Dispatches from the gap between how the world works and how we pretend it does.

Tag: history

The Buddha at the Back of the Room

A masochist’s mantra that began as a battle cry in a Ghanaian martial arts film.

I recently read an interview with Durba Mitra, a feminist historian at Harvard, on her new book The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism. The book recounts how, in the years following the UN’s International Women’s Year in 1975, women from the decolonising world began articulating an intellectual tradition that challenged colonialism, patriarchy and authoritarianism not as a queue of grievances but as a single interlocking system of power. Theirs was not Western liberal feminism translated into darker complexion, it was a different diagnosis altogether, and therefore demanded different remedies.

And then, gradually, in the way these things happen when they are put to work rather than when they are crushed, their vocabulary was digested. Development agencies, UN frameworks and gender-and-development programmes absorbed their language while quietly excreting the structure of thought that had given it meaning.

Or, to employ a different metaphor, the architecture they had designed was progressively renovated by institutions that retained the facade while altering the load-bearing walls. The Future That Was is an attempt to recover the women who conceived that architecture from a particular kind of disappearance: not forgetting, which would at least be honest, but the subtler process by which a radical vision survives only after its foundations are buried and built over.

Reading this, I found myself thinking about Elissar. A few days earlier, a friend had been telling me about the musical she is writing. Her subject is the founder of Qart Hadasht, the city Rome would later call Carthage, known to most, if at all, by her Greek name, Dido; known to herself, as Elissar or whatever name her own people spoke before their language became a scholarly reconstruction and their archives ash.

The conceit my friend has chosen is deceptively simple. The curtain rises not on Elissar’s flight from Tyre nor the founding of her city, but on her funeral. Only then does the story begin. From that point onward, the audience retraces the path that led there, watching each decision accumulate toward an ending whose significance it already understands, even as the characters remain oblivious to it.

There is something profoundly unsettling about that reversal. Ordinarily we experience life from within, moving uncertainly toward an ending we cannot see. History, by contrast, is almost always encountered in reverse. We know how Carthage ends. We know how revolutions end. We know, or think we know, what becomes of the slogans, the manifestos, the founding acts, the roads taken in youth and then mythologised by people who were not there. Looking backwards, necessity begins to masquerade as inevitability. We mistake outcomes for destinies and forget that, for those living them, every ending was once merely one possibility among many.

Consider what we actually know about Elissar, which is considerably less than one might expect for a figure of such historical and literary consequence. The surviving accounts come almost entirely from future adversaries of her people: Greek and Roman historians who recorded her story after Carthage had been annihilated, its libraries destroyed or dispersed, its population enslaved or scattered, its fields allegedly salted into permanent sterility. Even that last image, the salting of the earth, has become one of those historical details whose symbolic usefulness has outlived the evidence for it. Carthage is the sort of civilization that reaches us through the sentences of others. The city lost; the victors’ metaphors endured.

The narrative preserved in Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus gives us the outline of something remarkable: a Tyrian princess whose brother, Pygmalion, murdered her husband Acerbas to seize the treasury and consolidate his power; who escaped with followers, ships, and what remained of the fortune; who landed on the North African coast and negotiated for land; who, in the famous ox-hide story, cut the hide into strips to claim more territory than the local ruler had imagined offering; and who founded a city that would become, for several centuries, the dominant power of the western Mediterranean. There are variants and uncertainties, as there always are when legend and history are braided around a missing archive.

Some traditions suggest that the father named both children as heirs and that Elissar’s claim was not merely sentimental but dynastic. What survives officially of Tyre’s succession gives us Pygmalion as king. The co-regency, if there was one, is missing. The absence may mean nothing. It may mean everything.

Virgil creates an account of a different personage. He gives Elissar to Aeneas, as Dido, a woman who loves a Trojan hero and curses him when he leaves, because she is useful to the epic he is composing. Augustus required a mythic prehistory for Rome, and Rome required a memory of Carthage that made its own wars appear not merely strategic but fated. Dido’s dying curse, calling down an unnamed avenger upon the race of Aeneas, served that purpose with impeccable economy. Virgil’s Roman readers understood immediately that the avenger was Hannibal. Her death provided the emotional origin story for a geopolitical rivalry. Carthage’s founder was drafted into the service of her conquerors’ mythology, not because Virgil misunderstood her but because he understood exactly what he needed her for. The fact that she is genuinely moving in the Aeneid, that readers have wept for her across two thousand years, does not alter what she was recruited to do. It rather proves the point.

In the older tradition, Aeneas does not appear. Elissar’s death there is a political act. The local chieftain Iarbas, from whom she had obtained the land on which Carthage stood, demands that she marry him or face war. The demand is not merely conjugal ; it is jurisdictional. It is a claim upon the city through the body of its founder. If she accepts, Carthage survives by surrendering its sovereignty. If she refuses, the city she has built may be destroyed before it can defend itself. She tells her people she needs time to prepare a ceremony in honour of her dead husband. She builds a pyre. She climbs it. She kills herself.

The conventional telling draws our attention to the woman as wife and away from her as queen, inviting us to read a constitutional crisis as a private tragedy. But the actor here is not contending with romantic despair. This is someone, who happens to be a woman, confronted with two unacceptable choices who invents a third one that neither party had offered. She preserves the city by removing the pretext for its destruction. She preserves her fidelity to Acerbas by refusing to replace him. She preserves, perhaps, her own authority by refusing to let her body become the instrument through which the city is absorbed into another man’s sovereignty.

Now whether we should call this courage or its opposite is a question the sources decline to answer, and one I cannot settle for myself. I only know that Virgil’s version is the ancient equivalent of the Harlequin romance. A woman dies because a man leaves her. Never mind the rather more pressing matter of preserving a city founded by exiles who had entrusted their lives, their fortunes and their future to you.

That deflation is what linked her, in my mind, to Mitra’s women. Women act. Later systems explain what their actions meant. A founder becomes a lover. A political death becomes a romantic one. A body that refused incorporation is incorporated into the literature of the power that destroyed the city she founded. Mitra’s Third World feminists did not face the same fate, but they faced a recognisable mechanism. They produced a way of understanding power, only to watch its language become available to institutions that did not share its original commitments. Their terms survived. The grammar changed.

