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

Articles:

• The Decline in Pandemic Sports Viewership (danfrank.ca): Speculation about contributing factors.
• The Economics of Vending Machines (thehustle.co): Interesting piece on easy-to-overlook but ubiquitous business.
• Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis (nytimes.com): “In the coming years, homelessness systems across the country will increasingly become systems that care for older adults.”
• The End of the American Internet (ben-evans.com): Technological innovation and cultural influence are shifting as represented in the ascendance of Tiktok.
• Expert Writing and the 2020 Nobel Prizes (ldmce.wordpress.com): Larry McEnerney offers sage advice for effective scholarly writing: “Don’t describe what you do as making discoveries. Describe what you do as solving problems.”
• The Good, the Bad, and the Bye Bye: Why I Left My Tenured Academic Job (reyammer.io): A former tenured professor looks at the cons of academia: the “publish or perish” culture was one big factor in his decision.
• GPT-3 Bot Posed as a Human on AskReddit for a Week (kmeme.com): It appears to have passed the Turing Test for some users.
• Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet (atlasobscura.com): The name makes no sense, old people love it, it’s been the center of dietary fads and it wreaks havoc when it comes to drug interactions.
• How to Remember What You Learn (vasilishynkarenka.com): A detailed description of one person’s system.
• The Island that Humans Can’t Conquer (hakaimagazine.com): A writer takes a rare trip to St. Matthew Island, one of the most remote and rugged places in Alaska.
• Luck and Success (theirrelevantinvestor.com): Michael Batnick offers a balanced take on the age old debate of luck vs. hard work.
• Peak Newsletter? That Was 80 Years Ago (wired.com): In the 1930s concerns about the mainstream media outlets and cheap mimeographs fueled a wave of new indie publications.
• Thoughts on Meaning and Writing (dormin.org): “It’s not just a method of creating memories, but a method of creating myself.”
• Viral Effects Are Not Network Effects (nfx.com): Technology businesses often conflate the two, but this article articulates key differences.
• What People Get Wrong About Herd Immunity, Explained by Epidemiologists (vox.com): “Herd immunity is the only way we’re going to move to a post-pandemic world. The problem is, how do you get to it?”

Podcasts:

• Chameleon: The Hollywood Con Queen (campsidemedia.com): Mini-series about a scam in which hundreds of Hollywood workers have been duped into flying to Indonesia to work on a film that doesn’t exist.
• Driving the Green Book (macmillan.com): Multi-episode series in which host Alvin Hall drives from Detroit to New Orleans and hears the oral histories of African American voices for whom the Green Book was a matter of survival during segregation.
• The Fall of Civilizations: Byzantium-Last of the Romans (youtube.com): Move over Dan Carlin and Hardcore History, this 3.5 hour episode had me a the edge of my seat as the host traverses 1000 years of politics, crusades and cultural upheavals.
• Rough Translation: How to Be an Anti-Casteist (npr.org): What is "caste privilege," and what does it mean for South Asians in the United States?