--:-- Sonal Choksi: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I'm Sonal Choksi, and as your primary host, editor, and showrunner here of the past seven years, I wanted to share some favorite episodes selected for you, not just by me, but by you, as they were very popular among listeners, too, as I get ready to make a change to other shows.
--:-- The third of these three special rerun episodes is a conversation that originally took place in October 2020 in the midst of the pandemic, hence some initial sound issues, but they quickly get resolved, so make sure to hang on. And it's probably my personal single most favorite episode, which is a really hard thing to say after overseeing nearly 700 plus episodes. But for me, it perfectly captures how I think of the signature identity of this show and my work, which is at the intersection of technology and humanity.
--:-- In it, we cover everything from science and math across several fields, to commerce, to management and measurement, to the always meta narrative of how innovation happens. Again, this will be my last episode here for a while. The team will be putting this feed on hiatus while they relaunch it with a new host. So in the meantime, you can continue to follow my work both here at A6NZ and other projects on Twitter at SMC90.
--:-- Thank you as well to our brilliant audio editors, expert guests, and several others here. But most of all, I want to say a most heartfelt thank you to you all for listening, sharing, engaging, and coming along with me and us on this journey the past decade. Stay tuned for more.
--:-- [Transition to original episode]
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I'm Sonal. Today, we have the very first episode for a new book coming out November 10th by Virginia Postrel, *The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World*, which is all about the central role of textiles in the history of technology, science, commerce, civilization itself. But it's really a history and evolution of innovation across all kinds of fields, so there's something for everyone in this episode.
--:-- Virginia has written several best-selling books, including *The Substance of Style*, a longtime favorite of mine, *The Power of Glamour*, which I excerpted when I was at Wired. She also wrote *The Future and Its Enemies* in the late 90s and was a former editor-in-chief of *Reason* and has been a columnist for various magazines and newspapers. Currently she has a regular column in Bloomberg Opinion.
--:-- But we're here today to talk about her soon to be released book. In the long discussion that follows, probably the longest we've done here, we both delve deep as well as lightly dip into a wide range of topics. The first segment covers fabrics from the genetics of cotton to the supply chain of silk, including early machines, early management techniques, what was considered expertise. We then cover the storage and transmission of knowledge, both explicit and tacit, including artifacts and manuals to notation and measurement, and especially mathematics, touching briefly on NASA's space program, AI, and the environmental impact of dyes. And in the last section, we go meta on how innovation happens from the zeitgeist of the times to the dynamics of codifying and sharing knowledge and the industrial enlightenment to the demographics and symbols involved. We actually go deep on the story of evolution of and meaning of Kente cloth and other patterns in Ghana, finally ending on the difference between cultures and civilizations.
--:-- Because the through line that resonated most deeply with me throughout this book is that the story of textiles is one of human ingenuity, which is also what this podcast, the A6NZ podcast, is all about. Please do also go ahead and rate us in your podcast app when you have a moment. And now let me welcome Virginia.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Virginia, I'm so excited to have you. Welcome.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Thank you.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: So I'm not going to ask you the obvious question, which is why did you write this book? First of all, I know why you wrote the book because we talked about it over many, many long dinners.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Yeah, right. I mean, this book wouldn't exist without you.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Oh, one of my favorite things is you actually talk about the metaphors. You call them heirloom metaphors. But tell me about some of these metaphors. I mean, you basically say we catch airline shuttles, we weave through traffic, we follow comment threads. Like all our listeners have done all of those things.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Well, first of all, let's start with heirloom. So heirloom is a reference to a loom. And the reason that we have this word is that a loom was a piece of capital equipment, and so it would get passed down as a valuable heirloom. But some of the more fun ones are ones that we have no idea about, like "on tenterhooks."
--:-- When people would make wool cloth — and I've seen this in a museum in England — after they would weave it, they would do what's called fulling, which is a combination of wetting it and pounding it and using what's called fuller's earth on it. It felted it. It made it thicker and more waterproof. And then they would stretch the wool on these really vicious looking little hooks on a rectangular frame, like nails sticking out. When you see these tenterhooks, you realize, oh my goodness, that tension, that feeling of tension. I see why that metaphor came to be.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Perfect. So your very first opening quote in the book is, "The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." And that quote is from Mark Weiser in "A Computer for the 21st Century," which was a paper he wrote in 1991. Tell me about why you started with that quote.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: I love this quote for two reasons. The first is that it's profoundly true. The most significant technologies are the ones that disappear. But the other is, you see what he did there?
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I see what you did there.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: I don't even think he realized what he was doing. Maybe he did. It proves my point that this ancient, ubiquitous technology is really important. And I want people to pay attention to it and to pay attention to all the ingenuity that goes into the fabric that surrounds us.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: A little known fact about that Mark Weiser quote — I remember this when I was at PARC and I was writing up some language for a living museum project. One of the things that I found fascinating is we had these quotes about how he also said that not only are the most profound technologies the ones that disappear, but that sometimes technology should be that when you leave a pencil behind in a meeting, you never go back and feel like, oh no, I have to go grab that pencil. You're fine discarding that pencil. It can be discarded. And that is what he thought of as ubiquitous computing. Of course, it's the opposite with how technology has come out today in terms of, we actually want to keep our smartphones. They are not like a pencil. But the idea that something can become so ubiquitous as to be discarded — I love that quote also evokes that, which I don't know if you're aware that it did.
--:-- But you yourself in the book talk about how we suffer textile amnesia because we enjoy textile abundance. And I thought that was so profound.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Yeah, that's perfect. I didn't know that about Mark Weiser, who also, by the way, uses in that article the metaphor of seamlessness, which is another textile metaphor. And this really has mostly happened in my lifetime. I'm 60, where textiles have just become so abundant and so cheap that we really don't think about them.
