Aug 4, 2023 3 min read

You Should Read - Aug 4

Collected Ephemera

Wonderful Narrative Starting With A Diagram: A simple diagram can define a problem and set the stage for innovation.
⇛ Synthesizing a discussion into a simple diagram is one of my superpowers, so one of the few things I miss about in-person work is the ability to quickly diagram something on a whiteboard.

Eleven Thirty-Eight Eleven Thirty-Eight Turns a Page: After ten full years of operation, Eleven-ThirtyEight has officially ceased publication and now exists solely as an archive, so that our many great pieces of writing can continue to be enjoyed in the future.
⇛ I will miss reading their regular serious and thoughtful essays about Star Wars. But I admire knowing when a story should end.

BP&O Materiality v Materialism: A Love Letter to Paper

Scriptnotes How to Write a Movie: In a pre-Chernobyl, pre-Last of Us encore episode of the outstanding screenwriting podcast, Craig Maizen pontificates on his approach to writing stories.

Julian Schaff Villain in a Hero’s Mask: On Confronting the Sins of Our Luminaries
⇛ Many Zen sanghas have had to deal with confronting their teachers' harmful behaviors. Some years ago, my own sangha severed relations with its lineage temple because harmful behaviors such as these were not being addressed.

Aeon Poet of Impermanence: Enheduana is the first known named author. Her poems of strife and upheaval resonate in our own unstable times.

CNN Why America Stopped Building Public Pools
⇛ When I was a kid and visiting my grandparents in Nevada each summer, walking down to the public pool was a daily ritual. Where I live in California now, there are primarily private swim clubs, which I gather were created in the '60s or 70s as a way of "preserving the neighborhood character" as some like to say... ahem.

The Verge The Buttons on Zenith’s Original ‘Clicker’ Remote Were a Mechanical Marvel: The Space Command didn’t rely on infrared — or batteries.

Art or Ad? Manifestos: Poetry for the People

Forbes Three Years On, Has ‘Extreme Flexibility’ at Atlassian Delivered the Goods?: Work futurist Dominic Price looks back on three years of ‘Team Anywhere’ at Atlassian, which has a net worth of $44.49 billion and is lauded as one of the most successful companies in Australian history.

Cabel Sasser Fantasy Meets Reality

Creative Boom Standards, a Game-Changing Tool for Creating Brand Design Guidelines, Launches Today: This browser-based platform makes it easy to create online brand guidelines. We chat to founder Hamish Smyth about what Standards offers designers and why it's time to ditch the PDFs.

Nightmares On Wax Feelin' Good (2013)
⇛ It seems I'm always about 20 years behind in discovering great music.

Our Present Dystopia

The Guardian A Beautiful, Broken America: What I Learned on a 2,800-Mile Bus Ride From Detroit to LA: Gone are the small, clean, cheap motels and public spaces where anyone can find a place to nurse a cup of coffee. Yet the camaraderie of the Greyhound is hanging on.
⇛ Related to the video about Amtrak that I shared last week. Travel alternatives to owning a personal car in the US are kinda abysmal, and that includes air travel.

Associated Press Chatbots Sometimes Make Things Up. Not Everyone Thinks AI’s Hallucination Problem Is Fixable

Vox The Night Sky Is Increasingly Dystopian: SpaceX’s satellites are messing up astronomers’ observations. It’s just the beginning. (2020)

The Wabbit Hole

Scrolling Subreddits

/r/nursing How do you handle homelessness?

I was in tears recently because I had a married couple in for dehydration. They'd been out in the woods and sun for almost a week. They're married. They were a normal family and husband was a manager before COVID. That time wrecked them and now they can barely get by staying in motels. They both got sick and can't work and their entire income is tips. They weren't druggies, they were clean and took care of each other. My hospital is so small we don't have case management every day and our town doesn't have a single homeless shelter.

What do you do? I sent them off after ordering food and giving them daily care supplies and extra water. But during the summer our temps can get over 110.

Also, why is there no government help? This disgusts me. These people work and have worked for their entire lives and are trying. Why can't we help people like this?? Does anyone have some kind of resource? I don't know what else to do.

/r/ExplainTheJoke What does Plato have to do with the Barbie movie?

Barbie starts to have thoughts of an inevitable death, Discovers aging and suffering and pain. Discovers true beauty, wonder, and love. Discovers she has no purpose and despite bringing things back to the way things were, she can't bare to live the same life again knowing what she knows now. She's given a choice to embrace life despite its flaws and thus embraces her own inevitable death. Finds true happiness in becoming herself.

It literally kicks off the entire plot but it feels like nobody's been talking about it. Barbie is the Buddha as it follows the story of siddhartha.