This is where the title of Mitra’s book begins to burn rather than merely describe. The future that was. Not the future that failed, which would be sad enough, nor the future that never came, which would be merely elegiac. The future that was suggests something more difficult: a future that existed as an intellectual and political possibility before being converted into a past. The women she studies were not simply defeated by patriarchal authoritarianism. They were, in a sense, succeeded by institutions that learned to speak in their language while meaning something else. To be forgotten is one fate. To be preserved under altered terms may be worse, because it allows the world to congratulate itself on remembering while ensuring that what is remembered no longer threatens it.

Several weeks earlier, on a flight home, I had watched Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation, a documentary about Jack Kerouac and the generations of seekers who have followed in his wake. The film moves between archival Kerouac and an array of inheritors: actors who rode motorcycles across America after reading the book, a fashion designer who credits the Beats for his Dior collections, a cultural critic who wonders what the road might have looked like with James Baldwin in the passenger seat. Each of them has taken something from Kerouac and made it mean what they needed it to mean. The film treats this as evidence of his reach. The possibility that it is also a description of what destroyed him is not one the documentary finds it necessary to explore.

The man who wrote the great American hymn to motion spent the final decade of his life watching strangers appropriate that hymn for purposes he found baffling and, eventually, contemptible. He drank against it. He appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in 1968, inebriated and raging at a hippie musician for building a career on tearing things down. He had become the reluctant saint of a movement whose politics, aesthetics and self-congratulation he increasingly despised. He moved back in with his mother in Florida. He died at forty-seven from internal haemorrhaging brought on by cirrhosis.

The common explanation is that Kerouac could not handle success. This may not be entirely wrong, but it is too small. Plenty of people cannot handle success. What seems more interesting is to explore why? His success placed him in the position of being interpreted by his adherents in a way that made repudiation impossible. Every objection he made was folded back into the myth. If he complained about the hippies, that merely proved he was complicated. If he drank, it became tragic evidence of his intensity. If he recoiled from the counterculture, the recoil could be treated as another scene in the drama of the prophet undone by the movement he inspired. There are forms of admiration from which no escape is possible because they metabolise objection as confirmation.

The film is itself an example of what it cannot see. The admirers it assembles are building on Kerouac’s story, extending it into their own lives, using it as a framework for their own searches. The myth that escaped him in his lifetime continues to escape him in ours. He would have hated the film, almost certainly, which the film would probably find touching. That is the cruel genius of canonisation. It can turn resistance into texture. It can transform disgust into pathos. It can make even the subject’s refusal of the story into one of the story’s most charming features.

What connects Mitra’s women, Elissar and Kerouac is not tragedy exactly, and not simply the corruption of ideals by institutions, which is the obvious reading and too consoling to be accurate. In each case, a foundational act generated an alluring story that became, over time, separable from the person or people who originated it, and into which others stepped to build what they required; with a large enough audience’s approval. Elissar’s founding of Carthage escaped into Rome’s origin mythology. Third World feminism’s intellectual tradition escaped into the bureaucratic vocabulary of international development. Kerouac’s search escaped into a counterculture he regarded as a misreading, and then into a documentary that treats his objections as one of his more poignant contradictions. The authors were not simply defeated. They were succeeded. Something was built on what they built, without their consent, and the something bore their name while serving other purposes.

One sees this pattern with such frequency that it begins to feel less like betrayal than like a structural feature of human life. It is perhaps especially visible in founding stories, because founding stories are always written twice: once by those who make the crossing, raise the walls, declare the covenant or plant the flag, and again by those who inherit the result and need it to mean something. A people fleeing violence can become a power that administers violence. A movement formed against domination can acquire the habits of domination once it has territory, law and archives. A critique of empire can become an institution that grades the empire’s former subjects against administrative indicators.

This is not hypocrisy in the simple sense. It is more disturbing than hypocrisy, because what supplants the founder’s story is not a betrayal that fails but a betrayal that succeeds. The institution functions. The myth travels. The city stands. It is precisely because Carthage prospered, because development agencies expanded their reach, because a generation found themselves in Kerouac’s book, that the founders became unnecessary to what they had founded. Dispensability is the reward for having built something that lasts.

This is where today’s political soul-searching becomes unavoidable. American settlers pushing westward, Israeli communities describing themselves through the language of return and survival, Phoenician colonists negotiating with Amazigh chieftains for a coastal hill in what is now Tunisia: these are not equivalent cases, and any argument that depends on treating them as equivalent should be distrusted. But they do share a formal problem.

Arrival must be narrated as necessity. Occupation must be translated into destiny, refuge, providence, reclamation or law. The people who arrive must tell a story in which their presence is justified, and the story almost always becomes more coherent as the people displaced by it become less audible. What begins as a solution to one people’s vulnerability can become the source of another’s. The solution does not fail because it is insincere. It fails because it succeeds well enough to acquire power.

Elissar’s death, in the older version, is therefore not an antique curiosity but a political grammar still intelligible to us. She stands at the hinge between refuge and sovereignty. Her body is the point at which a city’s survival is to be converted into another man’s authority. The demand made of her is not merely to marry but to ratify, with her person, a settlement in which the founding act is absorbed into a pre-existing power. Her suicide refuses the translation. It is a terrible refusal, and perhaps not one we should admire too quickly. Yet it exposes something that later, softer versions obscure: the founder’s body and the city’s sovereignty were not separate problems. The politics entered through intimacy, as it so often does.

The friend writing the musical is working through what Elissar’s life and death meant, what it says about a woman who built a world that eventually outran her authority over it. One might wonder, without any unkindness, whether she is also working through something closer to home: what it means to be someone’s daughter, someone’s heir, someone whose future has been narrated by people with their own interests in how that story ends. Elissar, after all, was also that. She refounded herself. Whether the musical will clarify what Elissar’s story actually was, or whether it will become the most recent vehicle by which her story is made to mean something other than itself, is a question opening night alone will not resolve. It may not even be the right question. Perhaps retelling is never a recovery of the original so much as an admission that the original can no longer defend itself.