--:-- I'm really contrasting it to a pre-industrial period where to make enough thread to weave the fabric in a pair of jeans would take something like 13 eight-hour days. And that's the fastest spinners in the world. And that's just making the thread. That's not preparing the fiber to make the thread. It's not weaving, it's not dyeing, it's not any of the other processes. So we live in this world where fabric is everywhere and it's really cheap. My friend Adam Minter has a great book called *Secondhand* that's in part about the secondhand trade in clothes among other things, also electronics. So we do take it for granted. We don't think about where it comes from and we don't think about the labor or the ingenuity over thousands and thousands of years.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: This is exactly where there's parallels to technology because you point out, I never actually even thought about this, that the agricultural revolution was as much about fiber as it was food. But the industrial revolution did bring all these technologies. And as you point out, the hours that goes into making thread, the cost reductions and everything that that then enables — that's exactly what's playing out with technology right now. If you talk about transistors being cheap and almost so ubiquitous as to be wasted, so abundant as to be forgotten, which is why I love the quote you open with so, so much.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: The other thing that I do in that intro — Arthur C. Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Yes, it's one of his three laws.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Right, exactly. And what I say in the preface is, "Any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature." What I'm thinking about there is we know intellectually that it's not natural, that somebody made it, that there were machines involved and chemistry and all these things, but we never really think about it.
--:-- But there's also in the first chapter, which is about fiber, a very important point, I think, which is that there's no such thing as natural fibers. All of these — what I would call biological fibers, like cotton and wool and linen and silk — are the product of many, many small, concerted human interventions. They're basically genetically modified organisms. In some cases, it's extreme, like with silk. Others, like cotton, naturally doesn't grow in most of the major cotton producing parts of the world because they're above the frost line. In that natural state, it would never make bolts. It would just freeze and that would be the end of it. But humans gradually modified it. And there are mysteries of why they would do that.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: This is actually one of my favorite stories in the book, which is you kind of go on this genetic sleuthing mission to figure out the origination of how we were able to turn cotton into this more reproducible type of cotton, I guess to grossly simplify it. I'd love you to quickly tell that story.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: So there are really two stories. One is a science story that's about the origins of cotton because there are around 50 cotton species around the world. Only one of them developed fiber originally. That was a species that geneticists call A, and it came in Africa. And then somehow — this is the great mystery — somehow it got to Mexico. Did it float? Did it go on a boat? What happened? This is the mystery.
--:-- So it got to Mexico and it crossbred with a native species there that didn't have fiber. And it produced what geneticists refer to as AD. The Mexican species was D. This is what is known in biology as a polyploidal plant, which is common in the plant world. It means it has twice as many chromosomes and therefore there's a lot more room to breed it, get more variety.
--:-- I interviewed this cotton geneticist named Jonathan Wendell. He said when he was first studying cotton genetics, there were two theories. One was that this crossing the ocean thing happened back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the continents were still stuck together. The other was, oh, well, human beings must have brought it on boats. It was what he calls the Kon-Tiki hypothesis after the explorer Thor Heyerdahl early in the mid 20th century.
--:-- But we now know from genetic research that it was neither of those. Somehow this cotton got from Africa to Mexico after the continents split apart, but long, long before there were any human beings. It could have gotten caught up in a hurricane. It could have gotten on a piece of pumice. We don't know, but we can use these genetic clocks to bracket roughly how long it was. So we owe cotton to this weird, random, unusual event. And by the way, so unusual that it hasn't happened again.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Right. It only happened once.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: It's two things that only happened once. One was that a species of cotton developed fiber. And then two was that it crossed the ocean and developed this rich genetic code that could be manipulated in various ways.
--:-- So then people come along and there's old world cotton and new world cotton. In the old world, cotton was being raised in places like India that are in the tropics. But somehow we know that cotton spread with the spread of Islam and it spread into places that were too far north for the cotton to grow. It spread in places that had frost. Why is that? My theory is that because they wouldn't have planted it there unless they already had cotton that would grow there. So it must have come from places like India. And why would Indians raise cotton that could survive frost? It's a tropical climate. They don't need to.
--:-- So my theory is it might have been a commercial consideration. Essentially, if your cotton bloomed first, you could get to market earlier and get a jump on the competition. Over time, there would be competitive pressures to get cotton to bloom earlier and earlier. And once it bloomed early enough — like the cotton we have today — it would be good for planting farther north. There is a competing theory, which is that it had something to do with controlling pests. But we don't know. This is one of the great mysteries of cotton.
--:-- So nowadays, most of the cotton in the world, 90%, is the species that originated on the Yucatan Peninsula, which is called *Gossypium hirsutum*. And it didn't survive terribly well above the frost line until late into the 19th century. I tell the story of this not-so-savory character who discovered a cotton in Mexico and he brought it to the American South, and that could grow above the frost line.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: There's so many threads. And in fact, oh my God, I keep saying that. And I swear it's not a pun, Virginia. I keep saying "thread" and it's actually a word I really legitimately have.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: You can't avoid it. We're just going to notice it all the time now.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: So a couple of quick notes on the story you just told about cotton. There's some details in your book about not only that Islam spread cotton, but you almost allude in that section that maybe the adoption accelerated because of cotton. That's one of the interesting ideas I noticed. It was a desire to get out from under certain landowners and sort of strike out on their own. And there were ways you could do that by raising cotton that were connected with also converting to Islam. So fascinating.
--:-- And then the other thread, too, you talk about the British Empire in India and people wanted Indian calico, but the East India Company put limits on that. And then it kind of pushed other manufacturers like Italian to come up and step up to the plate. And then also, this is so top of mind today, too, you talk about the kind of ugly part of this history, that it's the cotton gin and history of slavery in the South and even the observation that the South is not as un-tech savvy as people portrayed compared to the Yankee North. So I hope people pick it up and read it to find out more about this fascinating, terrifying history of all of that.
