Do you know who the Vikings were? Sure you do. We have all been fed hagiographic stories of the Vikings through movies and TV shows. We all know that they were raiding warriors renowned for their militaristic culture and non-sedentary civilization. Men have used them as something of a platonic ideal for masculinity.
But, as the first article of today’s NIV shows, we don’t really know our history as well as we think we do. Hand to heart, do you know if the currently in-vogue account of Prithviraj Chauhan is really the honest-to-god account of what really happened?
History is complex and it becomes even foggier the more we start converting historical figures into modern heroes. Beware of tales that seem too black and white.
Links of the Week
History - On how our current understanding of the Vikings is wrong and quite far apart from what may actually be the case. (Link)
The issue with the term is not merely semantic. This conception of ‘the Vikings’ seriously distorts our understanding of European history. We have tended to group almost all Scandinavian activity between the 790s and the mid-11th century together under the ‘Viking’ label, creating a distinct ‘Viking Age’ and an imagined ‘Viking’ culture and identity. The evidence, however, does not support this analysis.
Startups - I have always found the concept of creating an MVP and looking for product-market fit through it a bit far-fetched. Gagan Biyani’s MVT framework which focuses on testing the viability of the central idea provides a useful counterpoint. (Link)
If you build an MVP, you start to think about the 20 features you might build to make people happy in a market, which takes your eye off the one specific insight that the customer actually cares about. Purity breeds success.
Energy - If like me, you’d like to know more about why the war in Ukraine is creating volatility in energy markets across the globe, this podcast transcript of a conversation between Daniel Yergin and Ezra Klein is a great resource. I also highly recommend reading Yergin’s book The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. (Link)
So just to lay out the numbers, Russia exports 7 and a half million barrels a day of oil. But as you say, it’s 11 percent of the production. But some of that stays in Russia, of course. About half of that goes to Europe.
And what’s happening, we see now, is that one or two million barrels a day of Russian oil that would normally be loaded into tankers is not being loaded. Because the tankers aren’t there, because people won’t take the oil. Then there’s the additional thing that there’s Russian oil that’s on the seas in tankers, but can’t find a port, because it’s being rejected.
Film - a great essay on the use of Rachmaninoff’s piano concerto in the movie Brief Encounter and generally about the power of music in films. (Link)
The contentious music in question is Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, and it makes up the entirety of the score of Lean’s film for one very good reason: it’s breathtaking. It’s devastating. It’s glorious. There’s an undeniable sense of melodrama to Rachmaninoff’s piece. It embodies romance in its purest, most powerful form—that is, it embodies a specific type of romance in its purest, more powerful form. Namely: the doomed romance.
Careers - On the value of seeing careers over 40-year horizons (as opposed to the current popularity of FIRE (financial independence/retire early)) seen through the lens of the principle of time preference. (Link)
My point is that any type of career strategy should take these numbers into account. Many of us will have a four-decade long careers. The peak of our careers will occur during our late 40s to early 50s. And the stages we go through on our way to that peak will be oddly similar, if you’ve read enough biographies and talked to enough people about their careers.
England - On the delightfully English custom of hunting and eating grouse and what that says of the current political state of the country. (Link)
In 1888 Lord Walsingham (OE) personally killed 1,070 grouse in a single day on Blubberhouses Moor in Yorkshire – a rate of one every 13 seconds. On 12 August 1915, eight guns brought down the biggest bag in history, shooting a truly unfathomable 2,929 birds on the Earl of Sefton’s (OE) Abbeystead estate in Lancashire.
Economics - A brilliant interview of Lant Pritchett conducted by Shruti Rajagopalan over at the Ideas of India podcast. Really insightful on labor markets within the country. (Link)
Second, given the weakness of the legal environment in India, I think people feel they need to stay on their land to protect their claim to it. I think there’s a lot of partial migration to where somebody needs to stay on this plot that this family owns because if we leave for a year or two years, we can’t really expect that someone won’t essentially expropriate it from us. When we looked at, for instance, Dalit migration, there was a lot more migration among Dalits than among the land-owning castes.
Happy reading!