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

Articles:

• Continue, Pivot or Put It Down (pudding.cool): The Pudding’s process of generating interesting stories.
• How I Wrote, Crowdfunded, and Independently Published a Book in 2020 (blakeboles.com): Detailed account of one writer’s process.
• How Twitter Hijacks Our Desire for Meaning in Life (jakobgreenfield.com): “A tweet is to insight what refined sugar is to nutrition.”
• Inside the Competitive World of Lockpicking (cnet.com): There really is a community for every conceivable activity online.
• Laws of UX (lawsofux.com): Neat collection of 20 different design heuristics.
• The Nonconformist: Thomas Sowell (city-journal.org): A personal hero. “Sowell’s life could be the raw material for a compelling biopic or documentary. Instead, his story languishes in relative obscurity.”
• Productivity Porn (critter.blog): Good reminder to maintain perspective on personal productivity.
• The Rise and Fall and Rise of the Status Pineapple (bbc.com): “For about 250 years…signposts of wealth and good breeding were ably fulfilled by... the pineapple.”
• Success Addicts Choose Being Special over Being Happy (theatlantic.com): Success comes at a price.
• Theo: Homeless at Age 7 (sfchronicle.com): Heartbreaking story about a young boy living in Berkeley, CA with his mentally ill mother.
• TikTok and the Sorting Hat (eugenewei.com): “How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat?”
• The Truth is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free (currentaffairs.org): It costs money to produce quality content; garbage, on the other hand, is cheap and ubiquitous.
• Twilight of the Imperial Chef (nytimes.com): “For decades, the notion of the lone genius in the kitchen has fostered culinary creativity — and restaurants marred by abuse and unfairness.”
• We Quit Our Job to Build a Cabin—Everything Went Wrong (outsideonline.com): Two city-slickers buy a plot of land in the Cascades to chase a dream.

Podcasts:

• Conversations with Coleman (colemanhughes.org): Rational commentary on race, morality and culture.
• Matt Ball: The Future of Media (investorfieldguide.com): Excellent conversation about current trends in online consumer entertainment (movies, music, television and video games).
• Nice White Parents (nytimes.com): New series on public schools, race and equity.
• Planet Money: College Fails (npr.org): Should colleges be discounting their distance-learning courses this Fall?
• The Portal: Admission to Sugar Baby U. (art19.com): Rising tuition and debt have pushed young people (in this case, largely women) to turn to an unconventional financial strategy.