February Mega-List
Back in August I posted a list of articles that have been printed in a WP. That was still pretty early on, and not that many articles had actually been saved. This list has everything that's been printed for more than one person (which gets around the privacy issue quite nicely too).
If you're new to Pocket, or you've run down your existing content, this list might give you some material to load up your list with.
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The Physics of Productivity: Newton’s Laws of Getting Stuff Done
In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his groundbreaking book, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which described his three laws of motion. In the process, Newton laid the foundation for classical mechanics and redefined the way the world looked at physics and science.
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Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person
IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person. Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others.
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Garbage Language
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. I worked at various start-ups for eight years beginning in 2010, when I was in my early 20s. Then I quit and went freelance for a while.
The Art of Decision-Making
In July of 1838, Charles Darwin was twenty-nine years old and single. Two years earlier, he had returned from his voyage aboard H.M.S. Beagle with the observations that would eventually form the basis of “On the Origin of Species.” In the meantime, he faced a more pressing analytical problem.
The Dangerous Downsides of Perfectionism
In one of my earliest memories, I’m drawing. I don’t remember what the picture is supposed to be, but I remember the mistake. My marker slips, an unintentional line appears and my lip trembles. The picture has long since disappeared.
Audio’s Opportunity and Who Will Capture It
As most of the major media categories — music, video and video games — have existed for decades, we tend to forget that media is technology. Instead, we think of technology as being used to express media, rather than media itself.
How to Work 40 Hours in 16.7 (The Simple Technique That Gave Me My Life Back)
Sound familiar? Looking back, I realize I used my work to try and fill a void in myself. The problem was that this void was like a black hole. No matter how many hours I worked, it never seemed to fill it up. If anything, it made me feel worse.
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Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture
I was halfway through a job interview when I realized I was wrinkling my nose. I couldn't help myself.
You probably know to ask yourself, “What do I want?” Here’s a way better question
CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay/FoundryThink about what you want.By This article is more than 2 years old.Everybody wants what feels good.
The semi-satisfied life
Two years earlier, in Hamburg, Johanna’s husband Heinrich Floris had been discovered dead in the canal behind their family compound. It is possible that he slipped and fell, but Arthur suspected that his father jumped out of the warehouse loft into the icy waters below. Johanna did not disagree.
How to Learn Everything: The MasterClass Diaries
When I was a teenager I read James Thurber’s Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I fell in love with this story of a meek, middle-aged Connecticut man whose daydreams afford him temporary escape from a dreary shopping trip with his overbearing wife.
Marc Andreessen
Welcome to the first ever interview on 'The Observer Effect'. When planning for these series of interviews with interesting leaders and institutions, there was only one person I had in mind to have here first - Marc Andreessen.
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Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful
2019 UPDATE: Since this post came out, I co-authored a book about it called Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models. You can order it now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Indiebound.
Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead.
This article is an excerpt from Atomic Habits, my New York Times bestselling book.
How Exercise Shapes You, Far Beyond the Gym
When I first started training for marathons a little over ten years ago, my coach told me something I’ve never forgotten: that I would need to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss
Kim Scott, co-founder of Candor, Inc., has built her career around a simple goal: Creating bullshit-free zones where people love their work and working together. She first tried it at her own software startup.
Emotional Intelligence: The Social Skills You Weren't Taught in School
How much of what you learned in school do you still remember? Even more importantly, how much of it do you actually use on a daily basis? Though we may not need to know the Pythagorean theorem or what happened during the Spanish American War, we do—or at least should—understand how and why peopl
The Case for Letting the Restaurant Industry Die
In late March, not long after the coronavirus brought America’s restaurant industry to a tense and precarious halt, the writer, cook, and artist Tunde Wey posted, to Instagram, the first part of an essay titled “Don’t Bail Out the Restaurant Industry.
The Four Quadrants of Conformism
One of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism.
The 10/10/10 Rule For Tough Decisions
It’s good to sleep on it when there are tough choices to make, but you also need a strategy once you wake up–which is why you should employ the 10/10/10 rule. 5 minute ReadIt’s easy to lose perspective when we’re facing a thorny dilemma.
From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story
If you’re not sure what Odd Things in Odd Places is and why I’m in Iraq by myself, here’s why. On the morning of Saturday, August 2nd, I got in a taxi in Erbil, the regional capital of Kurdish Iraq, and asked the driver to take me to the Khazir refugee camp.
How to Think for Yourself
There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know.
The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
Why don’t successful people and organizations automatically become very successful? One important explanation is due to what I call “the clarity paradox,” which can be summed up in four predictable phases: Phase 1: When we really have clarity of purpose, it leads to success.
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GRETA'S WORLD
There is persona and there is reality in Greta Thunberg. It is Valentine’s Day in her hometown of Stockholm, but there’s only wind, no hearts and flowers. A few hundred kids mill about, with a smattering of adults.
The History of Loneliness
The female chimpanzee at the Philadelphia Zoological Garden died of complications from a cold early in the morning of December 27, 1878. “Miss Chimpanzee,” according to news reports, died “while receiving the attentions of her companion.
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How to retire in your 30s: save most of your money and rethink your core values
Seven in 10 Americans are disengaged from their jobs, according to Gallup. That's more than two-thirds of us who are unfulfilled by our work, just dragging our sorry selves to and from the office every day. One community has an attractive answer: just quit.
The 3 Stages of Failure in Life and Work (And How to Fix Them)
One of the hardest things in life is to know when to keep going and when to move on. On the one hand, perseverance and grit are key to achieving success in any field. Anyone who masters their craft will face moments of doubt and somehow find the inner resolve to keep going.
Why We Slouch
All physical structures can sag, but only sentient beings like you and me can slouch. To slouch is to adopt a degenerate behavioral posture. One that is aware of the potential for less degeneracy, and retains within itself a seed of an ability to actualize it, but consciously takes it out of play.
Emotional Intelligence: The Social Skills You Weren’t Taught in School
How well do you recognize and understand your emotions? What about the emotions of those around you?
Sheanderthal
The first Neanderthal face to emerge from time’s sarcophagus was a woman’s. As the social and liberal revolutions of 1848 began convulsing Europe, quarry workers’ rough hands pulled her from the great Rock of Gibraltar.
Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too
Many famous scientists have something in common—they didn’t work long hours. When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days.
Notes on technology in the 2020s
As we start a new decade, it’s a good time to reflect on expectations for the next 10 years. Tyler thinks the Great Stagnation could be ending. Caleb sees cracks. Noah expresses techno-optimism. In this post, my aim is not to predict an end or non-end to stagnation.
What Is It Like to Be a Man?
At the time my wife and I were beginning to date, I owned a broken bed. The box spring had a biggish crack on one side, which caused you to feel like you were being gradually swallowed in the night—an effect seriously exacerbated by the presence of a second person.
What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
Kami West had been dating her current boyfriend for a few weeks when she told him that he was outranked by her best friend. West knew her boyfriend had caught snatches of her daily calls with Kate Tillotson, which she often placed on speaker mode.
Stop coddling your dog—he’s 99.9% wolf
Richard Schultz for QuartzThey came out of the wild.From our SeriesIdeasOur home for bold arguments and big thinkers.By SANTA CLARITA, California—Cesar Millan crosses the road to meet me. Two pit bulls, a Chihuahua, and a Yorkshire terrier—named Junior, Taco, Alfie and Kaley Cuoko—follow.
The Conscience of Silicon Valley
Tech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media. Too few of us listened. Now, in the most chaotic of moments, his fears—and his bighearted solutions—are more urgent than ever.See more from GQ’s Change Is Good issue.
Love you to death: how we hurt the animals we cherish
Imust have been about four when we drove to buy a dog. The day is now only a haze of Sunday afternoon impressions of rain and green, of the muddy track somewhere in the Stirlingshire countryside, a room, a log fire, and the two chosen puppies who would be the confidants of my growing up.
Science Fiction Studies
Dick's voluminous work can be seen as falling into various distinct thematic groups or cycles: there is, for instance, the early Vanvogtian game-playing cycle, the Nazi cycle (e.g.
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An Absurdly Complete Guide to Understanding Whiskey
What really makes whiskey taste like whiskey? If flavor truly just came down to a simple formula of distilling ratios of grains plus time spent in a barrel, then there wouldn’t be an infinite range of tastes, profiles and qualities.
How to visualize decision trees
Please send comments, suggestions, or fixes to Terence. Decision trees are the fundamental building block of gradient boosting machines and Random Forests™, probably the two most popular machine learning models for structured data.
TikTok and the Sorting Hat — Remains of the Day
I often describe myself as a cultural determinist, more as a way to differentiate myself from people with other dominant worldviews, though I am not a strict adherent. It’s more that in many situations when people ascribe causal power to something other than culture, I’m immediately suspicious.
Not So Simple
Around eleven p.m. the night before the winter solstice of 2016 I unplugged my laptop and turned off my phone for what I hoped would be forever. I had just put the finishing touches to a straw-bale cabin that I’d spent the summer building on the three-acre, half-wild smallholding where I live.
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How Russia Wins the Climate Crisis
It was only November, but the chill already cut to the bone in the small village of Dimitrovo, which sits just 35 miles north of the Chinese border in a remote part of eastern Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region.
Stoic Insights for Happier Relationships
In ancient Rome, there was an entrepreneur-turned-statesman named Lucius Seneca. He was a philosopher who counted himself among the Roman Stoics. Seneca started from humble beginnings and rose to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world at the time.
Is It Really Too Late to Learn New Skills?
Among the things I have not missed since entering middle age is the sensation of being an absolute beginner.
The Day the Dinosaurs Died
A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event.
