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THE MAYA RULE

“Aha” Moments—in Television, Technology, and Design

Decades before he would be known as one of the great hit makers of the twentieth century, Raymond Loewy was a French orphan aboard the SS France in 1919, with a personally tailored army uniform and forty dollars in his pocket. His parents had died during the influenza pandemic. World War I had ended. At the age of twenty-five, Loewy was looking to start fresh in New York—perhaps, he thought, as an electrical engineer.

As he was crossing the Atlantic Ocean, a gentle nudge from a stranger redirected his career. Several passengers were auctioning off some of their possessions for easy money. Owning nothing of value, Loewy contributed a pen-and-ink sketch of a female passenger strolling along the promenade deck. The drawing sold for 150 francs to the British consul in New York, who gave the young Loewy a contact in the big city—Mr. Condé Nast, the prestigious magazine publisher. The more Loewy thought about the invitation, the more intrigued he was by the idea of pursuing art as a living.

When Loewy reached Manhattan, his older brother Maximilian took him to 120 Broadway. One of New York’s largest structures in the early 1900s, the Equitable Building is a neoclassical skyscraper with two connected towers that ascend from a shared base like a giant tuning fork. He rode the elevator to the observatory platform forty stories up and took his first look down the gaping mouth of New York City and its toothy skyline.

The engineer in Loewy was astonished by what he saw. New York was full of new stuff: towers, trolleys, automobiles, and boats. He could hear ferries whistling from the Hudson River. But when the artist looked closer, he was crestfallen. New York was a grungy product of the machine age—greasy, crude, and hulking. He had imagined such different shapes aboard the SS France—simple, slender, even feminine.

The world below would soon reflect Loewy’s dreamy vision. Within a few decades of his arrival, he would be widely known as the father of modern design. He would help remake the sports car, the modern train, and the Greyhound bus; he would design the Coca-Cola fountain and the iconic Lucky Strike cigarette pack. His firm put its imprimatur on products as prosaic as the pencil sharpener and as ethereal as the first NASA orbital workshop. In 1950, Cosmopolitan magazine wrote, “Loewy has probably affected the daily life of more Americans than any man of his time.” Today, it is hard to walk through some cities, offices, or homes without seeing a product designed by Apple. In the 1950s, it was equally impossible to move through America without bumping into something designed by Loewy and his firm.

At a time when American tastes were in violent flux, Loewy had what must have seemed like an ineffable sense of what people like. He also had a grand theory of it. He called it MAYA. People gravitate to products that are bold, yet instantly comprehensible—“Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.”

Unbeknownst to the now deceased Loewy, this insight has since been validated by a fleet of studies in the last hundred years. It’s been used to explain earworms in pop music, blockbusters in movie theaters, and even the success of memes in digital media. It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.

 • • • 

Raymond Loewy arrived in Manhattan at a key moment in the collision between economics and art. Artisans and designers of the nineteenth century had struggled to make enough stuff to meet the growing demand of consumers. But modern factories—with their electricity, assembly lines, and scientifically calibrated workflow—produced an unprecedented supply of identical cheap goods by the 1920s. It was an era of mass production, yielding an abundance of selfsame products. Henry Ford’s Model T was a symbol of its age, and from 1914 to 1925 it was available only in black. Companies did not yet worship at the altars of style, choice, and design. The era’s capitalists were monotheistic: Efficiency was their one true god.

But in the 1920s, art made a comeback, albeit for commercial reasons. It had become clear that factories could make more than consumers could buy. Americans were still neophobic—afraid of the new—and resistant to change. Capitalists needed buyers to be neophilic—attracted to the new—and so hungry for the next big thing that they’d spend their month’s income on it. It was a period when American industrialists were learning that, to sell more products, you couldn’t just make them practical. You had to make them beautiful—even “cool.”

Executives like Alfred Sloan, the CEO of General Motors, recognized that, by changing a car’s style and color every year, consumers might be trained to crave new versions of the same product. This insight—to marry the science of manufacturing efficiency and the science of marketing—inspired the idea of “planned obsolescence.” That means purposefully making products that will be fashionable or functional for only a limited time in order to encourage repeat shopping trips. Across the economy, companies realized that they could engineer turnover and multiply sales by constantly changing the colors, shapes, and styles of their goods. Technology enabled choices and choices created fashion—that perpetual hype cycle where designs and colors and behaviors appear suddenly cool and then suddenly anachronistic.

It was an age of new things, a birth of American neophilia. Artists, once silenced by the whir of assembly belts churning out identical products, played a starring role in the new mass production economy. Designers became the conjuring artists of the consumerist American Dream.

For many people today, craving the next hit from Nike, Apple, or Disney feels as natural as awaiting the turning of the leaves. But this is no ancient Darwinian itch. For millennia, the ancestors of today’s fashionistas wore the same clothes, and the sons of each generation didn’t seem to mind wearing the tunics of their great-grandfathers. Fashion, as we know it, was not written into human DNA. It is a recent invention of mass production and modern marketing. People had to be taught to constantly crave so many new things, and Loewy was one of neophilia’s first great teachers.