--:-- What I want to focus on in this conversation, and it kind of follows how you organize your book from fiber to thread to cloth to dye to traders to consumers, is you described the evolution of what allowed us to mass make cotton and the steps into that. Let's talk a bit about the supply chain and vertical integration and trade aspects. That's a big jump, but I think it's still a great jump to make.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Well, one of the things that is the case in all types of textiles is that you have a long supply chain. You have a lot of stages and there's a long delay between when you raise the cotton and when somebody gets paid for the cloth. So one thing that is the case throughout textile history is that you have to have a lot of innovation around working capital, the different ways of people getting paid. That's one aspect. Textiles force human beings to think at a very early stage in civilization about financial questions — about how do you pay for things where you're providing inputs rather than the final finished product. You could raise sheep and you shear sheep and you spin wool and you weave, but those things were not necessarily done in the same household.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: In some ways, the most interesting developments around the supply chain take place in silk for the reason that it is a luxury fiber and also because it's really complicated. So tell us about the silk and supply chain.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Okay, so silk — I discovered while working on this book that a lot of people don't know where it comes from. So let's start there. Silk comes from silkworms, *Bombyx mori*, which are basically caterpillars that have been bred over many centuries, originally in China, to feed on mulberry leaves and produce cocoons. The eggs need tending, the caterpillars need tending, they need to be fed, they need to be given sticks to build their cocoons on. And once they make the cocoons, they're put into boiling water, which kills the insect inside and keeps it from emerging as a moth and breaking the single filament that makes the cocoon.
--:-- Once you've done that, you need to get that filament off the cocoons. You have skilled people who know how to take filaments off of multiple cocoons and create thread. There's a lot of tacit knowledge involved in that. That's called reeling because it goes on these big reels. Then often when you want to make stronger thread, you have a stage called throwing, where you twist two threads together to make a stronger one. Then you need to get that on bobbins. And that's just the thread.
--:-- One of the most amazing things that I discovered when I was working on the book are these giant factories, 24-7, hundreds of people that started in Italy and had their heyday in the 16th and 17th century. This is before the Industrial Revolution. That was their heyday, but they started earlier. They were organized around these very large two-story throwing machines that were hydraulically powered. They would go down to the basement and there would be a source of water power. They're all made of wood. They're precision machines. It's just amazing. There are museums throughout Northern Italy where you can see them.
--:-- The machines are amazing enough, but it wasn't just the machines. They developed sophisticated management techniques. First of all, they vertically integrated. They didn't grow the cocoons. They went from cocoon to thread for export. Then the thread would go to Lyon, which was the silk capital in Europe.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I think most of us, and I would include myself here, think about factories and management as starting with the Industrial Revolution, maybe starting with Wedgwood. And this is actually before that.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: First of all, they are operating 24-7. I asked a historian who covers them, what did they do for light? He said they had torches. I said, that doesn't sound very safe. He said, no, it wasn't. And they developed measurement techniques. They developed standardized weights. They developed standardized tools for measuring things.
--:-- One of the things they developed, which is used to this day, is the idea of measuring the fineness of thread by having a standard measure of length, and then how much the thread weighed given that length. That ratio can tell you how fine the thread is. When you wander into the textile world, one of the things that's really disorienting is they have all these weird ways of measuring things like "denier." What is a denier? You may have noticed that when you buy stockings, it's from that idea of a certain amount of weight per a standard measurement. So they developed a lot of techniques like that. This was proto-industry.
--:-- Then the question comes, well, why isn't that the Industrial Revolution? Why isn't that the factory that changed the world? The reason is that silk is a luxury. It's a niche market. It can't change the world. You don't make sails out of silk. You don't make sacks out of silk. You don't clothe your armies with silk. All of these uses for other textiles don't apply to silk. So a lot of techniques and machines were developed and they did influence later developments, but they weren't revolutionary in the way that transforming everyday textiles was.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Isn't that so fascinating because it's such an inversion from revolutionary tech today. In that world, you did need mass production for the capital outlet that you described, the financing and everything required. But in today's world, the inverse is happening where we have this sort of niche, more long tail driven economy in many ways because of the internet, of course.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Another way of thinking of it is often new technologies start very expensive. Who used original computers? Big businesses. They were big, expensive pieces of capital equipment. Then they got smaller and smaller. Now we carry them around in our pockets. You sometimes have luxury items as the first way into a technology because you can finance it that way, justify a higher price. I don't want to push it too far. That actually applies in terms of silk versus other things more to the development of looms and the draw loom and Jacquard and his famous punch cards, the one thing that all technology people know about.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: So you have this phrase: management, measure, machines. Those three words just popped out to me because that to me is the art of technology and startups as well, or any business enterprise. But then you do point out a fourth M, which is the role of the maestra, which I didn't know what that was. Tell us about the role of the maestra and why that's so significant in this supply chain and evolution from cloth to industry.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: So the maestra — that's the singular — is a woman with many, many years of experience at reeling. That is taking these incredibly fine filaments — I mean, they're strong, but they're less than a human hair — off of the cocoons and twisting them together into a single thread. The very best could make thread out of just two. Keep in mind, these are natural fibers. They're biological. They are not totally consistent. So one of the skills is matching up these fibers so that they are as consistent as possible because that makes the best thread. It's a really, really high-skilled job.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: One might even call it pattern matching.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Yeah, it is pattern matching. It is a form of pattern matching along with a lot of manual skills as well. You learn how to do it because you spend many years as an apprentice being the person who turns the reel that takes up the thread while the maestra is doing this and you're watching her. You might spend 15 years doing that and acquiring all of that tacit knowledge.
--:-- These women were very well paid for the time because they were making a luxury product. But they thought about how to supervise people. They thought about incentives. For example, the maestre were not paid by the amount they produced because they wanted to ensure quality. They were paid by the day or by the time.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Oh, by the way, I underline that because I thought that was such a great example of incentive alignment. Modern management practice thinks about these very things.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Right, exactly. So they were thinking about incentive alignment.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: So you mentioned the ratio and this sort of mathematical problem solving that was already happening with the threading that the maestra did, the thinness, the thickness, et cetera. You also mentioned in the book as well, you open with this idea that technology means so much more than electronics or machines, which I love. And that is exactly what the book is about.
