February 2024 Links
Welcome! For an explanation of the motivation behind this project, check out “Intro - The Motivation Behind ‘Nick’s Links’”.
Short story is: this is a collection of content I found interesting in the last month. Topics range from very serious to very unserious. But I focus on content with a long shelf life (i.e., that would still be useful/interesting in a year+) and/or an in-depth analysis of a current issue. I hope you find something interesting!
Categories this month are: Wisdom; Business / Career; Tech; Culture; Science; China; Misc; Videos; Websites; Books.1
Wisdom
Slow Change Can Be Radical Change (Rebecca Solnit) - Brief, insightful piece about how most change is slow (as opposed to the result of a dramatic “turning point”).
It also touches on how reading about an insight can happen quickly, but internalizing it can take a long time.
“...you could read up on the essentials [of Buddhism] in a day, probably an hour, possibly in a quarter of an hour. But the point is to somehow so deeply embed those values, perspectives, and insights in yourself that they become reflexive, your operating equipment…that’s the work of a lifetime..”
'I’m sorry to have to announce that my cancer situation has developed not necessarily to my advantage' (Simon Boas) - A beautiful, short essay from someone facing death exploring how magical life is.
“We should be dazzled by our good fortune – dancing on the tables every day. And I mean to keep dancing in whatever time I have left here, and (who knows?) perhaps afterwards too.”
Allow other people their problems (Oliver Burkeman) - Nice reflection how much time and energy we can spend worrying that we’re upsetting other people - and how we should take other people’s emotions into account, but not let them dictate what we do.
My approach here has been to start any situation by asking myself: “what do I want?” Compromise may be appropriate, but we can easily lose our own interests by just jumping right to considering what everyone else wants.
For resolutions, is it better to add or subtract? (Tim Harford) - Focusing on what we can remove as opposed to what we can add (to our to-do list, home, product, itinerary, etc.) is a very powerful concept. “Substraction neglect” is real.
A unified theory of fucks (Mandy Brown) - I’m not a huge fan of the kind of click-baity way this is written, and I don’t really buy the “born with a certain number of fucks” concept - but I really like the point about focusing on living things:
“Give all your fucks to the living. Give a fuck about the people you work with, and the people who receive your work—the people who use the tools and products and systems or, more often than not, are used by them. Give a fuck about the land and the sea, all the living things that are used or used up by the work, that are abandoned or displaced by it, or—if we’re lucky, if we’re persistent and brave and willing—are cared for through the work. Give a fuck about yourself, about your own wild and tender spirit, about your peace and especially about your art. Give every last fuck you have to living things with beating hearts and breathing lungs and open eyes, with chloroplasts and mycelia and water-seeking roots, with wings and hands and leaves. Give like every fuck might be your last.”
Charlie Kaufman on Screenwriting - This is a beautiful speech. Ostensibly about screenwriting, it’s really a wide-ranging reflection on life, identity and meaning.
“Allow yourself the freedom to change as you discover, allow your screenplay to grow and change as you work on it. You will discover things as you work. You must not put these things aside, even if they’re inconvenient. Let’s not disregard all the little voices in order to simplify. Do not simplify. Let’s not worry about what it looks like, let’s not worry about failure. Failure is a badge of honour; it means you risked failure. If you don’t risk failure you’re never going to do anything that’s different than what you’ve already done, or what somebody else has done.”
On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue - “Self-Respect” is not something I’ve thought about a lot - so I found this very powerful.
What does it mean to have self-respect? It’s helpful to think about the opposite: what happens when you don’t have self-respect?
“To do without self-respect… is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”
“People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the…venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.”
Accept & Let Go — Nate Dickson Thinks… 30-second read, but great message.
I think one of the most underrated skills is learning how to take a compliment. Most people default to dismissing or downplaying, which typically makes the complimenter feel bad. It’s best to accept the praise and thank the person - then (as the title suggests) move on…
Ideas are Alive and You are Dead (Rodger’s Bacon) - What if ideas are “things” and we are just their hosts? A real galaxy-brain level take.
“What we call creativity is the quality of possessing a healthy mental ecosystem, one that offers fertile ground for a plenitude of ideas”
Three Waypoints On The Journey (Jim Dethmer) - A reasonably short description of the three “waypoints” the author went through on his journey to “consciousness.” You may or may not buy into the specific framework he describes, but it’s interesting and useful to read about one person’s evolution and see what resonates.