Paul Hekkert, a professor of industrial design and psychology, received a grant several years ago to develop a grand theory for why people like what they like, a Unified Model of Aesthetics. Hekkert’s grand theory begins with two competing pressures. On the one hand, 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. Our ancestors didn’t just walk out of Africa; they also walked out of the Middle East, and out of the Balkans, and out of Asia, and out of North America. Humans have climbed the peak of Mount Everest and descended to the nadir of the Mariana Trench. They have radical curiosity crossed with conservative minds. This battle between discovery and familiarity affects us “on every level,” Hekkert said—not just our preferences for pictures and songs, but also for ideas and even people.

In studies, Hekkert and his team asked respondents to rate several products, like cars, telephones, and teakettles, for their “typicality, novelty and aesthetic preference”—that is, for familiarity, surprise, and liking. The researchers found that neither measure of typicality nor novelty alone had much to do with most people’s preference; only taken together did they consistently predict the designs that people said they liked. “When we started the study, 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 dreamed of forward motion. Doodles of cars and trains filled out his childhood sketchbooks. Even in the trenches of war, the darkest corners of life received his light touch. As a twenty-one-year-old private in World War I, Loewy had decorated his dugout with “flowered wallpaper and draperies,” according to Time magazine. When the French military’s standard-issue trousers didn’t fit to his liking, he sewed himself a new pair of pants because, in his words, “I enjoyed going into action well dressed.”

But in the United States, Loewy initially felt stuck. In the early 1920s, he worked as a fashion illustrator for Condé Nast, the magazine publisher, and Wanamaker, the department store. For several years, he was overworked and lonely—“never a date, never any fun,” he wrote. He spent long hours sketching in his studio apartment on West Fifty-Seventh Street, often until dawn, when the familiar clomping of the milkman’s horses served as a reminder to lay the pencils to bed.

Loewy had devoted himself to drawing, but he felt his attention wandering back to engineering—to polish the grimy city that stretched out before him on his first afternoon in New York. He was fixated on the heinous design of a mass-produced world—its boxy cars, its dusty refrigerators. “Why manufacture ugliness by the mile,” he wrote, “and swamp the world with so much junk?”

Finally, in 1929, he received his first design request from Sigmund Gestetner, a British manufacturer of early printers known as mimeographs. Gestetner asked if Loewy had any ideas to tweak the machine’s appearance. Naturally, Loewy had more than a few suggestions. His initial reaction to the duplicator was visceral disgust:

Unwrapped and standing naked in front of me, it looked like a very shy, unhappy machine. It was a kind of dirty black and it had a rather fat little body perched too high on four spindly legs that suddenly spread out in panic as they approached the earth . . . What looked like four hundred thousand little gadgets, spinners, springs, levers, gears, caps, screws, nuts, and bolts, were covered in a mysterious bluish down that looked like the mold on tired Gorgonzola.

Given only three days to operate, Loewy got to work. He redesigned the crank and the tray, chopped off the four spindly legs, and covered as much of the machine as possible in a removable shell made of plastic clay. Loewy had never used a duplicator before he was instructed to fix decades of bad engineering in seventy-two hours. But when Gestetner saw the clay model, he immediately shipped it to UK headquarters. The company didn’t merely accept Loewy’s design; it kept him on retainer for the rest of his career.

Loewy’s approach belonged to an emerging philosophy called “industrial design,” which had a dual mandate to make mass-manufactured products more efficient and more lovely. A great industrial designer served as both engineering consultant and consumer psychologist—equally aware of assembly routines and shopping habits. But the concept of industrial design itself required a bit of familiarization for machine-age companies. Loewy spent much of the 1930s traveling to Toledo, Cleveland, and Chicago to beg small midwestern factories to look at his sketches. In aspirin-fueled business trips, Loewy would present his ideas before dozens of manufacturers, most of whom ignored him. His personal motto was that success is “25 percent inspiration and 75 percent transportation.”

Loewy’s first break was in duplication, but his first coup was in refrigeration. In 1934, Sears, Roebuck and Co. asked him to redesign their Coldspot fridge. Loewy accepted $2,500 and spent three times that amount moving the motor and installing the first ever rust-free aluminum shelves. The new design was a sensation: Within two years, Sears’s annual sales quadrupled from 60,000 fridges to 275,000.

