Noise #99

Ben Franklin, colonial counterfeiters, and an unlikely surfing champion

Two news stories stuck with me this morning—a New York Times feature about Benjamin Franklin using printing technology to battle colonial counterfeiters—and a GQ / New York Times Audio story describing how an unknown lifeguard became a global surfing champion.

Amidst what can seem like hailstorms of dark news, these stories felt luminous.

The Ben Franklin article is a fascinating reminder that though chaos and conflict can swell, drain, and transform over time, human ingenuity is their constant counterweight.

And the surfing article is an intriguing testament to the scale of time, illustrating how “forces had been conspiring for over 2 million years” to create a remarkable day of massive waves. The jaggedness of our news cycles, the vacillations that shake our historical nanosecond—when seen through a geological perspective, they look less like earth-rupturing catastrophes and more like unremarkable vibrations from a single, small molecule.