Business / Career
The Emperor Has No Clothes, There is No Santa Claus, and Nothing is Rocket Science (Andrew Kortina) From a founder of Venmo, an interesting collection of stories and reflections from a non-linear life and career.
“The idea that you figure out “what you are going to do” with your life when you become an adult and enter the “real world” was another fairy tale from childhood.”
“IMPACT is another word you hear all over Silicon Valley, in performance reviews and job posts, especially if you’re an engineer. It’s a euphemism for power and another code word corporations use to convince you that your work is meaningful. Silicon Valley’s obsession with power and celebration of impact always seemed to me a little disrespectful to school teachers, single parents, and anyone else working on a smaller scale.”
The Coldscape (Nicola Twilley) - A wild overview of one of the unsung heroes of the modern food system: the technology that keeps our food cold.
“More than three-quarters of the food consumed in the United States today is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and sold under artificial refrigeration.”
“Its story is central to every aspect of our national postwar narrative: the widespread entry of women into the workforce, the rise of suburban living, and the reshaping of the American landscape by the automobile.”
The first US patent for mechanical refrigeration was in 1851 - But the “modern-ish” refrigerated shipment industry is really only about ~50 years old.
Tyler Perry Puts $800M Studio Expansion on Hold After Seeing OpenAI's Sora: “Jobs Are Going to Be Lost” (Katie Kilkenny) - One of the most honest interviews I’ve seen about the near-term impacts of AI on labor (most are very hypothetical). As the article highlights, Tyler Perry is an interesting interviewee because he is part of both the business/production side and the talent side. And this is a very concrete question he’s grappling with: given this new technology, should he spend $800M on new physical studio space?
Scott Galloway’s most recent article - Corporate Ozempic - discusses how CEOs are generally being very coy about the near-term impacts of AI.
Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash (Kyra Dempsey) - A well-written exploration of how to design systems to prevent bad outcomes - and, more specifically, whether it’s useful to assign blame in the aftermath of a bad outcome.
It’s also a reminder that system design should assume humans will make mistakes - because of course they will - and, in many situations, fearing punishment is not realistically going to reduce the error rate.
“This principle underpins what is known in several advanced industries as the “just culture” concept. A just organizational culture recognizes that a high level of operational safety can be achieved only when the root causes of human error are examined; who made a mistake is far less important than why it was made.”
In Defense of Thin Wrappers (Jared Hecht) - A co-founder of GroupMe reflects on their initial reliance on third-party APIs for their app (the original GroupMe was SMS only and used Twilio) - and how they eventually had to do the hard work of of becoming more provider-agnostic.
Jared points out companies building AI applications today face a similar situation - and offers best practices for how to navigate.
The Independent Path (Brian Morrissey) - A thoughtful essay about the shift towards more people taking a more independent career path as opposed to the traditional corporate route. This trend has, of course, been happening for years in many sectors (“the gig economy”) - but it’s now accelerating amongst white collar workers.
“Many more workers will operate in a liminal space between the unhelpful labels of freelancer and entrepreneur.”
I liked the framing that many people are forging independent paths out of necessity - the corporate model is failing workers.
I especially liked the emphasis on how many ways there are to start a business:
“I don’t like the word entrepreneur because it’s pretentious and come to mean someone usually young and in tech, trying to hit the lottery. That caricature has led too many people, whether of ages or different backgrounds, to think starting a business is something that requires a particular gene. It’s just a job”
200 Cats 200 Dogs One Lab: The Secrets of the Pet Food Industry (Vivian Ho) - Probably only interesting to pet owners, but a fascinating look into the ($150B) pet food industry.
“In the 1990s, Mars scientists developed the first nutritional supplement to make dog farts less odorous”
Why 'ugly ads' are taking off - Interesting trend. This basically feels like part of a never-ending need to stand out. If this becomes big, it seems like the trend will shift (will “pretty ads” come back?)
By “ugly ad” they mean “a piece of content that doesn’t look like a conventional ad, but rather something that would naturally appear in a user’s social feed. It could be someone with shaky camera work showing off their favorite bad of snacks while working. Or, an ad with a handwritten post-it notes next to the product on a messy desk.”
Tech
Why everyone’s excited about household robots again (Melissa Heikkilä) - I am VERY excited by the prospect of robots doing household chores. And it looks like, due to a combination of AI and new data collection techniques, we’re a lot closer than I thought.
