After reading Jessica E. Lessin’s “What Critics of the News Industry Get Right — and Wrong” essay, it prompted me to return to the subject of modern journalism and the media companies it’s intrinsically entangled with.

Democratized technology is beneficial to society in that it enables citizen reporting, fast dissemination and syndication of stories, encouraging a community of discussion and commentary, and — essentially — building a voice to the oftentimes voiceless in broader media contexts. It has been discouraging to the practice of journalism, however, as old world news media companies have taken a backseat in the generally recognized idea of news. They instead seemingly have to play on the same service distribution level with any layperson or other potentially “untrusted” institutions on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, or YouTube. In a similar fate that has been wrought upon restaurants with their use of middle-platforms like DoorDash and UberEats, the direct connection to readers and their attention is now shared and competed for based on the sites, platforms, and apps they’re defaulting to (as opposed to visiting the nytimes.com or a restaurant’s site directly).

This permeates everywhere — what once was curated radio now competes on the same technological battlefield as sophisticated video and audio podcasts, distributed by citizens as well as upcoming media empires. It is generally a good and progressive thing to see this, but all of media is now predicated on limited attention behavior and exploitation of headlines and interfaces to propel engagement. And that is where we are seeing the fabric of journalism unravel, along with the bull rush on misinformation.

Lessin suggests “services should create tools and establish norms for disclosing conflicts of interest and encouraging questions from attendees.” That’s a fine approach — arguably a necessity. Twitter and YouTubr have done uneven jobs of this lately, but they’re on the right path for its inclusion in the platforms and trying to make sense of terms of service expectations so as not single out any specific person or behavior, but to create parameters around which we must use the platforms to their appropriate specs.

We inevitably get into misinformation territory when talking about this subject, and that’s where I have my concerns — not necessarily opposing opinions - to what Lessin states next.

The general idea is that platforms should allow people to get context on what they are hearing from public figures on new platforms.that should be baked into the culture of the products, not included as an after thought.

This isn’t wishful thinking, but it is a byzantine challenge of implementation, because it will now need to be an after thought for primary services and media platforms. And it’s not just about providing context for public figures and what they say — it needs to be equally applied to journalists, opinion columnists, and citizen reporters. In this sense, I don’t see it happening on a scalable way any time soon.

Outrage news, predominant headline narratives, and surgically edited sound/video bites will continue to dominate platforms and media sites because the inherent nature of readers and watchers is, again, predicated on limited attention and infinite scroll exploitation. We still live in a quick bites society (post character limits, meme storytelling, sub-1 minute video/audio clips), oftentimes out of context, and without a pragmatic, scalable ability to clarify any of it. The ability to link to more information (as in, use a sound or video bite as the attention grab, and link to a fuller essay or report) is one way of handling this, but that’s like mixing memes with textbooks — you came for the memes, you don’t want to read a book explaining them.

Lessin ends her essay with a note about how we should be concerned with how “[these services] will be manipulated by a few very powerful people in the future.” We’ve already seen this take place with mass misinformation dissemination in the political universe, but we also see it play out all the time in niche sectors.

Right now we are seeing Facebook sell a narrative about Apple conducting itself in an anti-small business way with an upcoming iOS update that simply prompts its users, upon opening an app, whether you want to allow the app to track you or not. This is a threat to Facebook’s advertising livelihood in how it conducts its business, but the predominant headline narrative is against the gatekeeper in charge of distributing the Facebook app. Alternatively, Apple has created a narrative about being the do-gooder in the tech space and advocating for privacy controls that do not impact its bottom line. Apple (and many privacy-forward internet browsers and content blockers) believe an end-user has the right to choose when they are tracked and how they are tracked. Without studying the intricacies of the situation, which require more than a quick bite of information, a reader may not understand the full context, jump to assumptions based on predominant headline narratives, and move on.