--:-- But also to me, the theme of this book, and in fact of the article that you did for *Aeon* Magazine, the one that I set you up with Ross for, is that the story of textiles is one of technology and science. So now let's switch to talking about the math. You have this great quote: "Spinning trains the hands, but weaving challenges the mind. Like music, it is profoundly mathematical. Weavers have to understand ratios, detect prime numbers, and calculate areas and lengths. Manipulating warps turns threads into rows and rows into patterns, points into lines, and lines into planes. Woven cloth represents some of humanity's earliest algorithms. It is embodied code."
--:-- I love this, Virginia. So talk to me and tell me about the math of textiles and more of the story there.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: First of all, I have to note that in researching the book, I learned how to weave on a hand loom.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I did not know that.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It challenges me because I'm not very good in three dimensions and you have to think in three dimensions, even though you're producing two-dimensional stuff. It is kind of complicated.
--:-- One point that I make in the book is that weaving is the original binary code. By that I don't mean Jacquard and his punch cards. That came long, long after. But it's all up, down, on, off, one, zero. That is woven into the cloth itself. And then also there's this idea of math as the science of patterns. I talk in the chapter about weaving and the use of symmetry. The people who are doing it aren't necessarily thinking, "I'm following algorithms." It's sort of like the old thing about "I'm speaking prose." But it is profoundly mathematical.
--:-- One of the really interesting speculative theories that I talk about is the idea that Greek arithmetic might have originated from the challenges of working on warp-weighted looms, because you have to know about prime numbers, especially on those types of looms and the techniques that they use. Another thing which I didn't get into the book — Judy Frater, who ran the place that I went to in India where I learned how to do printing and dyeing, she makes the point that in creating these complex printed fabrics in India, there's a tremendous amount of ratios because you want to get the repeats exactly right. You need to be able to think mathematically to get things to look right.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: That's fantastic. One note in a later part of the book is you talk about this 1976 study from Dan Edelman, and it talks about abacus manuscripts and books and how he emphasizes their practicality. The classical view of mathematics inherited from the Greeks was the study of abstract logic and ideal forms, whereas the abacus books treat math as useful. I thought that was so fascinating because when I think of the fundamental challenge of learning and teaching mathematics, which is like my old world of work and research, that is the challenge right there.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: First of all, these abacus manuscripts have a very misleading name. They're the opposite of abacus manuscripts. In fact, they're teaching people how to do pen and paper calculation, not how to use an abacus. There's a history which I explain about why they're called that.
--:-- But in the early modern period in Italy, there was the development of these schools where people who were going to be merchants would go when they were kids to learn how to do arithmetic, sort of in between calculation and algebra. They'd do all these word problems which, if you were solving them today, you would set up with variables and unknowns. This was driven by essentially the need of textile merchants for this new type of arithmetic, which was incorporating the Hindu-Arabic numbers and the zero, all of these things that were moving away from using Roman numerals.
--:-- These are business problems. A lot of them have to do with currency conversions, with lengths — if you get this much money for this length, how much would you get for this length? All of this sort of thing. It's the cloth trade driving a kind of mathematical education. One thing that's interesting is that these teachers were the first Europeans to make a living just by math. They would teach schools and they would also hire out as consultants, particularly for various construction projects where they would be doing more geometrical calculations. That was driven largely by the textile trade.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I love that. I can't even tell you on so many levels.
--:-- So knitting is such an interesting thing to me because a lot of people describe how knitting is technology. I'd love for you to say more about the science and math of knitting.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Well, the interesting characteristics of knitting mathematically have to do with its three-dimensional qualities. There's an actual mathematical paper called "Any Topological Structure Can Be Knitted." There are pictures in the book of things like Klein bottles that have been knitted.
--:-- From a practical business point of view, this is very important because we are at a technological moment where 3D knitting, which has been around for several decades, is becoming more and more important. It's driven by the mathematical characteristics of knitting, the computing power, and the shift where after millennia of being completely dominant, weaving is losing its market to knitting. Knitting is a relatively new way of making fiber. It started around 1200, whereas weaving goes back at least 9,000 years, probably more.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: And why is knitting taking over weaving?
--:-- Sonal Choksi: That was so surprising. So it's taking over weaving mostly because it's more comfortable, because it stretches in multiple dimensions. Also, a lot of the athletic wear that drives technological innovation in the textile and apparel industries — athletic wear and outdoor wear — is knitted. A lot of it is just this drive for comfort, which has only been accelerated by the pandemic.
--:-- You make a funny note in the book about what you're wearing while you're writing it. And of course, I chuckled because every time I met up with you, we'd wear nice clothes.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Oh, yeah. This is what I said. Everything I'm wearing except my jeans — my underwear, shirt, sweaters, socks, even my sneakers — is made from knitted fabric.
--:-- But this incredible expansion of knitting feeds into the business side too. We have this ability to do three-dimensional knitting. It has historically not been as economical as making big pieces of cloth and cutting and sewing, but it does allow us to make more to order so that your inventories are in thread rather than in finished garments or cloth. It allows more variety. There are advantages to it, and you can knit an entire garment with no seams. Traditionally, most of the knitting that you have in your closet is pieced together, sewn together, just like woven fabrics.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I don't know if you realize that you said that the comfort quality of knitting is that it's essentially seamless. And that, of course, goes back to the Mark Weiser quote. Earlier, you said that the other word in his big paper was "seamless." It can be seamless. And that is, in fact, what Shimizeki — the company that first innovated this three-dimensional knitting, although they're not the only company doing it now — sold it as the seamless garment.
--:-- And by the way, because our listeners are very curious, and that's what I love about everyone, the paper you referenced is, quote, "Every Topological Surface Can Be Knit: A Proof." And the journal, the full name is *Journal of Mathematics and the Arts*, and it's from June 2009. The authors are Sarah-Marie Belcastro and Carolyn Yackel. It was also in *Math Horizons* in November 2006. So those are the sources.
