ZD 24.07: Dispatch from Spring Break Land
ZD 24.07: Dispatch from Spring Break Land
Your pool deck bar reading list.
🥃 The Distilled Spirit 🥃
📉 Time to sell?
🤖 This week’s sign that we are living in the future.
⚾ Ohtani makes you go hmm.
🌿 Urban populations have lost much of the ability to digest plants.
🤖 Tech Things 🤖
Selected reads and videos from the world of techology.
🦾 The Sam Altman / Lex Fridman conversation is two plus hours but worth the investment. Cliff notes version if you do not have two hours.
🧠 Azeeem Azar hosted Ethan Mollick on his podcast to talk about how you can unleash the power of AI.
🚀 When he isn’t selling $50 stanley cups ships NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang is compressing reality.
🥽 Hugo Barra, former head of Oculus, has thoughts about the device. Technology analyst Ben Evans has his own take on the headgear.
🍏 ICYMI Apple is under anti-trust scrunity. Steven Sinofsky, who has a bit of experience with this from his days at Microsoft, has some notes about it.
📦 Reading Outside of the Box 📦
Some fun and interesting links to get you through the week.
🐳 How whales ended up on toast.
🏕 After Babel on why your kids need camp.
🧒 Peter Gray argues that Children invented language.
💿 The ringer has found ‘60s songs that explain the ‘90s.
🚫 A story of successful design by committee: the genesis of the no symbol.
🌄 Explore the Beauty of Cappadocia in five ways.
🧮 Not far from Cappadocia, man figured out how to count.
🚪 Doornails really are dead.
📚📧 Be The Most Interesting Person at Your Spring Events 📧📚
Being the most interesting person in any given room is a challenge. You need to have a great range, be conversant on a lot of subjects and find the stuff people have not yet discovered. It takes work and many subscriptions to many things to triangulate the right sources. The curated list below satisfies two requirements. First, they are all very interesting and will position you well for cocktail party conversation. Second they are efficent — they are generally short with a good lede for what they are linking to. You can pick the right places to go deep. Enjoy!
Daily Publications
Matthew Ingrahm’s Where the Going Gets Weird is one of my favorite reads every day. He has a great eye for fun stories from around the world.
Noah Brier and Colin Nagy deliver Why This Is Interesting, a daily dive into a differnent topic of potential interest. Their monday interviews are a wonderful discovery tool as well — great insight into things smart people read.
Chartr focuses on finding, visualizing and sharing interesting data every day. Very brief and to the point, really worth the 3 minute investment.
Weekly Publications
The Sunday Long Read curates the best long-form journalism of the week and puts it in your inbox. Bonus points for the team for making sure there are no paywalls on the articles they share — you can get to everything.
Also on Sundays nonostantment provides quality curated stores to explore. Joele has a real eye for the interesting and it shows.
It probably doesn’t come as suprise to many of our readers but deepculture is amazing for the variety and curation on Tuesday mornings.
The Deep Dive gives you a brilliantly curated set of video documentaries every Wedsnesday.
Scope of Work is “excellent writing about the physical world” and they hit the mark. Not a pure weekly but there is a weekly roundup each Friday and often a few very interesting things in between.
Not Boring publishes a Weekly Dose of Optimism each Friday with some great links about how the world is not falling apart.
Stay interesting peeps.