honest-broker.com

My 10 Rules for Public Speaking

Humans are mammals and always pay closest attention when others invade their space. At that juncture you will have everyone intensely focused on your presence and totally aware of everything you say—so you only do this at the most significant moment or moments in your talk.

honest-broker.com

42 Milestones in the History of Conversation

When we stop speaking to each other, we soon start warring. Our better nature descends to the bestial.

whyisthisinteresting

The Bibiliotherapy Edition

We live in an era when we diagnose ourselves and each other constantly, and we've developed an enormous infrastructure for explaining our problems. We've become very good at prescribing information, but information doesn't always provide consolation. Knowing more about grief, for example, isn't necessarily the same as feeling less alone in it.

25iq.com

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Jenny Lee about Investing and Business

A lot of people spend time pitching the solution, but they don't really explain the problem, and it should be so crisp and clear what the problem is you're solving that the solution almost just floats from that.

noahpinion.blog

A Nobel for New Keynesian macro, at last!

If you want to make people consume more, or if you want to make businesses hire more, etc., you have to do it in a way such that people generally understand what you're doing.

themarginalian.org

C.S. Lewis on How to Structure the Days of a Creative Life and Train the Receptive Imagination

It is an essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail and never dread the postman's knock. In those blessed days I received, and answered, only two letters a week; one from my father, which was a matter of duty, and one from [my best friend] Arthur, which was the high light of the week, for we poured out to each other on paper all the delight that was intoxicating us both.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 122

"I thought Slate's hostile commenters were out to get me. I decided to ask them why. They could not have surprised me more."

themarginalian.org

How to Speak Forest

To name something is to instate it in the family of things, to make it a node in the relational web we call reality. A word can be a pinhole, pinching a vista of complexity to a narrow point, but it can also be a magnifying glass for the invisible processes and nuances that tessellate that complexity.

honest-broker.com

Spammers Teach Me Six Ugly Truths About AI Writing

By July, I was receiving junk calls every fifteen minutes, more or less. After a few days of that, I decided to take extreme measures.

wired.com

Want to Get Off Your Phone? Mina Kimes Suggests Having a Baby

"I think that's been the most helpful thing," says the ESPN journalist. "So there you go, Zoomers. There's a reason to have children."

stratechery.com

Write Things Down

Biological evolution is the slowest and most permanent form of learning, but it takes millennia; oral communication is like a context window, effective but lossy; actually writing things down is what made learning extendable and scalable.

whyisthisinteresting

The Prisencolinensinainciusol Edition

Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything.

upstartsmedia.com

I Went On An AI Show. It Made Me Feel Better About Human News.

"The avatar is really good at talking, but it's not as good at listening, because it's not trained on it," Misra says.

whyisthisinteresting

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 118

The plan was to paint just ONE beam to bounce light. But DOT crews misunderstood, assumed the design team loved purple, and painted the entire highway.

whyisthisinteresting

The AI and Writing Edition

The other problem, I think, is that good writing is fundamentally anti-consensus. For writing to be above average, it shouldn't sound like everything else. My daughter might get a fine grade aping the teacher's example essay, but the road to good, or even great, is doing it your own way.

honest-broker.com

How Our Leisure Time Got Monetized

According to anthropologist Andrea Migliano's survey of 300 members of a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Philippines, she asked each respondent to pick five people they would want as companions if they were setting up a new community. She expected that they would choose the best hunters. Or maybe the strongest or the best at building. Or perhaps the best healer or the smartest leader. Instead they preferred the best storytellers.

noahpinion.blog

Where to eat in San Francisco

Culinary experiences are not very uniform across the population, so we haven't been able to develop as much of a shared vocabulary to describe what we're tasting — if I've eaten Sichuan pepper and you haven't, it's a little like trying to describe the color red to a blind person.

themarginalian.org

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tenets of Storytelling

Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

lennysnewsletter.com

How to make people care about your startup

Starting a company is a life-altering pursuit with a famously high failure rate. Whatever reason sent you down that path, it was once compelling enough to rearrange your whole life around and recruit others to do the same. Founder communications work because people care about and root for other humans, not entities or widgets.

themarginalian.org

Games People Play: The Revolutionary 1964 Model of Human Relationships That Changed How We (Mis)Understand Ourselves and Each Other