I found myself thinking of this again, improbably, in relation to peptides. Everyone appears to be taking something now, or considering taking something, or consulting someone who knows which protocol everyone else is taking. The language is familiar: optimization, recovery, longevity, performance, biomarkers, sleep architecture, inflammation, metabolic flexibility. I am not immune to the appeal. Quite the opposite. And the appeal is not unfounded. People are sleeping better, recovering faster, moving through their days with an energy they had quietly stopped expecting. The interventions are working, which is the problem, or at least the beginning of it.

Because when something works, the question of what it is working at the expense of becomes harder to ask and easier to dismiss. Who decided what counts as improvement? Which measurements are being privileged, and which forms of deterioration have been made difficult to see because they fall outside the selected dashboard? If energy improves but anxiety worsens, if recovery accelerates but sleep becomes dependent on a stack of interventions, if longevity becomes a project so elaborate that life itself is reorganised around its extension, what exactly has been optimised? Quantification is not the opposite of ideology. It is often ideology’s most efficient costume, because once a value has been converted into a metric it can pretend to have escaped argument. The founders of this particular movement, whoever they were, would recognise the trajectory.

This is not an argument against peptides, any more than Mitra’s book is an argument against reports, or the story of Elissar an argument against settlement or Kerouac’s ruin an argument against travel. It is an argument against allowing an intervention to become sovereign over the problem it was meant to address. The most dangerous solutions are not the ones that fail. Failure is instructive and often clarifying. The dangerous ones are those that work well enough to be inherited, abstracted, systematised and repurposed until the original need disappears beneath the procedures created to meet it. At that point the solution remains, sometimes in impressive institutional form, but the question it was meant to answer has moved elsewhere.

By this point an unwelcome figure had begun appearing at the back of the room. He was not in Mitra’s interview. He was absent from the legends of Carthage. Kerouac circled him, borrowed from him, drifted near him and then retreated into Catholic grief, American rage and alcohol. He has little to say about peptides, though one suspects he would understand the craving they answer. The Buddha does not enter this argument as a solution. He enters as an irritation.

His irritation lies in the fact that he does not ask whether the road, the city, the movement, the institution or the protocol has been properly designed. He asks what in us keeps demanding that any of them finally hold. The world changes, the self changes, the object of desire changes, and yet we insist on building as though the thing built could secure us against alteration. That does not mean one should build nothing. The cheap version of Buddhism, the one dismissed by those who require enemies more than interlocutors, imagines detachment as withdrawal and compassion as sedation. The harder version asks what it would mean to act without needing the action to become a monument to the actor.

I am not sure I believe this. Or rather, I believe it intermittently, which may be the only honest way I believe anything that competes with my instincts. Camus would say to build anyway, to recognise the absurdity of the enterprise and persist without appeal. Nietzsche would say that the hunger to create, to impose form, to make something of the chaos, is not a mistake but the very sign of life. The Buddha, standing quietly behind both of them, would ask whether their answers still leave the self intact as the hidden beneficiary of the drama. None of them has resolved for me the problem of what to do when your ideas are institutionalised, your story is drafted into someone else’s epic, or your myth turns up in a documentary making thoughtful remarks about the American spirit.

Elissar was, in some traditions, deified after her death. The people of Carthage worshipped the founder as a goddess, or perhaps later identified her with Tanit, for as long as the city endured. The city endured until 146 BCE, when Rome burned it. After that, the goddess, the city, the records and the library disappeared together, while Virgil’s Dido survived. The curse survived. Hannibal survived as Rome’s nightmare and later as history’s admired enemy. What did not survive was Elissar’s own account of what she had made, why she made it, and whether dying upon the pyre was an escape, a refusal, a sacrifice or the last act of sovereignty available to her.

Perhaps every solution that matters is destined to escape in this way. It enters the world to answer one problem and is inherited by people trying to solve another. That may not be failure, exactly. It may be the only form of survival history permits. Still, I cannot shake the unease that something essential is lost when an idea remains legible only after its foundations have been infilled, when a city survives only through the literature of its destroyers, when a road remains open only because the man who paved it has become one more landmark beside it. We keep building anyway, which may be courage, vanity, delusion, necessity or merely habit. The Buddha waits at the back of the room, neither applauding nor condemning, while the rest of us continue arguing about whether a foundation has been betrayed because another structure stands above it, or whether this is what foundations were always for.

June 29, 2026
Monuments to Ourselves

I recently moved to a place that is a short walk from Abbey Road in St John’s Wood.

Every day, and night, there is a crowd of varying size gathered at either side of a certain zebra crossing comprised of groups who have turned out for their turn to cross.

One member from each of the groups (some are pairs, some are a squad) will invariably dash out into the street holding up a phone, or, on rarer occasions, a proper camera, while the others attempt their best approximation of the Beatles stride pictured on the cover of their last recorded album. Traffic pauses. Horns sound. Photographs are taken. The next fireteam files forward while motorists silently shake their heads in scorn.

For those unfamiliar with the environs of Abbey Road Studios and the crossing beside it, this is not Piccadilly Circus. It is a quiet residential part of London. The assembled faithful therefore constitute a genuine throng in this corner of St John’s Wood. Residents and commuters find themselves incongruously negotiating safe passage through this incessant fracas.

Before this latest move, I was staying in Notting Hill. There, too, crowds assembled daily in a trafficked side street outside a private residence made famous by a romantic comedy that borrowed the neighbourhood’s name for its title. People emerge from the herd, wait their turn, stand before a particular house’s not so particular blue door, smile, photograph, and then chimp before melting back into the crowd.

The story of the door is revealing.

It originally belonged to Richard Curtis, the film’s screenwriter. The production designer chose it by chance, unaware of its ownership. Following the film’s success, the original door was auctioned off for charity. The residents who remained behind grew weary of the endless stream of tourists, graffiti and photographers and replaced it with a plain black door. Eventually, a subsequent owner repainted the replacement door blue and the pilgrims returned.

The original artifact had vanished.

And yet the ritual remained.

My irritation with all this was not surprising to me though that I kept dwelling on it was. There seemed to be something more noxious here than the odor of mass tourism. Something faintly indecent wafted off the transformation of ordinary pieces of infrastructure and private property into tourist attractions at a cost imposed upon people who never consented to bear it.

Let us linger there for a moment.

We are accustomed to monuments being erected to receive visitors. The Cenotaph was built to be visited. Cathedrals were built to receive pilgrims. Museums were built to preserve and display objects deemed worthy of our collective attention. Society decides, explicitly or implicitly, that a place or object possesses sufficient significance to justify the inconvenience associated with preserving and visiting it.

