I started a new job last week.
I mean that two ways. The first is the obvious one: As I mentioned recently, I started a new job last week. But how I started the job was an entirely new job of its own. See, at Automattic, no matter what work you’re there to do, no matter if you’re an executive or this is your first full-time gig, you spend your first two weeks doing user support. Zendesk tickets, live chat, the whole nine. Surprise: Running diagnostics and talking people through changing their DNS settings is exactly as nerve-racking as it sounds, especially for someone whose engineering know-how ends at the Engineer from Team Fortress 2.
But. But! By the time you finish those two weeks, the thinking goes, you not only have a solid understanding of WordPress—far more solid than it might be had you just read about it or gone to some meetings—but you’re thinking about your job from the user’s point of view. Serving the creator (or consumer, or both, depending on the business you’re in) is a foundational value of just about every business, but it’s rare to see an onboarding process that puts that value into practice quite so directly.
At any rate, the idea of my new job having a bonus new job attached to it kept making me think of fractals, of limbs spawning limbs in recursive patterns. And that, in turn, made me think about something I’ve been doing off and on since I was in elementary school. Something that has changed in some truly remarkable ways over that time.
Origami.
It started with cranes and water ballons and “fortune tellers,” like everyone else. But I immediately took to the structure and certitude of how paper-folding worked. It was creative, sure, but it was creativity with an insurance policy: if you followed the steps in the diagram and did the things with the paper that the diagram told you to, the paper would turn into the thing the diagram promised. I couldn’t draw for shit, but I could match up two corners and make a sharp-ass crease—and if I did in just the right ways, I had an elephant. (Side note: my love of origami, and by extension rules and structure, probably tells you everything you need to know about my psyche.)
As time went on, my interest branched out. Animals were cool, and folding cranes out of gum wrappers was a surprisingly effective bit of game, but there were incredible things happening: Tomoko Fuse created remarkable modular origami, assembling dozens of identical units into geometric wonders; in Spain and France and the US, folders brought humor to origami, playing with proportion and facial expressions. I’d read and I’d fold, and I’d feel proud of the results, but I never thought past them to the blend of art and science that had gone into designing them. And then I read Peter Engel’s Folding the Universe. (Finally, a Peter.)
Folding the Universe was like many other origami books, but the first 80 pages or so ignored instruction for disquisition. Engel, who had studied the history of philosophy and science as a college student, delved into the theory of origami, how masters rendered inspiration in paper form—and how mathematics helped that paper behave like the fractal hidden within its fibers. That art had been there all along, of course, but reading about how Akira Yoshizawa had taken 30 years to create a perfect origami cicada tore past my rote appreciation.
Last year, faced with the prospect of endless months in my house, I came back to origami all over again—and as with every other time I had returned to the hobby, I learned all over again how elastic a piece of paper can be. One of the big things over the past few years has been using “crease patterns” instead of diagrams to recreate incomprehensibly complex models. Designers essentially program these models rather than fold them, dividing a piece of paper into a 32x32 or 64x64 grid and then using mathematical principles to derive how to turn it into, say, a scale-covered rattlesnake or a crouching samurai with a sword in his outstretched hand. But folders are also making expressive, curvilinear faces and tessellations that turn paper into a mosaic. The science may leap forward, but the art is always there.
And if you’re gonna find a new job nesting within your other new job, it’s good to be reminded that art and science can go hand-in-hand.
Something I Can’t Get Enough of This Week
🎧 Gene and Roger
If you grew up watching Siskel & Ebert at the Movies, you know they talked about films in a way that made you feel like you were part of the conversation. But you might not have known how groundbreaking and influential they really were. That’s where the podcast miniseries Gene and Roger comes in. Over the course of eight episodes (#4 just aired this week), Brian Raftery tells the story of America’s favorite bickering Chicago duo since Michael Jordan and Jerry Krause. Incredible arsenal of archival footage? Check. New interviews with family members, coworkers, and A-list directors? Also check. I may be biased here—Raftery is a longtime colleague and friend of mine—but he’s both obsessive and omnivorous about pop culture, and the result is an absolute delight. Subscribe to Ringer’s Big Picture to get it in your feed every week in the app of your choice, or just click this here link to get started. (Spotify)