Scope Creep, 2025-03-18.

This morning I awoke to find my attention unmoored from any specific piece of writing. But I have a ton of tabs open, most of which concern things I've written about recently—and many of which should probably be closed. I'll be returning to some of their themes in the coming weeks; to commemorate how they've affected my thought process, I offer them to you below.

SCOPE CREEP.

• A few notes that came up around my profile of Alexis Madrigal:
  • Alexis' new book, The Pacific Circuit, comes out today. It'll be the next book that the SOW Members' Reading Group reads, and we'll have a group conversation with Alexis in a month or two; you can join us (and do a lot to support my writing) by becoming a Member today.
  • Here's a local-newsy video about a Schnitzer Steel facility; in the opening scene of the profile I published on Friday, Alexis and I drove past a different Schnitzer facility in Oakland. Schnitzer rebranded as "Radius Recycling" recently, and a few days ago a Toyota subsidiary announced that they will acquire the company for $907 million. "The deal comes as U.S. manufacturers have grown increasingly wary of tariffs’ impact on material prices, including for steel."
  • Here's a profile of sculptor Bruce Beasley, who helped organize residents of West Oakland to purchase the property they once rented. "Southern-Pacific Railroad owned the land in the neighborhood, charging exorbitant rents on buildings it barely maintained. Believing his neighbors would be better off owning the houses themselves, Beasley and the [South Prescott Neighborhood Association] rallied the community in an effort to buy them from the railroad. He negotiated with Southern Pacific, and eventually the company agreed to the deal on the condition that all the houses, without exception, be purchased in a single, cash transaction. When the day came to pay, one neighbor was $250 short. The railroad balked, but Beasley fought back, threatening to go to the press. Southern-Pacific ultimately accepted the deal—though it put the man on a payment plan to make up the missing $250."
  • There's a city called Piedmont which is fully enclosed by the city of Oakland; it is an enclave city. Its borders are weird: "in their haste to file paperwork to incorporate Piedmont, proponents grabbed the only map they had on hand to define the boundaries — a map of the sewer lines that snaked underneath the houses in Piedmont." As a result, there are parcels of land which straddle the Piedmont-Oakland border.
  • A "bobtail" truck is a tractor cab that's being driven without a load; it's a tractor-trailer without the "-trailer" part. Bobtails can be significantly more dangerous to drive than loaded tractor-trailers, as the cab's propulsion and braking systems are designed to be used with a lot of additional weight on the rear axles.
• In addition to Building SimCity (which the SOW Members' Reading Group will discuss with the author this Thursday), I recently finished reading Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion and Prudence Peiffer's The Slip: The New York City Street That Changed American Art Forever. I'm also still reading History of the United States Rubber Company, and just started listening to Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals and John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead.
• When rhubarb is "forced" (a process I wrote about here), it makes noise that is audible with the naked ear; you can hear a recording here.
• A long and very well-illustrated blog post about Gorton, a typeface used in engraving machines that became "the hardest working font in Manhattan." I used to own an engraving machine—a New Hermes Engravograph—and I still encounter things (mostly bike-related) that I engraved with Gorton.
• Here's a USGS map showing the concentration of iron in the soil across the US; click on "INTERPRETATION" to see more analysis, and change the number at the end of the URL to look at other elements.
• I don't really know what to do with this information, but there is a video game where all you do is walk around and power wash things. And it is apparently popular.
• You can make a "whoosh" rocket with a couple drops of rubbing alcohol and a two-liter soda bottle. This was suggested to me as potentially an indoor-friendly activity, and this (safety-focused) video shows a whoosh rocket being fired down an empty hallway.

• Since writing about the mural at Laguardia's Marine Air Terminal, I have opened so many tabs about Icarus:
  • Here's a William Carlos Williams poem called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. It was written in reference to a Breugel painting (which is now believed to be a copy) called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. More poems have been written about the painting, including Michael Hamburger's Lines on Brueghel’s “Icarus”.
    
