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

Articles:

• Action Produces Information (commoncog.com): The internal battle between System 1 thinking (intuition) and System 2 thinking (deliberation).
• Alternative Forms of Wealth (collaborativefund.com): Nice list of non-monetary forms of wealth.
• A Complete Taxonomy of Internet Chum (theawl.com): I never had a word for those obnoxious modules of clickbait stories on advertising heavy websites were; now I do.
• A Hidden Tycoon, African Explosives, and a Loan from a Notorious Bank (occrp.org): Origins of the tragic Beirut explosion in early August are traced to the shadowy world of offshore trade.
• How Joshua Kaufman Does Research (substack.com): The author of The Personal MBA shares his tips and tricks.
• Humble Words Organized Beautifully: Ward Farnsworth on Style (themillions.com): Review of a new English language style guide focused on the classic style.
• Hunting the Nearly-Invisible Personal Website (cheapskatesguide.org): Clever presentation of a pet topic of mine (read it with the voice of David Attenborough).
• Kindle Collects a Surprising Amount of Data (nullsweep.com): Amazon tracks every single interaction you make while reading. Yikes.
• The New Dot Com Bubble Is Here: It’s Called Online Advertising (thecorrespondent.com): “The benchmarks that advertising companies use are fundamentally misleading.”
• No, Animals Do Not Have Genders (nautil.us): Helpful clarification on the difference between sex and gender (hint: gender requires culture).
• Patrick Collison’s List of Questions (patrickcollison.com): The Stripe founder maintains a list of interesting questions such as “why are so many things so much nicer in Switzerland and Japan?” A worthwhile habit.
• Why People Become Internet Trolls (dradambell.com): Strategies for overcoming the empathy deficit and anonymity of online interactions.

Podcasts:

• The Dark Horse Podcast (youtube.com): Exiled evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying discuss current events.
• Ongoing History of New Music (edge.ca): Fun podcast about popular music covering the past 50 years or so. Great way to get familiar with genres you might have missed.
• The Psychology Podcast: Jonathan Haidt (scottbarrykaufman.com): Conversation about Haidt’s most recent book, 2018’s “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
• Spectacular Failures (spectacularfailures.org): Each episode covers a business implosion. A few favorites: The fall of Schlitz Beer, Livent’s accounting fraud and scandal at a Christian theme park.
• We the Corporations (constitutioncenter.org): Conversation with legal scholars Adam Winkler and Kent Greenfield on the judicial history of corporate personhood.

Misc:

• Kialo: Explore Debates (kialo.com): Interesting collection of debate topics with crowd-sourced claims in the affirmative and negative.
• Linguistics, Style, and Writing in the 21st Century (youtube.com): Steven Pinker takes aim at legalese, academese, business-speak and poor communication.