The Mental Pivot Newsletter: No.4
A curated digest of interesting reads about technology, society, and culture.
Happy Friday everyone and welcome to the fourth edition of the Mental Pivot Newsletter.
It’s hard to believe we’re only 75% through 2020. I was considering the passage of time and my perception of it (is it moving too fast? too slow? a bit of both?), when an intriguing headline popped into my newsfeed from Quanta Magazine: “Reasons Revealed for the Brain’s Elastic Sense of Time.” I’m off to read it once I hit the Substack “publish” button.
By the way, if you have a moment after reading the newsletter, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what’s working, what could be improved, and things you’d like to see more of. My goal is to deliver the best possible newsletter to you. You can email me, add a comment, or message me on Twitter.
Now onto the updates…
What’s New on the Blog:
1. How to Save and Read Articles and Long-Form Web Content on a Kindle
A short bullet-point in last week’s newsletter about using the “Push to Kindle” service to download Ray Dalio’s “The Changing World Order” inspired this week’s blog post. It’s a deeper dive into the various tools you can use to send web content to your Kindle e-reader for later consumption. The benefits being: focused, distraction-free reading and access to the Kindle’s excellent annotation and reference tools.
Push to Kindle (free to use) is my go-to choice, but if you prefer to clip multiple articles and have them sent to your Kindle on either an automated or ad hoc basis, that’s possible with paid services like Instapaper, SendtoReader, and P2K. All three are quite good and allow you to collate multiple articles into a single e-book.
That’s the TL;DR. You can read the full story here.
2. Articles and Podcasts of Note (Week of 09/28/2020)
This is my weekly roundup of interesting links and internet finds. You can read the complete post on the blog, but here are the highlights:
The High Privacy Cost of a Free Website: Shines light on several disconcerting tactics: “piggybacking” trackers, keylogging of unencrypted data, canvas fingerprinting.
How Humanity Came to View Its Eventual Extinction: A Timeline: “It is only in the last couple of centuries that we have begun to grasp that our existence might one day cease to exist forever.”
Industrial Literacy: We are the beneficiaries of a number of industrial advancements—synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, vaccines, etc. A rational perspective on these technologies is essential for future progress.
Is This Real Life?: On conspiracy theories, alternate-reality games, religiosity, and the narratives we cling to for meaning and group-cohesion.
The Race to Redesign Sugar: A deep dive into the efforts to engineer sugar that retains the same cooking qualities, sweetness, mouth-feel, but with fewer calories and better blood-sugar levels.
The Students Left Behind by Remote Learning: “There are devastating costs of keeping kids out of school.”
Semantic Traps: Why Vague Words Are Risky: A critical look at problematic terminology: natural, authentic, and intuitive.
Stolen Lives: The Harrowing Story of Two Girls Sold into Sexual Slavery: Heartbreaking story about young victims of sex trafficking in West Bengal.
We Learn Faster When We Aren’t Told What Choices to Make: “Our sense of control in a situation influences how we learn—or do not learn—from our experiences.”
Podcast: Greg Lukianoff on Free Speech: Conversation with an expert on first amendment rights and the “Bedrock principle” (which disallows the censorship of speech solely on the basis of the subjective basis of “offensiveness”).
Podcast: Guitar Gods: Jimi Hendrix vs. Eric Clapton: Is it better to burn out or fade away?
The rest of this week’s link roundup can be read here.
Odds & Ends:
Entrepreneurship:
Entrepreneurs will appreciate this quote from Peter Rahal (founder of RXBAR): “I remember distinctly early in my business when I was asking my dad about all the investor money I needed to fulfill my vision for RXBAR. He told me very directly, ‘You need to shut up and sell 1,000 bars.” It’s a great reminder that action drives success and learning. (I stumbled across this quote in an old thread by Shane Parish, the person behind the popular Farnam Street blog).
And since I love podcasts, the How I Built This episode from 2018 about the origins of RXBAR and its eventual sale to Kellogg’s for $600 million is definitely worth a listen.
