Thursday Things: Coffee To Go Edition
22 June 2023. Vol 5 No 25. By Dan McGirt. #202
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Not a lost city. Also, good coffee. Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
200th Edition
Because I’m bad at keeping track of these things, I failed to note that two issues ago, the June 8 Super Solar Edition was the 200th edition of Thursday Things!
Thank you to all the Happy Subscribers who have been Thursday Things readers from the beginning and all who have joined our merry band along the way!
Count how many people are on their phone. Not a lot of world-changing intellectual conversation happening here… Photo by No Revisions on Unsplash
When coffee changed the world
Today we’d hardly consider Starbucks or Ye Olde Local Coffee Shop to be centers of learning, intellectual ferment, or gathering places for dangerous revolutionaries. But coffeehouses of yore were a whole other vibe:
“Penny Universities”: How British coffeehouses changed the intellectual world
For hundreds of years after their introduction, coffeehouses didn’t just sell coffee. They sold ideas. If you walked into an average 17th-century coffeehouse in Britain, you’d see gathered around the table academics, authors, artists, foreign exiles, revolutionaries, and political radicals. There would be a buzz in the air — the buzz of excited and scholarly debate. These coffeehouses were not hushed places of laptops and headphones. They were forums.
These were the “Penny Universities” of early modern Britain, and within their cozy, candlelit interiors, an intellectual revolution was brewing.
But did they serve double shot mint Frappuccinos?
If you were born in Britain in the 1600s, you would have had a slim chance of getting a good education. Wealthy families in England would pay for private tutors or send their children to one of the expensive “King’s Schools” (founded by or named after Henry VIII). Anyone who didn’t own a mansion and a title would have to be either very smart or very lucky to get into a good school. After that, no matter how brilliant you might be, your education would come to a yanking halt in adulthood. In England, there were only two universities: Oxford and Cambridge, and both charged fees far beyond most people’s annual income (not to mention the books and board you had to pay for). Higher education was reserved for higher incomes.
Things have certainly changed, haven’t they?
So, what were intelligent and academically curious people to do? Well, drink coffee. The first coffeehouse in the UK opened in Oxford in 1650 and it was crammed with dissatisfied or disillusioned academics. These Oxford coffeehouses were massively exclusive (serving only university members) but they set a precedent. These were places of erudition, debate, science, and intellectual curiosity.
You don’t get that with a drive through.
Click over and read the rest to see what coffeehouses have to do with Sir Isaac Newton, Halley of comet fame, Lloyd’s of London, and the stock exchange.
I need a refill.
Aerial view of Ocomtún site. Source: Ivan Ṡprajc / INAH
Missing the city
Lost cities exert a fascinating hold over our imaginations. Who lived there? What were their lives like? Why did they leave? What happened to them? I used to wonder how entire cities could go missing, but seeing the exodus of people from our major cities today, I think the reasons have been the same throughout history — plague, disaster, a breakdown of order, misgovernment, and a change of thesis.
Okay, I might have to explain that last one. If you’re a stock investor, you typically have an investment thesis for buying a particular stock. You might be convinced that electric cars are the future and Tesla is the best at making electric cars and will dominate that market, so that would be your thesis for buying shares of Tesla.1
But maybe later you decide that Tesla isn’t executing as well as you thought, or the CEO is too distracted by other projects and the competition is doing electric cars better. Or maybe someone invents nuclear-power atomic cars2 and you decide those are the future, so you don’t want to invest in electric cars anymore. Your investment thesis has changed, so you sell.
It’s the same with cities, I think. There is a logic to why a particular city is located where it is — central location, good harbor, close to the mines, whatever — and why people are drawn to live there and base their lives and businesses and careers there. Every resident has an investment thesis for that city — a why for living there and remaining there. And if that thesis changes for enough people the city stops growing and starts shrinking, perhaps even dying and becoming a ghost town or, eventually, a lost city.
When everyone gets their coffee to go, the city is gone.
Anyway, this just in:
Ancient Maya city discovered in Mexican jungle
A previously unknown ancient Maya city has been discovered in the jungles of southern Mexico, the country's anthropology institute said on Tuesday, adding it was likely an important center more than a thousand years ago.
So was Detroit. Once.
The city includes large pyramid-like buildings, stone columns, three plazas with "imposing buildings" and other structures arranged in almost-concentric circles, the INAH institute said.
INAH said the city, which it has named Ocomtun - meaning "stone column" in the Yucatec Maya language - would have been an important center for the peninsula's central lowland region between 250 and 1000 AD.
The “I ❤️Ocumtun!” t-shirts were flying off the shelves back then.
The site probably declined around 800 to 1000 AD judging from materials extracted from buildings, he said, adding this was likely a reflection of "ideological and population changes" that led to the collapse of Maya societies in that region by the 10th century.
Ideological and population changes will do it every time.
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This isn’t investment advice. Just an example.
Yes, please!