Can You Die From a Broken Heart?
What happens to our bodies when the bonds of love are breached. Ruth and Harold “Doc” Knapke met in elementary school. They exchanged letters during the war, when Doc was stationed in Germany. After he returned their romance began in earnest.
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Maybe Just Don't Drink Coffee
It's eight in the morning and you can barely keep your eyes open, much less engage in the activities that constitute productive participation in the glorious neoliberal machinery of our economy.
Lessons on Success and Deliberate Practice from Mozart, Picasso, and Kobe Bryant
How long does it take to become elite at your craft? And what do the people who master their goals do differently than the rest of us? That's what John Hayes, a cognitive psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, wanted to know.
Everything I know about a good death I learned from my cat
My cat has been dying for the last two years. It is normal to me now — it is simply the state of affairs. There's a rhythm to her medication: prednisone and urosodiol in the morning, urosodiol again in the evening, chemo every other day, a vitamin B shot once a week.
The secret rules of the internet
Julie Mora-Blanco remembers the day, in the summer of 2006, when the reality of her new job sunk in.
The Most Powerful Learning Tool (That Doesn’t Involve Studying)
A couple hours of studying isn’t nearly as impactful as eight hours of memorizing.
Digital Crackdown: Large-Scale Surveillance and Exploitation of Uyghurs
Over the last several years, numerous reports have emerged regarding the shocking treatment of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority ethnic group that makes up a large part of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China.
Why It Pays to Be Grumpy and Bad-Tempered
On stage he’s a loveable, floppy-haired prince charming. Off camera – well let’s just say he needs a lot of personal space. He hates being a celebrity. He resents being an actor.
Sam van Zwedenon creativity and rest
This essay is part of a new Sydney Review of Books essay series devoted to the labour of writing called Writers at Work. We’ve asked critics, essayists, poets, artists, and scholars to reflect on how writers get made and how writing gets made in the twenty-first century.
When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages
In the late 1940s, the United States air force had a serious problem: its pilots could not keep control of their planes.
The Secret History of One Hundred Years of Solitude
The house, in a quiet part of Mexico City, had a study within, and in the study he found a solitude he had never known before and would never know again. Cigarettes (he smoked 60 a day) were on the worktable. LPs were on the record player: Debussy, Bartók, A Hard Day’s Night.
What’s Next in Computing?
The computing industry progresses in two mostly independent cycles: financial and product cycles. There has been a lot of handwringing lately about where we are in the financial cycle. Financial markets get a lot of attention. They tend to fluctuate unpredictably and sometimes wildly.
The Internet of Beefs
You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming, right? It’s a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is — by design — no graceful way to shut down. A program can only crash and try to recover from a crashed state, which might well be impossible.
Lazy Leadership
Let’s just get this out there: on paper, I’m a terrible CEO. I avoid going into the office, I only meet with my team a couple times a week, and I especially hate giving speeches, coming up with vision statements, leading meetings, and all the other CEO-y stuff you read about in HBR.
The American Abyss
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. When Donald Trump stood before his followers on Jan. 6 and urged them to march on the United States Capitol, he was doing what he had always done.
Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This story is co-published with NPR’s Planet Money.
Life is Short
Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?
Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities
With well over 50 billion dollars to his name, Warren Buffett is consistently ranked among the wealthiest people in the world. Out of all the investors in the 20th century, Buffett was the most successful.
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The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking"
Today, if there's traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there's a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green. Fail to do so, and you're committing a crime: jaywalking.
Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet
In 1989, David Bailey, a researcher in the field of clinical pharmacology (the study of how drugs affect humans), accidentally stumbled on perhaps the biggest discovery of his career, in his lab in London, Ontario.
The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan
The jazz cafe was tiny, with a few polished wood tables, a record collection on display, and two beautiful speakers. The owner, in his 70s, wore a porkpie hat and a sleeve garter. I’d stumbled into this place during a long walk through a stretch of rural Japan.
Our Shared Unsharing
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Combat Fatigue With the Army's 'Aggressive Napping' Strategy
After more than a century with an image problem, napping is getting a rebrand, courtesy of the U.S. Army.
How the Internet gets inside us.
When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched.
Going Sohla
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. Sohla?” the video begins.
The Very Real, Totally Bizarre Bucatini Shortage of 2020
The very real, totally bizarre bucatini shortage of 2020. Part I: The Mystery Things first began to feel off in March. While this sentiment applies to everything in the known and unknown universe, I mean it specifically in regard to America’s supply of dry, store-bought bucatini.
Joan Didion: Staking Out California
In her new book, "The White Album," Joan Didion writes: "Kilimanjaro belongs to Ernest Hemingway. Oxford, Mississippi, belongs to William Faulkner... a great deal of Honolulu has always belonged for me to James Jones...
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The rise of American authoritarianism
A niche group of political scientists may have uncovered what's driving Donald Trump's ascent. What they found has implications that go well beyond 2016.
The Social Life of Forests
As a child, Suzanne Simard often roamed Canada’s old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste).
The Last Children of Down Syndrome
Prenatal testing is changing who gets born and who doesn’t. This is just the beginning. Every few weeks or so, Grete Fält-Hansen gets a call from a stranger asking a question for the first time: What is it like to raise a child with Down syndrome?
The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens
It had taken Pizza more than two years to reach this milestone. In late 2010 she had signed up for Tumblr, the then-three-year-old social network, and secured the URL IWantMyFairyTaleEnding.tumblr.com. At first, she mostly posted photos of party outfits—hipster photos, she thought.
The Digital Maginot Line
There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality.
What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn
Drew was 8 years old when he was flipping through TV channels at home and landed on “Girls Gone Wild.” A few years later, he came across HBO’s late-night soft-core pornography. Then in ninth grade, he found online porn sites on his phone.
Apt: The Natively Integrated Developer
Welcome to the 403 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Thursday! If you’re reading this but haven’t subscribed, join 5,900 smart, curious folks by subscribing here! Happy Thursday! We here at Not Boring HQ always want to keep you on your toes, mix things up, try new things.
Saving Uighur Culture From Genocide
China’s repression of the Uighurs in Xinjiang has forced those in the diaspora to protect their identity from afar. How do you protect a culture that is being wiped out?
The State of Micro Private Equity
Not every empire is built. Even by today's standards, these would represent extraordinary deals, with Louisiana costing roughly $345 million, the three western states totaling $600 million, and Alaska running a mere $126 million.
How Trump Changed America
At 10:37 p.m. on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, I wrote myself an email: I’d been watching the 2016 vote returns in our office. At 9:35 p.m. Donald Trump’s chance of winning the election was 26 percent according to our model; by 10:09 p.m. it had moved to 44 percent. At 10:31 p.m.
How Nothingness Became Everything We Wanted
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. In 2019, I developed a habit of indulging in nothingness.
Personal Leverage: How to Truly 10x Your Productivity
Our days are fixed. You have no less time than Musk or Bezos. You can only do it through personal leverage.
How a History Textbook Would Describe 2020 So Far
History never ends. But history textbooks must. As deadlines for new editions loom, every textbook writer lurches to a sudden stop. The last chapter always ends in uncertainty: unfinished and unresolved. I’ve experienced this many times myself, as a co-author on several history textbooks.
How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled
Note: An audio version of this story aired on NPR's Planet Money. Listen to the episode here.
Horizontal History
Most of us have a pretty terrible understanding of history. Our knowledge is spotty, with large gaps all over the place, and the parts of history we do end up knowing a lot about usually depend on the particular teachers, parents, books, articles, and movies we happen to come across in our lives.
Is technology scrambling my baby's brain?
I reached the breaking point, as many parents do, about two and a half months in. My newborn son, Oliver, was hitting a phase where his five senses were really coming online.
Why efficiency is dangerous and slowing down makes life better
We worship efficiency. Use less to get more. Same-day delivery. Multitask; text on one device while emailing on a second, and perhaps conversing on a third. Efficiency is seen as good. Inefficiency as wasteful. There’s a sound rationale for thinking this way.
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First Principles: The Building Blocks of True Knowledge
The Great Mental Models Volumes One and Two are out. Learn more about the project here. First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated problems and unleash creative possibility.
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Immunology Is Where Intuition Goes to Die
Which is too bad because we really need to understand how the immune system reacts to the coronavirus. Updated at 10:36 a.m. ET on August 5, 2020.
What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop.
How to sell good ideas
The night before I met Malcolm Gladwell, I went to see him speak at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank.
How to Actually, Truly Focus on What You’re Doing
Tired: Shallow work. Wired: Deep work. Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter! Every Monday, S.L. editor Tim Herrera emails readers with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Why Walking Helps Us Think
In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s inter
How to Talk to People, According to Terry Gross
It’s fair to say Terry Gross knows some things about talking to people. The host and co-executive producer of NPR’s “Fresh Air” has interviewed thousands of personalities over the course of her four-decade career.
The Many Faces of Ethan Hawke
On a chilly November morning last year, the sunlight a ribbon of gold on the rolling Virginia hills, Ethan Hawke, who would turn forty-nine the next day, ambled into a replica of Harpers Ferry in 1859.
“Emily in Paris” and the Rise of Ambient TV
By the end of its second episode, I knew that Netflix’s new series “Emily in Paris” was not a lighthearted romantic travelogue but an artifact of contemporary dystopia.
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds
In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life.
If Self-Discipline Feels Difficult, Then You’re Doing It Wrong
When I was in college, there were some people on the internet who claimed that you could train yourself to sleep as little as two hours per day. Keep in mind, this was back in the early 2000s when we all still believed random shit we read on the internet.
