The Mental Pivot Newsletter: No.12
In this issue: A word of thanks and a jumble of links to get you through the end of the month.
I took the week off from the blog as it’s Thanksgiving in the States. However, I didn’t want to leave newsletter readers hanging for two weeks. I hope you’ll excuse the abbreviated nature of this week’s post (normal programming will resume next week).
In the spirit of the holiday, I also wanted to say thank you to everyone subscribing to this newsletter—your continued support makes this newsletter possible.
Without further ado, here are some hand-picked items to get you through the end of November...
Articles:
Games People Play: Neil Kakkar offers a practical guide for dealing with common social interactions involving ulterior motives (aka “social games”). “Games” covered include: “See what you made me do” and “but I’m only trying to help!”
How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism: Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit) casts a critical eye on the incentives and questionable practices of venture capitalists and the highly ambitious entrepreneurs they often turn a blind eye to like Adam Neumann (WeWork).
Learn Difficult Concepts with the ADEPT Method: Kalid Azad (the creator of the excellent mathematics site “Better Explained”) describes his framewok for making sense of ideas. ADEPT is an acronym for Analogy, Diagram, Example, Plain-English [description], and Technical [description].
We Will Not Understand Covid Until We Give up Debating It: Author Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) admonishes us to stop trying to win every argument. It might feed our egos, but it’s also ruining all manner of discourse.
Why Is Life Expectancy in the US Lower than in Other Rich Countries?: Americans suffer higher rates of death from smoking, obesity, homicide, opioid overdoses, suicide, road accidents, and infant mortality. The well-designed charts on this website effectively illustrate these facts.
Why Is Scientific Illiteracy so Acceptable?: “Gaining a perspective of the fundamental science, which I would argue is not beyond the grasp of a Supreme Court Justice, or a United States Senator soon to be Vice-President, is a precursor to proposing rational policies...”
Podcasts:
All Your Genes Are Belong to Us: Believe it or not, private companies could patent parts of the human genome (at least in the USA) until a lawyer named Chris Hanson took a case to the US Supreme Court in 2012.
Enthusiast!: Each week a featured “guest enthusiast” talks about the object of their affection. Episodes are under 10 minutes and cover an eclectic range of topics including concert halls, fish sauce, and retro video games.
The Levi’s that Came in from the Cold: During the Cold War, Levi’s became so popular in East Germany that the government first attempted to design and distribute its own brand of denim to appease young East Germans (it failed) and later placed a large order to the iconic company to quench demand for Western goods. Interesting story about capitalism vs. communism in the post-WW2 period.
State of the Apps: Hosts CGP Grey and Myke Hurley of the Cortex podcast perform their annual review of favorite iOS and Mac apps.
Odds & Ends:
Our World in Data is an amazing resource for open-source charts and data covering a dizzying array of topics. Want to know which country produces the most apples? How about carbon footprint by transit mode? This site gets a permanent bookmark in my reference folder.
The Future of Text is a newly released collection of essays from dozens of writers, thinkers, and technologists. Per the website, the book “is a collection of dreams for how we want text to evolve as well as how we understand our current textual infrastructures, how we view the history of writing, and much more.” You can download a PDF or EPUB version of the book for free.
Finding iOS-native note-taking apps that are as robust as Roam or Obsidian is challenging. Thankfully, iOS users have Craft, a new note-taking app worth checking out (I’ve been testing it out all week). Craft ticks a number of boxes for avid note-takers including backlinking, collaboration, and cloud syncing. Craft is also available for macOS so you can use it across all your devices (note that Craft offers a premium paid-tier that unlocks added capabilities).
If you’re a fan of “lightweight” websites that are text-centric, quick to load, and don’t make use of excessive JavaScript, advertising, and other annoying client-side downloads, check out the 1MB Club. It’s a listing of websites that do not exceed 1MB in downloaded client-side resources (yours truly is listed at a relatively lean 80kb).
CBS Sunday morning recently ran a short piece titled “The Oldest Continuously Running Chinese Restaurant in America.” It’s not in New York or San Francisco, but Butte, Montana. An interesting bit of Chinese-American history.
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