His next breakthrough came in locomotives. The president of Pennsylvania Railroad approached the young designer with a deal: If Loewy could come up with a better way for passengers to dispose of waste at its grand New York City terminal, Pennsylvania Station, he would get the chance to design the trains themselves. Loewy accepted enthusiastically. The young man who fussed over wartime wallpaper was more than equipped to beautify a train station’s trash cans. He spent three days immersing himself in amateur anthropology at Penn Station, studying the waste-disposal habits of its violent current of passengers and staff. Pennsylvania Railroad enthusiastically welcomed his suggestions and awarded him the opportunity to redesign the company’s most popular locomotive. He suggested eliminating thousands of rivets by welding a shell—a single smooth, chromatic skin for the whole machine. His train designs are now iconic, the round head and slender body, the shape of a bullet fired through water.

His talents stretched to logos. In the early months of 1940, George Washington Hill, the president of American Tobacco Co., bet $50,000 that Loewy couldn’t improve Lucky Strike’s iconic green and red cigarette packaging. Loewy sketched an alternative that kept the font, the red target, and the slogan “It’s Toasted.” He then replaced the green background with white and copied the logo on the reverse of the cigarette pack so that the company seal would always show faceup, doubling its brand impressions. That April, Loewy invited Hill back to his office and showed him the new designs. He won the bet on the spot, and the white Lucky Strike design lasted the remainder of the century. In the next few decades, Loewy’s firm would go on to design several of the most famous logos in America, including Exxon, Shell, and the U.S. Postal Service.

These successes with Gestetner, Sears, Pennsylvania Railroad, and Lucky Strike opened his firm’s doors to all varieties of design projects—ferryboats, furniture, toothpick wrappers, bridges, coffee cups, menu designs, and store interiors. Loewy was mad for all sorts of undulations, but the prettiest curve, he liked to tell executives, was a sales curve that swept up and rightward.

Loewy’s most memorable designs were the body shells of his cars. Early in his career, Loewy had patented a sketch of a sedan. The prevailing style of cars in the 1920s was upright and boxy—a stagecoach with an engine. But the silhouette of Loewy’s early car sketches anticipated the automobile’s future. They featured a subtle forward lean, as if the upright Model T were set in italics. Even standing still, Loewy said, a car ought to have “built-in forward motion.” In the 1950s his work with the auto manufacturer Studebaker produced perhaps the most famous work attributed to him. The Starliner Coupe—nicknamed the “Loewy Coupe”—is one of the most famous automotive designs of the twentieth century. The body of the car, long and angular, rises to present two wide-open eyes for headlights. It is exactly as the younger Loewy imagined cars might one day look—set in motion, even when sitting still.

In March 1962, he witnessed President John F. Kennedy’s plane landing at the airport near his home in Palm Springs. That evening, he told a friend and White House aide that the plane looked “terrible” and “gaudy.” Someone took the hint, and Loewy was invited to the White House. He presented some livery sketches of America’s most famous airplane to the president. Kennedy looked across the designs and selected a red and gold variety, with one special request. Kennedy asked that the design be rendered in his favorite color, blue. Loewy took the president’s suggestion. The blue version of the livery he showed President Kennedy adorns the Air Force One 747 to this day.

As the designer laureate of midcentury America, Loewy and his firm touched every station in the life cycle of American appetites: They designed International Harvester tractors that farmed the Great Plains, merchandise racks at Lucky Stores supermarkets that held the produce, kitchen cabinets in suburban homes that kept the food, the Frigidaire ovens that cooked the meals, and the Singer vacuum cleaners that ingested the crumbs of dinner. As a designer for Soviet companies in the depths of the Cold War, Loewy’s design instincts transcended ideologies and hemispheres.

At the end of his career, he was not even bound by the atmosphere. NASA asked Loewy’s firm for help in designing the habitat inside its first space station, Skylab. Loewy’s company conducted extensive habitability studies and concluded that orbiting astronauts would appreciate a reminder of the most familiar thing on earth—earth itself. It was Loewy who insisted on the inclusion of a viewing porthole, so that astronauts could sneak a peek at their pale blue home. And so the designer’s career ended as it began—looking down from a great height and imagining something more beautiful. Loewy’s final contribution to design was, literally, a new way to see the world.

 • • • 

Raymond Loewy’s shop was, as much as any modern music label or Hollywood studio, a hit factory of his time. Photographs from the mid-1950s show a world sheathed in smooth chrome. Loewy wanted to clothe the sharp man-made protuberances of the machine age with nature’s smooth shells. The Studebaker coupes, pencil sharpeners, and locomotives of the era all hold the same ovular style.

This was purposeful. Loewy thought the egg was nature’s time-tested pinnacle of design and function, a structure of such precise curvature that a shell less than one one-hundredth of an inch thick could resist twenty pounds of applied pressure. Once you know Loewy’s north star, it’s impossible to stop seeing eggs—or eggish curves—throughout his firm’s designs.

The breadth of Loewy’s success raises a question: How did one man—or, more realistically, one man’s firm—develop a philosophy for what millions of Americans wanted, in everything from toothpicks to space stations?

Loewy himself offered two answers—one tactical and anthropological, the other grand and psychological.

