The art of writing obituaries, on Nordstrom and Forever 21, and This is Water
Here are some stories and talks that I came across last week:
• Who reads obituaries, I wondered. But then I started reading them and discovered that a well written obituary pulls you in. The Economist’s obituary writer — unfortunately we don’t know who she is, and we don’t know if it’s one person or several — is doing a master job. She tugs at you with single-page summaries of a career that spanned decades, gently making space for the eccentricities of the now dead person. Here’s one beautifully crafted obituary on the first man who took a walk in outer space: Alexei Leonov. “In the silence he could hear only his heartbeat and his heavy breathing. Stars were all around him against a coal-black sky. They did not blink,” it reads. Read this piece just for the sake of good writing. A factual discovery I made while reading this essay was just how lucky Leonov had been, to not die from freak accidents, and that in some ways he was destined to walk in outer space. “Space was not a place where men should be anything but brothers,” the essay concludes. I wouldn’t know but it feels right, and of course it reads fantastic.
• Two good long-form stories appeared in NYTimes on two retail brands undergoing transformation, albeit of different kinds. This essay profiles the Nordstrom family (Swedish roots), and their eponymous department store chain, which just opened a new store in New York. What struck me was how carefully thought and unrushed Nordstrom’s expansion has been: 30% of their sales already come from the online channel (the Nordstroms don’t like to use that word apparently). They have conceptualised smaller Nordstrom Local stores, and though the family still has tight control over the business, outsiders are often involved and given important roles. To contrast, this other story captures the collapse of fashion brand Forever 21. The article is relevant for it profiles the founder family, the Changs (Korean roots). Also family run, the management at Forever 21 was however more insular and rarely involved outsiders. Moreover, they didn’t have a Board to guide them. There are other reasons cited in the article about what led to the bankruptcy, including changing consumer preferences, and some bad real estate deals. But read these stories to understand how very similar circumstances can lead to often extremely varied results, and how slow thoughtful growth contrasts mindless blitz-scaling.
• ‘This is Water’ is a 2005 commencement speech by the American writer David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008. Though it has been viewed millions of times, I stumbled across it only last week. Wallace talks about shifting perspective, about telling yourself a story, which may most likely not be true, but not completely impossible either. And why to tell these stories? Well, because we have a choice, and if we don’t exercise this choice, our default setting takes over, which is to look at the world with cynicism and consider ourselves as the centre of the universe. “You get to decide what has meaning and what not,” Wallace says in the talk. “If you really learn how to think, how to pay attention” he says, “then you will know there are other options. You get to decide what has meaning and what doesn’t”. A summary will not do any justice to this speech and I recommend listening to it in full, and if you can’t, then slip past the first ten minutes.
A quote I came across last week:
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?”
― David Foster Wallace
