Stuff Rocco found #67
Late-arriving documents, improvised survival, engineered ecosystems, inherited systems, and a body trying to keep up with the habits around it.
I am celiac. Celiac disease is a chronic autoimmune disorder where eating gluten (protein in wheat, barley and rye) damages the lining of the digestive tract, causing it to really suck at doing its job of absorbing nutrients from food, leading to a whole host of chronic issues, not just the ones you have probably heard about most. Gluten fucks me up and puts me out of commission for days as its impacts skip around my body like a pinball and causes mischief and mayhem like Dean Winters on the Allstate ads.
I take you on this little adventure of TMI because it is relevant to tell you about what occurred a few weeks ago at a restaurant in Vegas.
I was at a dinner, scanning the menu the way you do when you have celiac: less reveling in my options, and more doing reconnaissance to figure out what won’t kick my ass at the dinner table. I was looking for the small GF symbol on the menu, the one that helps me know the restaurant folks, at the very least, won’t look at me like celi-huh? if I ask about gluten-less food.
And, BAM there it was. The pappardelle with bolognese and the GF mark next to it. Instantly, my Italian soul, stomach, and taste buds snap up to attention like they just heard the opening bars of a favorite song. A real meal and not just a workaround. I told the waiter I was glad to see the option and ordered the pasta.
A few minutes later, the waiter comes back with that body language and tone that immediately suggests the story is about to change. “Yeah, um, the pappardelle are not gluten free. It’s a misprint.”
We go back and forth for about ten minutes, and it’s the typical dance. I ask a question, he goes back and checks with the manager and disappears into the kitchen. Much further into the conversation, almost like it just occurred to him, he said they could swap in a gluten free pasta. He volunteered what information the menu concealed, and if he hadn’t thought to say it, I would have gotten sick.
To be clear, on a list of pasta dishes, this one dish had a GF beside it. Not a “gluten-free pasta upon request” but a straight up: this dish is gluten-free. And it was inaccurate. Nothing else on the menu was labeled gluten-free. Just that one, now fictional, pappardelle with bolognese option.
I’ve got no issue with the waiter because he did what you hope someone does in that spot. He kept it moving, didn’t get defensive, and found a way through it. He called the manager over to check-in and, gentle reader, this is where things went from bad to worse: the waiter had already done the good work and brought me a solution. All this manager had to do was affirm it. Instead, she apologized for the miscommunication and said: yeah, that’s a misprint. A misprint? Yes, she affirmed. A typo.
A typo is writing “teh” when you mean “the.” A misprint is a typographical error like text that’s printed crookedly on a page. Guess what is not a fucking typo nor a misprint? Saying: this food is safe to eat when it is, in fact, not. Can you imagine a, say, rat poison maker using a defense like, “oh, sorry the package says ‘suitable for human consumption’ that’s a misprint and it should be ‘NOT suitable’.. our bad, we’re sorry for the typo.” No, because that would be ridiculous and negligent and awful.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting there doing the math on how hungry I’m willing to get before I just say fuck it and walk and skip their rat poison logic.
To very intentionally belabor this point: a misprint is a typo, a minor embarrassment, a thing to fix in the next print run. But for someone with celiac, a misprint on a gluten-free option means the information you are relying on is wrong. The GF symbol could be the reason a customer orders the dish and it’s the thing they’re trusting. Some people can afford to treat it as just another mark on the page, but for celiacs, it’s taken literally because it has to be. The gap between those two understandings is exactly how people get hurt.
My issue is with a restaurant that printed something wrong and left it for a waiter and a customer to untangle at the table. In other words, they didn’t care.
Mistakes happen and things get missed all the time. It’s all a part of working, moving fast, and being human. What bothers me is the framing that treats the error as the end of the story rather than a reason to look at the whole system. Was there a process for flagging menu errors before service? Was there a clear fallback when something marked turns out to be wrong? It didn’t feel like it. It was improvised at the table by one waiter, in real time, on behalf of someone who knew how to push.
And it’s situations like this that I have been noticing more lately. Because, let’s face it: so many things are just getting shittier and shittier every day. Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It speaks to this point, and though he is talking mostly about tech platforms in the book, enshittification is everything, everywhere and all at once. (Not you, Artemis II kids. You folks are the best.)
But, NASA excellence aside, there’s otherwise this palpable feeling of half-assery right now in which there’s less attention on what happens and less curiosity about/regard for what it costs someone else when things aren’t quite right. There’s barely any tolerance for the gap between what something says and what actually shows up. And when that gap opens, someone pays for it, and it’s usually not the person who created it. Did fucking Temu get put in charge of the whole fucking world? Is this temuification?
The theme for this week’s top 5: What happens when attention is paid, and what it costs when it isn’t.
1. The $500 Million Mystery Will (via NYT)
Anyone who’s tried to raise money for a project, really raise it, where contracts are circulating and people are waiting on signatures, knows how much of it runs on sequence. What arrives when. In what order. The truth of a thing matters less than its timing. A seven-page document, mailed from nowhere in particular, lands at a law firm in Reno. Priority mail. $10.10 to ship. Inside is a will for Tony Hsieh the Zappos founder who died in 2020, leaving behind $500 million and no estate plan anyone could find. The document is dated 2015. It surfaces five years after his death, found supposedly among the belongings of a 91-year-old man in Pakistan who had never, as far as anyone can tell, existed. And yet, there it is. In the system now. The witnesses? Untraceable. The trust named to receive $50 million? No record of it anywhere. The man who mailed it? A name attached to a return address that turned out to be the courthouse itself. Nevada’s bar for “serious consideration” is low enough that the judge’s response was essentially: it’s odd, but odd doesn’t mean invalid. So now the estate is spending Hsieh’s money to argue about a document that may have been written by ghosts. Lawyers on both sides, billing by the hour. Years of this, potentially. What’s fascinating to me is how little the document needed to do. It didn’t have to be airtight. It just had to show up. Once it was in, everything that had been moving had to stop and account for it. How many things only feel settled because nothing arrived late enough to interrupt them.