You are the world
For any materialist vision of consciousness, the crucial stumbling block is the question of free will.
Chemobrain is real. Here’s what to expect after cancer treatment
A few years ago, one of my students came to me and spoke about her mother who was undergoing treatment for breast cancer. She said her mother was losing her memory and her bearings, and was very worried because nobody knew what to do about her symptoms. The oncologist sent her to the psychiatrist.
Your Pocket journey starts now. Make the most of it.
Welcome to Pocket. You’re about to embark on a journey, one where the vast swaths of information you discover online become knowledge. Everywhere you go with Pocket, the words, sounds, and stories that delight, enlighten, and even shape you will be at your fingertips.
How to Make Yourself Into a Learning Machine
You’re an 18 year old with just a high school degree. You immigrate to a new country that speaks a different language, and start work with some of the brightest engineers in the world. Soon after, you’re thrust into management.
Love and Nice Guys
Are Nice Guys just guys who are nice? If so, why can’t they get a date and what can a BDSM class teach them? And what does this all have to do with bell curves? [Content warning: you will learn little math in this post.
The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
My Dad first gave me The Talk when I was 12 or 13. We were driving down the freeway, and he asked me if I’d ever been judged or harassed for being black. I remember this conversation vividly because my family doesn’t talk too much about their personal experiences with racial discrimination.
What's Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Over the past year, I have skimmed through 2578 social science papers, spending about 2.5 minutes on each one.
The Rise and Fall of American Growth: A summary
The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by Robert J. Gordon, is like a murder mystery in which the murderer is never caught. Indeed there is no investigation, and perhaps no detective.
Global issues beyond 80,000 Hours' current priorities
Here we list over 30 global issues beyond the ones we usually prioritize most highly in our work that you might consider focusing your career on tackling.
Down the ergonomic keyboard rabbit hole
For best results, listen to me read you this post instead! Just play the audio and the page will automatically scroll in sync. This post is all about my recent obsession with ergonomic keyboards.
How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language
When programmers discuss the relative merits of different programming languages, they often talk about them in prosaic terms as if they were so many tools in a tool belt—one might be more appropriate for systems programming, another might be more appropriate for gluing together other programs to a
How To Schedule Your Day For Peak Creative Performance
Are you a certified organizational ninja? It’s okay, nobody is–so steal this idea from career kickstarter Amber Rae, who shares her “Work, Play, Fit, Push” framework for getting things done while staying inspired. 3 minute ReadAbout four years ago I started working for myself.
Reduce Your Stress in Two Minutes a Day
Bill Rielly had it all: a degree from West Point, an executive position at Microsoft, strong faith, a great family life, and plenty of money.
Periwinkle, the Color of Poison, Modernism, and Dusk
On a stretch of rural road not far from my house, there is a small wood where, once a year, for just a few short and cold days, the ground turns a magnificent shade of purple. In a reversal of fortunes, the stand of gracious Maine trees becomes secondary to the ground cover below.
Andrew Sullivan’s Advice for Beating ‘Distraction Sickness’
I was sitting in a large meditation hall in a converted novitiate in central Massachusetts when I reached into my pocket for my iPhone. A woman in the front of the room gamely held a basket in front of her, beaming beneficently, like a priest with a collection plate.
How I became a morning person (and why I decided to make the change)
It’s early and dark. The alarm sounds, and you reach over to switch it off. After a short pause, you sit up. You swing your legs off the bed, touch the floor with your feet, and reach for your phone. You sit quietly while your phone’s screen illuminates the dark bedroom.
You Need to Practice Being Your Future Self
I was coaching Sanjay,* a leader in a technology firm who felt stuck and frustrated. He wasn’t where he wanted to be at this point in his career. He had come to our coaching session, as usual, prepared to discuss the challenges he was currently facing.
Un-Adopted
The Stauffers’ adopted son, Huxley, had been a focal point of their YouTube and Instagram pages until this spring, when he suddenly stopped appearing in videos. This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
Are We Trading Our Happiness for Modern Comforts?
One of the greatest paradoxes in American life is that while, on average, existence has gotten more comfortable over time, happiness has fallen. According to the United States Census Bureau, average household income in the U.S.
The Doomsday Invention
Last year, a curious nonfiction book became a Times best-seller: a dense meditation on artificial intelligence by the philosopher Nick Bostrom, who holds an appointment at Oxford.
``You and Your Research''
J. F. Kaiser Bell Communications Research 445 South Street Morristown, NJ 07962-1910 jfk@bellcore.com At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr. Richard W.
The Ultimate Guide to Becoming Your Best Self: Build your Daily Routine by Optimizing Your Mind, Body and Spirit
Aristotle is credited with saying these 15 famous words. And for most of my life…I didn’t believe him. I fought against cultivating good habits and routines because I didn’t want to feel like I had to live my life by other people’s rules. I wanted to be my own person and do my own thing.
Nostalgia reimagined
The other day I caught myself reminiscing about high school with a kind of sadness and longing that can only be described as nostalgia. I felt imbued with a sense of wanting to go back in time and re-experience my classroom, the gym, the long hallways.
The ‘Batman Effect’: How having an alter ego empowers you
How do the world’s top stars muster the poise and determination to stand on stage, despite the nerves and anxiety of having a bad performance? For both Beyoncé and Adele, the secret has been the creation of an alter ego.
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This cartoon explains why Elon Musk thinks we’re characters in a computer simulation. He might be right.
Elon Musk thinks it's almost certain that we are living in a computer simulation. In short, we are characters in an advanced version of The Sims — so advanced that it creates, well, us.
How to Make Yourself Work When You Just Don’t Want To
There’s that project you’ve left on the backburner – the one with the deadline that’s growing uncomfortably near. And there’s the client whose phone call you really should return – the one that does nothing but complain and eat up your valuable time.
On Witness and Respair: A Personal Tragedy Followed by Pandemic
In early January, we became ill with what we thought was flu. Five days into our illness, we went to a local urgent care center, where the doctor swabbed us and listened to our chests. The kids and I were diagnosed with flu; my Beloved’s test was inconclusive.
The Kingdom That Failed
This is the sixth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction stories from previous years, here. Just behind the kingdom that failed ran a nice little river. It was a clear, lovely stream, and many fish lived in it.
The Munger Technique: The Best Way To Improve Yourself
We’ve all heard about the magic of compounding interest. Something equally powerful is mental compounding interest. Here’s some advice from the investor Charlie Munger that I read in the book, University of Berkshire Hathaway:
Letterheads
There used to be something called the public intellectual. A class of thinkers — mostly writers with prestigious degrees and academics with a knack for writing — set the Discourse.
It Shouldn’t Have Come Down to Her
She died at the Jewish New Year, and my family is not religious. But I had been so happy, in this time of being far from our loved ones, to be eating a Friday-night dinner next to my father, until the news came and the food that had been delicious suddenly tasted like ashes.
How Iceland Beat the Coronavirus
On the morning of Friday, February 28th, Ævar Pálmi Pálmason, a detective with the Reykjavík police department, was summoned by his boss. Iceland did not yet have a confirmed case of COVID-19, but the country’s Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management wanted to be prepared.
The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part I)
“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.”
Yuval Noah Harari: the world after coronavirus | Free to read
Humankind is now facing a global crisis. Perhaps the biggest crisis of our generation. The decisions people and governments take in the next few weeks will probably shape the world for years to come. They will shape not just our healthcare systems but also our economy, politics and culture.
What makes the perfect office?
In 1923, the father of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, was commissioned by a French industrialist to design some homes for workers in his factory near Bordeaux. Le Corbusier duly delivered brightly-hued concrete blocks of pure modernism.
The dangerous downsides of perfectionism
In one of my earliest memories, I’m drawing. I don’t remember what the picture is supposed to be, but I remember the mistake. My marker slips, an unintentional line appears and my lip trembles. The picture has long since disappeared.
What You'll Wish You'd Known
January 2005 (I wrote this talk for a high school. I never actually gave it, because the school authorities vetoed the plan to invite me.) When I said I was speaking at a high school, my friends were curious.
‘Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome’: top climate scientists
Australia’s top climate scientist says “we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse” of civilisation, which may now be inevitable because 9 of the 15 known global climate tipping points that regulate the state of the planet have been activated.
A Letter to My Nephew
I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. I have known both of you all your lives and have carried your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed him and spanked him and watched him learn to walk.
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Installing air filters in classrooms has surprisingly large educational benefits
An emergency situation that turned out to be mostly a false alarm led a lot of schools in Los Angeles to install air filters, and something strange happened: Test scores went up. By a lot. And the gains were sustained in the subsequent year rather than fading away.
Dystopia Isn’t Sci-Fi—for Me, It’s the American Reality
Imagine a city where a group of people have managed against all odds to carve out prosperity for themselves, at least for a little while. These people used to be owned by other people. Now, they are permitted freedom, but only so much, subject to the whims of the once-masters.
The highly unusual company behind Sriracha, the world’s coolest hot sauce
Reuters/Amit DaveNo matter how many chili peppers Huy Fong harvests, it may never be enough.From our ObsessionExplosive GrowthBy This article is more than 2 years old.
How to Be Bored
In the 1930s, a professor of psychology at City College of New York, Joseph Barmack, ran a series of experiments on the psychophysiology of boredom.
The Black Bartenders That Created the Dive Bar
Part of writing history is finding a path around the load of stories and “facts” that have been handed down to us so that you can see the real people standing behind them.
Did Pangolin Trafficking Cause the Coronavirus Pandemic?