So if we are making an argument about media service companies needing to label and fact check, shouldn’t we apply this same principle to every scenario imaginable that could manipulate or persuade an end-user? Is that possible? Is it the right thing to do? We are entering a slippery slope with attempting to regulate major tech services and platforms, which in one way makes sense only to help clarify concerning headline or misinformation trajectories, but on the other hand, endangers the very democratic principles that allow us to communicate freely and openly with one another, including the evolution of citizen reporting in places normal media and journalist outposts have been unable to cover. A smart servicing layer atop these platforms, with accredited or blessed old/new world media institutions as the resource backend, could help with identifying topics and scaling additional reference material to compliment any kind of posting, sound bites, video reporting, etc. it would require coordination among tech platforms and an agreement to build an approved ecosystem that allows them all to scale it together in a consistent manner.

Without coordination and general guidance among these service platforms, I don’t see the challenge at hand being remedied in a competent way any time soon.

[Includes updates after using One for four months; scroll to bottom.]

January 7th brought disappointing news to a small contingent of bank users in the US -- Simple, a clever fintech banking experience, informed users it was over. The email was blunt, pointing to BBVA USA (the current back-end housing Simple's deposits) as having "made the strategic decision to close Simple".

This was met with a resounding, gutteral sigh from several of us who had been around since the beginning days in 2009. According to the New York Times, Simple had acquired 20,000+ users and aggregated $200MM in transactions by 2013, likely catalyzing it to be acquired by BBVA USA in 2014. The draw of Simple was its experience -- thoughtful in every aspect, the bank was designed to be helpful to users managing their money. It set itself apart immediately from others in the space and, even to this day, has outclassed competitors in its holistic experience and feature set. (There is likely an obvious explanation why.) With Simple, you could:

• Manage checking and "protected" accounts (essentially savings) in an integrated interface
• View transaction-level data that has apparently been available to any bank forever, but no one cared enough to share, like time of transaction render and location information, and permitted editing vendor name, categories, hashtags, and memos
• Provided a programmatic envelope-divvying system in two ways:
  • Expenses, which could be automated to align to date-specific goals that would expense out on a recurring basis (including completion tracking), and pull from direct deposits or other income sources to fund
  • Goals, which could be set up ad hoc to dump money in, or aligned to long-term goals with manual/auto-investments daily/monthly to meet the target funding
• Safe-to-Spend, a calculated figure indicating the remainder in your available funds to use outside of Expenses and Goals
• Any transaction could also be aligned/tagged to these Expenses and Goals, allowing for even more organization around money flow and budgeting
• The beauty of this whole system was that it was native to the bank: Goals, Expenses, and Safe-to-Spend were all virtualized over a basic checking account. This was the magic of its execution.

Simple was, and will continue to stand as, the best banking experience ever designed. Alas, a good thing had to come to an end, evidently. When BBVA USA was acquired by PNC very recently, it came as no surprise Simple was getting shuttered. It competes directly with PNC Bank's other products, and likely interferes with brand building. We'll assume the acquisition was userbase and assets.

And so I, like many others, have been looking elsewhere. The banking and fintech landscape has changed significantly in this past decade, but seemingly has not changed much at all in what's uniquely on offer for banking solutions. An influx of new, flashy banking brands have cropped up in much the same way and variety that millennial DTC brands have been bootstrapped through Red Antler's identity marketing program. That includes the omnipresent Chime, but who offers few value propositions aside from early paycheck deposits (like many others now) and, at this time, a decent APY on savings (0.50%). But their fee-free and overdraft-free account programming isn't anything revolutionary. Many have this now. And it's not compelling enough to switch a discerning Simple user.

I've spent a good deal of time scouring Reddit, fintech industry sites, and Twitter to seek the best alternatives. There has been an enormous amount of other folks’ goodwill towards this research, and I'd like to point out one Reddit user in particular who has compiled a comprehensive comparison list of several alternative "neo-banks", alternative banks, and fintech software layers to traditional banking.

I finally found something that should work.