Loewy’s personal style was effete—his suits and cars were each fussily self-designed—but his business philosophy was hard-nosed. He believed in ethnography as an entry point for design: First, understand how people behave; second, build products that match their habits.

When the meatpacking company Armour & Co. hired him to redo its eight hundred different products, Loewy sent employees on a six-month talking tour to speak with hundreds of housewives about Armour meats. (Their conclusion: The packaging came in way too many colors.) To redesign Pennsylvania Railroad’s locomotive, Loewy rode its trains for thousands of miles, talking to passengers and crew members to discover the machines’ most subtle deficiencies. Although he is most celebrated for throwing a chromatic coat over the locomotive, his hours of travel also revealed acute design failures, like the absence of toilets for the crew. So he installed those, too.

Loewy was an excellent teacher of consumer preferences in part because he was an obsessive student of consumer habits. He piggybacked off people’s behavior rather than design products that would force them to change their lives.

But Loewy felt that his sensitivity to the familiarities of his consumers connected to a deeper layer of psychology. His MAYA theory—Most Advanced Yet Acceptable—spoke to the tension between people’s interest in being surprised and feeling comforted. “The consumer is influenced in his choice of styling by two opposing factors: (a) attraction to the new and (b) resistance to the unfamiliar,” he wrote. “When resistance to the unfamiliar reaches the threshold of a shock-zone and resistance to buying sets in, the design in question has reached its MAYA stage: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.”

Loewy understood that attention doesn’t just pull in one direction. Instead, it is a tug-of-war between the opposing forces of neophilia versus neophobia, the love of the new versus the preference for the old; people’s need for stimulation versus their preference for what is understandable. A hit is new wine aged in old oak, or a stranger who somehow feels like a friend—a familiar surprise.

 • • • 

The last chapter explained how one of the most powerful forces in popularity is the power of exposure. Exposure breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds fluency, and fluency often breeds liking.

But there is such a thing as too much familiarity. It’s everywhere, in fact. It’s hearing a catchy song for the tenth time in a row, watching a movie that is oh so predictably uncreative, or hearing a talented speaker use overfamiliar buzzword after buzzword. In fluency studies, the power of familiarity is discounted when people realize that the moderator is trying to browbeat them with the same stimulus again and again. This is one reason why so much advertising doesn’t work: People have a built-in resistance to marketing that feels like it’s trying to seduce them.

Instead, the most special experiences and products involve a bit of surprise, unpredictability, and disfluency. Imagine entering a room full of strangers. You look around for somebody you know but you cannot find a single recognizable face. And then suddenly there is a parting in the room, and through the crowd you see her—your best friend. The warm feeling of relief and recognition bursts through the clouds of confusion. That is the ecstasy of sudden fluency, a moment of eureka.

Pop culture is a parade of these eureka moments large and small. Crossword puzzles design for confusion followed by coherence—aha. Great storytellers excel in creating tension followed by a cathartic release—aha. In 2013, several researchers asked people to rate paintings by cubist artists, a group that includes Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger. First the researchers recorded people’s reactions to the paintings alone; they weren’t very good. But then the scientists included clues to the paintings’ meaning, or brief histories of the painters themselves. With these clues, audience ratings improved dramatically; suddenly, the abstract paintings were not like the inscrutable backs of strangers, but rather like a new friend, reaching out to take their hand. “The creation of meaning itself is what’s rewarding,” researcher Claudia Muth told me. “An artwork doesn’t have to be ‘easy’ to appeal to its audience.” People like a challenge if they think they can solve it. She calls this moment where disfluency yields to fluency the aesthetic aha.

Audiences appreciate aha moments so much that they also enjoy simply expecting them, even if the moment never comes. Somebody can enjoy a long book or television show that offers no answer for hours and hours if the genre itself promises a resolution. When the popular, mystic television show Lost ended, many fans erupted in indignation that the showrunners failed to resolve the series’ many puzzles. This deprived careful viewers of the final aha moment they thought they’d been promised. Some people surely felt like they’d wasted cumulative weeks, even months, of their lives waiting for answers. But their final disappointment didn’t retroactively change the sincere thrill they’d felt throughout the series. Lost was a monster hit for many years because audiences enjoyed the experience of anticipating answers, even though the writers were just stockpiling riddles without resolutions. Many people will put themselves through quite a bit of disfluent anguish if they expect fluent resolution at the end.

Video games, too, are often puzzles whose interactivity offers the wondrous click of recognition or jolt of accomplishment. The most popular video game of all time is Tetris. Alexey Pajitnov was a twenty-eight-year-old computer scientist working at a Soviet R&D center in Moscow when, after buying a set of funny-shaped dominoes, he got an idea for a video game. On June 6, 1984, he released an early version, which he named by combining “tetra,” after the four square blocks of each game piece, with “tennis,” his favorite sport. Before long, the game spread across Moscow, hopped over to Hungary, was nearly stolen by a British developer, and went on to become the bestselling video game of all time, selling four hundred million copies. The game is a dance of anticipation and completion. Many novels and mystery stories may be analogous to falling puzzle pieces clicking into place, but Tetris is explicitly just that.