Check out Dobb·E and a video of a robot Cooking 3 Course Cantonese Meal to get a sense of what’s possible.
Also see What’s It Like to Eat a Robot (Evan Ackerman) - a brief introduction to “HERI” - Hunan-Edible Robot Interaction
Ireland's Memory Machines (Jessica Traynor) - A very personal look at an otherwise impersonal subject: the rise of data centers in Ireland. Told from the perspective of a local, the piece is a good reminder that “the cloud” is ultimately a physical thing that has physical impacts.
This article also introduced me to the concept of “junk data” - data that is stored which is stored but is unlikely to ever be used again (the article points to an estimate that up to 88% of data is junk data).
THE EXECUTIVE COMPUTER - The New York Times- This article was written in 1995. In some ways, it was ahead of its time: the laptop is often (maybe even typically) not the ideal form factor: tablets and phones are often better. But this demonstrates, among other things, that people are willing to put up with the less-than-ideal form factor while the better versions are built (obviously this is linked to the Vision Pro discussions).
Reading this, I think more about what we’ve lost (the peace of being without a computer at all times) than what we’ve gained.
For funny content in this vein, check out the Pessimists Archive
How To Design A Better Urban Soundscape (Jeffrey Arlo Brown) - A nice meditation on how cities sound (including a discussion of “noise pollution”) and what can be done to change it. I could have done without the discussion of birds (I get it - birds like it when there’s less noise so they can communicate more easily) - but in general this was an interesting look into something I hadn’t thought about.
“Noise mitigation is the most important thing, first of all,” Kusitzky said. “First you make sure that it’s not too loud. And once you have that under control, then you have a lot more options for urban soundscape planning.””
It’s also interesting to think about what your preferred level of noise is. This is, of course, a very individual thing. But it’s not as simple as less noise is better. I enjoy a little city noise.
Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany (Alex Chan) - What a ride. “Eventually I ended up with a PDF that Preview claimed is larger than the entire universe – approximately 37 trillion light years square. Admittedly it’s mostly empty space, but so is the universe.”
This Guy Used ChatGPT to Talk to 5,000 Women on Tinder and Met His Wife (Maxwell Zeff) - On its face, this is a silly story about ChatGPT. But I think it raises broader questions, including:
What is the purpose of our initial conversations with someone (romantic or otherwise)? Is it to extract information? Can that be done more efficiently (and why aren’t profiles enough to accomplish this)?
Also, in what contexts is it ethical to use a robot to “talk for you”? It seems clear that the lines here will get increasingly blurry. It feels dystopian to enter a world where you’re really never sure if you’re talking to a person - but if it genuinely emulates that person, is it a problem?
215. Building Under Regulation - (Steven Sinofsky) EXTREMELY LONG. Way too long. But, if you’re interested in the nitty gritty details of what it looks like when big tech companies interact with regulators, particularly in the EU, very interesting. Steven Sinofsky (famous Microsoft exec) discusses the impact of the EU’s new “Digital Markets Act” (DMA) on Apple by discussing what it was like for Microsoft to interact with regulators in the 90s and 2000s.
My Comments Are in the Google Doc Linked in the Dropbox I Sent in the Slack (Gwynna Forgham-Thrift) - Short. Too Real.
Why NASA Is Watching Where Idaho’s Parachuting Beavers Landed (Danielle Hallock) - An ode to Beavers.
“For decades, people have gone out of their way to move beavers across great distances. Today’s preferred methods—hiking, humping, and horseback rides—are an improvement over 1948, when beavers were parachuted out of planes in Idaho.”
Culture
Dog Day Afternoon (Hussein Kesvani) - A brief look at the relatively banal orgy scene in a town in rural England.
Culture is Stuck (Paul Skallas) - This piece is over a year old now (Dec 2022), but still feels relevant. It argues that culture has been stuck since ~2005/6. I’m not sure I agree, but it’s certainly thought provoking.
2018 Trend Reports Read Eerily Similar to the Forecasts for 2024 (Matt Klein) - Similar idea as the previous article: this article uses a “scientific-ish” analysis shows that culture seems relatively stagnant - and discusses several theories as to why that may be the case.
Every year, Matt Klein reviews “cultural forecasts” and creates a “meta analysis” Here’s 2024’s.
