Uncommon Carriers
McPhee's books are about real people in real places. Over the past eight years, McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. This is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. He attends ship-handling school on a pond in the foothills of the French Alps, where, for a tuition of $15,000 a week, skippers of the largest ocean ships refine their capabilities in twenty-foot scale models. He goes up the Illinois River on a "towboat" pushing a triple string of barges, the overall vessel being "a good deal longer than the Titanic." And he travels by canoe up the canal-and-lock commercial waterways traveled by Henry David Thoreau and his brother, John, in a homemade skiff in 1839.--From publisher description.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
8mentions
7people
2014–2023years
88% recommend13% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- McPhee is truly a national treasure. If you're interested, that article was one of several published in his book Uncommon Carriers which includes a train and river barge voyage. Looking for a Ship is also great as it follows a merchant marine through various stages of that job.
The Curve of Binding Energy is a fascinating study of Theodore Taylor, the engineer behind the smallest nuke warhead in the world, and his concerns that terrorists may be able to build warheads themselves.
Pretty much any McPhee book or article is fascinating. His book Oranges is all about farming oranges, processing orange juice so it can sit in refrigerated vats for months (and how it is reconstituted through "flavor packs" that give it back the OJ flavors after long storage) and all kind of other orange stories. No matter what rabbit hole McPhee jumps down, his research and writing are nothing short of engrossing.
- Full circle: I discovered this article after another HN commenter suggested the book Uncommon Carriers, a collection of essays including this one.
- Related I also gotta recommend "Uncommon Carriers" by John McPhee. It's got a chapter that follows a barge operator on the Illinois river that's pretty great.
- Read Uncommon Carriers, by John McPhee, which contains the essay "Out in the Sort" [0]. UPS actually does do some 3rd party fulfillment and warehousing. The essay doesn't go into too much detail, but I get the sense that they're targeting smaller volume, higher margin customers. I further get the sense that they're doing so on the basis of being able to deliver small quantities of an item anywhere in the country ASAP while keeping required inventory levels low (because they do the warehousing near their hub).
N.B. It's a 14 year old article at this point. Things may have changed.
[0] Or if you're a New Yorker subscriber: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/18/out-in-the-sor...
- John McPhee wrote a super-awesome journalistic piece based on a visit to Port Revel (called "The Ships of Port Revel"). It's published in his book Uncommon Carriers (which is about profiles of people who work in different parts of the transportation industry).
Depending on your country, you may be able to read the whole thing on Google Books via this link from Danielle Sucher:
https://twitter.com/daniellesucher/status/491217820945223680
- John McPhee write an excellent article about this: "The Ships of Port Revel" by John McPhee. It was an atlantic article and is included in his book "Uncommon Carriers".
Related
Looking for a ship
3 recommend · 5
Survival of the Bark Canoe
2 recommend · 4
Oranges
8 recommend · 8
The control of nature
14 recommend · 20
Curve of Binding Energy
19 recommend · 30
A sense of where you are
2 recommend · 3
Annals of the former world
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