The town of Yokadouma lies in remote eastern Cameroon, close to the border with the Central African Republic, at a juncture of narrow roads that—when I visited, in May, 2010, near the end of the long dry season—were unpaved and parched, their laterite clay pounded to powder by logging trucks rum
The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape
Eight years ago, in the coastal township of Shawbost on the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis, I was given an extraordinary document.
The Secret to Happiness Is 10 Specific Behaviors
Happiness is the purpose of life. Despite this, only one in three Americans say they’re very happy. Several years ago in an interview with Conan O’Brien, Louis C. K. tells of flying on a newly equipped Wi-Fi airplane. He was amazed by the new technology.
I Think You're Fat
Here's the truth about why I'm writing this article:I want to fulfill my contract with my boss. I want to avoid getting fired. I want all the attractive women I knew in high school and college to read it.
Email Is Broken. Can Anyone Fix It?
Let's start this story at the end: You can't kill email. Attempting to do so is a decades-long tradition of the tech industry, a cliché right up there with "Uber, but for" and "the Netflix of X." AOL Instant Messenger tried to kill email. So did MySpace.
8 Life Lessons I’ve Learned at 40-Something That I Wish I’d Known at 20-Something
My 40s are a lot different than I thought they’d be when I was still in my 20s. On the one hand, I have a much deeper understanding of why my dad liked naps so much when I was a kid. I’ve learned not to ever fall asleep in an awkward position if I want to be able to walk the next day.
The War That Doomed America in Vietnam: The First Indochina War
Heavy guns ring out from the surrounding, wooded, hills. The enemy seems like they’re everywhere and nowhere. The troops on the ground are slowly surrounded and pounded from invisible positions. Morale is sinking quickly as the jungle is torn up in explosions of mud, dirt and fire.
Which of these 6 time traps is eating up all your time?
There is an 8 out of 10 chance that you are one of the poorest people in the world. However, when I say you’re poor, I’m not talking about your bank account (although material poverty is indeed a pressing concern for many of us).
How to Tell the Story of a Cult
Not 20 minutes into The Vow, HBO’s enthralling-then-ultimately-gasbaggy docuseries, things started to feel concerningly familiar to me.
An anxious discipline
Byron Kinnaird on the need for our discipline to take responsibility for the mental health of students and the wider profession.
The Tricks to Make Yourself Effortlessly Charming
From the first moment you walk into a room, people are making judgments about how much they like you. Fortunately, there are ways to improve your chances.
Building the Middle Class of the Creator Economy
[Hi readers, This essay was published today in Harvard Business Review. Hope you enjoy it, and let me know your thoughts in the comments below! -Li]
The Top Product + Growth Strategy Posts Of 2020 — Reforge
Push the frontier of knowledge on building and growing technology companies. Elevate the voices of those practicing on the frontier.
Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man is, particularly relative to its prescience, one of the most misunderstood books of all time. Aris Roussinos explained at UnHerd:
How to Get Things Done When You Don't Feel Like It
Have you ever come into work, sat down at your computer to begin a project, opened your editor, and then just stared at the screen? This happens to me all the time, so I understand your struggle. Even if you love your job, you don't always feel like doing it every day.
The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising
Sometime in June 2003, Mel Karmazin, the president of Viacom, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, walked into the Google offices in Mountain View, California. Google was a hip, young tech company that made money – actual money! – off the internet.
How I Got My Attention Back
There are a thousand beautiful ways to start the day that don’t begin with looking at a phone. And yet so few of us choose to do so.
What you should be working on
I do not plan to start another startup. After ten years, it feels mad to say that. Here's how this happened: I spent an hour listing out everything I cared about — from human connection, to self-education, to wealth.
My Mustache, My Self
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. Like a lot of men, in pursuit of novelty and amusement during these months of isolation, I grew a mustache. The reviews were predictably mixed and predictably predictable. “Porny”? Yes.
The Prophecies of Q
American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase. If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street.
Why Trump Can’t Afford to Lose
The President was despondent. Sensing that time was running out, he had asked his aides to draw up a list of his political options.
From The MIT Press Reader
Why do we include the sounds of words in our thoughts when we think without speaking? Are they just an illusion induced by our memory of overt speech?
Torn apart: the vicious war over young adult books
Authors who write about marginalised communities are facing abuse, boycotts and even death threats. What is cancel culture doing to young adult fiction? Earlier this month, the author and screenwriter Gareth Roberts announced that his story was being removed from a forthcoming Doctor Who anthology.
N. K. Jemisin’s Dream Worlds
Several years ago, N. K. Jemisin, the fantasy and science-fiction author, had a dream that shook her. In her sleep, she found herself standing in a surreal tableau with a massif floating in the distance.
Serial Killers Should Fear This Algorithm
On Aug. 18, 2010, a police lieutenant in Gary, Ind., received an e-mail, the subject line of which would be right at home in the first few scenes of a David Fincher movie:
How to Start Running: A Beginner’s Guide
Want to start a running habit but have no idea where to start? Here’s everything you need to know to start running and actually enjoy it.
You’re Only As Good As Your Worst Day
We tend to measure performance by what happens when things are going well. Yet how people, organizations, companies, leaders, and other things do on their best day isn’t all that instructive. To find the truth, we need to look at what happens on the worst day.
Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic
Woman running through the mud at the Woodstock Music Festival, New York, US, 17th August 1969. (Photo by Owen Franken/Corbis via Getty Images)) In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States.
Don’t Lose the Thread. The Economy Is Experiencing an Epic Collapse of Demand.
Despite it all — a nation on edge, with an untamed pandemic and convulsive protests over police brutality — for the first time in three months there is a scent of economic optimism in the air.
There’s a Dark Side to Meditation That No One Talks About
Meditation can bring about a wide variety of thoughts and emotions—some are peaceful, others are not.
An Effortless Way to Improve Your Memory
A surprisingly potent technique can boost your short and long-term recall – and it appears to help everyone from students to Alzheimer’s patients.
Why You Need an Untouchable Day Every Week
Some days it can feel impossible to escape constant meetings and phone calls that get in the way of your personal productivity. Here’s one method for getting back some of that precious time.
Fruits and Vegetables Are Trying to Kill You
Antioxidant vitamins don’t stress us like plants do—and don’t have their beneficial effect.
A Few Rules
The person who tells the most compelling story wins. Not the best idea. Just the story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads. Something can be factually true but contextually nonsense.
The Minimalist’s Strength Workout
Five exercises that will guarantee you have the strength to adventure all weekend, well into your eighties.
Context switching costs more than we give it credit for.
When I was a junior engineer, one of the best advice I got from a seasoned principal engineer was to batch things, stack rank them in preferred order (by time, size, impact, or priority), and execute. And, be careful when batching them.
Against Waldenponding
1/ Lemme do a 1-slide presentation since I'm feeling job sick. Title: How to Actually Manage Attention Without Smashing Your Phone and Retreating to a Log Cabin2/ Premise: FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books.
Inside the airline industry's meltdown
Coronavirus has hit few sectors harder than air travel, wiping out tens of thousands of jobs and uncountable billions in revenue. While most fleets were grounded, the industry was forced to reimagine its future
How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda
The messages wishing me a gruesome death arrive slowly at first and then all at once. I am condemned to be burned, raped, tortured. Some include a video of joyful dancing at a funeral, with fists pounding on a wooden casket.
This Land Is No Longer Your Land
Before setting foot on this path, he unfolded a huge U.S. Forest Service map and reviewed the route, Trail 267.
The Eleventh Word
The sky was a slate of electric indigo. We were sitting in the bath, my year-and-a-half-old son and I. My wife popped her head in the door. He looked at her, giving her a smile I will never get, and then pointed to the painting of a magenta fish on the wall. It was, perhaps, his eleventh word.
The Inside Story of MacKenzie Scott, the Mysterious 60-Billion-Dollar Woman
While Jeff Bezos was building Amazon from a garage into one of the most powerful companies on earth and becoming the richest businessmen of this age, the world knew very little about his wife, MacKenzie, a novelist and a mother of four who helped start Amazon from that garage.
How to overcome distractions (and be more productive)
Distractions tempt us at every turn, from an ever-growing library of Netflix titles to video games (Animal Crossing is my current vice) to all of the other far more tantalizing things we could be doing instead of doing what actually needs to be done.
The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projections, 2010-2050
The religious profile of the world is rapidly changing, driven primarily by differences in fertility rates and the size of youth populations among the world’s major religions, as well as by people switching faiths.
Desire Paths – Emergence Magazine
Being restricted in where we can go offers new opportunities for noticing where we are. Since we went into lockdown, I’ve been working in a room that looks down on our suburban back garden.
The Communal Mind
A few years ago, when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind. My interest was not academic.
Whatever Happened to ______ ?
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?/Are you — Nobody — too?”” — Emily Dickinson, 1891 “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” — Virginia Woolf, 1929 “No name? Well, the roads are full of nameless girls.
Nine Nonobvious Ways to Have Deeper Conversations
After all we’ve been through this year, wouldn’t it be nice, even during a distanced holiday season, to be able to talk about this whole experience with others, in a deep, satisfying way? To help, I’ve put together a list of nonobvious lessons for how to have better conversations, which I’ve
The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial
A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre. The food, I opined to my wife, was premium mediocre.
Never-ending Niches
You have almost certainly seen this chart about newspaper advertising revenue since World War II: The obvious takeaway is that the Internet killed what had been a profitable and growing business; what is interesting, though, is that circulation numbers tell a somewhat different story: Time and Rea
Mansionism 1: Building-Milieu Fit
In politically turbulent times, when it is not clear which way the arc of history will bend, it is useful to reframe the question of political futures in terms of built-environment futures.
