Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
Primary care is unique in health care. It cannot be managed the same way as other parts of health care where the emphasis has rightly been on streamlining and cutting waste from a bloated system. At the heart of primary care’s success remains a unique relationship between physicians and patients built on trust.
Babies commonly have a growth spurt between 2 to 3 weeks, 4 to 6 weeks, and again at about 3 months. It is important to let your baby feed more often during these spurts. Generally, you should not need to supplement with formula during these times. In a few days, your baby will go back to a more normal pattern.
We predicted that engaging in a visuospatial task during memory reconsolidation would compete for working memory resources with visual imagery and interfere with the reconsolidation of intrusive memories. There are dual-task experiments indicating that when similar cognitive tasks compete for shared resources, they interfere with each other and thereby impede memory processing; for example, a visuospatial pattern-tapping task interfered with holding a visual mental image in mind (rendering it less vivid and emotional),
Best practices from smart people are great and all, but remember—not everything you read about will work within your specific business, market and team. You may be too early-stage for a highly opinionated way of building. Your company may already work in a way that makes it impossible to work differently. You may not have a team that wants to change.
The peculiar stew of old school "keep Austin weird" iconoclasm, paired with one of the highest concentrations of info marketers and New Age lifestyle coaches in the country, Burners, anti-vaxx UFC podcaster bros, God, Guns and Guts Evangelicals, a slug of crytpo currency Silicon Valley libertarians and Don't Mess with Texas homesteading tax resisters...
To find the one program that might be a real game-changer, you probably have to sift through 10 other ideas. Maybe some of the marketing strategies sounded brilliant on paper, but when you get into the execution, you realize that many assumptions were incorrect. You need to focus your team’s energy on nurturing the seeds that have the most promise — and divest from the ones that don’t
Statistics–seeing the world around us clearly and understanding nuance, analog results and taxometrics (learning how to sort like with like). Realizing that everyone and everything doesn’t fit into a simple box. Learning to see the danger of false labels and propaganda, and the power of seeing how things are actually distributed.
The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana. But one offhand detail in the 9/11 Commission report underscores just how American their defiance was. The passengers had made phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other aircraft that day. “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane,” the commission report states. “They decided, and acted.”
After the invention of photography, artists and collectors had to come to terms with the fact that an artist can produce an unlimited number of identical prints of any photograph. The art world’s practical answer to the question of authenticity, and thus collectibility, in the era of mechanical reproduction was signed editions.
Imagine your child actually gets COVID-19. What should you expect?
First, the broad technological future is pretty clear: there will be ever faster cellular networks, far more numerous Wi-Fi “hotspots” and many more gadgets to connect to these networks. Second, the social changes are already visible: parents on beaches waving at their children while typing furtively on their BlackBerrys; entrepreneurs discovering they don't need offices after all (if you need to recharge something, you just go to Starbucks); teenagers text-dumping their boyfriends. Everybody is doing more on the move.
We’ve intentionally avoided any public counts. We don’t want Glass ever to become a popularity contest. We’re not home for influencers. We are a home for photographers.
“Over time, this general sense may grow of ‘Why are we who are vaccinated enduring this in order to coddle this liberty fantasy of the unvaccinated?’ And I think that is going to get stronger as the inconvenience grows, and as the wind goes out of the getting-back-to-normal sails, which is clearly happening. Everybody I know is pissed off.”
regardless of whether you’re focused on fundraising, selling, or product, as a CEO you’re responsible for the output of the entire organization. In my current role at the company, I think of myself as an information router, so my primary job is to unblock everyone else on the team to operate at peak efficiency.
At the end of that five minute sequence, I ended up with no valuable additional information. In this instance, Twitter played the role of an ephemeral anxiety delivery device. Is that really how I want to spend my time online? Given how much I use social feeds to consume news, I don’t even know if that’s a rhetorical question. For the last two years I’ve thought a lot about whether I am lightly addicted to information that gives me a low grade level of worry.
And as these loyalists harm themselves and expose all of us to unnecessary and preventable risk, publications—including this one—have run articles sympathetically explaining the recalcitrance of the unvaccinated. These tales are 2021’s version of the Trump safaris of 2017, when journalists traveled through the Midwest to seek enlightenment in diners and gas stations.
We will also work fully remotely two days a week, 3 weeks a year, and for the month of July, to keep our remote muscle working.
I propose using a simple taxonomy of related activities that put it in context.
