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.

whyisthisinteresting

The Monday Media Diet with Jake Newby

Even if you think you have no interest in those topics, it's hard not to be drawn in by Em's super smart writing and analysis, which regularly broadens out to examine wider cultural and societal issues.

3quarksdaily.com

The Secret to Ending Arguments Faster

When you see anger, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Anger is the secondary emotion. The primary emotion could be sadness, could be disappointment, could be stress.

jefftweedy

I Wish I Was Your Mother (Mott the Hoople cover)

Such an evocative and weird lyric. Beautifully empathetic and sad. I tried to do an acoustic version, where I don't really scream it, but it just doesn't communicate. So I had to stand up and sing full-throated.

3quarksdaily.com

Zen and the Art of Persuasive Writing

Judges check page length before reading a word. • Long brief? We read faster and with less attention. • Short brief? We slow down and pay closer attention. Brevity signals confidence.

noahpinion.blog

Scoring the Jensen-Dwarkesh debate

It's all too easy to slip into doing a softball puff piece — fawning all over your guests and treating them like gurus dispensing wisdom from a mountain. This is an even easier trap for someone like Dwarkesh, who is very young and who is primarily known for interviewing people instead of for dispensing his own thoughts. So it's extremely impressive that he consistently avoids this trap — he always manages to challenge and provoke his subjects, rather than just letting them spout their usual talking points.

wired.com

OpenAI Really Wants Codex to Shut Up About Goblins

Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant.

longreads.com

The First Tomato to Know Everything

Gray literature's high and narrow window onto specialist processes is anathema to traditional general-interest non-fiction publishing, which delivers information like a tap dispenses safely managed water—filtered, chlorinated, and piped into your very own quarters. Gray literature is a sploshing bucket of someone else's water, murky with unfamiliar vocabulary, its means of application not always entirely obvious.

jefftweedy

Quiet Amplifier (solo acoustic)

I love really loud music. My favorite music in the world is built upon that necessity for volume. But at the same time, I think there's something very unsettling and intense about quiet music. There are definitely periods when I just want to whisper. I want people to lean in and get closer to me.

3quarksdaily.com

Writing Advice from Scott Alexander

The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn't naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.

upstartsmedia.com

Scoop: How A Board Departure And Product Launch Sparked An Anthropic And Figma Feud

For Anthropic itself, Field chose more loaded words: "They were not consistently candid in their communications," he said.

themarginalian.org

A Place for Intimacy: bell hooks on Language and Desire

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries. It speaks itself against our will, in words and thoughts that intrude, even violate the most private spaces of mind and body.