Abbey Road is different.

The Notting Hill door is different.

Neither was intended to become a monument.

Neither was designed to receive visitors.

Neither was built to absorb the inconveniences that inevitably accompany significance.

And yet significance arrived all the same.

This is not a problem in itself. Meaning is rarely conferred by decree.

John Searle called these things “institutional facts”: realities that exist because we collectively accept them as such. “Money, property, governments, and marriages,” he wrote, “are all institutional facts. They are facts only because we believe them to be facts.”

Abbey Road is an institutional fact.

The Notting Hill door is an institutional fact.

Millions of strangers have collectively invested them with significance.

In this sense, Abbey Road and the Notting Hill door are indeed monuments.

No less than the Cenotaph.

The Cenotaph is, literally, an empty tomb. A carefully shaped arrangement of stone. Yet nobody regards it as merely stone because it has become a vessel for memory, sacrifice and national identity.

Abbey Road is thermoplastic paint on asphalt.

The Notting Hill door is painted wood.

Meaning has transformed matter in all three cases.

And once a thing or place has been invested with meaning, people will inevitably come to visit it.

Again, that, in itself, is not the problem.

The inconvenience of pilgrimage is tolerable when pilgrimage remains an act of reverence. The problem arises when the crowds are not really there for the monument at all.

The crowds at Abbey Road seem to be engaged in something subtly different. They do not come to stand before the monument. They come to stand at its centre.

The famous blue door in Notting Hill is gone. The original object was auctioned years ago. The tourists need not know, because once the sign has detached from the referent, that knowledge becomes irrelevant.

The same is true of Abbey Road. Visitors are not really interested in a zebra crossing. Nor, I suspect, are they particularly interested in the Beatles. What they seek is proximity to significance.

Not significance itself.

Its acquisition.

The photographs they take function as a deed to significance, albeit borrowed. A fragment of cultural meaning harvested and placed on display among the many symbols from which contemporary identity is curated.

And this is where my two objections converge.

First, these monuments have been erected without consent. Their costs have been socialized while their benefits remain private. Residents and road users are conscripted into maintaining a theatre whose script they never approved.

Second, and more damningly, the theatre is not performed in service of remembrance or reverence.

It is performed in service of extraction.

The visitors arrive at places invested with meaning not in order to be changed by them, but in order to carry some portion of that meaning away.

Not transformation, association.

Not inward change, outward display.

Not reverence, acquisition.

They do not seek communion with the monument. They seek to appropriate its symbolic capital and attach it to themselves.

This is what pilgrimage becomes when reverence is replaced by appropriation.

“The consumer society needs its objects in order to be, and more precisely it needs to destroy them.”
Jean Baudrillard

While the authentic pilgrim carries home a changed soul, the pilgrim-on-trend carries home a photograph; the latest token in a civilization organized around endless acquisition.

Experiences are accumulated.

Places are accumulated.

Culture is accumulated.

Even identity becomes a project of curation in which symbols are gathered, displayed and discarded in pursuit of an ever-receding core sense of self.

The object of our interest has not merely lost its sacredness, it has been subordinated to the project of self-construction.

The tourists play at paying homage to the Beatles when in fact something more parasitic is taking place.

The crossing is mined.

The film is mined.

Culture itself is mined.

Meaning is excavated, photographed and carried away in pockets.

And when every monument becomes a quarry for the self, the self ceases to be formed by reverence and is instead enlarged by annexation.

This is not growth.

It is accumulation.

The encounter is no longer metabolized.

It is recorded.

Its significance is not digested and transmuted into character.

It remains external.

The photograph.

The association.

The anecdote.

The proof of having been there.

Each is affixed to the self rather than incorporated within it.

The self becomes an assemblage of borrowed meaning: a collage of appropriated symbols whose significance derives from elsewhere.

It grows larger.

But not deeper.

More decorated.

But not more substantial.

Its parts never fuse into a coherent whole because they were never truly absorbed. They remain trophies of encounter rather than agents of transformation.

And so the monuments remain.

The crossing.

The blue door.

The Cenotaph.

But increasingly they are no longer destinations.

They are mirrors.

No longer places before which we diminish ourselves.

Increasingly, they are places at which we place ourselves at the center.

And the most elaborate monuments we build today are not dedicated to our heroes, our dead, or our ideals.

They are monuments to ourselves.

June 18, 2026
From Polo Sticks to Spades: How Cards Conquered the World
I’ve never been a card player. Yet I’ve always been drawn to the aesthetics of card play.

From the crisp snap of a freshly shuffled deck, the intricate symmetry of suits and ranks, the quiet choreography of hands and cards, to the charged silences around the table cracked by curt instructions or blown open by flared tempers, emerges a globally adapted drama that is part performance, part probability, part prayer.

Quality playing cards use a layered cardstock construction with a graphite or plastic core that provides just the right amount of “snap” and resilience. The linen finish creates micro-textures that improve airflow during shuffling, producing that distinctive riffling sound. The standard size of 2.5” × 3.5” (a lingering trace of British heritage) represents an optimal balance for human hands, large enough to display clear symbols yet small enough for comfortable manipulation.

By shuffling a deck of cards, you make your own unique contribution to an ocean of possibilities so vast, the drop in the ocean metaphor underestimates it. By several orders of magnitude.

Yes! The number is absolutely staggering. There are 52! (52 factorial) possible arrangements of a standard deck, which equals approximately 8.06 × 10⁶⁷.

To put that in perspective: if you shuffled a deck every second since the Big Bang began 13.8 billion years ago, you would have shuffled roughly 4.35 × 10¹⁷ times. You’d need to shuffle for about 1.85 × 10⁵⁰ times longer than the universe has existed to even approach trying every possible arrangement.

Here’s an even more mind-bending way to think about it: if every person who ever lived (roughly 100 billion people) shuffled a deck every second for their entire lifetime (say 80 years), and did this continuously since the Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, you still wouldn’t come close to exploring all possible deck arrangements.

If time isn’t your thing, if you’re more comfortable with space, imagine covering the entire Earth in a layer of A4 sheets of paper, where each sheet represents one possible shuffle. That layer would need to be about 5²¹ times thicker than the observable universe is wide.

