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

Articles:

• Earning $800/Month with Spotify (stevebenjamins.com): An indie song writer shares his experience with digital distribution on the leading streaming platform.
• He, She, One, They, Ho, His, Hum, Ita (irb.co.uk): Lengthy book review of Dennis Baron’s “What’s Your Pronoun?” explores the long history behind the search for English’s ‘the missing word’: a third person singular, gender-neutral pronoun.
• How to Be Happy? Most People Have it Backwards (ox.ac.uk): “...there are only three avenues to take. We can change how we think, how we spend our time, or the external facts of our life.”
• How to Learn JavaScript (sivers.org): JavaScript is an essential programming tool. Derek Sivers shares the resources he used to become proficient.
• Inefficient, But Smart (strongtowns.org): An American lives in Ecuador for a year and compares the chaotic economy of goods and services there with the highly regulated US consumer economy.
• I Was Isolated for a Year in Antarctica—Here’s What Surprised Me Most When I Came Back (rd.com): The author’s observations are highly relevant for a world about to reengage after COVID-19 lockdowns.
• iOS Text Editors (brettterpstra.com): Comprehensive feature-specific comparison matrix for 70+ iOS Markdown editors.
• Must Ride Mule (to and from) Work Location (deepsouthventures.com): A short history of ranchwork.com, a jobs board for the ranching industry—there really is a niche website for everything.
• Stop Firing the Innocent (theatlantic.com): How quickly we abandon the basic principles: “people should not be punished for accusations against them that are unsubstantiated, for actions that are perfectly reasonable, or for offenses that were committed by others.”
• Stuff Matters (shuby.de): Lovely piece on the wonders of “common” materials we take for granted: concrete, glass, paper, metal alloys.
• Substack Has Spawned a New Class of Newsletter Entrepreneurs (digiday.com): The current platform du jour for content monetization.
• This Politically-Correct Witch-Hunt is Killing Free Speech, and We Have to Fight It (medium.com): Pushing back against censorship (even when said censorship is in the name of social justice).
• Why I Left Substack and the Email Renaissance (kevin-indig.com): Some content-creators want greater control of their audience.
• Zero-Sum Thinking on Immigration Will Make America Poorer (uw.edu): The US government falls prey to the “lump of labor” fallacy.

Podcasts:

• Boom/Bust: HQ Trivia (theringer.com): This multi-episode miniseries follows the dramatic rise and fall of one time attention-economy darling, HQ Trivia.
• Nicholas Carr on Deep Reading and Digital Thinking (google.com): Interesting ideas on reading and contemplation in the digital age.
• Making Sense: Can We Pull Back from the Brink? (samharris.org): “Conversation is the only tool we have for making progress…but many of the things we most need to talk about, seem impossible to talk about.”
• Reply All: Candidate One (gimletmedia.com): The story of election fraud in the 2019 Berkeley High School student body election and the 17 year-old election commissioner that saved the day.