    But this is the Icarus poem that really struck me: W.H. Auden's Musée des Beaux Arts, which is explained and contextualized wonderfully in this detailed NYTimes piece. The story of Icarus is a tragedy, and Auden's poem shows how tragedy is all around us—and how often we are ignorant of it, either by choice or by chance.
  • In Dante's Divine Comedy, Virgil takes Dante on a brief flight on the back of Geryon, a monster. Writing about how scary this experience is, Dante references Icarus; you can read the section in question starting on line 105, here. Here, meanwhile, is a short blog post on various visual depictions of this scene.
• There is a private jet company called Icarus Jet. There is a page on their website titled "Why Icarus?" and it doesn't even address the fact that they named themselves after the most infamous death in aviation history.
• There is a statue of Icarus at the Air Force Institute of Technology, to commemorate AFIT graduates who later died in service.
• Ekphrasis is the written description of art. If manual labor can be considered art—and I believe it can—then I would argue that any written notes made while umarelling are also examples of ekphrasis.
• Thucydides Trap describes the supposedly high likelihood of war when one dominant power (the US, say) is challenged by another rising power (commonly China). A 2015 study popularizing this idea has attracted considerable controversy; Xi Jinping apparently took notice, saying that "We all need to work together to avoid the Thucydides trap."
• A pomfret is a kind of fish whose name I hope to remember.
• Here's a really compelling chapter—a digression, really—from Stewart Brand's upcoming book on Maintenance. In it, he compares two infamous guns: the AK-47 and the M16, which have been used on many of the same battlefields and whose design principles diverge wildly.
• A few weeks ago I revisited something that Vaughn Tan wrote—and I published, with TW Lim's help—back in 2022. I had mostly forgotten about it, and think it's worth reprinting here:

Today, most wheat intended for milling into flour is grown as a monoculture: Each wheat field is sown to a single cultivar of wheat, which is selected/bred/genetically modified for particular properties when milled into flour.

In contrast, a *population wheat* is a mix of genetically heterogeneous wheats (which can change over time) that’s sown and grown together, then harvested at the same time to be milled into flour. Population wheat flour has the properties of its variety of wheats in their relative proportions. To adjust the flour’s final properties, farmers apply selection pressure to the population (e.g. by periodically pulling out wheats with less desired properties during the growing season). This changes the type and distribution of different wheats in the population, so that the resulting flour has the desired properties even if individual wheats within it do not.

A well-designed population comprising mostly pre-1900s wheats will be more resilient and adaptable than a monoculture of modern (post-1900s) wheat, because it is diverse at more levels and in more ways: A well-designed population has component wheats that are more likely to be *individually* genetically diverse and thus phenotypically plastic and responsive, and the population *as a whole* has more freedom to respond by changing the relative prevalence of component wheats.

A responsive population is more likely to adapt well to its growing environment, and so will require lower inputs to grow. John Letts — a population wheat researcher and farmer in the UK, and instigator of the Heritage Grain Trust — tells me that his population wheats can be grown with almost no inputs of water, fungicides, pesticides, or fertilizers. The upshot: Instead of failing in a suboptimal growing environment, a population wheat is likely to adapt to its specific environment by changing in composition and expression. The flour milled from it will change over time, but even in poor harvest conditions there will be flour – as opposed to an unharvestable monoculture wheat field.

The population approach to wheat agriculture is a form of evolutionary design, and has much in common with the design principles of successful APIs, platforms, and ecosystems: We should design open-ended systems, which adapt over time to emergent uses.

• Here's a video of Claes Oldenburg talking about his large Ice Bag sculptures, which are made of fabric and are actuated such that they inflate and deflate over time.
• Denmark's state-run postal service will stop delivering letters at the end of 2025.
• In the first two months under Manhattan's new congestion pricing zone, honking complaints have dropped 69% compared to last year.
• An essay on the "Golden Age" of Japanese pencils, which occurred from 1952-1967 and was characterized by the "sometimes inexplicable tendency of Japanese manufacturers to perfect what doesn't need to be perfected."

Thanks as always to Scope of Work’s Members and Supporters for making this newsletter possible. Thanks also to Vaughn, Adan and Matt for helping source links this week.

Love, Spencer