5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times <——Universe——>

Here’s the math:
- Earth’s surface area: ~5.1 × 10¹⁴ m²
- A4 sheet area: 0.21m × 0.297m = 0.062 m²
- Number of sheets needed: (5.1 × 10¹⁴) ÷ 0.062 = 8.2 × 10¹⁵ sheets
- So about 8.2 quadrillion A4 sheets would cover Earth’s surface.
- With 8.06 × 10⁶⁷ possible combinations, we would have to stack the remaining sheets atop those covering the surface.
- Each sheet would have 9.8 x 10⁵¹ stacked on top of it at half a mm per sheet, you would end up with a stack that is 4.9 x 10⁴⁸ meters high.
The universe is ONLY 8.8 x 10²⁶ meters wide!

Because the Earth is curved, at that distance the top-most sheet of any stack would be at a distance from the closest other top-most sheets of 1.6 × 10⁴¹ meters.

160,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Broken down:
- Original spacing center to center × (radius at top / Earth’s radius)
- = 0.21m × (4.9 × 10⁴⁸) / (6.37 × 10⁶)
- = 0.21m × 7.7 × 10⁴¹
- = 1.6 × 10⁴¹ meters apart
- That means the distance between each sheet at the top of each stack is 1 Quadrillion TIMES further from another as the universe is wide!
This is why when you shuffle a deck of cards, you’re almost certainly creating an arrangement that has never existed before in the history of the universe and will never exist again. Every shuffle is essentially a unique event in cosmic history.

Complexity from Simplicity

The best innovations often transcend their original purpose, becoming cultural artifacts that satisfy deeper human needs. Playing cards achieve this through an elegant convergence of physical, mathematical, and aesthetic properties that make them irresistible even to non-players like myself.

From just four suits and thirteen ranks split between 10 pip and 3 face cards emerges a combinatorial explosion of possibilities. A single deck supports hundreds of different games, from the singular meditation of solitaire to the psychological warfare of poker. The simple binary of face-up versus face-down cards alone creates a world of possible game mechanics. The hierarchical ranking system enables everything from trick-taking to set collection. It’s a case study in emergent complexity; minimal components generating maximum variety. Cards provide a pocketable universe of possibilities.

Unlike other game systems that lend themselves to centralized tracking through federations and tournaments or user accounts and telemetry, card play exists largely outside formal record-keeping. The extent to which cards surpass other formats for play in global reach is therefore difficult to ground in direct statistics. It must be extrapolated from comparative analysis: by way of example, it is estimated that 600 Million chess sets have been sold since the game was invented, whereas decks of cards are sold in those numbers every 12 to 18 months.

Cards were not born with universal appeal. This universality is the result of centuries of adaptation, shaped by the hands and habits of countless cultures. To grasp the extent of that evolution, consider this: the original ancestor of the modern playing card’s direct descendant is Mahjong. You can see the extent of the lineage’s mutations.

From Chinese Coins To Global Standard

The story begins in Tang Dynasty China, where the earliest playing cards emerged sometime between the 9th and 13th centuries. These weren’t the hearts and spades we know today. Chinese cards featured suits based on currency denominations: coins, strings of coins, myriads of strings, and tens of myriads. The cards themselves depicted actual currency symbols, with coins showing naturalistic representations and strings showing coins connected through their center holes.

The crucial innovation was the concept of suits and numerical hierarchy, creating a modular system that could support various games. When cards reached the Islamic world via trade routes in the 12th-13th centuries, they underwent their first major cultural translation. The Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt transformed Chinese money suits into symbols reflecting their own aristocratic culture: cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks. Islamic religious restrictions on depicting human figures led to abstract, geometric court card designs.

This Mamluk transformation illustrates a crucial principle of innovation diffusion: successful cultural adaptation requires more than mechanical copying. The Mamluks preserved the functional structure – 52 cards, four suits, hierarchical ranks – while completely reimagining the symbolic language. Polo-sticks replaced strings of coins because polo was the Mamluk elite’s defining sport. The Arabic word “nā’ib” (deputy) for court cards would eventually morph into the Spanish “naipes” and Italian “naibi,” showing how linguistic borrowing accompanies technological transfer.

The European Explosion

When playing cards arrived in Europe around 1370-1380 through Italian and Spanish ports, they triggered an explosion of regional creativity. Each culture translated the Mamluk template into local symbols and artistic styles. Italian cards kept cups and coins but transformed polo-sticks into batons (since Europeans didn’t play polo) and adapted swords to local weapon styles. Spanish cards developed their own distinctive straight swords and rough cudgels.

The Germans went further, completely reimagining the suit system to reflect rural life: acorns, leaves, hearts, and bells replaced the Mamluk suits entirely. Swiss cards developed yet another system with shields and roses. Each region’s cards became a mirror of its culture: Italian cards with their curved scimitars and ceremonial batons reflected Renaissance court life, while German cards with acorns and bells embodied rural traditions.

This proliferation of regional variations represents innovation diffusion through cultural adaptation; a decentralized process where each adopting culture modifies the innovation to fit local values and contexts. There was no central authority imposing uniformity. Instead, cards spread organically through trade networks, with each region creating its own interpretation. The result was a rich ecosystem of playing card traditions, each optimized for local preferences.

The French Revolution In Card Design

Around 1480, French cardmakers introduced innovations that would eventually dominate globally. They simplified the suit symbols to trèfles (clovers/clubs), carreaux (tiles/diamonds), cœurs (hearts), and piques (pikes/spades). More importantly, they divided these into two red suits (hearts, diamonds) and two black suits (clubs, spades), creating high visual contrast that improved gameplay.

The French breakthrough wasn’t just aesthetic, it was fundamentally about manufacturing efficiency. The simplified geometric shapes were perfect for stencil printing, a new technique that could produce cards “a hundred times more quickly” than traditional woodcutting. Where German cards with their detailed acorns and bells required skilled artisans, French suits could be mass-produced by workers with minimal training. The cost reduction was dramatic.

This represents a different principle of innovation diffusion: technical efficiency driving adoption. The French didn’t create more beautiful or culturally meaningful cards. They created cards that were cheaper to make and easier to recognize. The design was culturally neutral enough to travel well; hearts and diamonds lack the specific cultural associations of acorns or polo-sticks. It was a triumph of industrial logic over artisanal tradition.

