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DEREK THOMPSON

Called “one of the brightest new voices in American journalism” and named to

both Inc. and Forbes magazines’ “Thirty under Thirty” lists of promising talent,

Derek Thompson has quickly established a distinguished career as a writer and

speaker. Born in 1986 and raised in Washington, DC, he earned a bachelor’s

degree with a triple major in journalism, political science, and legal studies from

Northwestern University in 2008 and immediately landed a position at The

Atlantic, where he is now a staff writer. Thompson’s insightful explorations of

economics, technology, and the media have also appeared in Slate, Business

Week, Business Insider, and the Daily Beast. He is a weekly guest on National

Public Radio’s Here and Now and makes frequent appearances on television news

discussion panels. Thompson’s first book, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity

in an Age of Distraction (2017), was, fittingly, an instant bestseller. He lives in

New York City.

What Makes Things Cool

Thompson is highly regarded for his skill at constructing sophisticated and

uncannily astute analyses of millennial culture, connecting dots that others might

not even see. In this essay, adapted for The Atlantic from a chapter in Hit Makers,

he starts with a theory from industrial design to examine the factors that contribute

to perceptions of coolness, or popular appeal — and then applies that theory across

multiple disciplines to determine why “people like what they like.”

Several decades before he became the father of industrial design, Raymond

Loewy boarded the SS France in 1919 to sail across the Atlantic from his

devastated continent to the United States. The influenza pandemic had taken his

mother and father, and his service in the French army was over. At the age of 25,

Loewy was looking to start fresh in New York, perhaps, he thought, as an electrical

engineer. When he reached Manhattan, his older brother Maximilian picked him up

in a taxi. They drove straight to 120 Broadway, one of New York City’s largest

neoclassical skyscrapers, with two connected towers that ascended from a shared

base like a giant tuning fork. Loewy rode the elevator to the observatory platform,

forty stories up, and looked out across the island.

“New York was throbbing at our feet in the crisp autumn light,” Loewy

recalled in his 1951 memoir. “I was fascinated by the murmur of the great

city.” But upon closer examination, he was crestfallen. In France, he had imagined

an elegant, stylish place, filled with slender and simple shapes. The city that now

unfurled beneath him, however, was a grungy product of the machine age —

“bulky, noisy, and complicated. It was a disappointment.”

The world below would soon match his dreamy vision. Loewy would do

more than almost any person in the twentieth century to shape the aesthetic of

American culture. His firm designed mid-century icons like the Exxon logo, the

Lucky Strike pack, and the Greyhound bus. He designed International Harvester

tractors that farmed the Great Plains, merchandise racks at Lucky Stores

supermarkets that displayed produce, Frigidaire ovens that cooked meals, and

Singer vacuum cleaners that ingested the crumbs of dinner. Loewy’s Starliner

Coupé from the early 1950s — nicknamed the “Loewy Coupé” — is still one of

the most influential automotive designs of the twentieth century. The famous blue

nose of Air Force One? That was Loewy’s touch, too. After complaining to his

friend, a White House aide, that the commander in chief’s airplane looked

“gaudy,” he spent several hours on the floor of the Oval Office cutting up blue-

colored paper shapes with President Kennedy before settling on the design that still

adorns America’s best-known plane. “Loewy,” wrote Cosmopolitan magazine in

1950, “has probably affected the daily life of more Americans than any man of his

time.”

But when he arrived in Manhattan, US companies did not yet worship at the

altars of style and elegance. That era’s capitalists were monotheistic: Efficiency

was their only god. American factories — with their electricity, assembly lines,

and scientifically calibrated workflow — produced an unprecedented supply of

cheap goods by the 1920s, and it became clear that factories could make more than

consumers naturally wanted. It took executives like Alfred Sloan, the CEO of

General Motors, to see that by, say, changing a car’s style and color every year,

consumers might be trained to crave new versions of the same product. To sell

more stuff, American industrialists needed to work hand in hand with artists to

make new products beautiful — even “cool.”

Loewy had an uncanny sense of how to make things fashionable. He

believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a

curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result,

they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible. Loewy called

his grand theory “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable” — MAYA. He said to sell

something surprising, make it familiar; and to sell something familiar, make it

surprising.

