New Yorker - "Bad Character" (From 2016)
By Ted Chiang
Sunday, February 16, 2025
Saturday, February 1, 2025
Legendary Edit
New Yorker - "What Michael Crichton Reveals About Big Tech and A.I."
"In 1968, a young Michael Crichton, still a student at Harvard Medical School, sent a manuscript to Robert Gottlieb, who had just taken over as editor-in-chief at Knopf. The document had a compelling title, “The Andromeda Strain,” and it featured a fast-paced plot: a group of scientists gather in an ultra-secret underground laboratory to study a deadly extraterrestrial organism, brought to Earth on a crashed space probe. Crichton later revealed that he had been inspired by a biology-textbook footnote about the possibility of organisms in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. He had struggled with the manuscript for years—“every draft was awful”—but finally found inspiration from NASA. “When I finally learned that a complicated quarantine procedure really existed for the U.S. moon program,” he said in a 1969 interview, “it was a considerable psychological boost, and then I knew I could do the book.”
“The Andromeda Strain” had a strong premise, but Gottlieb, who would later become the editor of The New Yorker, thought it needed work. As he recalled in a joint 1994 interview, he told Crichton that if the young author agreed to “completely rewrite it” he would publish the book. “Somehow, it occurred to me that instead of trying to flesh out the characters further and make the novel more conventional,” Gottlieb said, “we ought to strip that stuff out completely and make it a documentary, a fictional one.” He suggested that Crichton treat the book like a magazine article, reporting on the events as if they actually happened instead of developing each character’s subjective world. “The author of a nonfiction account would not have the access to the characters’ innermost thoughts in the way you assume for fiction,” Crichton said. “So I began to take all that stuff out and make the book colder and more impersonal.”
The changes worked. The Detroit Free Press said that the thriller featured “hideously plausible suspense,” and Life called it “chillingly effective.” The book hit the New York Times best-seller list and caught the attention of Universal Pictures, which paid Crichton a quarter-million dollars (more than two million in today’s dollars) for the movie rights. Crichton ended his medical training early and became a writer and director in California. Gottlieb’s advice, which helped launch Crichton’s career, remains surprisingly relevant today. The story of a new technology needs no hero or villain to drive the action forward; the technology itself often becomes the protagonist, and we all live with the consequences."
The Closing of a Seattle Icon
Seattle Eater - "The Original Burgermaster, a Chunk of Seattle History, Is Closing After 73 Years"
"Burgermaster may not have the cultural cachet of Canlis or Dick’s, and the six-restaurant chain is pretty much unknown outside the Seattle area. But its original location embodies a kind of small-city grittiness that has faded as Seattle has become wealthier and more cosmopolitan. That restaurant started as a drive-in but changed to a dine-in model in the 1970s. And unlike the other Burgermasters, the location serves breakfast, making it more like a diner than a fast-food joint. (A Burgermaster spokesperson said that the other locations were drive-in only, but the chain hoped to offer breakfast options soon.)"
From Goat to Armchair Quarterback
New Yorker - "Tom Brady, Armchair Quarterback"
"This persona is apparent in the career of one of Brady’s chief on-field rivals, Peyton Manning. Manning is from good Southern football stock—his father, Archie, was a quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, his brother Eli was the scrappy, courageous leader of the New York Giants, and his nephew Arch will soon be drafted into the N.F.L.—but his excellence seemed well earned. His game was full of minute adjustments and quick decisions; he was famous for how encyclopedically he could master any playbook you threw at him. Nowadays, he owns a production company whose main product is “Manningcast,” an ESPN2 show that Peyton hosts with Eli. As they watch football games and chat, Peyton comes across as a great hang, an enlightened good old boy. He doesn’t seem driven by demons or a need to dominate anyone. It’s easy to understand why his teammates all seemed to like him so much.
Brady, though, has a fishier personality and a cooler eye. His closest likeness isn’t to other quarterbacks but to the basketball superstar Kobe Bryant, who, five years ago, died in a helicopter crash at a woefully early age. Like Bryant—who turned his gym-rat nature into a tall-tale mythos like that of Paul Bunyan—Brady likes to talk about his work ethic, about how desperately he needs to win and how far he’s willing to go to fill the void. Brady, in his own telling, holds on to small slights and inflates them just enough to fuel himself to victory. “I was always kind of motivated by people that say, ‘You can’t do it,’ ” he once told his fellow ex-player Michael Strahan on “Good Morning America.” All he needs is a snippet of smack talk, the hint of an insult, or even a cross look to make him mad enough to reach the end zone. If the classic quarterback, embodied by Manning, accomplished his exploits through the force of good will, Brady—a progenitor and a product of today’s so-called hustle culture—needs grist for irritation to reach his true heights."
The Making of Vuori
New York Times - "How Vuori Became One of the Hottest Names in Fashion"
"After his career as a model ended, Mr. Kudla returned to San Diego to work as a senior auditor for Ernst & Young. His first entrepreneurial pursuit was helping his girlfriend at the time with a short-lived contemporary women’s clothing line. He then founded Vuori as a graphic T-shirt line, named after the Finnish word for mountain. The brand, however, failed to attract interest from retailers or consumers.
A chance encounter with an executive business coach and intuitive, or psychic medium, shifted Mr. Kudla’s trajectory.
“She told me that the business that I was working on is going to be wildly successful, but it wasn’t going to be in its current form or with my current partner,” he said. “And that was very hard for me to hear. She told me all these things about my family, and it got my head spinning — it was very emotional for me.”
The very next day, Mr. Kudla began a process of what he called “personal development and growth as a human being,” committing himself to a yoga and meditation practice. The idea of Vuori as it is today crystallized during this time.
“You didn’t have this overall ‘active lifestyle’ positioning,” Mr. Kudla said, “where it was a fashion-meets-function product that could work in a yoga class, but you’d feel comfortable wearing it to a dinner afterward or hanging out with friends — and that was very much the lifestyle I was living.”
Most sports apparel at the time was designed for a specific activity — running, say, or basketball — and often came with flashy design flourishes, Mr. Kudla recalled, like racing stripes, logos or reflective accents. Instead, he wanted to create something that had a subtler, everyday aesthetic but retained those activewear properties. He knew there was a market because he noticed that men in San Diego, instead of wearing athletic shorts to yoga class, often opted for more understated board shorts."
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