The Last Word On Nothing

I wrote this in 2021 and originally published it in my newsletter. Almost two years later, I am still thinking about it, so please, if you know Crest’s copywriters, please reach out.

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For unobservant people (me), product labels are background noise. I don’t pay much attention to the text on a package of toilet paper or what’s written on the various boxes and cans I bring home from the grocery store, though I do think about this can of peas all the time. My partner, on the other hand, reads everything closely. If there’s anything on the dining table while we’re having a meal — a flier, the wrapper around takeout chopsticks — he’ll reflexively read it. So it did not surprise me at all when he showed me the text on our toothpaste tube.

“What does this even mean?” he asked with incredulity, pointing at a phrase highlighted in its own little white box: “Protects against areas dentists check most.”

A snake oil salesman and some hedge funds partner up to pimp the latest ‘synthetic biology’ scam—as phantom revenue, a hocus-pocus business model, rampant related-party games, and a decade of colossal failure get shoveled into yet another garbage SPAC. Ginkgo Bioworks is a colossal scam, a Frankenstein mash-up of the worst frauds of the last 20 years.

So begins a 2021 short-seller’s report, representative in style of the literary form.

This year I’ve been reading a fair number of ‘short reports’, a type of inflammatory, investigative presentation aimed at convincing other investors to dump a stock. Short sellers play an important ecological role in the public markets, clearing away excess valuations that otherwise build into bubbles. If one couldn’t sell short, investors could only speculate in one direction—upward. But like all scavengers, activist short sellers are roundly loathed.

The short reports I’ve been reading have done nothing to dispel this grimy reputation. There is a kind of disdain for their victim, a schadenfreude in the suggestion that they will not only bring down a company but gain from its downfall, too. But there is something else in the literary style. Each time, I sense I should be wearing a fedora. The language is so reminiscent of noir detective fiction that my surroundings transmogriphy into a dimly-lit bar, a lone saxophone playing at the edges while, as I read, my inner voice takes on a transatlantic accent.

My grandmother used to take me to master classes at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where young musicians from all over the world came to train. After buying our $10 tickets, we’d stand in the line of mostly senior citizens waiting for the doors to open. I’d hold her hand and rest my head on her shoulder, inhaling her Obsession perfume.

Nana wasn’t allowed to listen to music growing up, so as an adult she learned to play cello and taught her children and grandchildren to love classical music and jazz. We usually sat in the first or second row, close enough to hear the students breathing and their shoes squeaking. Barely-out-of-college opera singers wiped their sweaty hands on their pants and pianists dropped their sheet music. Then the teacher would arrive, the students would pull themselves together, and they’d get to work. 

The students were very, very good. But as we listened, their instructors made small adjustments that transformed their performances from good to something shiver-worthy, perfect.