Mar 13, 2025 3 min read

You Should Read - Mar 13

Earlier this week, I applied for a brand strategy position with a big tech company. The role was primarily focused on naming, something I have a fair amount of experience with. A former colleague working at the company made a referral for me and I soon received a HR screening questionnaire. Based on the questions, I felt I was well positioned to go to the next step in the hiring process. Agency and client-side experience? Check. Technology branding experience? Check. Located near a branch office for hybrid work? Check.

This morning, I noticed the hiring manager had checked my LinkedIn profile. Great! I took a look at his profile, as well. I wanted to believe he'd have an open mind about my experience, but his own career path was so utterly different, I was pretty sure this was a dead end. Sure enough, about forty-five minutes later, I received the standard "thanks, but we'll be pursuing other candidates" email.

What made me so sure? The hiring manager's career was one naming position after another, first in consulting, then at the company in question. He had a PhD in Linguistics from MIT. A specialist, par excellence. My generalist background surely would be of no interest to someone with such deep and narrow expertise. For a few fleeting minutes, I'd imagined what a work conversation might be like between two people with such mismatched mindsets. I find such a focused career as his hard to fathom and wonder what it must be like to have the ability to go so deep for so long.

Five Things

Grieving David Lynch (Cody Lakin)

...it’s no small comfort knowing there was someone like David Lynch in the world, someone who grew up in the time he did, who lived to the age he did, whose view of the world expanded rather than narrowed, who lived and taught the aforementioned values of acceptance, goodness, and love. That’s the kind of person I always try and hope to be.

Next Slide, Please: A Brief History of the Corporate Presentation (MIT Technology Review)

Gaskins’s 1984 proposal for PowerPoint, written when he was VP of product development at the Sunnyvale startup Forethought, is a manifesto in bullet points. It outlines the slumbering, largely-hidden-from-view $3.5 billion business presentation industry and its enormous need for clear, effective slides. It lists technology trends—laser printers, color graphics, “WYSIWYG” software—that point to an emerging desktop presentation market. It’s a stunningly prescient document throughout. But Gaskins italicized only one bullet point in the whole thing.

User benefits:

Allows the content-originator to control the presentation.

This Is Just The Start: ICE agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil for his role in pro-Palestine protests, signaling the beginning of a surveillance nightmare. (The Verge)

...there are no reports of Khalil having a criminal record, which raises questions about why ICE detained him — and how they found him. (The NYPD did not respond to The Verge’s request for comment.) His arrest raises questions about ICE’s surveillance apparatus and the possibility of government overreach.

The 200+ Sites an ICE Surveillance Contractor is Monitoring (404 Media)

Marketing material available online says SocialNet can plot identities and find connections between them; create a map of suspicious activity and follow a suspect’s trail, and “follow the breadcrumbs of your target’s digital life and find hidden correlations in your research.” In one promotional video, ShadowDragon says users can enter “an email, an alias, a name, a phone number, a variety of different things, and immediately have information on your target. We can see interests, we can see who friends are, pictures, videos.”

The Wabbit Hole

Selections from my Wikipedia searches from the past week.