~the-official-medium | Bookmarks (100)

It’s just starting to feel like spring where I am (temperatures in the mid-50s, sort of San Francisco-ish even though I’m on the East Coast!). After a very dark, sleet-y, dry winter that had me applying moisturizer every hour, I am glad to finally participate in my favorite pastime: popping in my AirPods and running...

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote a newsletter on the anti-establishment origins of International Women’s Day, and by extension, Women’s History Month. One notable point of origin for both holidays? The historic 1908 workers’ protest, when 15,000 women marched in New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay, ...

There’s an essay I read a while back, by Sasha Chapin, about what might be the key to the universe (or at least some parts of it): responsiveness.He begins with a viral video of someone ordering dinner at a halal truck (1.6 million hearts) and uses this as a jumping off point to make an argument about charisma: it’s...

Are you worried that AI might someday take your current job?I am, a bit. I run the Content team at Medium, which means we do a lot of writing in various forms — particularly writing marketing copy, one of the main use cases for LLMs like ChatGPT. But also? Like a lot of the claims around tech trends, it feels like h...

I have a friend — whom I am absolutely not going to name, for obvious reasons — that works in U.S. federal government. Last week, they emailed Elon Musk their requisite approx. five “bullets” listing their accomplishments for the week. He will apparently feed the responses to an LLM, creating an automated portrait o...

In 2019, around this time of year, Jenny Harrington published what is literally the most moving essay I have ever read — a tribute to her eight-year-old son, Ewan, who passed away from leukemia. I still remember where I was when I first read it. I was in the middle of Medium’s office at the time, at my standing desk...

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Senate confirmed RFK Jr. as our new Secretary of Health and Human Services. Notably, he doesn’t seem to believe the Covid vaccine saved lives.Vaccine hesitancy has risen in the U.S. over the last few years. Belief in vaccine safety fell from 77% in 2021 to 71% in 2023 — not a giant drop, but ...

“The reality of a technical position,” writes systems administrator Cooper Lund, “is that most of what you do isn’t what people think counts as technical work like writing code — the majority of the work is being an investigator and a thinker.”Essentially, his job is to be curious.It’s true of most “knowledge work”:...

Monday marked three years since Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia still occupies 20% of the country. Every day, more missiles and drones hit Ukrainian infrastructure and monuments. Over 1 million people have been killed or injured, and the war shows no signs of stopping — despite failed attempts to resolve it through U...

A few weeks ago, I met a new friend: 2024 YR4. He’s an asteroid, and as Neil DeGrasse Tyson tweeted on Valentine’s Day, for a brief period there was a 2% chance that he would hit Earth sometime within the next decade. 2024 YR4 is a pretty big boy (slightly larger than a football field) and he’s a level 3 on the Tori...

“Being told you need to be more strategic is common feedback for senior engineers,” writes CTO and technical advisor Dan Pupius on Medium. (He was Medium’s Head of Engineering a decade ago.)It’s a phrase I’ve heard a lot throughout my career, and it’s usually thrown around without a precise definition. The gist seem...

Meghan Daum, author of My Misspent Youth (excerpted here by the New Yorker), said memoir is often described as “navel-gazing,” and “indulgent” because many writers “treat it sloppily and without respect.”While honesty is the key to good memoir writing, Daum warns this doesn’t mean you should “include every detail, p...

A few months ago, we launched Featured stories for publications as a way for publication editors to directly influence story recommendations for their followers. Since then, our team has released multiple improvements, making Featured stories visible in stats and post page labels.Now, we’re excited to give Featured ...

In our issue on “third places” — venues for socializing apart from work and home — my colleague Carly Rose Gillis visited an American Legion Post. She wrote about why “third places” are so important: they help us connect with people who are different from us, but who live close by. The best ones level the socioecono...

From a U.S. news perspective, January 2025 was a year in a month, beginning with the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles and followed by the presidential inauguration in Washington D.C.Throughout, writers came to Medium to share their stories. Ajounisingh asked, “Your house burned down in a wildfire — now what?” an...

Hello, it’s Girl Scout Cookie season (Jan-April) in the U.S., aka the time of year when I vaguely crave minty chocolate discs… though I don’t think I’ve actually had one since the early aughts. If you’re reading from a country that doesn’t sell limited-edition carbs every winter to raise money for cool trips, here’s...

“If you take an idea and hold it in your head, you unconsciously start to do things that advance you toward that goal.” — Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter and Medium, in his book Things a Little Bird Told MeOne of the keys to writing — or creating anything meaningful — is landing on an idea that interests you enough ...

🎆 It’s Presidents’ Day in the U.S., a holiday with no universally agreed upon name. It’s officially “George Washington’s Birthday” though few call it that, and it does not fall on Washington’s actual birthday, which is this Friday.Issue #269: the first-ever Medium story + who to forgetBy Harris SockelLast September,...

💖 Hello to everyone who, like me, will be spending tonight in bed watching Love is Blind, the most important anthropological study of our time.Issue #268: herds, heroes’ journeys, and lonely mouthsBy Adeline DimondHappy Valentine’s Day, a holiday that allegedly originated (sorry to break it to you) with the horrific...

✌️Only 45 more Thursdays to go in 2025Issue #267: the past is in front of you, spiteful biology, and 80 years of symbolismBy Harris SockelI featured this story briefly in Tuesday’s issue but it didn’t quite get the airtime it deserves, so I’m mentioning it up here: Attila Vágó’s Hippocratic Oath for software designe...

🕰️ We’re officially 11.6% of our way through 2025Issue #266: your responses to academia’s paper mill problem, 12x-ing humanity, and luckBy Harris SockelI have a simple piece of advice today, one that calms me down — and is also something Carter Gibson learned after nine years as an internal community management stra...

👋 Hello!Issue #265: auditioning for SNL, an engineer’s Hippocratic Oath, and waking up at 5 a.m.By Harris SockelBuilding on yesterday’s theme of not taking what you read online at face value, I want to share a new report coauthored by two computer scientists and a former health reporter who, after a six month invest...

👋 We’re back!Issue #264: confessions of a healthcare comms lead, executive orders, and brown noiseBy Harris SockelJon Krakauer, bestselling author of several blockbuster nonfiction books including Into the Wild, took to Medium last week to respond to a YouTuber who claims there are significant factual errors in his ...

👋 Welcome backIssue #263: fibroids, catfishing, and simmer potsBy Adeline DimondICYMI like I did, last week was Data Privacy Week. It used to be Data Privacy Day, but as Taylor Armerding writes on Medium, the National Cybersecurity Alliance (NCA) expanded it to a whole week, probably to get people like me to sit up ...