Economics

Nobody Told the Scribes

In 1492 a German abbot named Johannes Trithemius wrote a passionate defense of the monastic scribes, the monks who copied books out by hand, one letter at a time, the way it had been done for a thousand years. He was alarmed by the printing press. He argued that the copying was holy work, that a hand-inked page held a devotion no machine could stamp into paper, that something sacred would die if we let the contraption take over. It’s a genuinely moving little book with quotes like, “He who gives up copying because of the invention of printing is no genuine friend of holy Scripture.” He titled it In Praise of Scribes .

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The Diamond Was Always a Story

My wife designs rings. She has the eye: proportion, the way a stone sits in light, when to use a flat rose cut vs. an elongated cushion or an old mine cut, and when the positioning of each reads as intention instead of approximation. What she didn’t have, until fairly recently, was room to use it. A mined center stone of any real size is a four- or five-figure commitment before she’s sketched a single prong, so every design was an expensive bet, and you don’t place many bets when each one costs a mortgage payment. Then lab-grown diamonds got good and cheap in the same handful of years, and the bet got a lot smaller. Now she works the way a painter works: try it, rework it, chase an idea three rings deep just to see where it wants to go.

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