Wisereads Vol. 56 — Moleskine Mania by Roland Allen, The Importance of Being Earnest, and more

Last week, we shared The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, a classic collection of short stories in Middle English. This week, we're sharing The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde's short comedy known for its witty dialogue and critique of Victorian manners.

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A history of the trademark black notebook reveals why retailers with identical notebooks, at half the price, fail to put a dent in Moleskine's sales. "You don’t need me to tell you what a Moleskine looks like, but you may not have considered how insistently its design sends messages to the contemporary nomad... Discreetly minimal it may seem, but the whole package is as shot through with brand messaging as anything labelled Nike, Mercedes, or Apple—and, like the best cues, the messaging works on a subconscious level."

Readers supplied the Guardian with general tips on everything from being punctual: "Always add 10% on to the average journey time when factoring when to set off," to eliminating multitasking when planning your day: "Block it in such a way that you have focused attention on one thing when that’s important to you."

John Lanchester takes a skeptical look at the zero-sum nature of contemporary finance through the lens of Rob Copeland and Gary Stevenson's recent books. "The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. That’s the mangoes. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. It does nothing and adds no value. It is just one speculator betting against another and for every winner, on every single transaction, there is an exactly equivalent loser."

After spending the last nine years in Japan, Chris Broad explains why now is the ideal time to visit. "It always felt a world away—a trip of a lifetime, perhaps out of reach for many. And yet today, with a significantly weakened Yen and a country that's put tourism at the absolute forefront of its future, you might be surprised to learn that a trip to Japan isn't quite as expensive as you might think." His tips cover accommodations, travel, and excursions for both budget and luxury travelers.

Content, confidence, and context—these are the three dimensions Shreyas Doshi discovered traditional companies use to promote employees. "This is unfortunately the cause of a lot [of] persistent frustration for otherwise-talented people who are GREAT at content, but repeatedly get passed over for promotion to higher levels… it is usually because they are not projecting as much confidence as they ought to for the next level and they are not as attuned to the context of the org & the company."

Researchers compare results from three studies to discover how GitHub Copilot affects developer productivity. "Though each separate experiment is noisy, combined across all three experiments and 4,867 software developers, our analysis reveals a 26.08% increase (SE: 10.3%) in the number of completed tasks among developers using the AI tool. Notably, less experienced developers showed higher adoption rates and greater productivity gains."

The Importance of Being Earnest, the last play Oscar Wilde wrote before his imprisonment, follows two men as they lead double lives in London to avoid social obligations, both taking on the name "Ernest" in their romantic pursuits. Although The Picture of Dorian Gray is Wilde's most well-known work, his clever comedy also stands the test of time with its witty dialogue and critique of Victorian manners.

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!"

This edition of The Importance of Being Earnest is available through Standard Ebooks. You can explore their collection of high quality, carefully formatted, and free public domain ebooks here.

Andrew Chen, author of The Cold Start Problem and a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, writes insightful Substack essays on startups, user growth, and network effects. From The end of the 1 billion active user ad-supported consumer startup: "Building an ad-supported startup is sort of a 'two miracle' problem, as they say. First, there's a miracle of getting to 10s of millions of users -- enough scale so that ads can even be a revenue generator -- and then a second miracle to build an ads marketplace, targeting systems, bidding systems, etc, to attract millions of advertisers."