America is facing a 'fringe friend' crisis (Juliana Kaplan) - This is a valuable addition to the many articles discussing how people, especially young people, are having trouble making friends. Its main argument is that one of the biggest reasons for the friend crisis is the loss of “fringe friends” - casual friends you enjoy seeing occasionally. This really resonated with me. I’m not sure exactly how to address this, though, other than to seek out opportunities to see people I don’t often see.
But I’m not sure about the other main argument: that it’s not enough to have one or two close friends - and that the more “close friends” you have the better. Maybe it comes down to how people define “close friend,” but do people really need 5+ “close friends”? I’m not sure.
The Woman Who Spent 500 Days in a Cave (D. T. Max) - Widely shared and with good reason. Riveting. I think the most interesting part is that it raises more questions than it answers. It’s not a straightforward story of human triumph; it’s much more complicated.
When Jane Jacobs Took on the World (Robert Fulford) - A magazine editor with no relevant formal training or credentials writes one of the most influential books on town planning (in 1961). A testament to the value of independent thinking- particularly from those outside of the “expert community” and the power of narratives.
It also has thought-provoking ideas about urban planning - especially the idea that more planning and organization is better, and that “single-use” zoning (which was en vogue) was misguided.
“Above all, Ms. Jacobs argued…for the appreciation and nurturing of spontaneity and inventiveness of individuals rather than the generalized and abstract plans of governments and corporations.”
“Jane Jacobs argued that we must love cities for what they are: not poor imitations of the countryside or works of art designed by master planners but unpredictable, exuberant and surprisingly rich creations of those who know how to use them and care for them.”
Why we tell strangers our secrets (Oliver Burkeman) - A brief but interesting piece that makes me think about the freedom of talking to strangers.
“...when asked who they’d most recently confided in, almost half the respondents [in a study said it wasn’t someone important to them, but a bartender, hairdresser – or maybe you, trapped in the window seat on a six-hour flight.”
Sleep tight: A curious history of beds through the centuries (Zaria Gorvett) - Brief history of beds.
The Romans knew what they were doing: “The Romans invented a wide taxonomy of different kinds of bed for various different activities, including the lectus lucubratorius for studying, the lectus genialis for newlywed couples, the lectus tricliniaris for communal lounging and eating, and the lectus cubicularis for sleeping. They even had a dedicated bed for funerals. Most of these beds consisted of a raised platform made of metal, topped with a thin mattress.”
Don't Trust The Trust Decline (Dan Gardner) - An interesting, data-based look at the theory that there is a decline in trust globally (in governments, corporations, media, each other).
This makes a broader point: we over-index on the United States and are quick to think that what is true here is true elsewhere. Although the data from other countries doesn’t seem particularly conclusive to me, I think it’s important to be aware of the impulse to homogenize the world.
The surreal life of a professional bridesmaid (Katherine Laidlaw) - The anti-wedding crasher? This is entrepreneurship - she makes more than 100k/year. Fascinating.
“Working with the bride, she develops a cover story to explain her identity to other wedding guests. If the cover story is that she went to high school with the bride, she memorizes the street names near the school and extracurriculars they did together. If she and the bride decide they met at yoga, she learns the names of the studio instructors.”
The art of doing nothing: have the Dutch found the answer to burnout culture? (Viv Groskop) - Short answer: no. At first glance, this is a self-help article about the art of doing nothing. But I think the more interesting thing is the look into the complexity of Dutch culture and the impulse to romanticize it (and other cultures).
The dating app paradox: Why dating apps may be worse than ever (Greg Rosalsky) - I find the fall of dating apps fascinating. I would not have predicted that usage would fall off so sharply. This article has a few ideas about why dating apps are such a difficult business, and why they may be getting worse than ever.
How I Fell for an Amazon Scam Call and Handed Over $50,000 (Charlotte Cowels) - Widely shared, and with good reason. Riveting and deeply personal. A warning that we are all more vulnerable to scams than we think.
The Real Divorcees of Facebook Marketplace - Anyone who’s used Facebook Marketplace knows the odd feeling of getting a very personal look at people’s lives. This is a nice look at that slice of life.
Maps Mania: Alien Arrivals Nosedive in 2023! - “According to the National UFO Reporting Center sightings of little green tourists were down 19% in 2023 compared to 2022.”
