Every Friday I highlight the most interesting or entertaining items from my media diet from the past week. These weekly lists will include a variety of media—articles, blog posts, forum threads, podcasts and videos—from a range of sources. It’s a personal bookmark archive of sorts but if it's helpful to others, that’s great too.

Articles:

• A Daily Roundup of Academic Studies: Serious, Sublime, Surreal and Otherwise (nationalaffairs.com): Daily blog by Kevin Lewis that curates abstracts from recent academic papers for a specific theme (a recent post collected papers dealing with political polarization another post focused on drug regulations).
• Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking (fs.blog): “A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.”
• Do Whatever You Can’t Stop Thinking About (shime.sh): Working on things that don’t feel like work is how work is supposed to feel.
• DuckDuckGo Is Good Enough for Regular Use (bitlog.com): A software engineers runs a variety of search tasks to determine if Google can be replaced (the title gives the unambiguous conclusion).
• How Working-Class Life is Killing Americans, in Charts (nytimes.com): Sobering stats on the divergence in quality of life and suicide rates between the college-educated and non-college educated.
• One Big Idea (perell.com): “Many of the most successful people I’ve studied have found their edge by putting their faith in one big idea. They’ve committed to the idea, and studied it so much that its implications have become second nature.”
• The Perils of Private Provision of Public Goods (ssrn.com): An examination of Starbucks nationwide policy to allow non-paying customers to sit in their stores and use their restrooms has resulted in a reduction in paying customers and patronage.
• Why All the Warby Parker Clones are Now Imploding (medium.com): The Direct-to-Consumer trend from shaving to mattresses to toothbrushes was supposed to revolutionize the consumer experience...until the financial realities of theses business models reared its head.
• Why the U.S. Is So Far Behind on Coronavirus Testing (theatlantic.com): “Bureaucracy, equipment shortages, an unwillingness to share, and failed leadership doomed the American response to COVID-19.”
• With No Prospects for Profits, Big Pharma Neglects New Infectious Diseases (swissinfo.ch): “Their business decisions risk leaving gaping holes in the fight against epidemics such as the one caused by the novel coronavirus.”

Podcasts:

• America’s Housing Crisis and the Gatekeeping of Opportunity (brookings.edu): Conversation with Conor Dougherty and his recent book “Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America.”
• Business Wars: Starbucks vs. Dunkin Donuts (wondery.com): It’s a coffee throwdown between the white-collar upstart from Seattle and the blue-collar New England stalwart.
• The Day Coronavirus Became a Pandemic (wsj.com): The Journal has fast become my favored podcast for current events.
• More Perfect: Citizen’s United (wnycstudios.org): Citizens United continues to be one of the most reviled Supreme Court decisions in the recent past. This is a surprisingly balanced account of the court case.

Video:

• TED Talk: Homework for Life (youtube.com): Storyteller Matthew Dicks describes his system for collecting stories and creating meaning in our lives.