The second bestselling game of all time is Minecraft, where users build shapes and virtual worlds from digital bricks. Minecraft is a kind of cultural inheritor to Lego, which was itself an “heir to the heritage of playing with blocks,” as tech journalist Clive Thompson wrote. But whereas Lego sets often come with a detailed set of precise instructions, Minecraft is more open-ended. The most popular games for smartphones, where the level of play must be simple enough to execute with a stray thumb, are often puzzles, too, including 2048 and Candy Crush. The point of these games is neither to make players tear out their hair nor to give away the secret too easily, but rather to design what the neurologist Judy Willis calls an “achievable challenge.” Most advanced yet achievable—MAYA.

Smaller aha moments—the sort that make you simply smile rather than sprint naked through the neighborhood—are all around us. There is a popular online video called “4 Chords,” with more than thirty million views, in which the musical comedy group the Axis of Awesome cycles through dozens of songs built on the same four chords—I–V–vi–IV.7 This chord progression is the backbone of dozens of classics, including oldie hits (the Beatles’ “Let It Be”), karaoke pop (Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”), country sing-along (John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”), arena rock (U2’s “With or Without You”), animated musical (The Lion King’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight”), acoustic pop (Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours”), reggae (Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry”), and modern dance pop (Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi”). In 2012, Spanish researchers released a study that looked at 464,411 popular recordings around the world between 1955 and 2010 and found the difference between new hits and old hits wasn’t more complicated chord structures. Instead, it was new instrumentation bringing a fresh sound to “common harmonic progressions.”

Several music critics use videos like “4 Chords” to argue that pop music is simply derivative. But this seems backward. First, if the purpose of music is to move people, and people are moved by that which is sneakily familiar, then creative people should aspire for a blend of originality and derivation. Second, 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” and “Paparazzi” don’t sound anything alike. These songwriters aren’t retracing each other’s steps. They’re more like clever cartographers, each given an enormous map, plotting new routes home.

 • • • 

The aha effect isn’t bound to arts and culture. It’s a powerful force in the academic world as well.

Scientists and philosophers are exquisitely sensitive to the advantage of ideas that already enjoy broad familiarity. The history of science is a long story about good ideas facing rejection after punishing rejection until enough scientists become acquainted with the concepts, at which point they become law. Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who helped lay the groundwork for quantum theory, said: “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 sort of proposals were most likely to win funding from prestigious institutions, like the National Institutes of Health—safely familiar proposals or extremely creative ones? They prepared about 150 research proposals and gave each one a novelty score. Then they recruited 142 world-class scientists to evaluate each project.

The most novel proposals got the worst ratings. “Everyone dislikes novelty,” lead author Karim Lakhani explained to me, and “experts tend to be overcritical of proposals in their own domain.” Extremely familiar proposals fared a little bit better, but they also received lower scores. The highest evaluation scores went to submissions that were deemed slightly new. There is an “optimal newness” for ideas, Lakhani said—advanced yet acceptable. The graph of optimal newness looks like this:

This appetite for “optimal newness” runs throughout the hit-making world. Film producers, like NIH scientists, have to evaluate hundreds of projects a year but can accept only a tiny percentage. To grab their attention, writers often frame original ideas as a fresh combination of two familiar successes using a “high-concept pitch”—like “It’s Romeo and Juliet on a sinking ship!” (Titanic) or “It’s Toy Story with talking animals!” (The Secret Life of Pets). In Silicon Valley, where venture capitalists also sift through a surfeit of proposals, high-concept pitches are so common that they’re practically a joke. 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 took to branding themselves “Uber for . . .” anything.

Creative people often bristle at the suggestion that they have to stoop to market their ideas or dress them in familiar garb. It’s pleasant to think that an idea’s brilliance is self-evident and doesn’t require the theater of marketing. But whether you’re an academic, screenwriter, or entrepreneur, the difference between a brilliant new idea with bad marketing and a mediocre idea with excellent marketing can be the difference between bankruptcy and success. The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.

 • • • 

For the last decade and more, the most valuable brand in media has been ESPN. For many years, the sports network has accounted for half of the Walt Disney Company’s annual profit and more than its entire movie division.

Much of ESPN’s lucre comes from the quirky economics of sports and the modern TV business. The “traditional” TV audience—the one with a remote control, a cable box, and a live menu of shows—has taken a gut punch in the last decade. Between 2010 and 2015, the amount of time eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds spent watching traditional cable TV declined by about 30 percent. To get people to sit down in front of a live show (and be present for the live advertising), executives have doubled down on entertainment that must be seen now. That includes live musicals, live variety shows, live game shows, live singing shows, and, most important, live sports. Sports are the keystone of the cable TV arch. Without them, the whole thing collapses.