One Finance Review

In all, there isn't a direct replacement for Simple. Nothing does what Simple has done for years, and there's only one bank that comes close: One Finance. But first... there are a couple solid contenders that could evolve in the right direction:

• Envel.ai: has the smarts and the talent backing it, uses envelope-based budgeting as a core component, but the hokey, emoji-heavy aesthetic, and the questionable approach of surrendering your money to AI autopilot “learning” was discouraging.
• Astra: Impressive automation software that layers on top of banking accounts (using Plaid integration only for now, which prohibits some banks) primarily to permit the user to program the movement of money between institutions with instructions like "every two weeks move $from to __". This works, in theory, with any traditional bank you may use, and in practice, this might work for some folks, coming the closest to Simple's recurring expensive and goal funding. It falls short, however, in being a layer atop of bank (not native), not yet being able to recognize income deposits (e.g., paychecks) and then move specified money to the appropriate accounts (only percentage-based). You also can't assign expenses against labeled budgets once they’ve gone through, which was an intrinsic component of managing and organizing in Simple.
• Huntington: One of the national banks actually does feature some smart integration on saving goals and budgeting within its checking and saving accounts, including MoneyScout that auto-saves money from transactions (essentially a “round-up” based on spending habits and cadence), and Savings Goal Getter, a way to divvy up multiple savings buckets for things like vacations. While these could work as an alternative to envelope budgeting, they still don’t allow for the customization of a recurring or transaction-assignments methodology.

One Finance was appealing enough to try, and immediately made the most sense once inside the platform. A short summary of what works well and helps rationalize why I went with this alternative:

• Sub-accounts called Pockets operate as distinct money budget envelopes, with the bonus of having their own unique routing + account number (permitting secure, literal connections to, say, utility bills or investing accounts), and with the bonus of being able to share this with other users (say, your spouse, in an alternative to joint accounts)
• Auto-save (up to 10% of your direct deposit) in an industry-leading APY (3% at this time) or deposit into a strong 1% APY normal savings account (up to $25K)
• Ability to attach your debit card to any given pocket at any time, providing extra security and budget-conscious usage of payment structures (virtual cards coming soon)
• Uses Coastal Community Bank as the back-end, a small regional outfit in Washington. There have been guarantees that there's no intention to attach or sell itself to larger national banks that could wind up putting One in a similar situation as Simple once it was passed from Bancorp to BBVA.
• Incredible goodwill and outreach to the Simple and bank alternative community on the OneFinance subreddit. They've been adamant about intaking community feedback and ideas, and re-engineering their feature roadmap, including a priority of recurring fund movement into Pockets ala Goals/Expenses.
• Checks the other expected boxes of no-fee ATMs (within the Allpoint network), no blatant/overdraft fees, early paycheck deposit, round-up transaction to savings, and a low-risk credit line if these things are of use to you.

Overall, One Finance has an altruistic approach to banking, including a lot of the transparent, no-bullshit values that echo Simple's philosophy. It helps that quite a bit of talent leading One is from Simple (their CEO led Azlo, Simple's sister bank) and similar derivatives. It isn't perfect, though, and it has a lot to prove in the months to come in how efficient and capable they are in meeting their ambitious roadmap. It's missing a significant amount of core features, which is why I'd still recommend having a traditional bank as a contingency plan/hedge on needing to do "normal banking tasks". While several of these are on the imminent roadmap, One currently (Jan 2021) doesn't have check deposits, recurring funding of Pockets, outgoing wires, outbound cash app integration (only inbound), physical checks, data exports, search functionality, or editing transactions (categories, memos, etc.). They aren't dealbreakers if you can bear with the early stages of a company carving its way in an ultra-competitive industry, but time will tell if they can meet their lofty aims.