I told her I felt like all I did every day was try to act normal while watching the world end, watching the lake recede from the shore, and the river film over, under the sun, an enormous and steady weight. There’s only one thing I have to say about climate change, I said, and that’s that I want it to rain, a lot, but it’s not going to rain a lot, and since that’s the only thing I have to say and it’s not going to happen, I don’t have anything to say. I said I had one more thing to say, which was that I didn’t even want to talk to my friends about it because of course none of them were doing well either and I just didn’t want to talk about how afraid and how sad I was because if I told them then I would just make them feel worse so that basically meant that I was never actually telling anyone what I was thinking so I just felt full of feelings that would be better not expressed and at this point I felt that my relationships were becoming yet another casualty of (points at relentlessly blue sky) “this.”
The sea level in Miami has risen ten inches since 1900; in the 2000 years prior, it did not really change. The consensus among informed observers is that the sea will rise in Miami Beach somewhere between 13 and 34 inches by 2050. By 2100, it is extremely likely to be closer to six feet, which means, unless you own a yacht and a helicopter, sayonara. Sunset Harbour is expected to fare slightly worse, and to do so more quickly.
Like I said, confidence is a funny thing. You have to somehow believe that the worst outcome simply won't happen. Sometimes you have to do that while knowing for a fact that the worst outcome is happening, all the time.
I was acting the part of what I call Quintessential Host, someone who seems to have anticipated every guest’s need and desire—and this is key—without breaking a sweat or having to try too hard. The role is a trap. It’s about martyrdom and the idea that you only get to enjoy yourself once everyone else has been taken care of. But it’s also a tad controlling.
But free to roam, with flights to any imaginable destination just a click away (credit card points!), an unlimited number of new people to meet, and nothing to tie me down but a backpack, I felt more unmoored than ever.
Interestingly, most management books describe peacetime CEO techniques while very few describe wartime. For example, a basic principle in most management books is that you should never embarrass an employee in a public setting. On the other hand, in a room filled with people, Andy Grove once said to an employee who entered the meeting late: “All I have in this world is time, and you are wasting my time.” Why such different approaches to management?
In reality, good assistants save their bosses much more than that. They ensure that meetings begin on time with prep material delivered in advance. They optimize travel schedules and enable remote decision making, keeping projects on track. And they filter the distractions that can turn a manager into a reactive type who spends all day answering e-mail instead of a leader who proactively sets the organization’s agenda. As Robert Pozen writes in this issue: A top-notch assistant “is crucial to being productive.”
__"I think walking is probably the single most underutilized tool in health and wellness,"__ says nutrition coach and personal trainer Jeremy Fernandes. According to Fernandes, the reason we rarely hear about walking as a major fitness tool—in the same conversations as stuff like yoga or expensive spinning bikes—is that people aren’t emotionally prepared for fitness to be easy. “Most people want to believe that working out and fat loss needs to be hard. If you need impossibly crushing workouts to get in better shape, then you’re not responsible when you fail,” he says. "But a basic program performed consistently—even a half-assed effort done consistently—can bring you a really long way, much further than going hardcore once in a while."
The research certainly concluded that the employees were working hard. Total hours worked were 30% higher than before the pandemic, including an 18% increase in working outside normal hours. But this extra effort did not translate into any rise in output. This may explain the earlier survey evidence; both employers and employees felt they were producing as much as before. But the correct way to measure productivity is output per working hour. With all that extra time on the job, this fell by 20%.
Isohumulone is the acid found in hops that gives beer its bitter bite. Though the IBU scale can be used as a general guideline for taste, with lower IBUs corresponding to less bitterness and vice versa, it's important to note that malt and other flavors can mask the taste of bitterness in beer.
The distributed office is not a placeless space. A Zoom call is a place; a Slack channel is a place; your manager’s inbox is a place. These are all “rooms” in which bosses can evaluate worker performance. It’s a fact of human diversity that different people thrive in different spaces, so we should expect that the virtual spaces of remote work will reward certain skills that went underappreciated in office settings.
Many women discount later-onset depression, thinking postpartum depression only happens right after the baby arrives. This is not the case.
We are now in late-stage performative Twitter, where nearly every tweet is hungry as hell for favorites and retweets, and everyone is a trained pundit or comedian. It's hot takes and cool proverbs all the way down.
Disagreement with their program becomes irrefutable evidence of a dissenter’s ‘white fragility,’ ‘unconscious bias’ or ‘internalized white supremacy.’ I’ve seen this projection of false consciousness on their opponents play out dozens of times in my reporting. Diversity trainers will make an outrageous claim — such as ‘all whites are intrinsically oppressors’ or ‘white teachers are guilty of spirit murdering black children’ — and then, when confronted with disagreement, adopt a patronizing tone and explain that participants who feel ‘defensiveness’ or ‘anger’ are reacting out of guilt and shame.”