Every month, your cable company sends about one half of your cable bill straight to the TV networks you can see on the menu. These fees range from a penny to a few dollars. ESPN gets about six or seven dollars per pay TV customer per month, whether that household watches zero minutes of ESPN or one hundred hours. This is the equivalent of tens of millions of households buying six movie tickets a year to the same film—even if they don’t watch any of the movie.

But the network’s financial ascent in the last decade was more than a clever bank shot off the economics of TV bundling. It also has to do with engineering familiarity.

At the network’s New York City headquarters on West Sixty-Sixth Street in 2014, I sat with Artie Bulgrin, ESPN’s director of research, in a wood-paneled conference room as he swooshed through slides of a massive annual presentation that he’d prepared for the company since 1998. He stopped at what he called “the money chart.” It showed the results of a survey asking men for their favorite cable networks.

“Men have named us their favorite channel for fourteen straight years,” he said. “Other networks need to create hits. We don’t. People tune in to ESPN without even knowing what’s on.”

The worldwide leader in sports didn’t always enjoy such dominance. At the turn of the century, the network was in crisis. In the late 1990s, ESPN found itself languishing after a decade of out-of-control growth. “As we grew, we tried to be everything to everyone,” ESPN sales and marketing VP Sean Bratches said, sitting to Bulgrin’s right in the Sixty-Sixth Street conference room. “We had bass fishing and cheerleading and salsa dancing and scripted dramas and comedy shows,” he said. “We tried to promote every single thing rather than focus on a few things.”

To guide the turnaround, ESPN tapped an unlikely new leader. John Skipper, a magazine editor with no experience in television, arrived at Disney after serving as president of the music magazine Spin. In his fifteen years at ESPN before becoming president in 2012, he oversaw Disney-branded magazines and books, launched ESPN The Magazine, and managed the website ESPN.com. ESPN had lost a sense of its core, Skipper told the company’s leaders at one of the first executive meetings. Rather than being great at serving one perfect product, like a steakhouse, it had become a network that served lots of mediocre fare, like a cheap diner.

Skipper started the turnaround by focusing on SportsCenter, ESPN’s unavoidable collage of the day’s news. Rather than serve many audiences across the sports spectrum, from college squash to Indian cricket, he said SportsCenter should spend more hours covering mostly the most popular story lines. Why? To maximize the odds that whenever a fan tuned in, he could expect to see a team, player, or controversy that he recognized—like the New England Patriots, LeBron James, or Olympic doping scandals. SportsCenter would become, he decided, an entertainment steakhouse, serving up new takes on the same core sports, stars, and scandals—over and over and over. After that, Bulgrin said, things “started to change rather dramatically.” SportsCenter had become the thing every sports fan quietly craves: a news machine for delivering new takes on familiar stories. Ratings soared, and ESPN has been the favorite network of American men every year since.

In the last few years, CNN has taken the same approach, devoting more time to fewer stories, like terrorist attacks and disappearing airplanes. This makes for pretty repetitive TV, if you watch all day long. But who would want to watch CNN all day long? The typical television news viewer watches about five minutes of cable TV news per day. CNN is doing something smart—maximizing viewers’ expectations that they will see a story they recognize no matter when they tune in.

Throughout the 2016 election, the CNN spotlight trained its white-hot focus on Donald Trump, who reportedly referred to network president Jeff Zucker as his “personal booker.” Media critics sighed over CNN’s singular obsession, but the strategy paid off, at least in the most literal sense. In 2015, CNN saw its highest viewership in seven years and enjoyed the strongest rate of advertising growth of any cable news network. Journalists mocked the network’s Trumpist worship, often with good reason, but television economics is not a morality play. Trump and Zucker’s relationship proved to be fantastically profitable.

ESPN and CNN have discovered what Top 40 radio has known for several decades: Most people tune in to a broadcast to hear more of something they already know. Radio audiences can’t anticipate what the next song will be. But as every car driver and radio executive will affirm, people mostly just want to hear songs they recognize. For decades, DJs on pop music radio stations have considered unfamiliar songs to be “tune-outs” because audiences tend to spurn new music. These listeners want to be surprised—that’s why they play the radio rather than a CD or playlist—but they want to be surprised by the feeling of familiarity.

The age of old-school television, with one dominant screen and one live stream, is giving way to an age of social video networks with billions of screens and zillions of personalized feeds. From 2010 to 2015, the average viewership of SportsCenter fell by almost 40 percent among eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds. The most valuable piece of glass for ESPN today might be the smartphone screen. In an average week, ESPN delivers more than seven hundred million alerts to tens of millions of phones. When something big happens in sports, more than seven million people get a notification from ESPN in their pockets and purses; that’s more than ten times the typical SportsCenter audience. One and a half million people—a sizable audience for a TV show—have signed up for news alerts for a single basketball team, the Golden State Warriors. When the Bay Area squad does something newsworthy, ESPN buzzes on the home screen of more people than the combined city populations of San Francisco and Oakland.

