this week in highlights

out of context // 20–11–16

From some stuff I read:

• But let me tell you what does get better as time passes: the relationships, the accrued knowledge, your own self-awareness. These compound like high-interest investments, as you shift from early career (time to learn) to later career (time to earn)
• It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, to tell my father goodby over the phone on a conference call.
• I got a Peloton last month. I’m one of those people now. I sit on my stupid little bike almost every day for as long as I can stand it and I pedal nowhere for 8 or 10 or 12 miles until I feel like I’m going to puke and then I unclip myself and I drink a lot of water and stretch my dumb little legs.
• An investigation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation found that the lemmings were pushed off the cliff by the camera crew, from a truck.
• In its analysis of Prime Day 2018, McKinsey further reported that “consumers who buy an Echo increase future spending at Amazon by ten percentage points compared with those who do not, and Amazon obtains an additional $15 in revenue per quarter for every customer who purchases a Kindle.”
• An old boss called me the Zelig of podcasting. But I prefer to think of myself as the Beetlejuice of podcasting.
• Comparisons with the turmoil of the 1960s are en vogue, but a key difference is Black Lives Matter and the recent protests have majority support across all ethnic groups, even among white Americans, much more than Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement did in its apogee. Moreover, the uprisings of the 1960s were in direct defiance of authority and officialdom, and certainly did not have their approval. Today, officialdom, while dutifully condemning outright instances of rioting and looting, for the most part, is for Black Lives Matter, at least rhetorically.
• So let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment: when did you actually ever enjoy talking to a chatbot?
• As a writing teacher, I quickly spotted their mistake: to write in a genre, you must read in the genre, heavily, and they were not.
• “Wokeism” stands for all that. Trumpism also stands for all that — just with a different set of identities and grievances.
• We are conducting a large biogeophysical experiment with no predetermined outcome.
• Obviously, I’ll be back. This isn’t a forever thing, but if you absolutely must reach me, there’s an abandoned-yet-still-fully-functional phonebooth in the Mojave Desert. It was removed in May of 2000 but if you can get to it before then, you can give me a call from there.
• We only have a tiny spot of time together. We can notice, or we can not notice, nice things. I recommend the former.
• I think this is something Hollywood understands better than Silicon Valley. A lot of their big financial hits are organized around creatives and everyone recognizes that even if there is maybe a lot of swearing and arguing about how difficult these creatives are. But in Silicon Valley, we shade more toward thinking the people driving big ideas are super analytical mentats. And I just don’t think that’s actually the case.