If you're interested in giving One a shot, try it via either of these links:

➔ Affiliate Link (if you're inclined -- you'll get $50 after an initial $250+ direct deposit set-up)

➔ Non-Affiliate Link to Sign Up

Four Months In - Update

Since I opened an account, I've had several direct deposits from my salaried paycheck drop in (it truly does come a few days early due to the way they pull the trigger quicker than normal banks' ACH acceptance + transfer), have created a handful of Pockets (their version of envelope-budgeting), and set up payment structures with utility companies and investing firms where credit card payments don't work.

What I like:

• Pockets. Simple, but also complex envelope-budgeting. You can share them with any other One user, and each one also has a unique account number, meaning you can securely share these with various companies you want to pull money from without risking security exploits or access to your entire account's funds.

• Savings. A savings account with 1% APY (at this time) is unheard of. And the way the auto-savings works (a separate account for 3% APY with a max contribution of 10% of all direct deposits) is both a brilliant way to encourage and retaining savings habits, but also an incredible savings rate up to $25K).

• Engagement. The team has been highly active on social media and answering thorough questions and feedback on One Finance's subreddit. It's a promising sign from an early start-up.

• The team behind it. Ex-Azlo/Simple folks are contributing, and there have been initial promises that One won't face the same fate as Simple with a sell-off to a large national bank. 🤞

• A transparent roadmap. This is excellent to see, and reassuring they’re committed to evolving the product over time, like most great software is. Why should the banking experience be any different?

What I don't like (but know will probably be solved for in their roadmap):

• Lack of transaction search. [I'm using Monarch in the interim.]

• Limited recurring transfer feature (monthly or every week/two weeks just don't cut it for how this should work). Astra does a superior job of acknowledging a deposit amount and moving xx or xx% to a designated place, but is delayed and clunky by comparison due to it being a third-party method and the fact that our current banking infrastructure is slow and cumbersome.

  • In a recent update on their roadmap, however, they are tackling this in what they’re calling the to their Money Movement update. So again, fantastic to see this be addressed, and so quickly.

• Lack of authenticator app-based two-factor authentication (they have installed 2FA via text messages, and will be adding step-up authentication this summer, which is great).

Overall, I'm pleased with the switch and look forward to its future. They've already made good on a number of short-term roadmap promises. Here's a raised glass to them rounding out the feature set this year.

➔ Deep reading being eroded by skim reading via modern child development

These processes include connecting background knowledge to new information, making analogies, drawing inferences, examining truth value, passing over into the perspectives of others (expanding empathy and knowledge), and integrating everything into critical analysis. Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought.

Just received my first book from Black Garnet Books, the recently-launched Black, woman-owned bookstore in Minnesota that curates contemporary literature from racially-diverse authors. And their online store is open for safe browsing/buying during the pandemic.

➔ I’m always sleuthing for great advice on meetings, agenda, and whether/why to have one. This is a great tip on seths.blog:

The purpose of a meeting is not to fill the allocated slot on the Google calendar invite. The purpose is to communicate an idea and the emotions that go with it, and to find out what’s missing via engaged conversation.

Just watched Boys State 📺 (Apple + A24 joint). Excellent, superbly cinematic documentary.

Just grabbed a subscription to Brand New to keep it afloat. I’ve probably read dozens of their logo analyses over the years, and they’re always thoughtful visual exercises.

➔ Perlstein’s Fourth volume on the rise of the US right

Like trying to keep up with American politics in any election year, reading Perlstein can be like trying to drink from a firehose. There’s something Melvillean about the sheer scale of the work, four leviathans to make up a whole.

Chip Butties

Really fascinating to come upon such a strange delicacy in the UK.

Baffling. But worth creating, I’m sure.

Great read from Current Affairs found by Gruber (via Kottke – hah, love how this stuff gets around) earlier today that I am compelled to add to, as it hits an important beat on my radar of journalism.

I wrote more commentary here.

Great read from Current Affairs linked to by Gruber (via Kottke -- love how this stuff gets around) earlier today that I am compelled to add to, as it hits an important beat on my radar of journalism.