Why do people like what they like? It is one of the oldest questions of philosophy

and aesthetics. Ancient thinkers inclined to mysticism proposed that a “golden

ratio” — about 1.62 to 1, as in, for instance, the dimensions of a rectangle — could

explain the visual perfection of objects like sunflowers and Greek temples. Other

thinkers were deeply skeptical: David Hume, the eighteenth-century philosopher,

considered the search for formulas to be absurd, because the perception of beauty

was purely subjective, residing in individuals, not in the fabric of the universe. “To

seek the real beauty, or real deformity,” he said, “is as fruitless an enquiry, as to

pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter.”

Over time, science took up the mystery. In the 1960s, the psychologist Robert

Zajonc conducted a series of experiments where he showed subjects nonsense

words, random shapes, and Chinese-like characters and asked them which they

preferred. In study after study, people reliably gravitated toward the words and

shapes they’d seen the most. Their preference was for familiarity.

This discovery was known as the “mere-exposure effect,” and it is one of the

sturdiest findings in modern psychology. Across hundreds of studies and meta-

studies, subjects around the world prefer familiar shapes, landscapes, consumer

goods, songs, and human voices. People are even partial to the familiar version of

the thing they should know best in the world: their own face. Because you and I are

used to seeing our countenance in a mirror, studies show, we often prefer this

reflection over the face we see in photographs. The preference for familiarity is so

universal that some think it must be written into our genetic code. The evolutionary

explanation for the mere-exposure effect would be simple: If you recognized an

animal or plant, that meant it hadn’t killed you, at least not yet.

But the preference for familiarity has clear limits. People get tired of even their

favorite songs and movies. They develop deep skepticism about overfamiliar

buzzwords. In mere-exposure studies, the preference for familiar stimuli is

attenuated or negated entirely when the participants realize they’re being

repeatedly exposed to the same thing. For that reason, the power of familiarity

seems to be strongest when a person isn’t expecting it.

The reverse is also true: A surprise seems to work best when it contains some

element of familiarity. Consider the experience of Matt Ogle, who, for more than a

decade, was obsessed with designing the perfect music-recommendation engine.

His philosophy of music was that most people enjoy new songs, but they don’t

enjoy the effort it takes to find them. When he joined Spotify, the music-streaming

company, he helped build a product called Discover Weekly, a personalized list of

thirty songs delivered every Monday to tens of million of users.

The original version of Discover Weekly was supposed to include only songs that

users had never listened to before. But in its first internal test at Spotify, a bug in

the algorithm let through songs that users had already heard. “Everyone reported it

as a bug, and we fixed it so that every single song was totally new,” Ogle told me.

But after Ogle’s team fixed the bug, engagement with the playlist actually fell. “It

turns out having a bit of familiarity bred trust, especially for first-time users,” he

said. “If we make a new playlist for you and there’s not a single thing for you to

hook onto or recognize — to go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a good call!’ — it’s completely

intimidating and people don’t engage.” It turned out that the original bug was an

essential feature: Discover Weekly was a more appealing product when it had even

one familiar band or song.

Several years ago, Paul Hekkert, a professor of industrial design and psychology at

Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands, received a grant to develop a

theory of aesthetics and taste. On the one hand, Hekkert told me, humans seek

familiarity, because it makes them feel safe. On the other hand, people are charged

by the thrill of a challenge, powered by a pioneer lust. This battle between

familiarity and discovery affects us “on every level,” Hekkert says — not just our

preferences for pictures and songs, but also our preferences for ideas and even

people. “When we started [our research], we didn’t even know about Raymond

Loewy’s theory,” Hekkert told me. “It was only later that somebody told us that

our conclusions had already been reached by a famous industrial designer, and it

was called MAYA.”

Raymond Loewy’s aesthetic was proudly populist. “One should design for the

advantage of the largest mass of people,” he said. He understood that this meant

designing with a sense of familiarity in mind.

In 1932, Loewy met for the first time with the president of the Pennsylvania

Railroad. Locomotive design at the time hadn’t advanced much beyond Thomas

the Tank Engine1 — pronounced chimneys, round faces, and exposed wheels.