The End of OS X
Yesterday, 18 years later, OS X finally reached its own end of the road: the next version of macOS is not 10.16, but 11.0. There was no funeral.
How to Angel Invest, Part 2
We have another podcast called Spearhead, where we discuss startups and angel investing. This is a compilation of recent episodes. Also, see Part 1. Nivi: For the past few episodes, we talked about why you should angel invest and how to get proprietary dealflow by building a brand.
Walking
Henry David Thoreau, the naturalist, philosopher, and author of such classics as Walden and "Civil Disobedience," contributed a number of writings to The Atlantic in its early years.
Off-beat Zen
Ever since I was a child, I have been acutely sensitive to the idea — in the way that other people seem to feel only after bereavement or some shocking unexpected event — that the human intellect is unable, finally, to make sense of the world: everything is contradiction and paradox, and no one
The Unexpected Antidote to Procrastination
A recent early morning hike in Malibu, California, led me to a beach, where I sat on a rock and watched surfers.
An Adult’s Guide to Social Skills, for Those Who Were Never Taught
It’s a shame so few of us are taught the basics of how to interact constructively with each other. If you never were, we’re here to help. Unlike topics like math or science, social skills are more of a “learn on the job” kind of skill.
The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time
Why is it that between 25% and 50% of people report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work? It’s not just the number of hours we’re working, but also the fact that we spend too many continuous hours juggling too many things at the same time.
The economics of vending machines
Three months ago, Jalea Pippens — a phlebotomist at St. John Hospital in Detroit — had her hours cut. In the midst of the pandemic, the 23-year-old found herself in dire need of a second income stream.
Wordy Weapons of Is-Ought Alloy
[Note: I have a nagging feeling I’ve spent a few thousand words spelling out something completely obvious. Still, I hope there’s value in actually spelling it out.] It depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. —William Jefferson Clinton He was right, you know.
Synthetix for Beginners
Synthetix is a derivatives trading protocol on the Ethereum blockchain where holders of the Synthetix Network Token (SNX) are shareholders of the network and receive fees from every trade.
Introduction to Alexander Technique – It’s Not Posture
Most people know Alexander Technique as something about posture, or something to remove muscle tension or aches. It can have those effects, but that’s not what I’ll be discussing here.
Three Big Things: The Most Important Forces Shaping the World
An irony of studying history is that we often know exactly how a story ends, but have no idea where it began. Here’s an example. What caused the financial crisis?
My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s
It can be hard to see the gradual improvement of most goods over time, but I think one way to get a handle on them is to look at their downstream effects: all the small ordinary everyday things which nevertheless depend on obscure innovations and improving cost-performance ratios and gradually dropp
The Vegetarians Who Turned Into Butchers
At Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe in Denver, Kate Kavanaugh trimmed the sinew from a deep-red hunk of beef the size of a bed pillow.
All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10X Revenue Club
With the IPO market now blown wide-open, and the media completely infatuated with frothy trades in the bubbly late stage private market, it is common to see articles that reference both “valuation” and “revenue” and suggest that there is a correlation between the two.
We Need a New Science of Progress
Humanity needs to get better at knowing how to get better. In 1861, the American scientist and educator William Barton Rogers published a manifesto calling for a new kind of research institution.
It’s Time to Build for Good
Americans have gotten quite bad at building things in physical reality. Although the United States remains on the frontier of information technology, we have neglected the mundane and the essential to the point of crisis.
There’s No Homunculus In Our Brain Who Guides Us
Why the cognitive-map theory is misguided. In the early 1980s, the psychologist Harry Heft put a 16 mm camera in the back of a sports car and made a movie. It consisted of a continuous shot of a residential neighborhood in Granville, Ohio, where Heft was a professor at Denison University.
Signaling as a Service
One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. So we think and say that we do something for a specific reason, but in reality, there’s a hidden, selfish motive: to show off and increase our social status.
A Text Renaissance
There is a renaissance underway in online text as a medium. The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are: I want to take a stab at lightly theorizing this renaissance. And also speculating, in light of this renaissance, about what might be the eighth and penultimate death of blogging.
Edward Hopper and American Solitude
I’ve been thinking a lot about Edward Hopper. So have other stay-at-homes, I notice online. The visual bard of American solitude—not loneliness, a maudlin projection—speaks to our isolated states these days with fortuitous poignance. But he is always doing that, pandemic or no pandemic.
How to Start a Blog that Changes Your Life
Depending on the month and Google's mood, 10,000 to 20,000 people read this site per day. The various products associated with the site earn over $10,000 a month, almost entirely passively. Last month they made over $60,000.
OLD Florida Folk Magic: Native Shamanism and Hoodoo (Pt 1)
One day it hit me. I’d read books on Southern Conjure, New Orleans Voodoo, and Appalachian folk magic, but I’d never read anything on Florida folk magic. In my naivete, I thought it would be a quick internet search. But when Google gave me no results, I realized I had to dig deeper.
The Wartime Spies Who Used Knitting as an Espionage Tool
During World War I, a grandmother in Belgium knitted at her window, watching the passing trains. As one train chugged by, she made a bumpy stitch in the fabric with her two needles. Another passed, and she dropped a stitch from the fabric, making an intentional hole.
Old Florida Folk Magic: Granny Midwives, Hoodoo & Folk Remedies (Pt 2)
Six months ago, I set off on a journey into the mysterious world of old Florida folk traditions, herbalism and spiritual practices. The time spent researching, asking questions, and doing footwork was well spent and the results? Fascinating and enriching.
The Retro Wife
The Makino family. Photo: Julie Blackmon When Kelly Makino was a little girl, she loved to go orienteering—to explore the wilderness near her rural Pennsylvania home, finding her way back with a compass and a map—and the future she imagined for herself was equally adventuresome.
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Inside Sun Noodle, the Secret Weapon of America's Best Ramen Shops
There were only about three or four ramen shops on Oahu when Hidehito Uki founded Sun Noodle in 1981. Ramen in America was pretty much just a cup of noodles you cooked in the microwave.
On Jane Austen’s Politics of Walking
Left foot, right foot. Left foot, right foot. Since we last picked our kids up at school, four months ago, we have taken two walks a day around our neighborhood on the south side of Chicago.
Big Tech Has Helped Trash America
The chaos of the last two weeks offers an opportunity to rethink the role of technology in our lives. Ms. Swisher covers technology and is a contributing opinion writer.
Have We Already Been Visited by Aliens?
On October 19, 2017, a Canadian astronomer named Robert Weryk was reviewing images captured by a telescope known as Pan-STARRS1 when he noticed something strange.
‘We’re the Only Plane in the Sky’
Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board. Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001.
What if You Could Outsource Your To-Do List?
Back when the world seemed bright and ambitious—another century, it might have been—I managed to convince myself, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, that what I really needed in my life was an assistant.
Birding While Black
It’s only 9:06 a.m. and I think I might get hanged today. The job I volunteered for was to record every bird I could see or hear in a three-minute interval. I am supposed to do that fifty times. Look, listen, and list for three minutes. Get in the car. Drive a half mile. Stop. Get out.
Sweatpants Forever: How the Fashion Industry Collapsed
Even before the pandemic, the whole fashion industry had started to unravel. What happens now that no one has a reason to dress up? By Irina Aleksander Photographs by Stephanie Gonot • August 6, 2020
Philosophy of Therapy
For a lot of people, therapy can be a confusing, mysterious thing of questionable value. Many have tried it when they were younger, and felt that at best it was only of minimal help, while for others it actually made things worse.
The Need to Think and Talk like an Executive
Here’s a hard truth user experience design leaders find themselves learning: No one will buy into your UX design ideas if they can’t see how those ideas matter to them. This is especially true for your organization’s leadership.
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Cultural Design: The Scientific Field Needed for the 21st Century
This article is translated from its original Portuguese version and was written by Danilo Oliveira Vaz. He has done a fantastic job summarizing what we are doing to birth the field of culture design. Obrigado, Danilo!
Radical dimensions
Writing away at my desk, I reach my hand up to turn on a lamp, and down to open a drawer to take out a pen.
Goodhart’s Law and Why Measurement is Hard
The other day, I was failing to teach my 3-year-old son about measurement. He wanted to figure out if something would fit in an envelope, and I was “helping” by showing him how to measure the width of the envelope, then comparing it to the width of the paper he was trying to insert.
Building remote-first teams
It’s hard to pinpoint the beginnings of remote work, but undeniably there’s credit due to one tech company originally based in Chicago — 37 Signals.
The Street as Platform 2050
So began an essay I wrote in 2007 called ‘The Street As Platform’, concerning the then-emerging ideas of urban informatics, Internet of Things, and the smart city.
Running the Arc’teryx Squamish 50 23k
On Saturday, the 10th of August, I ran in my first ever race, road or trail, the “Squamish 50” 23k. It’s called the Squamish 50 as the main race is 50 miles long, but they also offer variants of the course that are 50km’s and 23km’s in length.
The need to touch
Touch is the first sense by which we encounter the world, and the final one to leave us as we approach death’s edge. ‘Touch comes before sight, before speech,’ writes Margaret Atwood in her novel The Blind Assassin (2000).
Social Justice: Our New Civil Religion
Good afternoon from Krakow. I have a long, meaty post about the life and death of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, the priest martyred by the Communists in 1984, but I can’t post it until I hear back from the museum researcher I interviewed yesterday, who needs to confirm some facts.
A Self-Governing Literature
Who Owns the Map of the World? The imaginative literary mind is as boundless as it is borderless and bountiful in its way, finding ways of powerfully creating anew the already imagined with the unimagined or unimaginable.