The gist of the article is that quality, integrity-based journalism exists, it's available, but there's often a paywall or fee to access it. Other sites, like Fox News, Breitbart, and the Daily Wire are free, but spin significant misinformation and second-rate journalism or news curation.

This is, at its heart, a difficult problem to solve, especially given the Herculean undertaking publishers and journalists are going through in attempting to stay afloat financially -- especially at the local level. There is no easy answer here. Major curators with native apps built-in, like Apple News and Google News, do an important job of bringing a variety of news sources together to cover breaking news, topical news, etc., but also point to articles that require subscriptions or another layer to the app itself (like Apple News+).

There are some larger issues at play here, though, beyond the free vs. paid dilemma:

• You could make a convincing argument that most people nowadays do not read full-length articles and skim headlines or images as representations of the “news”, and that paywalls aren’t as important in these contexts. Sure, free news does a great job of capturing that vibe anyways since the content itself is fairly vapid.
• Those who believe in the institutional importance of journalism, funding well-sourced and researched reports, and keeping companies and government in check at all levels of geography probably pay for news. Others who believe the media is biased, fake, misleading, or have become disillusioned with the matters covered have resorted to simply getting their fix elsewhere (radio and TV), and usually from fewer sources. (And yes, there’s a middle ground here, but this is the spectrum.)
• TV news. Instagram “news”. Facebook “news”. These visual-based mediums continue to be problematic: they are much more bias-driven in messaging than reading an audio-less, visual-less (aside from photography) investigation or report. And they’re free or easily accessible via a pre-paid TV package.

So, yes, it’s a dire situation when you zoom out at the discrepancy in what type of news is free and behind a paywall, but the nature of and vessel for news is also a concern. It’s too easy to dismiss news, or sideline its importance, or view it in an exceedingly lazy way. Without focused commitment from readers or viewers or listeners, journalism dissolves, and what you have left are the easiest, frictionless click-worthy shells of its former self. To incentivize people to pay for news you have to create redeemable value. Perhaps some of these great publishers should take a cue from the freebie sites and partition their way doing business: carve off hard-hitting, visual treatments of real, on-the-ground news stories that are freely available and easily shareable, but always tie it back to a site that, if you want to truly read more about it, you have to pay, and present a value proposition on why someone should fund it.

The New York Times has done a tremendous job with The Daily, a widely-listened to podcast that is free and accessible to anyone, but drives home a consistent point in subscribing to continue to fund these efforts. That’s a great value proposition. Alternatively, Axios does a remarkable job of cutting through the heavier reports and simplifying the news to bulleted lists and summaries, plus has a few ancillary, very short podcasts. They, conversely, do not have a subscription-based service and use advertising and (likely) residual earning from HBO for their show, to fund the work.

Either way works, but publishers need to start thinking more responsibly about how they operate in the news climate of 2020 to combat and elevate visibility of their better products in the midst of cheaper, shittier, more dangerous free alternatives.

First, Some Background

After stumbling upon these ingenious (maybe? Let’s give it a few months) shower storage designs from Tooletries, I ordered us up a kit. These objects are useful, practical, and excellently designed. I don’t know how long I’ve been looking for add-on shower storage that doesn’t suck (not long, let’s pretend), but it’s probably been ever since I had my first apartment in Chicago. 

In the beginning... I came across a decent piece of tech from Simplehuman at Target several years back, and while it worked great, it had a few glaring issues that most of this equipment does:

• It was cumbersome due to its constrained design and necessary adherence to the front of the shower below the shower head

• As such, it hung off the shower head (which is fine, but it assumes you want your kit right in front of you under the shower — where plenty nastily-accumulating drippage happens); if you have a ceiling spout, obviously this doesn’t work.

• The heights of the shelves do not accommodate all kinds of bottles and shower items you may have on hand, particularly anything 8oz (big buys from Costco won’t fit, unless you have room at the top near where the head hanger is). You don’t have to use it for bottles, but the shelf design assumes you’d be doing this, so...