The British Synthesis And Global Conquest

England adopted French suits in the 1480s but made subtle modifications that would prove crucial. They retained familiar Latin-derived names, “clubs” from the Spanish/Italian batons and “spades” from the Spanish “espada” (sword), making the French symbols feel less foreign. English manufacturers standardized patterns and improved quality to ensure longevity and justify the cost to the consumer.

The transformation from regional English variant to global standard came through the convergence of empire and industry. The 19th century saw British cards achieve something unprecedented: true global standardization. This wasn’t the organic, culturally adapted spread of medieval innovations. It was standardization through power structures and industrial might.

Thomas De La Rue’s company revolutionized card manufacturing in the 1830s-1860s, applying steam power to production and achieving unprecedented scale. Output rose from 93,000 packs in 1856 to 265,000 in 1868. Technical innovations like quicker-drying inks, improved glazing, and mechanical color printing created cards of consistent quality at lower prices than any competitor could match.

But manufacturing was only part of the story. The British Empire provided distribution channels that reached every inhabited continent. Military regiments, colonial administrators, and trading companies carried standardized English-pattern cards throughout the empire. From Bombay to Brisbane, Cairo to Cape Town, Hong Kong to Halifax, British cards became the default. Even non-colonial territories often adopted English patterns due to their prevalence in international trade.

The “Worse Is Better” Principle

This brings us to a counterintuitive principle of innovation diffusion: sometimes worse solutions win. The English pattern that dominates globally isn’t the most beautiful (many prefer the elegant Spanish designs), the most innovative (German suits showed more creativity), or the most culturally meaningful (regional patterns better reflected local values). It won because it was simple, cheap to produce, and backed by powerful distribution networks.

This “worse is better” principle, articulated by computer scientist Richard Gabriel, suggests that innovations with 50-80% of ideal functionality often spread faster than those approaching perfection. Simple, portable, “good enough” solutions can achieve viral growth while complex, optimized solutions struggle with adoption barriers. Once established, network effects lock in the inferior standard.

We see this pattern repeatedly. VHS defeated Betamax despite inferior picture quality because it offered longer recording times. QWERTY keyboards persist despite more efficient alternatives because switching costs are too high. Playing cards follow the same pattern. The English design achieved just enough quality at low enough cost to spread everywhere, then network effects made switching impossible.

Finding The Sweet Spot

The global success of English-pattern playing cards reveals a more nuanced truth than simple “worse is better” dynamics. Successful global innovations must find a sweet spot, an optimal balance across multiple dimensions:
- Desirability: Cards satisfy universal human needs for entertainment, social interaction, and mental stimulation. They work across cultures and generations.
- Feasibility: The French stencil innovation made mass production possible. British industrial techniques perfected it. Technical achievability enabled everything else.
- Viability: Low production costs, high demand, and good profit margins made cards an attractive business. Government taxation actually helped by encouraging standardization.
- Adoptability: Network effects were crucial. Games require compatible decks. The more people using English patterns, the more valuable they became to adopt.
Beyond these pillars, cards found optimal balances between competing tensions:
- Simple enough to mass-produce, complex enough to enable rich gameplay
- Familiar enough to feel comfortable, novel enough to excite interest
- Standardized enough for compatibility, adaptable enough for regional customization
- Cheap enough for mass adoption, quality enough to satisfy users
The sweet spot isn’t a fixed target but a dynamic zone where innovations must maintain balance while adapting to changing conditions. Playing cards found this zone through evolutionary innovation by building on existing patterns while introducing key improvements at just the right historical moment.

Adaption vs Standardization

The journey of playing cards reveals a fundamental pattern in how innovations spread globally. The key insight isn’t about different mechanisms of diffusion, but about matching the innovation to the heterogeneity of its recipients.

Think of it like a drug seeking receptors. If all humans have the same receptor, you can standardize the drug. If receptors vary, you must adapt the compound or it won’t bind. The question for any innovation is: what varies in the receiving population?

When Mamluk cards reached medieval Europe, the heterogeneity was cultural. Europeans had the same functional need (gaming) but completely different symbol systems. Polo sticks meant nothing to German farmers, but acorns and bells resonated. The adaptation wasn’t a choice; it was the only way local minds could process foreign concepts. Each region had to translate cards into their own meaning system for the innovation to take hold.

When British cards spread globally in the 1800s, they encountered a different world. Trade, empire, and early industrialization had begun homogenizing certain aspects of culture. The functional need for gaming was still universal, but now increasingly connected populations could share symbol systems. The British didn’t need to adapt their cards because they were spreading into populations whose “receptors” had been standardized through colonial education, military service, and commercial exchange.

This pattern holds today, though the lines of heterogeneity have shifted. Geographic and cultural differences matter less; functional and use-case differences matter more. A software platform spreading globally doesn’t need French or German versions as much as it needs accountant versus designer versus student versions. The adaptation required isn’t cultural translation but functional customization.

Consider how this applies to modern viral phenomena. A TikTok dance spreads unchanged across continents not because adaptation isn’t needed, but because digital culture has already homogenized the relevant receptors. Teenagers in Tokyo and Toledo share the same platforms, references, and digital vernacular. The heterogeneity that would have required adaptation has been eliminated.

But when innovations hit genuine heterogeneity, they still must adapt or die. This is why enterprise software requires extensive customization for different industries. It’s why social movements that work in one context fail in another. It’s why some innovations achieve instant global adoption while others require gradual, adapted spread.

The lesson is that successful diffusion requires recognizing what varies in your target population and adapting accordingly. If the variation is cultural symbols, you need cultural translation. If it’s use cases, you need functional customization. If it’s technical standards, you need compatibility layers. And if you’ve managed to find or create a homogeneous population, you can standardize and scale.

What Cards Reveal About Virality

The contrast between playing cards’ centuries of dominance and today’s ephemeral viral moments is striking. A TikTok dance might reach a billion people in a week, then vanish. Playing cards reached billions over centuries and stayed.

The difference isn’t just speed. It’s that cards achieved something viral content doesn’t: infrastructure lock-in. Every deck printed, every game rule codified, every child taught to play created switching costs. Virality creates no such friction. The same frictionlessness that enables instant spread enables instant abandonment.

