Articles & Podcasts of Note (Week of 09/14/2020)
Every Friday I highlight the most interesting or entertaining items from my media diet of the past week.
Articles:
- An Economic Collapse Has Pushed Families Who Live in Orlando’s Motels to the Brink (washingtonpost.com): Sad accounts of poverty on the 192 corridor (side note: there’s an excellent fictional representation of this world in the 2017 film The Florida Project).
- The Billionaire Who Wanted to Die Broke Is Now Officially Broke (forbes.com): Role model Charles Feeney quietly gave away his $8 billion fortune.
- Buying Myself Back: When Does a Model Own Her Own Image? (thecut.com): Emily Ratajkowski recalls intensely personal stories from her career that explore themes of objectification and exploitation.
- Coordination, Good and Bad (vitalik.ca): The founder of Etherium explores how large groups of actors work in concert.
- The Four Kinds of Side Hustles (substack.com): Nice framework for generating ideas for a new side business.
- How Climate Migration Will Reshape America (nytimes.com): Will scorching summers, rolling blackouts, lightning storms, wildfires, drought and other environmental forces force mass relocation?
- How HTTPS Works (howhttps.works): Wonderful illustrated explanation about a core internet protocol. Should be basic web literacy for everyone online.
- “I Have Blood on My Hands”: A Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Manipulation (buzzfeednews.com): Frightening: “I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight...”
- Our Problem is Gullibility, Not Disinformation (danielmiessler.com): It’s probably a combination of both, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to consider the factors we can individually control as consumers.
- Remembering My Father (gatesnotes.com): Moving tribute by the software titan about the “real” Bill Gates.
- Security by Obscurity is Underrated (utkusen.com): A formula for considering defensive security is risk = likelihood * impact. Obscurity is one way to alter visibility and therefore reduce likelihood.
- 'Ugh Fields’—Why You Can’t Bear to Think about that Task (medium.com): That universal experience called procrastination.
- When Technology Takes Revenge (fs.blog): “Seeing technology as part of a complex system can help us avoid costly unintended consequences.”
- When You Browse Instagram and Find Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Passport Number (pdf.zone): Abbot posts a photo of his airplane boarding pass, a security expert sees it, and a lesson on the dangers of posting even seemingly innocuous personal information online ensues.
- Writing Process: Gardeners, Architects and Engineers (the-world-that-was.com): Writer Jay Pelchen shares an interesting template he uses in his fiction writing process.
- Your Phone is Your Castle (puri.sm): Given the breadth of personal info and data, you should have some sovereignty over your phone, but in most cases you do not.
Podcasts:
- Business Wars: Pizza Hut vs. Domino’s (wondery.com): Founded in 1958 and 1961 respectively, these businesses have battled for national and then international pizza supremacy ever since.
- Freakonomics: What If Your Company Had No Rules? (freakonomics.com): Netflix founder Reed Hastings reads excerpts from his new book.
- Hidden Brain: Why Nobody Feels Rich (npr.org): “We are constantly comparing and contrasting our lives with those of others.”
- Listening with Curiosity with Larry King (jimkwik.com): Larry King offers wisdom and lessons from a legendary career in broadcasting.
- The Myths and Questions of Education (a16z.com): Marc Andreessen discusses the purpose of education as well as economics, regulatory moats, oligopoly and more.