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

Articles:

• Abolish the Police? Those Who Survived the Chaos Aren’t so Sure (nytimes.com): One Seattle neighborhood experimented with the elimination of law enforcement. The result: widespread property damage, private security teams and lost revenue for small businesses.
• Ask HN: What Are Some Available Force Multipliers that Most People Don’t Know? (ycombinator.com): Rich discussion thread on the topic of the tools and behaviors that can generate outsized personal benefits.
• Batch Blogging (stevepavlina.com): A prolific and long-time blogger experiments with writing multiple articles in a single day.
• Defetter: A Young Species Primer (defetter.com): Comprehensive look at Information Addiction (IA) and how to fix it.
• Do a Job Market Audit (commoncog.com): Good career advice given the state of the economy. Cross-reference with James Altucher’s recent 3-part series on The Great Reset.
• Entropy Explained, with Sheep (aatishb.com): Engaging interactive introduction to the concept of entropy.
• How the Pandemic Defeated America (theatlantic.com): “A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.”
• Matt Ball: The Future of Media: Movies, the Metaverse, and More (investorfieldguide.com): I featured this podcast episode in last week’s edition of A&PoN; the recently released transcript and show notes are exemplary.
• Take Notes as Online Help for Your Creative Future Self (joepairman.com): A Zettelkasten practitioner offers helpful principles to ensure that notes are comprehensible and useful in the future.
• The Mesmerizing Geometry of Malaysia’s Most Complex Cakes (atlasobscura.com): Saw these on The Great British Baking Show, but those made by expert Malaysian bakers are even more intricate and incredible.
• Music Is as Good as Gold or Oil: Meet the Man Spending Billions on Old Hits (theguardian.com): The former manager of Elton John and Guns N’ Roses has amassed a valuable portfolio of 13,000 back-catalog songs.
• Sweatpants Forever (nytimes.com): “What happens now that no one has a reason to dress up?”
• The Ultimate Guide to Summarizing Books (fortelabs.co): Tiago Forte’s approach to distilling ideas to accelerate learning.
• Unraveling the Mindset of Victimhood (scientificamerican.com): “They believe that one’s life is entirely under the control of forces outside one’s self, such as fate, luck or the mercy of other people.”
• The Unraveling of America (rollingstone.com): “How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats...when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community?”
• What Irony Is Not (mit.edu): I always appreciate a good explanation on the concept of irony. In my mind, the gold-standard is still to be found in Matt Bird’s Secrets of Story.

Podcasts:

This week, bored with my regular podcast subscriptions, I opted to hunt down podcast episodes on topics related to Hawaii (a place where I spent the first 18 years of my life and always enjoy visiting in-person or via books and stories).

• Endless Thread: The Most Interesting Man in the World (wbur.org): King David Kalakaua brought modernity to Hawaii and revived old traditions. Unfortunately, his reign also precipitated the downfall of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
• Futility Closet: The Ni’ihau Incident (futilitycloset.com): After the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese pilot crash lands on a remote Hawaiian Island setting off a dramatic week-long encounter between the pilot and islanders.
• Hawaii’s Legend of the Menehune (iheart.com): A mythological race of tiny people who are expert builders may have roots in real world events.
• Noble Blood: Until We Meet Again (noblebloodtales): The story of Hawaii’s last monarch: Queen Lili’uokalani and the coup d’etat that ensued when she attempted constitutional reforms.
• Offshore Podcast: Far from Home (offshorepodcast.org): Season 4 of this Hawaiian issues podcast looks at the Native Hawaiian diaspora (past and present) including a fascinating account of Hawaiians who fought in the Civil War.