Cards also reveal something about heterogeneity and homogenization. Medieval cards had to adapt to local cultures because cultures were genuinely different. Today’s viral content doesn’t adapt because digital platforms have already homogenized us. We’re all looking at the same screen, using the same gestures, speaking the same meme language. The adaptation happened upstream, in us.

This might explain why viral content feels so disposable. When innovations must adapt to local conditions, they develop roots. The German cards with acorns and bells weren’t just games; they were cultural artifacts. But when content spreads unchanged to pre-homogenized audiences, it remains surface-level, rootless, replaceable.

The 52-card standard succeeded through a peculiar combination: mathematical depth that created infinite gameplay possibilities, physical simplicity that enabled mass production, and historical timing that caught the wave of industrial standardization. It found a sweet spot not through design genius but through centuries of evolutionary accident.

Perhaps the most sobering insight is that our current innovation landscape might be selecting for the wrong traits. We optimize for viral spread, engagement metrics, and rapid adoption. But playing cards suggest the innovations that truly last are those that embed themselves in infrastructure, create switching costs, and find mathematical or functional cores that transcend their initial packaging.

The eight followed by sixty-seven zeros of possible card arrangements isn’t just a curious mathematical fact. It may just be the reason cards persist while countless other games disappeared. That mathematical infinity meant cards could never be “solved” or exhausted. Every shuffle renewed their possibility space. Compare that to viral content, which is often exhausted on first viewing.
August 21, 2025
Boards, Brands, and the Blind Spot for the Broader Context

Why every organization needs a resident historian—not just a marketing department

I’ve been thinking a lot about organizational effectiveness lately. I’m working on a primer for innocent bystanders thrust into high-stakes managerial roles, as a prelude to something even more ambitious—one that concerns a titan of industry—and since then, everything around me seems to be speaking in that language.

Last night, I attended the premiere of Tempest, an orchestral work by a composer friend, performed by the Q**** Philharmonic. The piece draws from the rhythmic foundations of Q***** pearl diving percussion and blends them with the seafaring musical traditions of Nordic, Celtic, and Baltic cultures. Beneath the obvious differences lies deep resonance and a shared rhythm shaped by wind, water, and survival at sea.

It was a remarkable experience. But I struggled to follow the modes or recognize the sonic codes. I was moved, but, unmoored, I drifted. Knowing the composer, I was certain that the work was layered with meaning that eluded me for lack of a processing framework.

That disorientation allowed my mind to drift to my daily plat du jour—management terrine—shaped by the mold in which it is made. I was reminded of the first time I stepped into an organizational leadership role without any bearings.

Despite your best efforts to discover, intuit, or interrogate a coherent picture of the organization, you struggle to find a critical mass of overlap. You sense there’s a rhythm to how things are done—a set of inherited assumptions, values, and buried conflicts—but no one can quite explain them. You’re handed a PowerPoint deck and a set of KPIs, but no backstory. No context. No through-line.

And without context, even the most brilliant efforts are susceptible to falling flat. It’s like entering a story halfway through—every action is vivid, but the meaning is lost. Worse, such efforts may lead to misalignment. At best, energy is spent—but not compounded.

Once upon a time, context was maintained through epic poems and tales transmitted down the generational line. Earlier civilizations may not have pursued coherence for its own sake, but they understood the power of story to legitimize rule, stabilize succession, and elevate victories into destiny. That’s why empires employed court historians. Their job wasn’t to report—it was to narrate. And while the motive was often glorification, the byproduct was cohesion: a shared encyclopedia, a sense of continuity, a framework through which people could make sense of the present. They helped a polity remember itself—not always truthfully, but usefully.

Today, that role has been quietly outsourced—if not erased. The modern equivalent, if one exists at all, is marketing.

To be sure, marketing has evolved to craft compelling narratives that insinuate themselves into the psyche and make you yearn for goods and services you never imagined needing. It knows how to mythologize products, how to dramatize launches, how to harness the emotional grammar of storytelling to build brands that feel like legends.

But marketing is built for speed. Its job is to chase relevance. It tells the story the market wants to hear—not necessarily the one the organization needs to remember.

And therein lies the irony: we understand the ancient power of narrative when it comes to our offerings. We hire agencies to weave myth into packaging. We pour millions into commercials that echo the Hero’s Journey. Our products have origin myths—but our people have amnesia.

Intra-organizationally, the story breaks down. Knowledge is managed, not narrated. Culture is defined in bullet points. “Lessons learned” are archived in shared drives no one visits. Strategy is deployed without memory. And slowly, coherence erodes.

The result? A kind of institutional drift. A feeling of disconnection. A lack of narrative ballast. And in moments of stress—mergers, pivots, leadership transitions—this absence becomes acute. People can’t see the pattern. They don’t know what came before, or why. They don’t know if this storm is survivable—because no one has told them that the organization has weathered worse.

This is where the historian belongs.

Not as an archivist. Not as a content generator. But as a resident meaning-maker.

The historian listens. Connects. Synthesizes. They draw lines from past to present and surface the stories that help people understand who they are part of, and why it matters. They recover buried episodes that deserve to be part of the institutional identity. They interrogate values—not just by asking what they are, but where they came from, when they held, and when they broke.

They don’t produce slogans. They craft coherence.

This is not a romantic gesture. It is good business. A single hire, a modest role—yet the benefits ripple: more resilient cultures, more grounded strategies, more humane onboarding, and a richer capacity to learn from experience.

It remains a wonder that Fortune 500s don’t all have resident historians. Especially when we know what stories can do. Especially when we invest so much in telling them—except when it comes to ourselves.

Levi’s has Tracey Panek. American Express employs Ira Galtman. A handful of others—Ford, CocaCola, IBM—have long maintained archives and occasionally retained in-house historical expertise. But these examples are exceptions, not the rule. And even they are often misdirected into brand archivists—curators of memorabilia rather than interpreters of meaning.

Slow thinking isn’t indulgence. It is infrastructure. And story—internal story—is the infrastructure of identity.

It’s time to bring back the historian. And give them a seat on the board.