According to Axiox’s map of UFO hotspots, they like the West coast; they have good taste.
McMansion Hell - Fun takedown of a truly odd mansion.
I wasn’t familiar with “McMansion Hell” but boy am I glad I found it. It is “a bi-weekly blog that aims to educate the masses about architectural concepts, urban planning, environmentalism and history by making examples out of the places we love to hate the most: the suburbs.”
If you want more, check out the houses that are “Certified Dank™”
Tech Libertarians Fund Drug-Fueled ‘Olympics’ Where ‘Doping’ Is a Slur (Maxwell Strachen) - A brief look into a wild new sports league which encourages steroid use. What could go wrong.
Why the name ‘Fanny’ was rejected by NZ officials (Imogen Wells) - We need a profile of “The Last Fanny,” who was born in 2009. How are they handling finding their name is now offensive? Also rejected: Prince, Princess, and Rogue.
Science
The brain is the most complicated object in the universe. This is the story of scientists’ quest to decode it – and read people’s minds (Timo Istace) - Nice summary of the state of humanity’s centuries-long quest to understand the brain. The piece begins with the 2023 breakthrough in technology that allowed the thoughts of people who could otherwise not communicate to be translated into natural language - then goes back more than two centuries.
AI helps scholars read scroll buried when Vesuvius erupted in AD79 (Ian Sample) - This story is incredible for multiple reasons:
We’re beginning to understand huge amounts of previously indecipherable ancient texts
The three-person team that read the scroll (it was part of a challenge with a big cash prize) were students and from three countries (Germany, US and Switzerland) - I think this highlights how accessible this new technology is and how powerful it can be to combine efforts from around the world.
The subject of the scroll itself is interesting: “The scroll discusses sources of pleasure, touching on music and food - capers in particular - and whether the pleasure experienced form a combination of elements owes to the major or minor constituents” - debates about what causes pleasure and food criticism have been going on for thousands of years. More things remain constant than we think.
Medicine's Endgame - (Elliot Hershberg) Long, but very interesting look into (what the author claims is) the future of medicine: cell-based therapies. I won’t pretend I understood all of it, but I understood enough to get the general sense of where things are headed.
The article also documents how progress in medicine (like all science, or any discipline really) is non-linear, and what seems crazy at the time may become mainstream - and how pure science interacts with commercial interests.
I certainly don’t have the expertise to evaluate the claims here, but the thesis makes sense: “If we zoom out to the limit, cell-based therapies are likely to be the endgame of modern medicine. How can they not be? Every human starts out as a single cell. Through a profoundly complex cascade of genetically controlled cellular divisions, we ditch our microbial ancestors and grow into a mosaic of cells that are hierarchically organized into tissues and organs. Every disease stems from cellular dysfunction. By definition, if we can target—or even replace—diseased cells with other cells, it’s difficult to imagine a more effective medical paradigm.”
I should have loved biology (James Somers) - As someone who thought biology was one of the most boring subjects, the premise of this resonated deeply with me: we think of biology as boring because it’s taught as a series of things we have to memorize, as opposed to a way to understand the world’s deep mysteries about life itself.
As a former computer science student, I especially appreciated these comparisons:
“Enormous subjects are best approached in thin, deep slices. I discovered this when first learning how to program. The textbooks never worked; it all only started to click when I started to do little projects for myself. The project wasn’t just motivation but an organizing principle, a magnet to arrange the random iron filings I picked up along the way. I’d care to learn about some abstract concept, like “memoization,” because I needed it to solve my problem; and these concepts would lose their abstractness in the light of my example.”
“I’ve never come across a subject so fractal in its complexity. It reminds me of computing that way. A day of programming might involve constructing an elaborate regular expression, investigating a file descriptor leak, debugging a race condition in the application you just wrote, and thinking through the interface of a module. Everywhere you look—the compiler, the shell, the CPU, the DOM—is an abstraction hiding lifetimes of work. Biology is like this, just much, much worse, because living systems aren’t intentionally designed. It’s all a big slop of global mutable state. Control is achieved by upregulating this thing while turning down the promoter of that thing’s repressor. You think you know how something works—like when I thought I had a handle on the neutrophil, an important front-line player in the innate immune system—only to learn that it comes in several flavors, and more are still being discovered, and some of them seem to do the opposite of the ones you thought you knew. Everything in biology is like this. It’s all exceptions to the rule.”