#3 - What Vertical Integration Means for Architects
Hello and welcome to new subscribers! Two big topics on my mind for this issue. If you’ve stumbled on this and enjoy what you read, please subscribe so you don’t miss future issues! This week, two relatively new entrants into the pre-fab residential startup space received some good press.
Inside the Invasive, Secretive “Bossware” Tracking Workers
COVID-19 has pushed millions of people to work from home, and a flock of companies offering software for tracking workers has swooped in to pitch their products to employers across the country. The services often sound relatively innocuous.
The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality
Why I Made This Future is a recurring feature that invites speculative fiction authors, futurists, screenwriters, and so on to discuss how and why they built their fictional future worlds.
Body Pleasure
Suffering is very serious. Death is very important. Let me instead talk about something else that is becoming both serious and important, as the world gets richer and more awesome: the problem of pleasure. Excessive leisure time is a problem that has only become widespread in the past century.
Generative Design is Doomed to Fail
I tried to recall whether I’d said anything controversial. But my most recent article was relatively tame, just 1,300 words in Architect Magazine about algorithms generating building layouts. If anything, it was complimentary of Autodesk.
Boudica the Warrior Queen
In the 1st century CE, Boudica, warrior queen of the Iceni people, led an army of 100,000 to victory against the mighty Roman Empire. So complete were Boudica’s triumphs that Rome was in danger of losing control of her province.
Building a digital New York Times: CEO Mark Thompson
Thompson looks back on an eight-year tenure that has transformed a 170-year-old news brand into a global, digital-subscription-first powerhouse—and at what lies ahead for its new leadership.
Plot Economics
For the fourth time in my adult memory, humanity has collectively, visibly lost the plot at a global level. My criteria are fairly restrictive: The dotcom bust and the 2007 crash don’t make my list for instance, and neither do previous recent epidemics like SARS or Ebola.
The economics of shit speech
It’s time we fixed the New Zealand news media’s problem with shit speech. First, let’s put together a working definition. Shit speech is the stuff that might not necessarily be described as hate speech, but it occupies much of the same spectrum.
‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of dropshipping
Canggu is a place where people go to feel rich. The clicking of keyboards in the Balinese town’s co-working spaces is drowned out only by the roar of mopeds. Over smoothie bowls and lattes, western immigrants – expats, as they prefer to be known – talk about themselves, loudly.
The sole function of the clitoris is female orgasm. Is that why it’s ignored by medical science?
Professor Caroline de Costa is awaiting feedback.
The Amazing Psychology of Japanese Train Stations
The nation’s famed mastery of rail travel has been aided by some subtle behavioral tricks.
Where loneliness can lead
‘Please write regularly, or otherwise I am going to die out here.’ Hannah Arendt didn’t usually begin letters to her husband this way, but in the spring of 1955 she found herself alone in a ‘wilderness’.
‘We belong out there’: How the Nordic concept of friluftsliv — outdoor life — could help the Pacific Northwest get through this COVID winter
It started with a green light. Andy Meyer noticed it as he looked out from the house where he was staying on Beacon Hill, as his own home underwent renovations to welcome a new baby. “We figured it was a traffic light peeking through the trees,” he said.
When to break a rule
In a high school in Wisconsin, an African American security guard is dealing with a disruptive student, also African American. While being led away by the guard, the student repeatedly calls him a notorious racial slur.
The mindfulness conspiracy
It is sold as a force that can help us cope with the ravages of capitalism, but with its inward focus, mindful meditation may be the enemy of activism. By Mindfulness has gone mainstream, with celebrity endorsement from Oprah Winfrey and Goldie Hawn.
Amp It Up!
As the former CEO of both Data Domain and ServiceNow, two successful tech companies in recent years, I am often confronted with questions: what did you guys do? What is the secret sauce? How did you do it? We never thought of ourselves as that different.
Land of the “Super Founders“
I Spent 300 Hours Gathering Data On Billion-Dollar Startups and Here’s 100 Charts You Shouldn’t MissAli TamasebAbout 15 months ago, I embarked on a journey to answer a personal question: what did billion-dollar startups look like when they were getting started? There are a lot of stereotypes and
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
Alright folks, gather round and let me tell you the story of (almost) the biggest engineering disaster I’ve ever had the misfortune of being involved in.
The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
It was heard in over 50 different locations around the globe.
How Hatred Came To Dominate American Politics
To anyone following American politics, it’s not exactly news that Democrats and Republicans don’t like each other. Take what happened in the presidential debate last week. President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden did little to conceal their disdain of one another.
How the Coronavirus Will Reshape Architecture
But the Aaltos’ choices of material and design weren’t just aesthetically fashionable. “The main purpose of the building is to function as a medical instrument,” Hugo would later write.
Colorectal cancer screening
When I learned about Chadwick Boseman’s death from colorectal cancer (CRC) at the age of 43 a few weeks ago, it broke my heart. I know it might seem odd to be so struck by the passing of someone we never knew.
In praise of choicelessness
The choiceless mode of relating to meaningness has no “becauses.” In the systematic mode, when you ask “why,” a system answers “because…”. The “becauses” hang together in ways that make everything make sense.
My 2020 Review, Reflection, and Key Lessons
I’ve never spent anywhere close to as long on this process before. It’s often happened in a few hours on a plane ride, or on some December Sunday afternoon. But this year I wanted to take it seriously. Especially since I happen to be at a pivotal point in my life.
Design Docs at Google
One of the key elements of Google's software engineering culture is the use of defining software designs through design docs. These are relatively informal documents that the primary author or authors of a software system or application create before they embark on the coding project.
Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy
For a decade, Carlos Silva has been gluing, nailing, and re-zippering shoes and boots at Stern Shoe Repair, a usually well-trafficked shop just outside the Metro entrance at Union Station in Washington, D.C. On a typical day, he would arrive at 7 a.m. and stay until 8 p.m.
“I Have Blood On My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation
A 6,600-word internal memo from a fired Facebook data scientist details how the social network knew about specific examples of global political manipulation — and failed to act.
Buying organic veggies at the supermarket is a waste of money
Reuters/Rebecca CookOrganic carrots: not worth your whole paycheck.By This article is more than 2 years old.It has happened to all of us.
Why Did Humans Lose Their Fur?
We are the naked apes of the world, having shed most of our body hair long ago.
Why You Should Talk to Yourself in the Third Person
According to the Bible, King Solomon, the Israelite king, was an incredibly wise man. People traveled far and wide just to ask for his advice, including two women who claimed to be the mother of the same baby. Solomon devised a clever way to solve the dispute.
The Mutated Virus Is a Ticking Time Bomb
A new variant of the coronavirus is spreading across the globe. It was first identified in the United Kingdom, where it is rapidly spreading, and has been found in multiple countries.
The tyranny of chairs: why we need better design
Most chairs aren’t designed to serve human bodies – but a better seat is possible. By ‘Let’s face the considerable evidence that all sitting is harmful,” writes Galen Cranz, a design historian whose book The Chair traces this object’s long history. Not all sitting, of course.
Why Sudan's Remarkable Ancient Civilization Has Been Overlooked by History
If you drive north from Khartoum along a narrow desert road toward the ancient city of Meroe, a breathtaking view emerges from beyond the mirage: dozens of steep pyramids piercing the horizon. No matter how many times you may visit, there is an awed sense of discovery.
There Are Other Options Besides Reopening Schools
Alternative solutions to parents’ dilemma just require more time, money, and imagination. In ordinary times, K–12 schools offer valuable services to two distinct populations, and arguably get far more credit for serving one than the other.
The Mysterious Deaths of 6 Historical Figures
You might think that dying while famous means a well-documented death proceeding from an obvious cause, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Scientists Discover a Major Lasting Benefit of Growing Up Outside the City
“It’s only the last few hundred years that we have moved into cities.”
The Science Behind Honey’s Eternal Shelf Life
A slew of factors—its acidity, its lack of water and the presence of hydrogen peroxide—work in perfect harmony, allowing the sticky treat to last forever.
How To Say No, For The People Pleaser Who Always Says Yes
It can be tempting to say yes to things you just don't want to do. Might as well just get it done so nothing bad happens, right? But there's a high price for constantly aiming to make other people happy.
Pointers for Appliqué
Appliqué may be a fancy-sounding word complete with an accent mark, but the process is nothing more than simply sewing a piece of fabric on top of another and adding a neat border of stitches.
It’s 2022. What Does Life Look Like?
The pandemic could shape the world, much as World War II and the Great Depression did. Mr. Leonhardt writes The Morning newsletter.
10 Tips to Shift Your Money Mindset and Generate Abundance
Do you worry about your finances and feel that no matter how hard you work or what you do there’s never enough money to cover your expenses let alone do the things you really want to do like starting your own business or traveling? It’s a concern for many women at midlife.
What Romance Really Means After 10 Years of Marriage
This week, the Cut brings you True Romance: five days of stories about love as it’s actually lived. I’m an advice columnist, so sometimes people ask me about how they can “keep the romance alive” in their marriages.
Everybody Hates Facebook
Welcome to the 2,121 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since last Monday! If you aren’t subscribed, join 25,452 smart, curious folks by subscribing here!
Slack Is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work
In 2016, I interviewed an entrepreneur named Sean who had co-founded a small technology startup based in London. As with many organizations at that time, Sean and his team relied on e-mail as their primary collaboration tool. “We used to have our Gmail constantly opened,” he said.
Barefoot in Quarantine
This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly. On the first of April, a few weeks into our national confinement, Ina Garten posted a video of herself to her Instagram account mixing up a batch of cosmos.