May 7, 2025
The Guardrails Are Gone: How Institutional Power’s Decline Will Be the Death of US All

Niall Ferguson cautioned that empires unravel from within when the institutions meant to sustain them weaken under the strain of their own inefficacy, eroding public trust as they cease to fulfill their intended purpose. The American empire has not yet disintegrated, but its foundations have been critically undermined. Once destabilization reaches a tipping point, the descent is swift and irreversible. Watching the news, it certainly appears as though we’ve crossed the Rubicon.

The Deep State, ostensibly the mechanism that should have mitigated such an implosion, was and continues to be systematically vilified and dismantled. The very apparatus responsible for insulating democratic governance from impulsive political excess was delegitimized by the very elites it was designed to serve. The power elite failed to recognize the peril of abandoning their stabilizing mechanisms.

Rather than act as the shadowy, conspiratorial force caricatured in populist rhetoric, the Deep State has historically functioned as a necessary ballast, preserving institutional integrity amid fluctuating political landscapes. However, its failure to navigate a treacherous political realignment—and its inability to circumvent the populist revolt against expertise and bureaucratic governance—has left American democracy increasingly vulnerable to collapse. In the absence of stable institutions, governance defaults to personality-driven rule, where spectacle and gut instinct replace deliberation and strategy.

The postwar American state was structured around an expanding bureaucratic and security apparatus that safeguarded economic stability, strategic hegemony, and social order. From the 1940s to the early 2000s, institutional growth coincided with the expansion of the middle class and the maintenance of a delicate equilibrium between economic elites and the general populace.

However, as institutions ossified, their fundamental purpose—protecting the middle class from the unrestrained ambitions of the ruling class and restraining elite overreach—was abandoned. The 2008 financial crisis revealed this failure with devastating clarity: banks were rescued while working-class homeowners were left to absorb the collapse. The Iraq War further discredited institutional legitimacy, exposing the military-industrial complex’s predatory interests as contractors reaped fortunes while veterans returned to shattered lives.

Globalization, as much maligned as the Deep State, was executed without guardrails—without mechanisms that could have balanced local economic strength, national security, and long-term stability. Instead of serving as a model for inclusive economic expansion, it was weaponized by corporate interests, enabling a mushrooming class of new billionaires to maximize profit at the expense of national resilience.

The expansion of global markets created unparalleled opportunities for capital accumulation, allowing corporate giants to optimize production through the exploitation of cheap labor while expanding their consumer base to a global population of eight billion. This was not globalization’s failure, but rather the failure of institutions to regulate its trajectory—to ensure that economic expansion did not result in unchecked wealth concentration and the erosion of domestic economic stability.

The billionaires and multinational corporations that emerged from this transformation did so by systematically reducing production costs through labor arbitrage while maintaining high-margin profitability in the wealthiest consumer markets. The institutions that once constrained corporate excess were no longer equipped to mediate the balance between capital and labor; instead, they facilitated the very conditions that entrenched economic disparity.

Similarly, the Deep State is neither benevolent nor malevolent; nor can it be dismissed as “anti-democratic” if it works to safeguard a democratic republic. Considering that it is an amalgamation of bureaucratic frameworks, intelligence agencies, regulatory bodies, and financial institutions that collectively function as the administrative machinery of governance, it is not an agent of authoritarian control but rather a structural necessity, ensuring policy continuity beyond electoral volatility. Democracy requires this.

History provides clear precedents for what happens when institutional stability collapses. The Roman Republic unraveled not solely because of Julius Caesar’s ambition but because the Senate—once the state’s bureaucratic ballast—lost its ability to constrain executive overreach, allowing populist demagoguery to replace deliberative governance. The Ottoman Empire did not simply fall to external pressures; its ruling bureaucracy weakened while the Janissary corps, originally an elite military force loyal to the state, transformed into a self-serving political faction, resisting reform and prioritizing its own privileges over imperial stability. The Qing Dynasty collapsed when its bureaucracy—once a model of Confucian meritocracy—failed to modernize in response to industrial and imperialist pressures, leading to economic stagnation and foreign encroachment.

Each of these cases underscores the same principle: when the administrative institutions designed to balance power falter, the door opens for opportunists, who, instead of strengthening the system, accelerate its collapse.

We are living in an era where vitalism is holding sway over determined managerialism. Popular psychology elevates manifestation, energy, and intuitive impulse over deliberate, systematic action. Self-help gurus preach that intention shapes reality, that vision alone bends the arc of events. It is no wonder, then, that political leadership has begun to mirror this trend—governing less through strategic calculation and institutional rigor and more through charisma, instinct, and performance.

To be sure, human limitations require that iterative deliberation be cut off at a certain point, and decisions must be made. The presence of urgency does not, however, justify the abandonment of rational process in favor of blind impulse. The political organism, much like the biological one, cannot survive on unregulated spontaneity alone.

This is where Iain McGilchrist’s theory of brain lateralization provides a useful lens. The right hemisphere, associated with intuition, emotion, and big-picture thinking, thrives on immediacy and gut feeling. The left hemisphere, by contrast, specializes in analysis, categorization, and procedural structuring—the very faculties necessary for sustained governance. In a functional system, these two domains are in balance, with the right hemisphere generating vision and the left implementing it.

But when vitalism dominates without an institutional counterweight, governance devolves into erratic decision-making, unmoored from structure, precedent, or strategic foresight. It is the political equivalent of governing from the right hemisphere without left-hemispheric constraints.

The United States, once a paragon of structured managerialism, is increasingly operating in this state of dysfunction, where policy is dictated by emotional reaction, spectacle, and the immediacy of the news cycle rather than by institutional continuity and long-term planning.

Historically, no enduring state has thrived under unchecked vitalism. Napoleon’s France, the Third Reich, and even Imperial Japan all relied heavily on emotional mobilization and ideological fervor, but each succumbed to the limits of unregulated ambition—overextension, internal instability, and the inability to manage power in the long term.

Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, by contrast, succeeded precisely because it recognized the necessity of institutional discipline. A strong state, like a strong mind, must balance intuition with structure, instinct with rational oversight.

If history has taught us anything, it is that once the guardrails are gone, they do not reappear on their own. The Power Elite who believe they can ride this storm without consequence are mistaken. The time for course correction is vanishing, and when the reckoning comes, it will not be evenly distributed.

March 8, 2025