Every Friday I highlight the most interesting or entertaining items from my media diet of the past week.

Articles:

• 10 Powerful Life Skills for the New Decade (neilkakkar.com): Neil Kakkar considers useful but generalized skills and thinking strategies like systems thinking, specificity, story-telling, efficient sequencing, and more.
• 30 Years Since the Human Genome Project Began, What’s Next? (wired.com): Interview with Eric Green, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute.
• A Simple 2x2 for Choices (seths.blog): Seth Godin offers a potentially helpful decision matrix.
• Circumlocution: When People Use Too Many Words (effectiviology.com): Good reminder.
• The Cruise Ship Suicides (bloomberg.com): “After the guests went home [due to COVID-19], tens of thousands of workers stayed at sea for months. Some described feeling like prisoners or pieces of cargo with no ETA.”
• How Claude Shannon Invented the Future (quantamagazine.com): In 1948, Shannon published a seminal paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” which laid the groundwork for the modern information age.
• How the Placenta Evolved from an Ancient Virus (whyy.org): It’s an evolutionary hallmark of mammals and a biological wonder: the only temporary organ, a lung for the fetus, a waste disposal system, and a nutrition source.
• ”Is This Really Happening?”: The Siege of Congress Seen from the Inside (politico.com): Five reporters, all on the ground in the US Capitol building on Jan. 6, give a minute-by-minute oral account of the events and chaos witnessed.
• Moral Competence (evanjconrad.com): “For the morally incompetent, helping people is more important than the folks being helped.”
• No Meetings, No Deadlines, No Full-Time Employees (sahillavingia.com): If you’re interested in profitable companies with novel approaches to work/life balance (à la Jason Fried and DHH and Rework), this article about the digital products platform Gumroad is a worthwhile read.
• Notes on Technology in the 2020s (elidourado.com): High-level survey of trends and innovation in the biotech, energy, transportation, space, and information technology sectors.
• Shamelessness as a Strategy (nadiaeghbal.com): Article from early 2019 that is as relevant as ever. Shamelessness throws people off, creates confuses and sows uncertainty and doubt among participants by the perpetrator. Moreover, it’s rewarded by the traditional and digital media.

Podcasts:

• Intelligence Squared: How to Make the World Add Up (acast.com): Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) and David Spiegelhalter (The Art of Statistics) discuss statistics, thinking errors, and political agendas in a fascinating conversation.
• Making Sense: A Few Thoughts for a New Year (samharris.org): Sam Harris continues to offer the antidote to social and political chaos through his grounded, calm, rationale commentary. This podcast along with daily meditation helps keep me sane.
• Throughline: War of the Worlds (npr.org): A look at the origins and long legacy of the Sunni-Shia split in Islam.