--:-- On the 3D notion of knitting, have you heard of this project called Skynet, which is basically a neural net that generates new patterns for knitting?
--:-- Virginia Postrel: I haven't.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Oh, you would love this. I'm going to send you an article about it. It's on Janelle Shane's work — she does a lot of creative AI type experiments — but she basically took the knitting forum Ravelry and she trained a neural network on a series of 500 knitting instructions, and then she generated new instructions that the Ravelry community has actually attempted to knit. It's just one of my favorite stories of online things.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: I'm not surprised it exists.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: One of my other favorite stories — and this is an Instagrammer I follow named Shannon Downey, because I'm super excited about fabric textile artists — she had heard about this unfinished quilt. They found a box full of fabric and discovered it was a massive quilting project that was just begun and it was mapped out. So many people on the internet joined up to quilt this quilt. It's called Rita's Quilt, and they just completed it. In that case, it's more technology for collaboration than for creation.
--:-- But it's a segue to my next question, which is: let's talk about the artifacts and really this theme of record keeping and the transmission of textile knowledge. That's another really interesting theme in your book. I'd love to probe on that a bit.
--:-- So traditionally, textile knowledge is transferred through apprenticeship — either formal, like there were these apprenticeships in Europe that were highly regulated, or informal within families or villages. But you have a shift in the early modern period in Europe. There's more documentation in China earlier, but you have a shift in the early modern period where there's this idea in the air that it's a good thing to share knowledge as opposed to keeping it secret.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Yeah, it's in the zeitgeist. It's in the zeitgeist, and it's very important in the history of technology and science. The touchstone example is Diderot's encyclopedia, which in fact includes a lot of documentation of how various looms work and is the source of some of the illustrations in my book.
--:-- But in my research, I found a couple of less well-known examples. One is the first dye manual, which is called the *Plictho*. It seems to come from some word for envelope. Essentially, we had an Italian guy who went around over a long period of time prying various recipes out of dyers, and he published the first dye manual. It's sort of like a recipe book — it tells you use this much of this and this much of that.
--:-- The other one, which is very interesting because it reminds us how important notation is, is the first weaving manual. Nowadays, if you go online, Ravelry has these weaving drafts, which is a form of notation that tells weavers how to set up a loom, which threads to raise in what order to create a pattern. Somebody had to invent that notation. Probably it was invented for personal use and it was secret. But there was a guy who was very frustrated that they would have to import textiles to get the good patterns. He was like, "No, we can do just as well. The problem is people are too secretive about the knowledge and they aren't teaching other people." So he put together a manual that was the first weaving manual. There is a site called handweaving.net where they've turned a lot of these instructions into instructions for today.
--:-- This is a theme throughout the book — there is a tension because making textiles requires a lot of tacit knowledge, the kind of knowledge that's very difficult to write down and articulate. You talk about the maestre reeling cocoons. It would be very hard to convey that to another person. But there are other types of knowledge that can be codified. When there is this move toward codification, that really helps jumpstart a lot of technological progress because you're able to have people from outside fields understand what's going on in other fields and maybe apply that in other ways. Or you just get people better able to understand the state of the art in technology and perhaps innovate on top of that.
--:-- The notation that develops for organic chemistry is really important. I don't use it in the book, but I do talk about the development of organic chemistry out of the dye industry. It's funny because all my friends in college were taking O-Chem. I remember just kind of enjoying the notational aspects of it.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: So basically the notation, the manual encoding, helped make the notation more standardized and common as well. And then there was a zeitgeist move of making the knowledge and artistry and weaving more public. You quote Ziegler, who did that original handbook, that quote: "I hold that it would be possible to produce many more artists in all branches of technology if only there were no shortage of publishers." Which I loved because what it told me is that that manual was basically the printing press moment of the textiles industry.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Exactly.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: And this resonates so much with today in terms of all the riches we have available online, which includes not only printed stuff but videos, which are incredibly important for people learning how to do things. But it also goes to the tensions that we have around copyright. The history of textiles is full of industrial espionage. I have a few examples in the book, but people are constantly trying to keep stuff secret and other people are trying to get it because it's very valuable.
--:-- I'm glad that you shared that in the book. And I don't know if you know this, but I actually interviewed Joel Mokyr on this podcast a number of years ago. The podcast is called "Knowledge Builds Technology and Technology Builds Knowledge." It was about the Republic of Letters and its role in what he calls the Industrial Enlightenment.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Oh, and I use that term a lot. Joel's work is really great. I'm very influenced in my understanding of this zeitgeist moment by his work, because you have this moment where you have craftsmen intersecting with codification, intersecting with scientists. Each feeds the other in ways that were not previously happening. That really allows a certain kind of scientific and technological takeoff — particularly technological takeoff — because it gives people where to look for new advances and also just shares things across borders, shares things across class. You get to tap a lot more knowledge.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: One of the things that fascinated me in the history of the knowledge transmission of patterns and record keeping is the idea of storing things in song and in the cloth.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Oh, yeah.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: You talk about that in the book. I thought that was so beautiful, yet so ephemeral. One thing I wonder: when you talked about how it's really important that we now have videos for so many things, do you worry about the artifacts of the future and how future historians might come back into our time and look at some of this? I was intrigued by this idea simply because you opened the book talking about how over half of the tablets that were uncovered on Crete when they were doing excavation of the ancient Minotaur Labyrinth area were textile tablets. Will future generations have those concrete artifacts? I'm very seduced by that idea of best immortality and permanence.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Well, I am a great supporter of the Internet Archive. I think it's an incredibly important organization. It's incredibly important.
--:-- So do we lose this kind of traditional knowledge? One thing that's interesting is that since about the 1970s, there's been a tremendous appreciation and recording of people's traditional knowledge about traditional crafts. What interests me the most about that is not just that it happened — there are some really interesting stories about how it happened in different places, particularly Peru — but also that when you have a living textile tradition, it's very different from what people in developed countries sort of think it ought to be. It's not static. It's not producing the same thing that the ancestors produced. It's subject to all the kinds of changes that affect all of us. You have people adopting and adapting their traditional techniques for the world they actually live in, which is the 21st century world.
