Noteworthy This Week
[Week of November 3, 2024]
…use the stress of this election to be the final push needed to step away from the exhausting digital chatter that’s been dominating your brain. Take a break from social media. Stop listening to news podcasts. Unsubscribe, at least for a while, from those political newsletters clogging your inbox with their hot takes and tired in-fighting.
Our job today and tomorrow is the same as it’s always been—to be good, to be wise, to stand up for what’s right, to resist what is wrong and evil. Nothing changes that. Nothing exempts us from that. Nothing prevents us from doing that.
The consequences and the costs and the stakes can change…and these election results may well have done that, but the obligation remains. The duty remains.
Do it. Like a Stoic.
Presentation experts call this central message a THROUGHLINE.
A strong throughline aids understanding and helps to capture an audience’s interest and engagement. In essence, a solid throughline ties the content and the audience together. Every great presentation has one. Quite predictably, how a presenter decides on the throughline is of critical importance.
(Compelling Presentations Have a Strong and Unique Throughline)
Fantastic metaphor for knowledge and ignorance.
Michael Smithson, a social scientist at Australian National University who co-taught an online course on ignorance this summer, uses this analogy: The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask. Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.
Love this trend. Many fond memories of meeting my future wife at Barnes & Noble and hanging out with the smell of books and coffee. A fantastic new B&N just opened up near me in Paramus, NJ.
The golden age of wandering around the mall with your crush is finally returning. A refreshed Barnes & Noble will open 12 new locations this month, which puts the chain on track to hit its goal of 60 planned openings this year.
The bookseller, which was on the verge of bankruptcy just six years ago, is copying the indie bookstore model and ditching its one-size-fits-all attitude to claw its way back to the top.
(Barnes & Noble is on track to open 60 new locations this year)
Have to admit that this massive of a shift even caught me by surprise.
This election cycle relied more heavily on podcasts than a cross-country driver with no passengers—and it’s part of a broader transition that has long-standing media empires struggling to stay relevant, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.
You can see it in…the interviews President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris participated in on the campaign trail.
Trump appeared on ~20 podcasts this year, chatting with Logan Paul, Theo Von, Joe Rogan, the boys of Barstool Sports’s Bussin’ With the Boys, and others to connect with younger men. His Rogan episode got a reported 70+ million combined views and listens.
Harris also went the podcast route. She sat down with former NFL player Shannon Sharpe, Brené Brown, and others. Her episode on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy drew 8+ million people.
We could all use this kind of single-minded focus, at least some of the time.
Early in his life, (Quincy) Jones’ father told him, “Once a task is just begun, never leave it ‘til it’s done.” Those words stayed with Jones for his entire career, and he committed to them with every assignment. Whether writing a song or producing a recording, he worked diligently on that project and that project alone. Nothing else got through.
Perfect.
Having kids, we’ve said, makes you a hostage to fortune.
Unfortunately, you cannot turn your kid into a hostage to protect them. You will have to accept risk. You will have to accept that your heart is outside of your body—alarmingly, it’s in the body of a fearless toddler or a reckless teenager. You will have to accept that something could happen to them. You can also be heartened by the fact that your worst fears almost certainly won’t happen to them. And understand that not only is your worry mostly impotent, but it often comes at the expense of this moment you have with them right now and your ability to teach them the skills that will help them survive and thrive in the world.
So stop worrying and start focusing on what you control. Raise resilient kids. Raise kids who ask for help. Raise kids who know their limits. Raise kids who make good decisions. Raise kids who can live their own life.
I forgot just how magical Ajax felt when it first came out. Total paradigm shift in how websites were designed and functioned.
And then, this really weird thing happened where this technology started being supported by browsers, which was Asynchronous JavaScript — they call it Ajax — which allowed you to click on something and see the page refresh without having to go to another page.
That was what made Gmail feel so magical!