• The grated shelf system isn’t ideal for storing smaller items like razors or bobby pins (in my wife’s case), as they are wont to slip through the aforementioned grates. You get it.

These issues stack up to what I’d consider important checklists for shower storage in any context. You want it to accommodate key items (granted, shampoo/soap/conditioner bottles likely are always going to be troublesome). You also want it to be positioned where you’re going to need it based on how you like to take a shower. All showers are different, I imagine. You don’t even know how I shower, but still, let’s just say.

Enter Tooletries

Get over the pun name. It describes their goods accurately. To be honest, it was difficult to dig up any kind of background on this company. It was recently curated by Huckberry, which I consider a legitimate outlet for discovery, so I’m confident it’s coming from a trustworthy source. But their site is half-baked, with several missing pieces of content (like FAQs and a proper list of their global stores). If you can get over this aspect of the product’s parentage, I guarantee that the goods themselves are rock-solid.

Their admittedly stale, male-oriented mantra is about believing that a bathroom is a “sanctuary” and a “place of calm and serenity… free from chaos and disorder”. Sure, I can agree with that, and I’m sure every gender could, too. What’s not stale is the design integrity behind these pieces. And whole thing doesn’t work without their 100% antibacterial silicone, extremely-adhesive sticking surface, and thoughtful design like anti-fog mirror and shelf drainage holes.

Let’s take a look at the kit I bought, and I’ll walk you through this.

Harvey & Oliver Set

Available here ➔ The Harvey and Oliver Set

I don’t shave. At least in the traditional sense. I use an electric razor on my haphazard bullshit beard, and I don’t do in the shower lest I get electrocuted. Which means this part of the kit is for my wife, who does shave, and like many, I conjecture, does it in the shower.

This might be the least impressive of the Tooletries items, but certainly serves a functional purpose if you need it: 

1. It holds a traditionally-designed razor (my guess is it’ll fit 95% of them in it’s cubby drop-down holder), and also has a little rest for an extra razor, too. Which I suppose is convenient.

2. It also has a deep pocket for perhaps some kind of shaving cream or tube of something related to shaving or other shower antics. Honestly, it’s not a great shape, and would really only fit a 2-3oz lithe tube of liquid, nothing fatter. I’ve brushed my teeth a few times in the shower, and I’ll park my toothbrush in here between finishing and getting out. It’s about that size.

3. The mirror is cool. I’ve never had a mirror in a shower before, and while its use is limited (what would I honestly be doing that requires looking at myself... is extremely limited in a shower context). But, having it adds a surreal element to the daily cleanse (at least in these early stages). Maybe its use will manifest itself down the road. I don’t know. Either way, I’m keeping the fucking thing in there.

Body Scrubber & Hook

Available here ➔ - Body Scrubber and Hook

By far the most effective tool in the collection. I ordered two (one for my wife, one for me). Same two-toned options. 

These things stick as well as the rest of the kit, and provide the (likely) most used component. They operate as replacements to loofahs or hand towels, whatever your previous preference in body-washing. Lather the soft-spiked surface area with body soap of any kind, and comfortably hold the joystick handle to apply the region across yourself while showering. Simple operation. 

The surface area, while significantly different than a loofah’s swirly mess of fibers, does feel different at first: its areal spikes, diameter-y plane of existence is a combination of a towel and a loofah, and it makes perfect sense. Easy to rub that soap everywhere. It causes a bit of friction, which in my unprofessional observation, helps with sloughing off dead skin and priming the epidermis for some lovely cleanliness. 

Phone Holder

Available here ➔ - The Phone Holder

Yeah, this was a hesitancy buy. It’s weird bringing tech into the shower, but if the acoustics of your bathroom aren’t great (how many actually are?), then listing to music or podcasts is best with the phone with you. And since many modern devices are water resistant or proof, this is an obvious choice.