--:-- I tell some stories from Guatemala. I've also written about some stories from Chiapas in Mexico. That was not the book. It's in our article. It's online. All these things are on my website also.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Great. I'll link to some in the show notes as well.
--:-- One last question on this thread. I did think it was interesting that you talked about how programmers first wrote code using punch cards and this idea of how NASA produced rope memory.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: There are two intersections between early computer memories and weaving. The first, which was the dominant form of computer memory before the development of silicon chips, was core memory. Essentially what you had was weaving. You had threads — copper wires going horizontally, intersecting with ones going vertically, just like cloth. At each intersection, you would have a ferrite donut. They were tiny, tiny, tiny. By sending a certain electrical signal down the right thread, so to speak, you could flip the core from positive to negative, and it would be a one or a zero. That's how essentially RAM was done. That was before silicon. That was from the '50s to the '70s. That was how computer memory for most purposes was done.
--:-- In the Apollo program, they needed to do essentially ROM — read-only memory — in a very stable and very compact and lightweight form. What they did was called rope memory. Instead of having the intersection of the warp and weft with a core that could flip, they would write the program on punch cards, debug it, get it all working, and then they would code it into wires that either went over or under, depending on if it was a one or a zero. It was literally software you could hold in your hand. It was this physical embodiment. I guess the punch cards are a physical embodiment too, but this was much more compact. That was used in the Apollo program.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: What is rope memory but the code that runs the space program? It's a perfect thread to end the section of how to store knowledge, transmit knowledge.
--:-- I also love throughout your book there are actually a few semiconductor analogies scattered about. I finished Andy Grove's *High Output Management* book recently for the first time. People have been telling me about it for years and I finally read it this year. I was so struck by how much semiconductor manufacturing actually applies to creative work too. It's just so fascinating when you see all the analogies from semiconductors to textiles as well, and in some of these creative crafts as well. I just think that's fantastic.
--:-- We don't have time to go into the dye chapter. You already pointed out how the dye industry was one of the earliest applications of some of the organic chemistry notation. But the one interesting fact that I wanted to quickly flick on in this chapter, which was really counterintuitive and quite surprising to me — especially because Andrew McAfee and I did a podcast on his book *More from Less* — is that people have this assumption that the past was more environmentally conscious than now. And in fact, that's not true.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Yeah. One thing that people don't realize, particularly when they talk about natural dyes, is they're very messy, very smelly. Indigo particularly — which is a wonderful, wonderful dye — but it stinks. And it's not even the stinkiest dye that I talk about in the book. So there's that.
--:-- The other thing is dyeing uses a lot of water. I was really struck by this when I took dyeing classes in India, in Adipur, which is in Kutch, which is a desert area. It's in Gujarat.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: It is my home region.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: So it's not like water is plentiful. But I came from California, Southern California, and we were in a drought. I was hyper-conscious of the use of water. They're just using tons of water, throwing the water in the yard, throwing the water in the yard. This was not particularly polluting, but it really struck me — the combination of the history of dyes as this kind of thing that you wanted outside town. People didn't want to be next to dyers, with this use of water even today.
--:-- I think when we think that in the olden times everything was environmentally benign, that's partly a matter of scale. When you have large scale production, you're going to use more of everything. But it's really the very modern plants — and I talk about a dye house I visited in LA — that are using really precise measurements and looking for innovative ways to save on water, save on energy, save on time, save on labor. All the economic factors as well as the environmental factors — that's where you really get the innovation that becomes environmentally more benign. It's not by going back to the past. It's this yearning for a past that never was.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Yeah, exactly. The technology is the way forward.
--:-- If we do want to do a lot of these great things, to know some kind of meta-themed questions around innovation — you actually have a chapter at the end called "Innovation," which made me chuckle because actually your entire book is on innovation. A whole book is about innovation.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Actually, my editor — a great editor — her idea when we were talking about this last chapter, she said, "Why don't you call it 'Innovators,' which is parallel to 'Traders' and 'Consumers.'" There are innovators in every chapter. This is not orthogonal — both the warp and the weft.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: So let's kind of come full circle. You'd say that "to weave is to devise, to invent, to contrive function and beauty from the simplest of elements." I thought that was profound because I think that is exactly what innovation is. It's transforming something into something else, or taking building blocks like Legos or words or code and turning them into something else.
--:-- Chris Dixon in his post described how code is the encoding of human thought. In your book, you actually have a line in the chapter on fiber where you talk about Hardy's work and how when you twist things into forming ropes and knots, it demonstrates "an infinite use of infinite means" and requires a cognitive complexity similar to that required by human language.
--:-- I want to ask you about more of the "how" versus the "what." You say that this is a story of innovation — things that are both famous and forgotten, incremental improvements and sudden leaps, repeated inventions and once-forever discoveries. I'm going to have you do very lightning round style.
