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

Articles:

• 9 Signs That Your Business Idea Will Probably Fail (dannorris.me): Knowing when to stop is a tricky problem. An entrepreneur with dozens of failures under his belt offers some red flags.
• Ask HN: Name One Idea that Changed Your Life (ycombinator.com): Discussion thread that elicited some golden nuggets of wisdom.
• The Coronavirus Killed American Exceptionalism (vox.com): “Faced with perhaps the most significant global crisis since the end of the Cold War, America has proven itself to be depressingly ordinary, even substandard.”
• It’s Time to Reject the Gods of Commerce: America Is a Society, Not an “Economy” (salon.com): Worthwhile counterpoint to contemplate for even the most ardent free market believers.
• The Man Feeding a Remote Alaska Town with a Costco Card and a Ship (thehustle.co): Nothing but admiration for this kind of hustle and initiative.
• Never Attribute to Stupidity that Which is Adequately Explained by Opportunity Cost (erikbern.com): “They just didn’t have time yet” as a common root cause.
• Pricing Your Product (sequoiacap.com): Guide from a celebrated Silicon Valley venture firm on strategies for uncovering the right price for a product.
• The Turkey City Lexicon (sfwa.org): Classic science-fiction collection of terms, concepts and tropes for providing critical feedback at writing workshops.
• Who Invented the Wheel? And How Did They Do It? (wired.com): Excerpt from Cody Cassidy’s new book “Who Ate the First Oyster?: The Extraordinary People Behind the Greatest Firsts in History.”
• The World’s Biggest PC Games Are Fighting a New Surge of Cheaters and Hackers (theverge.com): An overview of some of the creative solutions software developers are employing in a never ending game of cat-and-mouse.

Podcasts:

• American Scandal (wondery.com): Wondery’s recent 6-part miniseries on David Koresh and the 1993 Siege of Waco. Riveting.
• Yang Speaks (radio.com): Andrew Yang’s new podcast. His advocacy for Universal Basic Income is especially relevant in the current climate.
• You’re Wrong About (apple.com): Hosts Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbes have fantastic chemistry and accomplished something I didn’t think possible: they made me interested in the OJ Simpson Trial of the mid-1990s.