this week in highlights

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. …

On pay-to-play, verification, and staying relevant in a Gen Z world 📺

A few weeks ago, I set up a form to ask me questions, and I got a lot of them. Thanks! The vast majority are about Medium, which is an indication to me we need another forum where we can receive and answer more user questions. We are looking into that. Meanwhile…

Anonymous Medium Writer asks: Do you now have to have a paid membership as a participant in the partner program to earn? If not, why not given this means people are taking money away from a limited pot that they are not contributing to?

The answer is no. You do not have to be a paid Medium member to earn money as a writer. We don’t want to make writing “pay to play.” …

We often think that people who don’t agree with us on issues have different values. And when someone doesn’t value the same things we do — things we hold sacred — it can seem like they are broken, distorted, corrupt in some fundamental way that’s hard to understand. I think that's rarely the case.

For example, I bet there are very few people in the world who don’t value freedom, fairness, and a healthy environment. However, one person, if forced to choose, may say the order for priority is:

1. Freedom
2. Fairness
3. Environment

While another would stack rank thusly:

1. Environment
2. Fairness
3. Freedom…

“What matters for the long-term health of cities in general and New York City in particular, though, is what happens next. The great pandemic-induced experiment in working from home seems certain to result in lasting changes in how (and how often) knowledge workers use their offices, but they won’t completely go away. White-collar employers also won’t necessarily abandon cities, to which they had been returning from suburban office parks in recent decades in large part because cities were where educated young people wanted to be — and will likely want to be once again when indoor dining, nightlife and other attractions return.”

The Big-City Exodus Isn’t Very Big (Yet) — Bloomberg Opinion

“The tendrils of current polarization in the U.S. can be traced back to the 1990s or even before. In parallel tracks, an increasingly paranoid and rigid worldview developed across much of the far-right that was driven by radio. On the left, increasing radicalization was spurred through academic channels, i.e., mostly through books and academia.”

How The Social Dilemma Got Social Media Mostly Wrong by Christopher J. Ferguson

There are many interesting ideas and developments emerging about how to fund companies in more sustainable ways. Four recent posts from thinkers I follow (which highlight that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution):

Reid Hoffman:

But an IPO isn’t the end of a company’s story. In many cases, it’s just the second inning. Yet once a company goes public, it’s typical for its VC board members to roll off, leaving the CEO without someone to play an analogous role as an experienced partner. What’s missing is a major financial investor with patient capital who will partner with the CEO for the long term (i.e. …

— Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

On beta deficiencies, bundle economics, and blogging

Last week, I posted a call for questions. I got many! Thank you for writing. There’s no way I will keep up with answering them all, but here’s a start.

Many of them were about recent Medium updates, which is not surprising. I’ll batch some of those answers here. Next time, I’ll do some non-Medium questions.

‘A concerned Medium fanatic’ writes:

Why did anyone at Medium think removing basic navigation and the existing layout options for publications was a good idea in the Beta rollout?

Our new version of publications — which are now available to everyone (if you have a publication, look for “beta” in your pub settings)— have a bunch of new functionality. Most visibly, the ability to change the look of your publication — colors, fonts, etc. They also don’t have all the old functionality (specifically, more layout options and navigation). As the word “beta” implies, this new product is not done (not that software ever is done — unless it’s dead). …