Technology is quickly changing the delivery of news, but not necessarily the philosophy of what people want from it. Consider a news ecosystem quite opposite from ESPN and cable news: Reddit, a community news site created entirely by anonymous users.

On Reddit, each piece of content is two parts: a headline and an article link. Users can promote links with “upvotes” or register their dissatisfaction with “downvotes.” Several years ago, a team of computer science researchers at Stanford University submitted and resubmitted thousands of images to Reddit with different headlines and controlled for network effects to see if the Reddit community had a clear preference for certain titles. They wanted to understand a question that I think about all the time: What makes a great headline?

In my time at The Atlantic, I’ve developed, refined, discarded, and revived countless pet theories about what makes a perfect headline. When I was younger, I used to say a great headline should be “definitive or delightful.” That is, it should try to make a clear and superlative statement (“One Graph Explains Why the United States Is the World’s Best Place to Start a Company”) or it should be obviously funny or cute (“I Can’t Stop Looking at This Baby Tiger Play with Yarn”).

Several years ago, the Internet was awash with an exotic species of headline based on something called the “curiosity gap.” That is, the writer tells the reader enough to pique interest and then, like a cheap magician, says, “You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.” These headlines conquered the world (well, my world) for several months, then fell out of fashion for the same reason that people tire of every marketing gimmick: When you’re savvy to the source of fluency, you tend to discount the stimulus as boring or manipulative. When the audience knows the formula, a magic trick isn’t magic anymore; it’s just a trick. After the curiosity gap year, however, The Atlantic continued to find great success with stories about the mind and body—essentially, psychology and health—and my personal headline motto changed, again, to: “A reader’s favorite subject is the reader.”

Meanwhile, these Stanford computer scientists were putting empirical meat on the bare bones of my headline writing theories. They concluded that the most successful headlines on Reddit presented novel images or stories while “[conforming] to the linguistic norms of the community to which it is submitted.” A good headline, they said, is not overly familiar, but rather familiar enough; a welcome surprise expressed in the vernacular of its intended audience; a promise to advance understanding in a broadly acceptable subject—MAYA.8

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If a television is a piece of furniture, a mobile device is an appendage—not just familiar, but personal and even intimate. A one-screen world targets the mainstream. But now people get music, news, and everything else from the piece of glass in their pockets. This billion-screen world, not bounded by the limits of linear programming, is tailored to individuals. And although everybody has an appetite for the familiar, appetites can vary.

With more than eighty-one million listeners and twenty-one billion hours of played music each year, Pandora is the most popular digital radio app in the world. Name the bands you like, and Pandora builds a radio station around their sound. If I say I like the Beatles, Pandora will play the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, and newer bands with a Beatlesy vibe. Users can make the station better by signaling the songs they love or by skipping the songs they don’t.

These interactions give Pandora’s scientists a bird’s-eye view of how tastes work. Pandora’s algorithm isn’t best thought of as one formula. It’s more like an orchestra of dozens and dozens of formulas that are conducted by a metaformula. One of the most important instruments in this algorithmic symphony is familiarity.

“The most common complaint about Pandora is that there is too much repetition of bands and songs,” said Eric Bieschke, the first chief data scientist at Pandora. “Preferences for familiarity are much more individual than I would have thought. You can play the exact same songs to two people with the same tastes in music. One will consider the station perfectly familiar, and the other will consider it horribly repetitive.”

There are two fascinating implications here. The first is that neophobia, or preference for the familiar, is not a universal human constant. Rather, there is a spectrum between people who like things that are extremely familiar and people who like things that surprise: a Beatles fan who wants to hear only the Beatles versus a Beatles fan who wants to hear only new songs with John Lennon inflections; a family that likes going to the same place for each vacation versus a family that never goes on the same vacation twice. The most significant neophilic group in the consumer economy is probably teenagers. Young people are “far more receptive to advanced designs,” Loewy wrote, because they have the smallest stake in the status quo. “The dream of the alert industrial designer would be to design for teen-agers . . . Whether or not they fall periodically for some silly fad that does harm to no one, their basic taste remains fundamentally correct.”

The second implication of Pandora’s analysis is that familiarity- as-a-taste can vary by genre. Some people are music hipsters (they love hopping between esoteric bands) but information moles (they read only one local liberal blog). Others are the opposite, musically conservative but adventurous about reading political columns by writers they disagree with. As Loewy understood, neophilia and neophobia are not isolated states, but rather warring states, constantly doing battle both within the mind of every buyer and within an entire economy of buyers.

I recently visited Spotify, the large online streaming music company, to talk to Matt Ogle, the lead engineer on a new hit product called Discover Weekly, a personalized list of thirty songs delivered every Monday to tens of million of users.

