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

Articles:

• Amazon is the Fourth-Largest US Delivery Service and Growing Fast (digitalcommerce360.com): “Amazon is approaching a truly vertically integrated logistics network on par with the largest delivery companies in the world.”
• How Emotionally Intelligent People Avoid Negative Media (medium.com): We can all do better at cultivating a “sacred environment” that helps us focus, think and stay mentally healthy.
• Jim Collins: 10 Suggestions for Young People (remo.org): Good advice is evergreen. Highlights from a keynote given by the “Good to Great” author in 2010.
• List of Common Misconceptions (wikipedia.org): Being less wrong is a great way to improve your thinking. Consider this list “low hanging fruit.”
• Reflections on the Color of My Skin (haydenplanetarium.org): Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson writes about his experiences as a black man in America and offers his thoughts on the the way forward.
• Resources for Worldbuilding (acoup.blog): Fantastic site that explores historical accuracy in popular books, movies, and video games through essays covering a range of topics including urban life, social structures, religion, military tactics and technology.
• Rethinking Easter Island’s Historic Collapse (sapiens.org): Archeological research suggests that rampant disease following the arrival of the European visitors rather than the popular theory of resource depletion led to the downfall of the Easter Island.
• The Six Levels of Interaction with a System (charlieharrington.com): Author offers a progressive model for consider how we interact and learn about systems based on our goals, interest, and needs.
• Stop Taking Regular Notes; Use a Zettelkasten Instead (eugeneyan.com): A Zettelkasten is a powerful way to generate insights and connections between ideas. This is a good introduction to the method.
• Tools for Better Thinking (untools.co): “Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems” (e.g. issue trees, inversion, second-order thinking).
• Why Is Voting by Mail Suddenly Controversial? (npr.org): The practice dates back to the Civil War and every state offers mail-in voting. Accusations of fraud—despite evidence to the contrary—are turning this into a political issue.

Podcasts:

• Code Switch: A Decade of Watching Black People Die (npr.org): Since 2015, 1,252 black people have been shot and killed by police—a number that doesn’t include those that died in custody or who were killed by other means.
• Conversations with Tyler: Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty (conversationswithtyler.com): Sociologist and former fashion model Ashley Mears offers an objective analysis of the social and economic dynamics of “bodily capital” in the modeling industry.
• Every Little Thing: When Astronauts Come Home (gimletmedia.com): NASA astronaut Christina Koch walks listeners through the experience of leaving the International Space Station, falling back to earth in a cramped Soyuz capsule, and the challenges of readjusting to life and gravity.
• Floating Hellscapes: The Carnival Corporation (slate.com): Ocean cruises promise luxury at affordable prices. The reality is that cost-cutting measures and legal loopholes can result in some very unpleasant memories when things go wrong for tourists at sea.
• How I Built This: Tate’s Bake Shop (npr.org): Guy Raz interviews Tate’s founder Kathleen King. Surprisingly candid look at entrepreneurship and rebounding from a devastating business failure.