Its design is hefty — never once have I felt that it wouldn’t hold my phone’s weight. Its design suggests you lay the phone horizontal along its shelf, but you can flip it up vertical. It holds either way. In our paranoia, we usually stick a little piece of TP on the camera lens, but depending on where you place the Phone Holder, superstitious prying eyes probably aren’t going to be gazing at you easily. 

Anyway. This was a good addition to the core kit. Fits in nicely with the rest of the pack. Provides a nice use in the morning or evening if you’re catching up on podcasts or looking for some soothing tunes to wake or subdue you. 

In Summary

I recommend the purchase(s) if you want to invest in something like this, haven’t found the right shower kit, and/or if the two-toned options match your shower aesthetic. The sticky mounts do actually work without having to permanently nail anything into surfaces that will rile up your anxiety. These pieces are functional, washable, and — hey! — movable, meaning you can constantly readjust their location. How about that. Flexibility.

➔ A lovely memoir about family, heritage, and Taco Bell.

Taco Bell was easy, and inexpensive, and it was shamelessly Mexican. Emphasis on “shameless”: its garish facsimile of an entire nation’s culture was seemingly dreamed up by the type of white person who gets drunk on tequila and wears a sombrero for comedic effect. It was still Mexican, though. In fact, it was both Mexican and American. All under one greasy roof.

Delightful to see useful, playful hardware designs again from Sony, like this portable AC unit. Not sure about practicality, but I like that they built it and released it. No fear.

Writing is thinking.

📝

Reading through a few recent posts from Minneapolis’ Trylon cinema blog, Perisphere, I came across this from Matt Levine, after contemplating his initial enthusiasm for having moved to the Twin Cities:

I know now this rosy view of Minneapolis was a reflection of my white privilege. I suspected as much at the time; you’d have to be severely myopic to see the way cops lingered around the intersection of Broadway and Lyndale (but ignored most kinds of drunken mayhem in Uptown) and pretend everything was okay. But I wanted to believe, in the years of Barack Obama’s presidency, that Minneapolis was a sign of where America was going: suffering from a difficult past but working towards progress, visibly unequal but trying to right those wrongs. I wanted to believe that the city’s pseudo-liberal leadership and my semi-diverse (i.e., gentrifying) neighborhood were proof that things were okay and would only get better. The ease with which I convinced myself of that weighs heavily on my shoulders, as it does for a great many white residents of Minneapolis.

He ends on a hopeful note, one that I echo from across the river in St. Paul:

And yet my pride in Minneapolis continues to grow. What I’ve seen in the aftermath are peaceful protests at which people come together, undivided by race or by attempts to stoke further animosity; they kneel or chant or march in unison because they refuse to live in a country like this. I’ve seen people converge on Lake Street or Bloomington Avenue armed only with brooms and rubber gloves and trash bags, working together to clean up the mess. I’ve seen people donate money and food and cleaning supplies and homes and vehicles, people that may have not been mobilized in the past. I’ve seen and heard a lot of traumatic things, but also neighbors who stay up all night to keep watch over their street, and business owners who would rather see their property damaged in an act of public demonstration than be complicit. Yes, I had a naïve view of Minneapolis as a blissful city that welcomed everybody, and on the political level that probably was never true; but at the street level, where so many of us are afraid and furious but still working together, that is the Minneapolis I’m seeing now.

Great reminder from Gruber on the differences between the Return and Enter keys.

➔ Ranjan Roy on investing in a scathing piece about robot-investment firm, Robinhood:

It's mainly because, over the years, I've learned that a general rule is anytime anyone tells you about an investment, you shouldn't listen. They're most likely telling you a quarter of the full story, or they're trying to sell you some investment newsletter, or maybe some newfangled financial product, or just getting in a good old-fashion dick-swinging competition, but in investing, more than probably any other area of life, assume everyone is at least partially lying.

He harkens back to his days trading in 2009, but the principles of profit-making motives still apply today. It’s astounding how much money Robinhood makes on every dollar in a consumer’s account. And, of course, astounding how yet again a start-up sought to disrupt an industry without considering the consequences (intentional or not) through hyper-growth aims.