For about a decade, Ogle had worked for several music companies to design the perfect music recommendation engine. His philosophy of music was that most people enjoy new songs, but they don’t enjoy the effort that it takes to find them. They want effortless, frictionless musical revelations, a series of achievable challenges. In the design of Discover Weekly, “every decision we made was shaped by the notion that this should feel like a friend giving you a mix tape,” he said. So the playlist was weekly and included only thirty songs.

Here’s how it works. Each week, Spotify bots hunt through several billion playlists from users around the world to see what songs are typically grouped together. Imagine that Song A, Song B, and Song C often appear together in the same playlist. If I often listen to Songs A and C, Spotify guesses that I’ll probably like Song B—even if I’ve never heard of its band. This way of predicting tastes by aggregating millions of people’s preferences is known as “collaborative filtering”—collaborative because it takes many users’ inputs, and filtering because it uses the data to narrow down the next thing you want to hear. It’s conceptually similar to the algorithms that power the related-items sections of Amazon and other shopping sites: If many people purchase a certain chair with a certain table, buyers of that table will be prompted to buy the chair.

At the end of our interview, Ogle and I talked about how most music fans (but not all) are fundamentally conservative. They like what they like, and they don’t want to be too challenged by music. “The line from psychologists is, if you’ve seen it before, it hasn’t killed you yet,” I joked.

Ogle’s face lit up. “I have a story for you,” he said. The original version of Discover Weekly was supposed to include only songs that users had never heard before. But in its first internal test at Spotify, a bug in the algorithm let through songs that users already knew. “Everyone reported it as a bug, and we fixed it so that every single song was totally new,” he said.

But after his team fixed the bug, something unusual happened: Engagement with the playlist fell. “It turns out having a bit of familiarity bred trust, especially for first-time users. 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.”

The original bug was actually an essential feature. Discover Weekly was a more appealing product when it had even one familiar band or song. “I think users wanted to trust the feature, but they were waiting to see some sign that it knew them, too,” Ogle said. Spotify users wanted a fresh taste. But they also wanted to make sure it wouldn’t kill them.

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By the 1950s, Raymond Loewy could reasonably claim that the most iconic car, the most used locomotive, and most famous airplane in midcentury America all sprung from the sharpened tip of a Loewy pencil. So what can he teach today’s artists about how to make a hit? MAYA offers three clear lessons.

First: Audiences don’t know everything, but they know more than creators do. The most successful artists and entrepreneurs tend to be geniuses. But the paradox is that they are both smarter than their median consumer and dumber than all of their consumers because they don’t know how their consumers live, what they do every day, what annoys them, or what moves them. If familiarity is the key to liking, then people’s familiarities—the ideas, stories, behaviors, and habits with which they are fluent—are the keys to their heart. Loewy had his own theories of beauty, his eggshells and his chrome finishes. But he knew that designing for strangers was, at the beginning, like fumbling through a dark tunnel toward a tiny speck of light. He was obsessed with understanding the people he was designing for.

Second: To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar.9 At the far reaches of radical thinking, it’s critical for artists and entrepreneurs with wild ideas to heed the pull of familiarity and remember Max Planck’s warning: Even the most brilliant scientific breakthroughs face initial skepticism when they are too far from mainstream thought. Great art and products meet audiences where they are.

But the fact that people gravitate to fluency in art and design is no excuse for dumb simplicity. The central insight of MAYA is that people actually prefer complexity—up to the point that they stop understanding something. Many of today’s museumgoers don’t just stare at the water lilies. They enjoy strange and abstract art that gives them a feeling or a jolt of meaning. TV viewers don’t just watch reruns. They like complex mysteries with narrative puzzles that come to completion. Theatergoers love familiar revivals, but the most influential Broadway smash hits are ones, like Hamilton, that tell a familiar story in an ingeniously new way. The power of fluency, after all, is strongest when it emerges from its opposite, a challenging period of disfluency, to create an aha moment.

Third: People sometimes don’t know what they want until they already love it. Loewy and his ilk were constantly pushing tastes forward among an audience of midcentury Americans who didn’t know they wanted anything new. In the final pages of his memoir, Loewy relays an old joke about a Boy Scout and his scoutmaster discussing the day’s mandatory Good Deed.

“And what good have you done today, Ray?”

“Walter, Henry, and I helped a lady across the street,” the boy says.

“Very nice. But why did it take three of you?”

“The old lady did not want to cross.”

If Loewy had been a Boy Scout, he would have been like his namesake, Ray: pushy while playing within certain rules. He had taught drowsy, machine-age consumers to be neophiles of the highest order. He nourished an appetite for surprise to go with their taste for the familiar. The young man who surveyed New York City in 1919 from the top of the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway saw the other side of a street and carried the country across. He did not ask for permission.