Articles & Podcasts of Note (Week of 07/13/2020)
Every Friday I highlight the most interesting or entertaining items from my media diet of the past week.
Articles:
- 10 Theses About Cancel Culture (nytimes.com): An attempt to answer the question “What is this cancel culture thing, anyway?”
- Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel (mondaynote.com): Jean-Louis Gasée considers the industry implications of Apple’s transition to homegrown Apple SoC devices.
- Bari Weiss Resignation Letter (bariweiss.com): Regardless of your opinion on the author, this is a thoughtful piece on the current state of public discourse and independent thought.
- The First American Restaurants’ Culinary Concoctions (jstor.org): A fun look at mid-19th century dining in America.
- Financial Statements: A Beginner’s Guide (causal.app): Short primer on basic accounting principles and reading financial statements with concrete examples.
- Flailing States (lrb.co.uk): Ouch: “The moral, political and material squalor of two of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in history still comes as a shock to some.”
- The Great Reset: Should We Care About the Economy? (jamesaltucher.com): 4-part series that considers the broad economic opportunities and themes that will result from the COVID-19 pandemic.
- How to Understand Things (nabeelqu.co): “My countervailing advice to people trying to understand something is: go slow.”
- Learn Awesome: Humanity’s Universal Learning Map (learnawesome.org): Not an article per se, but a collection of user-generated syllabi for learning any topic.
- The Modern Day Mind Killer (keaganstokoe.com): If the internet is an information buffet, it follows that we will gorge quickly and mightily on the first thing to catch our eyes.
- The Polymath Playbook (salman.io): Important ideas in uncertain times and a rapidly changing professional environment.
- The TikTok War (stratechery.com): Video, frictionless content creation and decoupling compelling content from the social graph.
- Why You Should Share Your Ideas Online (stewfortier.com): Inspirational piece on some of the financially lucrative reasons for publishing online (as well as some satisfying reasons that don’t involve financial gain).
- The Winnebago Heli-Home Was a Real Flying RV (thedrive.com): In the 1970s, the RV maker acquired a fleet of Sikorsky S-55 transport helicopters and refitted them as flying RVs: only 8 were sold.
Podcasts:
- The Purity Spiral (bbc.co.uk): BBC Radio piece from February about bitter fights over diversity and racism in an online knitting community and the world of Young Adult fiction.
- Reply All: The Real Alex Martin (gimletmedia.com): Followup episode to a classic 2-part investigation from 2017 in which the host tracks down a scam call center in India.
- The Rewatchables: Stand By Me (the ringer.com): The hosts revisit a personal favorite: the 1986 coming-of-age classic starring Wil Wheaton and River Phoenix.
- Turner Novak: The Past, Present, and Future of Consumer Social Companies (investorfieldguide.com): Conversation with Patrick O’Shaughnessy about the rise of TikTok and its competitors.