2. The Polar Bear (via BBC)
There’s a moment on set, and anyone who’s worked on a shoot knows it, where something goes wrong and you watch the whole crew recalibrate in real time. Nobody announces it. The plan just quietly becomes a different plan. Apparently, set culture crosses species. A lone polar bear, somewhere in the Arctic in 2004, hadn’t eaten in months. The sea ice that he hunts from was gone, pushed out by warming temperatures, and he was on land, desperate, circling a walrus colony of hundreds. Cinematographer Adam Ravetch was perched on top of a small self-built cabin he called “the coffin,” camera rolling, the bear passing within feet of him to get to the herd. What happened next had never been documented before. The bear went for an adult female, repeatedly going for her neck. She held. The herd closed ranks, pushing the young to the center, creating a wall of bodies. The bear tried angle after angle. The walruses didn’t scatter, they organized. Eventually the bear limped away, wounded by their tusks, and disappeared. The producer of the episode described it as a scene where no one wins. Everyone’s struggling. The sea ice has been disappearing since long before that footage was shot. Polar bears evolved to hunt from it. Without it, they’re improvising, swimming longer distances, targeting prey they were never built to take down, burning more than they can gain. Some populations in Norway have adapted. Others are declining. The bear in that footage? His fate was never known. Ravetch was airlifted out shortly after.
3. Gaviotas (also via BBC)
Every project I’ve worked on has a moment where the original plan meets reality and loses. The location falls through, the budget shifts, the timeline compresses. You figure it out with what’s actually in front of you. The plan was just the starting point. In 1966, a 20-something Italian-Colombian named Paolo Lugari flew over a remote stretch of eastern Colombian savannah and decided he was going to build a community there. Violent floods half the year, scorching heat the other half, armed groups running coca through the same territory. He called it Gaviotas, named after the white river birds flying overhead while they broke ground. With no infrastructure and no reliable resources, the 20 or so people who showed up figured things out from scratch. They attached a water pump to a children’s seesaw to draw drinking water from 40 meters underground. They learned from the indigenous Guahibo people how to build roofs from palm fronds, how to read the land. When crops wouldn’t grow in the acidic soil, they planted 8 million pine seedlings. The pines created shade. The shade restored the soil. Eventually 250 plant species took root. Today 30% of the community’s food comes from that forest. Nothing was ever patented. Everything was shared. Gaviotas now has about 50 families. The school closed. Every attempt to replicate it ran out of money or momentum. But 30,000 of their solar water heaters are installed around the world, and 12,000 of their pumps are running throughout Colombia. The things they built in one of the hardest places on earth are working somewhere else right now. One of the members put it simply: most of their 150 projects were 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. You have to fail and try again. You have to experience it.
4. It Was Never About AI (via Big Think)
Every conversation I’ve been in lately eventually finds its way to AI. What it can do, what it’s replacing, what it means for the work. I’ve been sitting with that question for a while. Somewhere in all that noise, this perspective might be worth considering. Eric Markowitz, a columnist at Big Think, opens with a scene: a 26-year-old analyst at a hedge fund sees that a company’s headcount runs 14% higher than a competitor’s and writes a note that moves the stock. The board panics. A CEO hired to “unlock shareholder value” calls an all-hands. Two weeks later, 3,000 people get a calendar invite from HR titled “Quick Chat.” Meanwhile, a founder in a fleece vest stands on a stage talking about empowering humanity while unveiling a product designed to make human labor unnecessary. The audience applauds. His argument is that the technology didn’t create any of this, those systems were already running. AI just arrived when they were fully in motion and gave everyone a cleaner excuse. Every generation has faced a version of this moment. The printing press, the assembly line, the internet, each one landed with the same panic underneath it. The question was always the same: are we our tools, or are we something more? Markowitz keeps two research assistants. Could he replace them with AI? Yes. He won’t. Their value doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, but he knows everything they’re doing together is better because of them. On any project worth making, the people in the room are the project. The tool serves the work. The work serves something human. When that order reverses, you’re not making anything, you’re just running a process.
5. Protein Cocktails (via Esquire)
Scouting locations takes you to a lot of bars. Callbacks happen over drinks. Wrap parties are their own category entirely. So this one landed close to home.
Protein cocktails are apparently a thing now. Buffalo Wild Wings launched something called the Espresso Proteini, an espresso martini with 10 grams of protein powder and dry rub mixed in. A cocktail bar in Tribeca has been serving a drink built around sesame seed-infused Albanian grape spirit since winter. A spot in Cambridge is running a dry martini made with chicken bones dissolved in acid, borrowed from one of the best bars in London. And yes, the classic whiskey sour has always had egg whites in it, so apparently we’ve all been doing this longer than we thought. The piece gets into whether any of this actually works, alcohol does interfere with protein absorption, the science is pretty clear on that, but the counterpoint is straightforward: one or two drinks and your body keeps moving. If you have a glass of wine with a steak, you still ate the steak. Worth a read, especially if you’re someone who takes both their training and their happy hour seriously.