It’s been state, in jest, that noted venture capital firm Andressen Horowitz (aka A16Z) is a media company that happens to make investments on the side. There’s some truth to that: A16Z produces excellent business content that’s always information dense. They recently launched a podcast called “Bio Eats World” to discuss biotech developments. Inaugural episodes explore longevity, cancer treatment, and brain research.
We’ve seen the gig economy, influencer economy, and lately there’s been talk about the creator or passion economy. Venture fund SignalFire (taking a page out of the A16Z playbook) posted an interesting piece mapping the creator economy. It looks at the different platforms creators can use monetize their content. In case you missed it, last year A16Z published a seminal piece on this very topic titled “The Passion Economy and the Future of Work.”
In the Workplace
Crypto-exchange Coinbase was in the headlines when founder and CEO Brian Armstrong publicly blogged that “Coinbase is a mission focused company.” Response to the statement, which eschews politics in the workplace, was predictably polarized. I won’t inject my thoughts here—I prefer to let people decide for themselves how to think. Regardless of your position, it’s worth reading.
It’s worth noting that Coinbase privately offered a severance package for employees who are uncomfortable with the company’s stated mission. As an outsider, this seems like a reasonable (and relatively generous) offer.
Balanced Conversations
I previously highlighted a site for reasonable debate called Kialo. This week, I stumbled across a similar site called Pairagraph. Pairagraph features dialogues between “notable individuals” on a wide range of topics. Featured topics include: “The State of the Modern American University” and “Is Technology Actually Making Things Better?” There’s some good conversations to explore in the archive.
On a related note, my highschooler introduced me to AllSides, a website that offers news stories along with aggregated stories from the left, center, and right. I find the service interesting but exhausting.
Newsletters
As a “noob” in the newsletter-writing space, I’ve been trying to learn from other newsletters. I’ve founds some good examples to model my practices after, but subscription fatigue is real and so is the challenge of discovering quality newsletters. I did find a handful of services trying to solve this problem. Check them out and see if they scratch your itch.
Letterlist: Offers a curated list of newsletters as well as signup via their service.
Newsletry: Describes itself a “Feedly for newsletters”—a way to aggregate your newsletters in one place.
Newsletter Stack: Another newsletter curation tool.
Podcasts
The continued explosion of podcasting content is a boon for listeners but a curse when it comes to discovery. This Week in Podcasts—a worthwhile weekly newsletter—has published its list of Fall 2020 new releases. It’s one of the better ways I’ve found to keep abreast of recent releases.
Industry website The Podcast Host posted the results form a 780 person survey in March titled “Podcast Discovery Stats in 2020: How Do Listeners Discover New Shows?”; it has some interesting but not surprising findings.
The Pulitzer-nominated and Peabody Award winning podcast series Caliphate is facing scrutiny after one of the main subjects of the program, Shehroze Chaudhry (aka Abu Huzaifa), was arrested in Canada and charged with lying about being an ISIS executioner. Here’s the story as reported by the NYTimes.
I was unhappy to learn that Amazon signed the exclusivity rightsfor the popular podcast Disgraceland (starting early 2021). The siloing of podcast content continues. It certainly makes sense for content creators and improved monetization of the medium, but it’s slowly eroding the landscape of freely distributed content for listeners.
Social media critic Tristan Harris was on a recent episode Sam Harris podcast to discuss the impact of social media on a host of societal problems. It’s a worthwhile listen and excellent addendum to the recent Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” (recommended).
Fun Stuff
Video: Five Classical Composers Write for Heavy Metal Band. I got a kick out of this. Five one minute pieces are composed, performed and then analyzed by skilled musicians.
Irish Court Says Subway Bread Is Too Sugary to Be Called Bread. Irish VAT rules on staple foods require that sugar, fat and other additives not equal more than 2% the weight of the flour. All six varieties of Subway bread have 5 times the defined limit.
I didn’t know Apple has a comprehensive list of vintage and obsolete products. Funny to see the original Apple computer line listed under “Mac desktops.”
And to give some love to my Android subscribers, I was amused by Google’s recent post ‘Say Goodbye to Hold Music” in which a new phone app feature called “Hold for Me” has the Google Assistant wait on the line for you. The Google Assistant sends a notification to jump back on the call when a human joins the line. Bravo.
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