a hold on his memoir, So, Anyway…, at my local library.
Cyber Monday is tomorrow, and before you smash that “add to cart” button take a look at Vanessa Friedman’s NYT article ($) about the new and scary Amazon Haul rival to Temu and Shein.
I just searched “Amazon Haul,” and I learned that it’s only available on smartphone and tablet apps… which means that Amazon designed it to make impulse purchases frictionless. As my friend Ty Braswell has long observed, mobile commerce “shortens the distance between passion and purchase,” which is true but not good news for folks on a budget.
I’ve been using My Yahoo as my browser home page for years, and now Yahoo is discontinuing the service. Argh! Can anybody recommend a replacement?
Back to Thanksgiving, my cousin David made this devastatingly good version of the Ruth’s Chris Sweet Potato Casserole. You may require an angioplasty after eating it, but you’ll sink into a Propofol-induced sleep smiling at the memory.
By the way, I never go to Ruth’s Chris because the name makes my head hurt—who is Chris and why does he or she belong to Ruth? Who uses apostrophes that way?—which shows what happens when pedants and grammarians think too much. I did find this explanation, but it doesn’t help.
One last and important thing that I’m thankful for is you for reading The Dispatch. I love learning what readers think about these pieces, and one of my favorite things is when—at an industry event, when bumping into folks, or whatever—somebody mentions something that I’ve written here. For example, several folks pulled me aside at a recent gathering to ask quietly how My Ozempic Journey is going (it’s fine so far, and if I’m not quiet about it you don’t have to be either).
Thank you for reading. See you next Sunday.
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