But I’ve been in numerous meetings with enthusiasts for cryptocurrency and/or blockchain, the concept that underlies it. In such meetings I and others always ask, as politely as we can: “What problem does this technology solve? What does it do that other, much cheaper and easier-to-use technologies can’t do just as well or better?” I still haven’t heard a clear answer.
What Wheel does phenomenally well is bring together multiple sides of the marketplace to drive better, faster and more affordable access to care.
Most implausible-sounding ideas are in fact bad and could be safely dismissed. But not when they're proposed by reasonable domain experts. If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they're proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don't. And if they have deep domain expertise, that's probably the source of it.
Light a cigarette anywhere in my house, and you’ll be dazzled by the flow of the smoke—up and around, through doorways, swirling toward the ceiling and then back to the floor, inscribing elegant arcs through the air—never resting until it finds its way out a window.
Many pundits seem to delight in observing that the board can’t fix any of the “real” problems with Facebook, a view that is true at the level of questions like “how do we fix our broken information sphere and polarized society?”, and false at the level of many questions of vital importance to to individual users. Questions like: why did Facebook delete a post in which I criticized the government? Why can’t I see strikes against my account? Why are policies enforced inconsistently? Why are US politicians held to a higher standard than foreign leaders? Why aren’t the community standards available in Punjabi? People who don’t see those as “real” problems with Facebook have strangely little empathy for the billions of people who use the company’s services, even as those same critics style themselves as noble sentinels of a free society.
If you’re a programmer and you have no equity and no union representation, then you have no form of ownership or leverage. Any employer who’s trying to make you feel like an owner is setting you up for a rude awakening. So don’t be a chump and buy into it.
Employees are going to vote with their feet and I feel for People Ops teams who are going to be having a tremendous number of emotional conversations.
And in any case, the fact remains that this is a company co-founder calling out an employee in front of all of their peers, and then following up by sharing that post publicly on the web, redacting little more than the employee’s name. Unlike the co-founder, the employee can’t risk responding in public without fearing for their job. The power dynamics here are ugly — the sort of thing that could make you think twice about wanting to work for someone.
Most Americans don’t have a news source they trust, and more than half of Americans
Often, there are two company cultures. There’s the glossy, official, Comms Department-approved culture — and then there’s the real, lived experience of showing up every day and working at a place. If the difference between those two versions is large enough, the result is generally serious, sustained, employee-management resentment. Let’s call that “culture gap.”
The only benefit of Obama’s restraint was as a source of lessons for his vice-president Joe Biden. Most obviously, the lesson is that erring on the side of restraint is worse than erring on the side of stimulus. Second, that the likelihood of securing Republican support for anything is minimal, so there is no point in proposing an inadequate response in the name of bipartisanship. The final lesson is reflected in the fact that neither Emanuel nor Summers has been given any role, formal or otherwise in the Biden Administration.
Shopify merchants now represent 3.6 million jobs around the world, and every 28 seconds, a new entrepreneur makes their first sale on Shopify.
the idea that science should be devoted to finding the fact is itself an ideology. It’s an ideological belief that humanity is better off knowing the facts than not knowing them. That’s a deeply humanistic ideology. Knowledge is power, and the idea that human society always deserves more power — that in some general sense, we’ll eventually do the right thing with the knowledge science gives us — is an article of faith. It’s easy to find cases where reality tests that faith — the most obvious and famous example being the building of the atom bomb. Like many of the people who built it, I still wonder whether it was right to give humankind the power to wipe itself out; my faith in the goodness of science is not absolute.
What that view misses, I think, is how confusing rules like these are to employees. One Basecamp worker I spoke with today, who requested anonymity, wondered the extent to which parenting issues could be raised at work. “How do you talk about raising kids without talking about society?” the employee said. “As soon as I bring up public schools, then it’s already political.”
Team members want to know that you believe in them, and that you have their back. Particularly when taking on opportunities that could be exciting, but hold the risk of failure. Managers are often advised to ask in 1:1s, ‘What could I be doing to support you more?’
The first of April was a day when we were supposed to be aware that not everything was as it seemed, that we should be on our guard. And now, exhausting as it is, every day is like that.
In North Kosovo, though, cryptomining is about as close to printing free money as one can get. The region is an anomaly—not just within the country, but across almost all of Europe—for the fact that it doesn’t charge its residents for their electricity. In a strange twist of fate, locals pay for almost none of their public services.
THE REST OF US are going to pay for NFTs for a very long time. They use an astonishing amount of electricity to create and trade. Together, they are already using more than is consumed by some states in the US. Imagine building a giant new power plant just to make Christie’s or the Basel Art Fair function. And the amount of power wasted will go up commensurate with their popularity and value.