Loewy imagined something far sleeker — a single smooth shell, the shape of a

bullet. His first designs met with considerable skepticism, but Loewy was

undaunted. “I knew it would never be considered,” he later wrote of his bold

proposal, “but repeated exposure of railroad people to this kind of advanced,

unexpected stuff had a beneficial effect. It gradually conditioned them to accept

more progressive designs.”

To acquaint himself with the deficiencies of Pennsylvania Railroad trains, Loewy

traveled hundreds of miles on the speeding locomotives. He tested air turbulence

with engineers and interviewed crew members about the shortage of toilets. A

great industrial designer, it turns out, needs to be an anthropologist first and an

artist second: Loewy studied how people lived and how machines worked, and

then he offered new, beautiful designs that piggybacked on engineers’ tastes and

consumers’ habits.

Soon after his first meeting with the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Loewy

helped the company design the GG-1, an electric locomotive covered in a single

welded-steel plate. Loewy’s suggestion to cover the chassis in a seamless metallic

coat was revolutionary in the 1930s. But he eventually persuaded executives to

accept his lean and aerodynamic vision, which soon became the standard design of

modern trains. What was once radical had become MAYA, and what was once

MAYA has today become the unremarkable standard.

Could Loewy’s MAYA theory double as cultural criticism? A common

complaint about modern pop culture is that it has devolved into an orgy of

familiarity. In her 2013 memoir cum cultural critique, Sleepless in Hollywood, the

producer Lynda Obst mourned what she saw as cult worship of “pre-awareness” in

the film and television industry. As the number of movies and television shows

being produced each year has grown, risk-averse producers have relied heavily on

films with characters and plots that audiences already know. Indeed, in fifteen of

the past sixteen years, the highest-grossing movie in America has been a sequel of

a previously successful movie (for example, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) or an

adaptation of a previously successful book (The Grinch). The hit-making formula

in Hollywood today seems to be built on infinitely recurring, self-sustaining loops

of familiarity, like the Marvel comic universe, which thrives by interweaving

movie franchises and TV spin-offs.

But perhaps the most MAYA-esque entertainment strategy can be found on award-

winning cable television. In the past decade, the cable network FX has arguably

produced the deepest lineup of prestige dramas and critically acclaimed comedies

on television, including American Horror Story, The Americans, Sons of Anarchy,

and Archer. The ideal FX show is a character-driven journey in which old stories

wear new costumes, says Nicole Clemens, the executive vice president for series

development at the network. In Sons of Anarchy, the popular drama about an

outlaw motorcycle club, “you think it’s this super-über-macho motorcycle show,

but it’s also a soap with handsome guys, and the plot is basically Hamlet,”2 she

told me. In The Americans, a series about Soviet agents posing as a married couple

in the United States, “the spy genre has been subverted to tell a classic story about

marriage.” These are not Marvel’s infinity loops of sequels, which forge new

installments of old stories. They are more like narrative Trojan horses,3 in which

new characters are vessels containing classic themes — surprise serving as a

doorway to the feeling of familiarity, an aesthetic aha.

The power of these eureka moments isn’t bound to arts and culture. It’s a

force in the academic world as well. Scientists and philosophers are exquisitely

sensitive to the advantage of ideas that already enjoy broad familiarity. Max

Planck, the theoretical physicist who helped lay the groundwork for quantum

theory, said that “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its

opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents

eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

In 2014, a team of researchers from Harvard University and Northeastern

University wanted to know exactly what sorts of proposals were most likely to win

funding from prestigious institutions such as the National Institutes of Health —

safely familiar proposals, or extremely novel ones? They prepared about 150

research proposals and gave each one a novelty score. Then they recruited 142

world-class scientists to evaluate the projects.

The most-novel proposals got the worst ratings. Exceedingly familiar

proposals fared a bit better, but they still received low scores. “Everyone dislikes

novelty,” Karim Lakhani, a co-author, explained to me, and “experts tend to be

overcritical of proposals in their own domain.” The highest evaluation scores went

to submissions that were deemed slightly new. There is an “optimal newness” for

ideas, Lakhani said — advanced yet acceptable.