China
China’s Age of Malaise (Evan Osnos) - Long, deeply-researched piece about the current atmosphere in China, how we got here, and where we’re heading. This paints a very bleak picture.
Did Chinese Kiss? (Cai Yineng) - “It may seem like a silly question, but a new book by scholar Hu Wenhui tries to resolve the debate over whether kissing has always been a part of Chinese courtship.”
Misc
Half of TikTok users in the U.S. have posted a video - and 60% of 35-49 year olds have. Pictures of Birds. Teen Slang Dictionary from “Parents.com.” Sonny Angel dolls may be the next big thing. Turns out we don’t need to wear those lead aprons for x-rays at the dentist’s office? GenZ is rediscovering the public library - hell yeah. Amanda, Ashley, and Erica are now “old people names” according to Gen Alpha. Ranking of every best picture winner ranked by how good a Muppets version would be. Things unexpectedly named after people. How to sell feet pics - some people are making 5k/month. Turns out people who ride ebikes get more exercise than people who ride pedal bikes? Artist trains rats to take selfies. Major League Baseball’s uniforms give players unintentional diapers. Incredible Underwater Photos. India released a pigeon suspected of being a Chinese spy after eight months of detention. The search for Meeko, a fugitive raccoon entered its seventh week; two other raccoons were tempted back by hotdogs.
Videos
Microsoft Excel World Championship 2023 - Finals - Thrilling. Just watch 90 seconds (start from 46:30 - the link should take you there).
AlphaGo - The Movie - This is a full-length (90 minute) documentary about the 2016 match between the best “Go” player in the world and a computer player. Very engaging and surprisingly emotional. Very few believed the computer could win - and, when it came time for the match, the stakes felt enormous.
LA’s Forbidden Pedestrian Tunnels - This uses LA’s abandoned tunnels to describe how cities changed when cars started becoming mainstream.
Companies, countries battle to develop quantum computers | 60 Minutes - There’s a lot of hype about AI right now, but quantum computing breakthroughs are in reach - and they may be even more disruptive.
France: Another Way To Make Movies - For movie people. An interesting look at how France supports its cinema industry.
Harry Potter by Balenciaga - This is old-news but I just discovered it. Wonderful 54 seconds.
Big Bear Bald Eagle Live Nest - This is a live feed. U S A; U S A.
Loudest Purring Cat - Guinness World Records ~2 minutes. Probably only for cat people. Worth watching to see the serious audio equipment Guinness brings.
24 BEST Things I saw in Vegas at CES 2024! - If you’re interested in tech - especially home automation - this is a fun look at a few of the more interesting technologies at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Websites
T-Mobile Sidekick - A Tumblr of famous-ish people with the T-Mobile Sidekick.
List of 50 Trees - Lives up to its title.
Perpetual Calendar - (haveagood.today) - This is what the internet is all about.
Royalty Exchange - Auction site where you can bid on royalty rights. For example, you can currently bid on royalties from the Shrek Soundtrack. It’s mostly music - but there are some other types including royalties from the sale of Listerine.
earth.fm - a free repository of more than 700 natural soundscapes from all over the globe. They also recently added a “Quiet Places Finder” - a list of quiet places in loud cities.
Brutal Web - Brutalist architecture, but for webpages.
Windows 98 Icon Viewer - Fun way to spend ~45 seconds.
Shopping lists - A collection of shopping lists?
PowerPoint Karaoke - “The improv game where you give a presentation from slides you've never seen before.”
Ye Olde Blogroll - A human-curated list of independent blogs
Dexa AI - Makes podcast content searchable.
Also see “Listen Notes,” which is a searchable database of podcast transcripts.
Ihavenotv.com - Free documentaries.
Books
The MANIAC - Benjamin Labatut - A beautifully-written profile of one of modern history’s most influential thinkers (who I knew nothing about before reading this), John von Neumann. John made major contributions to game theory, quantum mechanics, and nuclear science (among other things). And, perhaps most notably because of the recent breakthroughs in AI, he laid the groundwork for the idea of truly intelligent - and even self replicating - machines. A very interesting backdrop for the current moment.
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters - Richard Rumelt - For anyone interested in strategy, this is a great read. “Strategy” is a term that’s used pretty loosely - this book provides a more rigorous definition along with practical guidance.
I’d add links to the sections if I could; Substack’s linking feature isn’t working.