Inside the Flour Company Supplying America’s Sudden Baking Obsession
Baking bread was a regular family affair in Linda Ely’s childhood home, leaving her with a lifelong bread-baking habit and some powerful memories. “I think of my family every single time I bake,” she says.
The Great Battle of Fire and Light
Note: This is the second post in a series. If you’re new to the series, start with the intro post. Visit the series home page for the full table of contents. There is a great deal of human nature in people. – Mark Twain
A Game of Giants
Billions of years ago, some single-celled creatures realized that being just one cell left your options pretty limited. So they figured out a cool trick. By joining together with other single cells, they could form a giant creature that had all kinds of new advantages.
Our Ghost-Kitchen Future
Last fall, walking down Mission Street, in San Francisco, I noticed a new addition to an otherwise unremarkable parking lot at the base of Bernal Heights Hill: a large, white trailer, about the size of three parking spaces, plastered with a banner that read “food pick up here.
Is Substack the Media Future We Want?
Haley Nahman was having a weird time. She had spent most of the pandemic inside, shuttling around the one-bedroom apartment she shares with her partner, Avi. “Not to paint too bleak a picture, but I’ve started sitting down in the shower,” she wrote, in September, in an e-mail.
Writing the Apocalypse
It’s like the apocalypse out there.’ How many times I heard it said in the summer, in the bushfire season.
The case for a learned sorting algorithm
We’ve watched machine learning thoroughly pervade the web giants, make serious headway in large consumer companies, and begin its push into the traditional enterprise. ML, then, is rapidly becoming an integral part of how we build applications of all shapes and sizes.
Could a Peasant defeat a Knight in Battle?
I was recently asked how movies about the Middle Ages often show that it was fairly easy for a peasant to fight and kill a knight in battle. That a heavily armoured knight could be dragged off his horse and just struck dead with a dagger.
Elle: inferring isolation anomalies from experimental observations
Is there anything more terrifying, and at the same time more useful, to a database vendor than Kyle Kingsbury’s Jepsen? As the abstract to today’s paper choice wryly puts it, “experience shows that many databases do not provide the isolation guarantees they claim.
Virtual consensus in Delos
Virtual consensus in Delos, Balakrishnan et al. (Facebook, Inc.), OSDI’2020 Before we dive into this paper, if you click on the link above and then download and open up the paper pdf you might notice the familiar red/orange splash of USENIX, and appreciate the fully open access.
Helios: hyperscale indexing for the cloud & edge (part II)
Last time out we looked at the motivations for a new reference blueprint for large-scale data processing, as embodied by Helios. Today we’re going to dive into the details of Helios itself. As a reminder:
Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation
Seeing is believing: a client-centric specification of database isolation, Crooks et al., PODC’17.
Achieving 100Gbps intrusion prevention on a single server
Papers-we-love is hosting a mini-event this Wednesday (18th) where I’ll be leading a panel discussion including one of the authors of today’s paper choice: Justine Sherry. Please do join us if you can.
Bias in word embeddings
There are no (stochastic) parrots in this paper, but it does examine bias in word embeddings, and how that bias carries forward into models that are trained using them.
The Invisible City Beneath Paris
The map runs to sixteen laminated foolscap pages, or about ten square feet, when I tile the pages together. I have been given it on the condition that I do not pass it on. It is not like any map I have ever seen, and I have seen some strange maps in my time.
The Eco–Yogi Slumlords of Brooklyn
Gennaro Brooks-Church at 1214 Dean Street as nearly 100 activists protest his attempt to evict his tenants. The battle of 1214 Dean Street commenced on a warm afternoon in early July.
Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?
Edinburgh Castle, many centuries old, has been called the most besieged place in Britain. In 2005, on the night Melissa Anelli arrived, it was besieged primarily by children. The cover of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was projected on its outer walls. Inside, J. K.
The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship
A few months ago, when millions of Americans were watching the Netflix series Emily in Paris because it was what we had been given that week, I cued up the first episode and was beset almost immediately by an intense longing.
Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life
In the very first instalment of my column for the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, a dizzying number of years ago now, I wrote that it would continue until I had discovered the secret of human happiness, whereupon it would cease.
The Big Here and Long Now
It was 1978. I was new to New York. A rich acquaintance had invited me to a housewarming party, and, as my cabdriver wound his way down increasingly potholed and dingy streets, I began wondering whether he'd got the address right.
The millions being made from cardboard theft
Getting all your cardboard recycled may often seem like a pain, but there is big money to be made from all this so-called "beige gold". And sadly this is attracting criminals around the world.
Religion, Violence, Tolerance & Progress: Nothing to do with Theology
1) Religions map to highly differentiated belief clusters and mentalities that have little to do with their theologies, 2) Heresies are separatist movements, often ethnic, and have little to do with religious doctrine.
How ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ Foretold Our Era of Grifting
On the eve of yet another screen adaptation, Patricia Highsmith’s mordant 1955 tale of calculated self-invention feels as relevant as ever. THERE’S AN ART to imposture.
Getting back to nature: how forest bathing can make us feel better
Every day, apart from when it’s raining heavily, Dr Qing Li heads to a leafy park near the Nippon Medical School in Tokyo where he works.
The Beyonce Freelancing Method
Nicki Minaj opens the track Only with the lines: “Yo, I never fucked Wayne I never fucked Drake. All my life man, fuck’s sake. If I did I’d menage with ‘em and let ‘em eat my ass like a cupcake.
Your handy postcard-sized guide to statistics
“The best financial advice for most people would fit on an index card.” That’s the gist of an offhand comment in 2013 by Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago.
The Unraveling of America
Wade Davis holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. His award-winning books include “Into the Silence” and “The Wayfinders.” His new book, “Magdalena: River of Dreams,” is published by Knopf.
How Gödel’s Proof Works
His incompleteness theorems destroyed the search for a mathematical theory of everything. Nearly a century later, we’re still coming to grips with the consequences. In 1931, the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel pulled off arguably one of the most stunning intellectual achievements in history.
The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading.
Don’t Sell a Product, Sell a Whole New Way of Thinking
We all know the story. A team creates a groundbreaking new innovation only to see it mired in internal debates. When it is eventually launched in the market, there is an initial flurry of sales to early adopters, but then sales cycles become sluggish.
Why Sex? Biologists Find New Explanations.
Why did sex evolve? Theories usually focus on the diversity of future generations, but some researchers find compelling explanations in the immediate benefits to individuals. Sex might be biology’s most difficult enigma.
How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
The brain can’t directly encode the passage of time, but recent work hints at a workaround for putting timestamps on memories of events. It began about a decade ago at Syracuse University, with a set of equations scrawled on a blackboard.
How to Disappear
Even in the middle of major city, it’s possible to go off the grid. In 2016, the Atlantic profiled a family in Washington, D.C., that harvests their entire household energy from a single, 1-kilowatt solar panel on a patch of cement in their backyard.
Archaeologists May Have Finally Solved The Mystery Of What Happened To Roanoke
In 1590, every settler in the colony of Roanoke suddenly vanished without a trace. An archaeological study has turned up thousands of artifacts that may prove what happened to them. The mystery of what happened to Roanoke has puzzled historians for centuries.
The Racist Dawn of Capitalism
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Edward E. Baptist Basic Books, $35 (cloth)
The Condensed Guide to Running Meetings
We love to hate meetings. And with good reason — they clog up our days, making it hard to get work done in the gaps, and so many feel like a waste of time.
How to find focus
I’ve had an easy time being focused lately. I say no to obligations or opportunities that I would have easily accepted before. I have fewer things on my todo list, which means I get to spend more time on the few things that I’ve said yes to when I sit down to be creative.
Why Time Management Is Ruining Our Lives
All of our efforts to be more productive backfire – and only make us feel even busier and more stressed.
India, Jio, and the Four Internets
One of the more pernicious mistruths surrounding the debate about TikTok is that this will potentially lead to the splintering of the Internet; this completely erases the history of China’s Great Firewall, started 23 years ago, which effectively cut China off from most Western services.
The TikTok War
Over the last week, as the idea of banning TikTok in the U.S. has shifted from a fringe idea to a seeming inevitability (thanks in no small part to India’s decision to do just that), those opposed to the idea and those in support seem to be talking past each other.
India Bans Chinese Apps, The App Store Firewall, Reddit and The Donald
UPDATE: I have added important clarification about India's capabilities with regards to banning Chinese services at the ISP level. I know that yesterday’s Weekly Article, Apple and Facebook, was unusually long, and featured a lot of old Stratechery pieces.
"Page Saved!" Here are some tips to get started with Pocket
You've used the Pocket button to save a page from Pocket's website! Now that you know how to save to Pocket, it's time to venture out and build your own personal reading list.
Your Brain Is Not for Thinking
Five hundred million years ago, a tiny sea creature changed the course of history: It became the first predator. It somehow sensed the presence of another creature nearby, propelled or wiggled its way over, and deliberately ate it. This new activity of hunting started an evolutionary arms race.
A story is a lie and a story is true
No takeaways this time, it'll spoil the story. It’s a 3k word post that could cut off in email, so you might want to click through to read on the substack site. There’s also a note towards the bottom on free postcards for subscribers! Let's start with a story about stories.
Early Work
One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame. And this fear is not an irrational one. Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don't seem very impressive, even to their creators.
Tome raiders: solving the great book heist
Everything went exactly to plan. Late on the evening of 29 January 2017, Daniel David and Victor Opariuc parked up and made their way towards the Frontier Forwarding customs warehouse in Feltham, less than a mile from Heathrow.
Options, Not Roadmaps
I understand you make bets six weeks at a time. But how do you plan in the longer term? Don’t you have some kind of a roadmap? The short answer is: no. We don’t have roadmaps. We think about what to do at the timescale larger than single bets, but we do it in a different way.