I really hoped this guy would have survived more than a few days after he finally bloomed, but a dual-front of bees and birds stole the thunder right out of it.

➔ Matt Mullenwag (Automattic’s CEO), interviewed in this New York Times Corner Office piece, elaborates on his point about leveling the playing field of everyone at a company via remote work scenarios:

...there’s a world of possibility that opens up when you move from the finite space of a shared office, and all the politics of dividing up the scarce resource of desirable space, to the infinite game where people can define their own “office” as the place where they will be most productive, and do so however they like with no penalties or restraints.

If you had the best space in the legacy office, you probably liked it and may even have had motivated reasoning around ineffable things that happened in the office like “culture” that would be impossible without it, but the average experience of an entry-level worker was not as positive. Now there can be a much more even playing field. At Automattic we have a home office allowance people can use to buy equipment they need to make their home work area comfortable and productive, and it’s the same if you’re leading a team of hundreds or if it’s your first job.

Having been working remote (or, as Matt is trying to formalize as better terms, distributed or decentralized) these past two years after moving to St. Paul (from Chicago), and running a team — at first remotely with mostly centrally-located teammates, then fully remote due to the pandemic — I concur with his rationale. Jason Fried (Basecamp) has leaned in this direction as well, and they’re both right about workplace environments for most computer-oriented companies: this kind of “office” scenario can be better for almost all leveled individuals at an organization, and it evens out equality of workplace environment and time bandwidth on a number of levels. Furthermore in the piece, he also details Automattic’s intriguing way of hiring (hint: all chat-based).

Nicole Cardoza schools inquisitive minds regarding AAVE (aka Ebonics):

There is no historical or grammatical grounds for entirely discrediting any type of English, let alone AAVE. In fact, correct language is relative to its time and setting, and native speakers are the ones who decide what is acceptable (JSTOR). Take the idea of double negatives, something that AAVE is often criticized for with terms like “ain’t nobody.” Those fell out of favor in the eighteenth century, but were loved by Chaucer and Shakespeare, and are critical in expressing negativity in both French and Ancient Greek (JSTOR).

The BBC has an intriguing examination of an occupied radio frequency that may or may not be used for message encoding by the Russians. It also could be a plethora of other things, leading the reader into conspiracy theory territory.

A great, 10-minute weekend read.

More on the “why” of the Lincoln Project, explained by Vox. This point is apt:

Liberals who oppose the Lincoln Project object to its core conceit: Trump, and Trumpism, are a cancer on the Republican Party, and by removing him and his ideas, things can perhaps go back to normal. In the conservative group’s mindset, Republican presidential candidates like John McCain and presidents like George W. Bush exemplified the best of American conservatism, while Trump is an aberration: a former reality show host with divorces, affairs, and affronts to “traditional morality” aplenty.

But as historian Eric Foner argued in 2016, Trump can be seen as “the logical conclusion of a lot of things the Republican Party has been doing” for decades, with predecessors like Richard Nixon’s “law and order” presidential campaign, rife with racist implications, and populist appeal as a businessman railing against Washington corruption. To many liberals, Trump isn’t an aberration; he’s the culmination of a decades-long political project.

➔ Agreed with Dave Winer on this bit:

Project Lincoln so far has been great entertainment. Good for base-rallying. They can't really get into inspiring visions, given that they are Republicans and won't be in power if the ads work.

While Project Lincoln has been savvy and entertaining, it’s unknown what their longer-term vision is for the country aside from defending “democracy”. Are they moderate Republicans? Their line has been that “those who sign onto Trumpism are a clear and present danger to the Constitution and our Republic”. But if they’re only hoping to dethrone him with a Democrat and influence more experts in a new administration, let’s hope it’s in the spirit of returning America to its values (including whatever is even left of the Republican Party), and not stymieing progressive movements forward.

Tackling Kaufman’s tome for the remainder of the summer. 📚