--:-- Give me an example in the meta story of innovation of something famous — even still famous today.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: The invention of nylon by Wallace Carothers. Nylon is the first polymer fiber. Carothers is the person who figured out what polymers — which also come in protein forms — really were: these giant molecules. He demonstrated it. Nylon is the first synthetic fiber and the first polymer. I tell the story. The inventor is less famous, but nylon is famous.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Give me an example of a forgotten one. I guess your whole book had a lot of these.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: The person that I would really love to know who invented it is somewhere in China. There was probably a woman involved in silk production who figured out what we now know as the belt drive. The particular application was what is called in spinning a spindle wheel, as opposed to a spinning wheel. She figured out how to take a big wheel and put a thread or a belt onto a little wheel. You could turn the little wheel many times by turning the big wheel. Basically, what this person figured out was you could turn that not-load-bearing wheel on its side and attach it to another wheel, and then you could have it turn faster. This is incredibly important in the history of textiles and incredibly important in the history of machines. We have no idea who did it, although we have a reasonable idea of what kind of person it was and where it was.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Okay, so that's famous and forgotten. Now let's do incremental and big leaps. Give me an example of an incremental improvement that was important in advancing the fabric of civilization.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: All the incremental improvements in the quality of cotton. Not only breeding cotton that could grow above the frost line, but making it more disease resistant, making it longer fibers, more per boll — all those kinds of incremental improvements.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Now give me an example of the opposite of incremental improvement — a sudden leap.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: The invention of aniline dyes — synthetic dyes — which set off essentially organic chemistry.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Say a teeny bit more on that one.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: There was a 19-year-old student named William Perkin who was fooling around. He was trying to synthesize something that would be like quinine, the malaria drug. He didn't get what he wanted, but he noticed that this precipitate in his beaker was kind of purpley. He tried dyeing silk with it and it worked really great. Then he said, "Hey, this is a business." Like many, many entrepreneurs before and since, if he'd known what was going to be involved in taking his bright idea and turning it into something that could actually be a company, he might never have done it. But he did. They had to invent all kinds of machinery and ways of producing large chemical sources, stuff like that. There's actually a whole book about that called *Mauve*, but I tell the essentials of the story.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: That's a story that I remember learning from Xerox PARC — when you have material science type innovations, the component is one tiny piece of the puzzle. It's actually the broader ecosystem that you build around it that's the true innovation. I was on the front lines of watching a lot of the architecture and orchestration and attempts at that.
--:-- This is also why a lot of textile innovation falls under material science today. People publish about some cool new textile idea, and it never sees the light of day because it's not viable either as a business or in some cases just as an actual textile. I tell some stories about the '20s and '30s, things that people were fooling around with because rayon was around. They had this idea that you could take natural materials — because rayon is made basically from wood — and transform them into fibers. They were trying everything: eggs, milk. I talk about the milk fibers, which were very big in Italy, very backed by Mussolini's government and stuff. They didn't maintain themselves after the war.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Well, that goes to the next lightning round one, which is repeated inventions. Today there is a resurgence in wood-based and bamboo-based fibers as alternatives to cotton, for instance. So what would you put on your list of repeated inventions — something that was invented over and over again throughout the history of textiles?
--:-- Virginia Postrel: The simplest one is the drop spindle, which is essentially a weight with a hole in it with a stick. The weight maintains the angular momentum and lets you draw out fiber and spin it. It was invented in slightly different forms all around the world.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: And what is an example of a not a once-in-a-lifetime, but once-and-forever kind of discovery? Does it have to be invented by human ingenuity? It can be discovered by human ingenuity.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: I mean, certainly we talked about the idea that cotton only happened once, but that's not really human ingenuity.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: That's why I was giving you an out, actually, because they did discover.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: I actually used my only once, which was the spindle wheel. You would think with all this spinning all around the world, people all around the world would have figured out ways to do it faster. But it actually only happened once. It happened in China and then it spread from there.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: It's interesting that you speculate that it was likely a woman. The thing that actually struck me personally is this idea of the role of women and taking back the power of women as some of the original coders or original scientists. A lot of critics today tend to emphasize that there's this implied domesticity and subordination in the era's images of spinning women. You talk about how that may not necessarily be the case.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Right. In the chapter on spinning, I start with a paired set of portraits that are in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It's a husband and wife. The woman is spinning and the man is a businessman. He's got his account books, he's got some money — symbols of their trade. These are actual real people. We have a pretty good idea who they were. They're not types. But these could also be the iconographic symbols of industry and commerce.
--:-- Before smokestacks became the images of industry in the 19th century, the symbol that people used to symbolize industry was a woman spinning, because this was the epitome of productive labor — making something as opposed to commerce, which is trading something. You would have these very common images. That's because it was an incredibly important activity. Cloth consumes enormous amounts of thread and there was never enough thread. That is why, in fact, it made such a big difference when you have the Industrial Revolution. Why does this start with thread? Because thread is incredibly in short supply always. It's this input into all these different kinds of uses of cloth — everything from sacks to sails for the British Navy. All of these kinds of things, really important.
--:-- Women's work — it was domestic, but then a lot of men's work was domestic too. It's not a symbol of subordination. In these portraits, it's a symbol of equality. If you look at the construction of the portrait in a deep art analytical sense, their hands are in exactly the same positions. It's commerce and industry as equally important.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: By the hands, you mean that there was a certain curl you described.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Yeah, exactly. It wasn't just someone posing. It was a precision of an actual weaver who knew the art. She is actually positioned like she knows the art. His hands are more artificially posed with the coin and with the book, but they mirror the positions of her hands.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: So then the last tension is that you open the book talking about how this is so ubiquitous across cultures. When you describe the words that we use, you talk about French words like *métier*. You talk about non-European words — in the Mayan language, the terms for weaving designs and hieroglyphics both use the same root. In Sanskrit, the word *sutra*, which now refers to religious scripture, originally denotes a string or a thread. You talk about the word *tantra*, which is tied to *tan* — warp or loom. The Chinese word *juzi*, meaning organization or range, is also the word for weave. And *chenji*, meaning achievement or result, originally meant twisting fibers together. So you really outline how this is so ubiquitous throughout multiple cultures.
--:-- Now I'm going to just have you tell me one last story, which is the story of Kente cloth. I think what's really fascinating to me about the Kente cloth chapter is my mom is born and raised in Uganda, which is not originally from — right?