What Is Glitter?
Each December, surrounded by wonderlands of white paper snowflakes, bright red winterberries, and forests of green conifers reclaiming their ancestral territory from inside the nation’s living rooms and hotel lobbies, children and adults delight to see the true harbinger of the holidays: aluminum
How the Passion Economy will disrupt media, education, and countless other industries (Part 1)
[Clayton Christensen’s writing has been hugely influential on my thinking. So when Cliff Maxwell, Christensen’s former Chief of Staff and student at HBS, reached out to discuss my work on the Passion Economy, I jumped at the chance to explore the intersection of our ideas.
How the Virus May Change Your Next Home
Designers and architects expect the pandemic to affect apartment design long after the lockdowns are over. Here are a few trends you’re likely to see.
The surprising traits of good remote leaders
Fifteen years ago, Steven Charlier, chair of management at Georgia Southern University in the US, had a hunch that in-person charisma and leadership skills don’t translate virtually. “Before I became an academic, I worked for IBM for a number of years on a lot of virtual teams,” he says.
Preparing Your Mind for Uncertain Times
This is a time of questions without answers. Will I get infected? When will there be a vaccine? Is my job secure? When will life be normal again? The experts may have guesses, or estimates, for some of these quandaries but there is no certainty, and this drives us nuts.
Research: Why Breathing Is So Effective at Reducing Stress
When U.S. Marine Corp Officer Jake D.’s vehicle drove over an explosive device in Afghanistan, he looked down to see his legs almost completely severed below the knee. At that moment, he remembered a breathing exercise he had learned in a book for young officers.
The Modern Experts Are Throwing Out the Old Rules for Managing Money
Four up-and-coming publishing titans are writing the new playbooks for personal finance. There is a whole new generation of personal finance experts tapping into specific modern needs.
How Lego Became The Apple Of Toys
Every September, largely unbeknownst to the rest of the company, a group of around 50 Lego employees descends upon Spain’s Mediterranean coast, armed with sunblock, huge bins of Lego bricks, and a decade’s worth of research into the ways children play.
How to Turn Small Talk Into Smart Conversation
Imagine almost any situation where two or more people are gathered—a wedding reception, a job interview, two off-duty cops hanging out in a Jacuzzi. What do these situations have in common? Almost all of them involve people trying to talk with each other.
How we get to the next big battery breakthrough
Electric planes could be the future of aviation. In theory, they will be much quieter, cheaper, and cleaner than the planes we have today.
A math problem stumped experts for 50 years. This grad student from Maine solved it in days
The problem had to do with proving whether the Conway knot was something called “slice,” an important concept in knot theory that we’ll get to a little later.
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
Like most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she became a researcher for two professors at Harvard, which was interesting but lonely. Maybe a big corporation would be a better fit.
The Quantum Internet Will Blow Your Mind. Here’s What It Will Look Like
This article appeared in the November 2020 issue of Discover magazine as "The Quest for a Quantum Internet." Subscribe for more stories like these. Call it the quantum Garden of Eden.
Elon Musk’s Totally Awful, Batshit-Crazy, Completely Bonkers, Most Excellent Year
But this year, Musk set off on the most difficult mission of all. An expedition that has nothing to do with space, or fossil fuels, or coronavirus, or saving the lives of 7.7 billion people.
The Rise and Fall and Rise (and Fall) of the U.S. Financial Empire
If 2020 confirmed one thing, it was the centrality of the dollar to the global economy. U.S. hegemony may already have passed us in a political and strategic sense, but U.S. financial influence is proving more enduring. This is reassuring in the sense that the U.S.
How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars
This is Part 3 of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1. Pre-Post Note: I started working on this post ten weeks ago. When I started, I never intended for it to become such an ordeal.
The Four Stages of Life
Life is a bitch. Then you die. So while staring at my navel the other day, I decided that that bitch happens in four stages. Here they are. We are born helpless. We can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t feed ourselves, can’t even do our own damn taxes.
How maverick rewilders are trying to turn back the tide of extinction
A handful of radical nature lovers are secretly breeding endangered species and releasing them into the wild.
It Does Not Matter If You Are Good
At some point you learn to speak clearly and slowly, to widen your eyes a bit, perhaps to smile, in situations where the underlying danger of everyday existence races to the surface like an air bubble in murky water.
Why the Flow of Time Is an Illusion
In his book Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark writes that “time is not an illusion, but the flow of time is.
Memory’s Work: The Art of Toba Khedoori
The appeal of Toba Khedoori’s work lies, perhaps, in the enigmatic precision with which her images are made. It lends them the virtue of high-draughtsmanship. But it is a draughtsmanship that left unfinished, deliberately so.
Was there slavery in Australia? Yes. It shouldn’t even be up for debate
Scott Morrison asserted in a radio interview on Thursday morning that “there was no slavery in Australia”. This is a common misunderstanding which often obscures our nation’s history of exploitation of First Nations people and Pacific Islanders.
White Debt
The word for debt in German also means guilt. A friend who used to live in Munich mentioned this to me recently. I took note because I’m newly in debt, quite a lot of it, from buying a house.
Why New York’s Mob Mythology Endures
If some nativist in this country had warned in 1900 that mass Italian immigration would bring us vendetta-obsessed crime clans, capable of getting their tentacles on the public life (and budgets) of major American cities while also corrupting the American labor movement for most of the coming centur
What If You Could Do It All Over?
Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dot-com boom.
Tobi Lütke
Welcome to the third interview on 'The Observer Effect'. We are lucky to have one of the most interesting founders in technology and commerce - Tobi Lütke, Founder and CEO of Shopify. This interview was published on December 16th, 2020.
Airbnb Reflections
With Airbnb’s IPO, I thought the time was right to take a look back at the past decade (Greylock led Airbnb’s Series A in November 2010) and reflect on what I learned from the journey. This essay is based on a Greymatter podcast episode, which you can listen to here:
An Elixir From the French Alps, Frozen in Time
GRENOBLE, France — When the world went into lockdowns this year, the monks of Chartreuse simply added another tick to their 900-year record of self-imposed isolation.
The $2 Billion Mall Rats
Catie McKee, Dan McNamara, and their boss Marc Rosenthal had millions of dollars riding on Crystal Mall in Waterford, Connecticut.
From the archives: Inside the exclusive team dinners that have built the Spurs' dynasty
This story, which reveals why it is that San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich cares so deeply about team dinners, was originally posted on April 18, 2019. The server is speaking to a man named Jeremy Threat -- and from the tone in his voice, something is clearly amiss.
I was homeschooled for eight years: here’s what I recommend
I was homeschooled for eight years, from age 11 through to college, before it was a novel way for tiger parents to show off their dynamic commitment to their children’s education.
The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals
Why is it that some people seem to be hugely successful and do so much, while the vast majority of us struggle to tread water? The answer is complicated and likely multifaceted.
The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”
My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I’ve watched every episode of both the British and American versions.
Daniel Ek
Welcome to the second interview on 'The Observer Effect'. We are lucky to have one of the most influential founders/CEOs in technology and media - Daniel Ek, Founder and CEO of Spotify. This interview was published on 4th October, 2020.
Coronavirus has left Australian women anxious, overworked, insecure — and worse off than men again
Political leaders have found it hard to resist the temptation of characterising the COVID-19 pandemic in military terms. Donald Trump — eager to self-apply a Rooseveltian shimmer in advance of November's scheduled presidential election — designated himself "a wartime President".
‘Build less, build smaller,’ says Caroline Pidcock
This call to action has highlighted things we haven’t necessarily focused on before, particularly carbon in buildings. People have been very focused on operational carbon but not necessarily embodied carbon, which is going to become increasingly important.
A space for storytelling: Blak Box
In June 2017, I was invited by Western Sydney-based Urban Theatre Projects (UTP) to design a pavilion that would enable a deep listening experience.
5 simple things that are killing your landing page
Landing page is a popular, yet quite specific kind of website.
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How Civilization Broke Our Brains
What can hunter-gatherer societies teach us about work, time, and happiness? This article was published online on December 13, 2020.
The Big Lessons From History
There are two kinds of history to learn from. One is the specific events. What did this person do right? What did that country do wrong? What ideas worked? What strategies failed?
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How to make this winter not totally suck, according to psychologists
This one idea may help you conquer the dread of pandemic winter. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’re probably dreading this winter. We know it’s going to be harder to socialize outdoors as the weather gets colder.
A Framework for Leaders Facing Difficult Decisions
Many traditional decision-making tools fall short when it comes to the complex, subjective decisions that today’s leaders face every day. In this piece, the author provides a simple framework to help guide leaders through these difficult decisions.
This Japanese Shop Is 1,020 Years Old. It Knows a Bit About Surviving Crises.
KYOTO, Japan — Naomi Hasegawa’s family sells toasted mochi out of a small, cedar-timbered shop next to a rambling old shrine in Kyoto. The family started the business to provide refreshments to weary travelers coming from across Japan to pray for pandemic relief — in the year 1000.
The Next Phase of Social? Listen Closely
Social Strikes Back is a series exploring the next generation of social networks and how they’re shaping the future of consumer tech. See more at a16z.com/social-strikes-back.
RECONSIDER
About 12 years ago, I co-founded a startup called Basecamp: A simple project collaboration tool that helps people make progress together, sold on a monthly subscription. It took a part of some people’s work life and made it a little better.
Breaking the Fourth Wall: The Business of Media Subculture
If media companies are record labels and creators are rock stars then the audience are fans — and that introduces an entirely new business opportunity.