Eight and the Well Still Has Water
Eighth time down the pile. No unifying idea has emerged and I’ve stopped expecting one. Proximity, again, is the whole method.
Markets open on divergence: a note on why the KOSPI fell despite Samsung’s record quarter, a clean sell-the-news story where a 19-fold profit jump still couldn’t lift the index, beside a broader read on the memory shortage as an existential event for small electronics makers — not a margin hit but an extinction event for the firms underneath Apple and Microsoft.
History this round is the built environment of antiquity. There’s Jean-Léon Gérôme and the Victorian gaze on Rome, a bronze in the Musée d’Orsay making explicit what his paintings kept implicit, alongside a process piece on shin-hanga, the modernist revival that tried to bring the Japanese woodblock print back to life after ukiyo-e collapsed.
On the workbench: the frequently re-fought question of whether Agile is dead in the age of AI — not dead, the piece argues, but under real pressure as its founding assumptions erode — plus the counterintuitive lesson that finding paying customers should come before you write a line of code.
For the eye and the road: a reflective piece on what we can learn from watching other photographers work, the education that happens when you put the camera down, and a look at Toledo’s old town, where a Mudéjar watchtower quietly doubles as an antiques shop.
Two to finish. The layered, honest guide to New Orleans, a city shaped by four flags and the largest forced migration in American history, and — the warm landing this list always seems to want — a Seoul-inspired lunch that arrives like a small ceremony.
Eight rounds and the well still has water. We’ll see how far it goes.