Phil Knight used to repeat a mantra: "The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us."

Michael. LeBron. Serena. Virgil. Leo.

While much spectacle has been made about the Pope wearing Nikes — and the Americanness of Chicago's highest son finding tradition in modernity — we must yet again thank the midwest for saving America's greatest export. MJ and Leo in Chicago. Virgil in Rockford, IL. LeBron in Akron, OH. Serena in Saginaw, MI. All masters of their craft, pushing Beaverton into a new era.

The swoosh might've been designed in Oregon, but the heartland gave it a soul. Turns out, when Phil Knight said "us" he was talking about Chicago.

A smartphone camera has no moving parts. It takes a photo silently. Yet, almost every phone plays a pre-recorded click-clack of a mechanical shutter when you press the button.

These are mechanical ghosts. They are sounds designed to comfort us, replacing physical feedback that no longer exists in a digital world. We deleted the mechanism, but we kept the noise.

It's similar to the artificial delay I wrote about recently. We don't just want a system to work; we want proof that it worked. We crave the auditory confirmation of a physical action, even when the action itself has been abstracted into software. We are deeply uneasy with silent systems.

Electric vehicles are another example. They run almost silently, which is arguably a massive improvement over combustion engines. But because pedestrians (and drivers) rely on engine noise for situational awareness, EVs are now legally required to emit artificial sounds at low speeds. We are synthesizing the past to make the future safer — or at least, more familiar.

It makes me wonder what other useless echoes of the past we'll drag with us as our technology evolves. Will our personal AI assistants always need to have synthesized voices and "type" to us, just so we feel like we're interacting with something recognizable?

We are terrified of the void. If our technology doesn't make a noise, we'll invent one for it.

I trust an object more after I have seen its back.

The front is where manners live. The polished face, the considered proportion, the little performance of inevitability. A chair from the front says sit here. A radio says listen. A painting says behold. The back says: I am plywood, staples, vents, screws, cable strain, dust, a sticker from a factory shift, two felt pads doing more work than anyone will notice.

That is not a debunking. I do not want objects exposed so I can stop believing in them. I want the opposite. The wrong side is where belief gets sturdier.

Museums understand this and still mostly refuse it. They hang the painting as if it arrived without stretcher bars, nails, labels, repairs, auction marks, fingerprints, bad decisions. But the back of a painting is not backstage trivia. It is part of the work's biography. It tells you the object survived being an object.

Good design has a secret ethics on the wrong side. Did someone care where the seam landed? Can the screw be reached? Is the ugliness honest, or merely hidden? The answer changes how the front feels.

I like things that can turn around without losing authority.

Though in many ways I’ve always known, I’ve only this weekend indwelled that without breath, we are nothing. I don’t mean that in some grand cosmic way (such is given) but in a kōanic, simple observation. Sure there are the meditators and monks and wellness types who know this all too well, but what about the rest of us? Do we take breath for granted? Or do we reserve that attention for the moments that matter?

Yesterday I laid on the brick in my backyard next to my Great Dane, Louie, as he died from what I assume was a heart attack (he was 9 and had DCM and a number of other long-term ailments, though through the end he was happy and nosy and sassy and playful all the same). I can’t shake the sound and feel of his last breath. One final exhale. There may be a word that encapsulates it — if there is I don’t know it. But then I noticed myself time after time yesterday and today exhaling slowly as my mind went back. I thought of my collegiate decathlon days, exhaling as I heard “on your marks”, drowning out all that was around me. I thought of the slightly-more-forceful-than-average exhales on my rebreather, deeper underwater than the Statue of Liberty is tall. Maybe it’s a good thing we think of breath only when absolutely necessary. Scarcity eases preciousness, even if only in notice. And what’s more precious than breath?