Unable to ask for what we really need — because it is too vulnerable-making and demands too much trust — we end up playing for strokes that are invariably compromises on what we most hunger for, simulacra of the deepest satisfaction: real intimacy.

readtheprofile.com

Kevin O'Leary Is Happy Playing the Villain

Heroes are expected to be flawless. Villains are allowed to be human. Audiences may not always like them, but they remember them and connect with their flaws.

themarginalian.org

How to Help Someone Change: The Samurai Guide to Giving Feedback

To give a person an opinion you must first judge well whether that person is of the disposition to receive it or not. You must become close with them and earn their trust. Approaching subjects that are dear to them, seek the best way to speak and to be well understood.

themarginalian.org

Thich Nhat Hanh on the Art of Deep Listening and the 3 Buddhist Steps to Repairing a Relationship

When we are hurt in a relationship, when we are spinning in the blooming buzzing confusion of sensemaking, the explanation we elect as correct usually has more to do with our own fears and vulnerabilities than it does with the reality of the situation; almost always, that explanation is wrong; almost always, the true explanation has more to do with the fears and vulnerabilities roiling in the other person invisibly to us.

personalcanon.com

i'm teaching 2 workshops this summer and you're invited

Interlocutors can help draw out what matters most to us (in a particular project, or in our overall practice). Mission statements make our ambitions legible to ourselves and to the external world. But writing one can feel lonely and uncertain, like fumbling through the dark recesses of our psyches.

longreads.com

Constructions, Concoctions, Conjurations: A Reading List on the Curious World of Conlangs

Natural languages are adequate, but that doesn't mean they're optimal. In 2004, he published a monograph on the Internet that was titled 'Ithkuil: A Philosophical Design for a Hypothetical Language.' Written like a linguistics textbook, the 14-page web site ran to almost a hundred and sixty thousand words.

whyisthisinteresting

The Please Call Again Edition

"CLOSED" is set in high-contrast uppercase, the typographic register of regulation and function, the language of parking signs and warning labels. "Please Call Again" is written in cursive, the register of warmth, of handwritten notes, of the personal. These two modes live on the same piece of plastic, covering the entire emotional project of the American small business: I am a commercial entity that also genuinely likes you.

longreads.com

A Diehard Drinker Accidentally Quits

Before giving up drinking, I had very little earnestness at my command. I drank in order to give myself permission to talk openly, or at great length, or to heighten the sensation of listening or being listened to. Drinking is way easier than saying that you want to talk to someone, or don't.

25iq.com

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Jenny Lee about Investing and Business

"A lot of people spend time pitching the solution, but they don't really explain the problem, and it should be so crisp and clear what the problem is you're solving that the solution almost just floats from that."

personalcanon.com

i'm teaching 2 workshops this summer and you're invited

I use the word 'interlocutor' to describe someone who is invested in your work and helps you understand it more deeply, but is not directly involved in the way a collaborator would be. Interlocutors can help draw out what matters most to us (in a particular project, or in our overall practice).

themarginalian.org

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

If we look with curiosity at people who do not share our values, they become interesting rather than threatening. As I've grown older I've learnt that the world and the people in it are surprisingly interesting, and that the more you look and listen, the more interesting they become. Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.

readtheprofile.com

The Profile: The Murdoch seceding from his family & the billionaire who fell from grace

But I often remind myself that the topics that make people uncomfortable are usually the ones that matter the most. So instead of backing away, I did the only thing I know how to do — I tried to understand. I saw the mask drop, and for a brief moment, the polished answers disappeared, and I got to see the real person underneath.

longreads.com

Life With Locked-in Syndrome: ‘Despite Everything, You Are Alive’

When a doctor finally noticed, he asked Bram to open his eyes when he heard the street he lived on being read out. The doctor named some random streets and then said, 'American Road.' Bram opened his eyes and his dad said, 'I knew it!'

oneusefulthing.org

Choosing to Stay Human

We are trained to read well-crafted sentences and intellectual sounding texts as the result of effortful human work and thus pay attention to these AI written comments when we see them. But there is often no human meaning there, these posts are just meaning-shaped attention vampires that take mental effort to decode and give you no equivalent understanding in return.

lennysnewsletter.com

HTML is the new Markdown: How Anthropic engineers are building with Claude Code | Thariq Shihipar

richer visual formats lead to better human engagement—and, ultimately, better products.