This appetite for “optimal newness” applies to other industries, too. In

Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists also sift through a surfeit of proposals,

many new ideas are promoted as a fresh spin on familiar successes. The home-

rental company Airbnb was once called “eBay for homes.” The on-demand car-

service companies Uber and Lyft were once considered “Airbnb for cars.” When

Uber took off, new start-ups began branding themselves “Uber for [anything].”

But the preference for “optimal newness” doesn’t apply just to academics

and venture capitalists. According to Stanley Lieberson, a sociologist at Harvard,

it’s a powerful force in the evolution of our own identities. Take the popularity of

baby names. Most parents prefer first names for their children that are common but

not too common, optimally differentiated from other children’s names.

This helps explain how names fall in and out of fashion, even though, unlike

almost every other cultural product, they are not driven by price or advertising.

Samantha was the 26th-most-popular name in the 1980s. This level of popularity

was pleasing to so many parents that 224,000 baby girls were named Samantha in

the 1990s, making it the decade’s fifth-most-popular name for girls. But at this

level of popularity, the name appealed mostly to the minority of adults who

actively sought out common names. And so the number of babies named Samantha

has collapsed, falling by eighty percent since the 1990s.

Most interesting of all is Lieberson’s analysis of the evolution of popular names for

black baby girls starting with the prefix La. Beginning in 1967, eight

distinct La names cracked the national top fifty, in this sequence: Latonya,

Latanya, Latasha, Latoya, Latrice, Lakeisha, Lakisha, and Latisha. The orderliness

of this evolution is astonishing. The step between Latonya and Latanya is one

different vowel; from Latonya to Latoya is the loss of the n; from Lakeisha to

Lakisha is the loss of the e; and from Lakisha to Latisha is one consonant change.

It’s a perfect illustration of the principle that people gravitate to new things with

familiar roots. This is how culture evolves — in small steps that from afar might

seem like giant leaps.

In a popular online video called “4 Chords,” which has more than thirty

million views, the musical-comedy group the Axis of Awesome cycles through

dozens of songs built on the same chord progression: I–V–vi–IV. It provides the

backbone of dozens of classics, including oldies (the Beatles’ “Let It Be”),

karaoke-pop songs (Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”), country sing-

along anthems (John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”), animated-

musical ballads (The Lion King’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”), and reggae

tunes (Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry”).

Several music critics have used videos like “4 Chords” to argue that pop

music is derivative. But I think Raymond Loewy would disagree with this critique,

for two reasons. First, it’s simply wrong to say that all I–V–vi–IV songs sound the

same. “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” and “No Woman, No Cry” don’t sound anything

alike. Second, if the purpose of music is to move people, and people are moved by

that which is sneakily familiar, then musicians — like architects, product

designers, scholars, and any other creative people who think their ideas deserve an

audience — should aspire to a blend of originality and derivation. These

songwriters aren’t retracing one another’s steps. They’re more like clever

cartographers given an enormous map, each plotting new routes to the same

location.

One of Loewy’s final assignments as an industrial designer was to add an

element of familiarity to a truly novel invention: NASA’s first space station.

Loewy and his firm conducted extensive habitability studies and found subtle ways

to make the outer-space living quarters feel more like terrestrial houses — so

astronauts “could live more comfortably in more familiar surroundings while in

deep space in exotic conditions,” he said. But his most profound contribution to the

space station was his insistence that NASA install a viewing portal of Earth.

Today, tens of millions of people have seen this small detail in films about

astronauts. It is hard to imagine a more perfect manifestation of MAYA: a window

to a new world can also show you home.

Questions on Meaning

1. What would you say is Thompson’s SUBJECT in this essay? Is the subject sufficiently

narrowed, in your estimation? Why, or why not?

2. Who is Raymond Loewy, and why does Thompson call him “the father of industrial

design” (par. 1)? What is industrial design?

3. What is “MAYA” (par. 5)? the “mere-exposure effect” (7)? “optimal newness” (22)?

What do these concepts have to do with each other?

4. How would you summarize Thompson’s THESIS? What makes things cool, and why?