--:-- Sonal Choksi: My whole entire family is from Uganda.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Oh, right.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: And so I grew up — they come to the U.S. So it was the idea — I mean, yeah, yeah. I remember when that happened. It was before I was born. My grandparents, her parents got relocated to the U.K. and my aunt went to Sweden, but I grew up surrounded by African fabrics. And then we have this political moment where people are using kente cloth as a symbol. The thing that I want to focus on, and especially by the way, because it also to me tied together your other books and that includes both *Glamour* and particularly *The Substance of Style*, which you're talking about. Yeah, I was very resonant on that one. Very resonant on that one because you talk about how fashion is totemic.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: So West African weavers have for a long, long time made cloths that are called strip cloths, which is that they weave four to six inch wide strips, which are then sewn together into a complete cloth that's then wrapped around the body in various ways. And this is ancient. And in fact, I talk in the book about how strip cloths were even used as currency. Cloth is coin.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: That was so cool.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Kente cloth is actually fairly recent, dates back to the 18th century, probably 19th century. We don't know exactly when it originated. And in Ghana, there's a great contestation between two ethnic groups, the Asante and the Ewe, about who invented it, because it's the national cloth and source of great pride.
--:-- I talk about research that's been done that suggests that its distinctive weave pattern was probably developed by the Ewe, but quickly adopted by the Asante, who then put on their preference for bright colors, which is very much what we associate with kente cloth.
--:-- And what makes kente cloth distinct is not the patterns, although they are distinct and interesting. It's the way it's woven. It is woven in alternating squares of warp-faced and weft-faced weaving. So it's something you could not produce a total kente cloth on an industrial loom. It has to be woven in these strips and the strips have to be put together. There's a special loom that was invented to make this kind of pattern. Kente cloth is very interesting technologically or artistically because it requires a great deal of forethought and planning.
--:-- Now, what makes it particularly interesting and, of course, resonant in the US is how it went from being a kind of cloth for particularly Asante aristocrats to then when Ghana became independent and you had the sort of Pan-African idea, it became a symbol of Africa in general, the African diaspora. Muhammad Ali went to Ghana and he wore kente cloth. It was a big deal. The president of Ghana was photographed in *Life* magazine shaking hands with Dwight Eisenhower on a state visit to the U.S. and he was wearing kente cloth.
--:-- And in moving from Africa to the United States, its meaning and even its physical characteristics changed. First of all, the Asante elite were not related to the ancestors of African Americans. Their ancestors were the ones who sold into slavery. But textiles mean what people want them to mean, how people use them, and their meanings evolved.
--:-- So what you had was, first of all, this transformation in the 1960s of kente cloth from being a symbol of a tribal elite and a national elite to being a symbol of African pride and the African diaspora. And then you started to have people who are famous, like W.E.B. Du Bois, they would put a little kente cloth in their stoles that they wore with their academic robes. And then at Westchester University of Pennsylvania, students adopted it as Black students to symbolize their pride in their academic achievements and their racial identity. And they started wearing not a whole piece of kente cloth, but essentially something that amounted to one of the strips that it was made from. And this spread to becoming a widespread custom, particularly at graduations.
--:-- And this is what a living textile tradition does, because people want many different things out of textiles. And one of them is an expression of their identity and also who they want to be, who they aspire to be. And then you have kente cloth also go from being always a woven pattern into being frequently a printed pattern for all kinds of things where it takes on this new meaning and new purpose.
--:-- So kente cloth has had many different incarnations and it has different incarnations in Ghana. I mean, the top weavers of it make new patterns all the time. There's a Ghanaian fabric maker that created a fabric featuring the Ghanaian president because he made lots of frequent televised speech appearances during the pandemic. Printed spectacles floating against the swirling red, white and green background, which I thought was fabulous. And it even had symbols like padlocks for signifying lockdowns and plane propellers for the borders that are closed. It just goes to show how culture evolves so quickly in so many ways and people find meaning.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: I've also been fascinated going up — going to India — that the history of powder is like ikat. Like it's part — it's great.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: I love ikat. I do too.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: And it's widely used in Turkey. But then some of the techniques are rooted in shibori in Japan. But shibori, it's something that they have their own kind in Guatemala.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Oh, I love that.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: But the other thing that I think is really beautiful about this is it's not only a story of things being reinvented or invented multiple times all across the world in different ways, but it's also a story of borrowing and re-borrowing and building on because, you know, shibori started in India and went back to China, Japan and went back to China. It was just like all over the place. I just got that messed up, but the technique just kind of comes back. And last time I went to India, it was totally in vogue to buy like salvar that had like modern shibori and cool new colors, like neon, which I think is so cool. Like this is the story of culture and technology.
--:-- But you also talk about how this is actually not about culture, but about civilization and how there's actually a difference between the two?
--:-- Virginia Postrel: You can have multiple cultures within a civilization and you can have a continuous civilization where the cultures change. And I'm not using it in a civilization-good, barbarism-bad kind of way. I'm using it to describe essentially a survival technology that humans have as a way of transmitting ways of protecting themselves against hostile world and hostile people. And then the second idea of it is that it's cumulative. It builds and that cumulative nature can be broken or it can continue.
--:-- The example I use is think about Western Europe in 1980 and think about Western Europe, or as it was known at the time, Christendom in 1480. That is a continuous civilization, but it culturally couldn't have changed more. The politics were different. The people's understanding of the natural world was different. How they dressed was different. How they spoke was different. Every aspect that constitutes culture had significantly changed, but this cumulative civilization had continued.
--:-- And what I've argued in a new article out in *Reason*, where I develop the idea about civilization in the current context, is that sometime in the recent past, we, for the first time ever, developed a world civilization. We had a coming together of East and West into a single civilization that hadn't been the case ever in human history before. So when I talk about the fabric of civilization, I'm talking about the continuous building up of knowledge and techniques and technology that helps knit together, to use a textile metaphor, different civilizations.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: This is a great note to end on because while you talk about how this book is about the fabric of civilization, which is cumulative, it has layers, it's about survival, what protects us. What you end the book on in your afterword is this beautiful quote, which is that this heritage does not belong to a single nation, race, or culture, or to a single time or place. The story of textiles is not a male story or a female story, not a European, African, Asian, or American story. It is all of these cumulative and shared, a human story, a tapestry woven from countless brilliant threads. And that is the essence of this book, *The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World* by Virginia Postrel. Thank you for joining this episode of the a16z podcast.
--:-- Virginia Postrel: Thank you.
--:-- Sonal Choksi: Thank you.
