The London Review of Substacks

The London Review of Substacks is a weekly feature in Flagship, Semafor’s daily global newsletter.

Ringing the bell

“To students of technological progress, Bell Labs is a giant.” So notes Brian Potter in Construction Physics, pointing to a dizzying array of technological breakthroughs from AT&T’s research arm, and an astonishing number of Nobel and Turing prizes awarded to its scientists. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, policymakers, writers, and executives often discuss the possibility of establishing a contemporary equivalent. “Unfortunately,” Potter warns, “the conditions that made Bell Labs so successful were highly historically contingent and not the sort of thing that could be deliberately recreated.”

It was, for one, part of a huge, government-sanctioned monopoly, giving it a long-term outlook and a sprawling list of credible research interests that few R&D departments can avail of today. The latter point — a wide array of experts in varying fields — became self-reinforcing, because those scientists could collaborate across disciplines. Plainly, it was also lucky. Yet, Potter argues, “the world that Bell Labs thrived in no longer exists.” It was, he continues, “not only… a product of unique historical circumstances, but unique technological circumstances.”

Out of the shadows

Among Indonesia’s most culturally significant performances is wayang kulit, a form of shadow puppetry in which figures are cut from raw buffalo hide and which can last for upwards of eight hours. That, in itself, is perhaps unremarkable: Plenty of countries have their own form of storytelling, each with their own idiosyncrasies. Yet Indonesia’s is unusual not only in that wayang kulit recounts the Mahabharata and Ramayana, two Hindu epics, in a majority Muslim nation — but that wayang kulit is repeatedly used by Muslim political parties and organizations to further their own goals and narratives.

As the journalist Pallavi Aiyar notes, wayang kulit is believed to have been used by Islamic scholars who first began spreading Islam on the island of Java, now part of modern-day Indonesia, as well as by Christian missionaries, along with the country’s independence hero Sukarno and the military dictator Suharto. Even now, huge crowds often attend: “To put this in perspective,” Aiyar writes, “one must imagine thousands of folk in England showing up to listen to an eight-hour long rendition of a Homeric epic in ancient Greek.” Wayang kulit is, she concludes, “the most tangible manifestation of Indonesia’s pluralism.”

Any way you slice it

Sliced bread has long existed, but its mechanization and increased scale in the 20th century increased its prevalence: Even in diverse cities like London today, “for every miche, roti, baozi, challah, injera, flatbread and focaccia, there are at least as many loaves of plain white,” Isaac Rangaswami writes in Vittles. As a result, sliced, white bread can seem plain, boring, mainstream. Yet that need not be so.

Rangaswami explores the multitude of ways London’s restaurants and bakeries manipulate white bread beyond simply making sandwiches: from fried slices at classic “greasy spoons” like E Pellicci to bread pakoras at Gujarati restaurants; kaya toast at Southeast Asian joints to prawn toast at Chinese takeaways; Welsh rarebit at upscale eateries to bread and butter pudding at the iconic Regency Cafe — a favorite of Flagship’s Prashant. All of them, Rangaswami writes, “are the very definition of making something out of nothing.”