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

Articles:

• Academics Are Really, Really Worried about Their Freedom (theatlantic): Toe the ideological line or face the repercussions.
• At 31, I Have Just Weeks to Live. Here’s What I Want to Pass On (theguardian.com): Reflections on life and death.
• Awesome Falsehood (github.com): Amazing rabbit hole of topical lists about falsehoods from a variety of subjects (e.g. business, education, science, etc.).
• Comfortably Numb (claremontreviewofbooks.com): Book review: “The only thing more frightening than annihilation is the possibility that our decadent society could coast on forever.”
• Escape from Creek Fire (jmeshe.co): A quartet of Sierra Nevada backpackers avoid distant wildfires. No daring rescue or climactic ending but a good story on the challenges of obtaining accurate information and making smart decisions amid uncertainty.
• For the Future of Work, Look to Gaming (github.io): “You can predict the 2020 remote work toolkit by looking at the 2010 gaming toolkit.” (e.g. Twitch, Discord, YouTube).
• Home Studio Setup Costs Compared—1980s and Now (pro-tools-expert.com): Effective illustration of progress.
• How to Make Podcast Listening Productive with Audio Highlighting (nateliason.com): Nat Eliason offers some thoughts on podcast note-taking through the use of Airr (mobile app) and Readwise (ebook annotation tool). (Thanks to reader JK for alerting me to this article).
• In Defense of Reading Goals (commoncog.com): Thoughts on the benefits of reading in volume.
• Is Spotify Killing the Top 40? (qz.com): “Gone are the days of Top 40, it’s now the Top 43,000.”
• Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy (medium.com): Looks at the second order effects of working from home.
• Subscription or No Subscription. That Is Not the Question (ia.net): The team that makes iA Writer asks the question confronting many developers today: “Does everything have to be a subscription?”
• Tech Firms Face Growing Resentment toward Parent Employees During COVID-19 (cnet.com): “Many parents are being forced to choose between their children's health and their livelihoods.”
• The Three Sides of Risk (collaborativefund.com): An intensely personal story about a skiing tragedy frames this meditation on risk. Quite the gut-punch.
• USC Professor under Fire after Using Chinese Expression Students Allege Sounds Like English Slur (cnn.com): I don’t think you can cancel a language spoken by a billion people.
• The User Always Loss (thenation.com): A review of Joanne McNeill’s “Lurking: How a Person Became a User”, a history of the internet from the perspective of the people who use it.
• Verne Edquist—Glenn Gould’s Piano Man (glenngould.ca): Short retrospective on the life of Glenn Gould’s longtime piano tuner who recently passed away.
• Why Civilization Is a Political Masterpiece (unherd.com): “Sid Meier's creation invites us to think about how the world works — and warns it could be a lot worse.”

Podcasts:

• Hunting Warhead (cbc.ca): 6-episode series that follows an international team working to take down pedophiles running a darkweb child-abuse site.
• Matt Ridley on How Innovation Works (econtalk.org): Overview of Ridley’s new book and the importance of permissionless innovation.
• Morgan Housel: Writing for the Internet (perell.com): Financial writer Morgan Housel talks about his new book “The Psychology of Money.”