The Elon Musk Interview. Aeon Magazine talks with Elon Musk about space exploration and pushing humanity in to a multi-planetary future.
Category: Links
Motivation Has Pit Stains. Dan and Merlin talk about how motivation plays out at work. Interesting anecdotes throughout. Also a good distinction drawn by Merlin between motivation and inspiration; the words are not interchangeable.
The Internet Rainforest. Great podcast episode from Ben Thompson and James Allworth about the changing economy. I dig the discussion about the individual autonomy this all provides for.
Scenes from the New American Dustbowl. Long feature story from Matter on the historic drought plaguing California. It’s well-written and tells a solid narrative story about the Central Valley.
Mastering the Machine and The Billion-Dollar Aphorisms of Ray Dalio. Two articles from a while back that take a look inside Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based hedge fund known for its aggressively transparent and honest company culture. via Matt.
Apple Watch. Gruber’s entire Apple Watch post is worth reading. Toward the bottom there’s a bullet point that really stood out to me:
Rather, I think Apple Watch is the first product from an Apple that has outgrown the computer industry. Rather than settle for making computing devices, they are now using computing technology to make anything and everything where computing technology — particularly miniature technology — can revolutionize existing industries.
How to Hire and Build a Remote Team. Zapier’s co-founder writes about how they interview, trial, and hire people. There are a lot of commonalities with how we approach things at Automattic.
Not for Teacher. Solid review of Dana Goldstein’s new book The Teacher Wars. It’s interesting to think about what a fundamentally different educational system would look like.
Hypertext as an agent of change:
But the technology we build inherits the social and political systems of the world we inhabit: it is not a pristine, perfect, clear-eyed utopia. It is as messy, sexist, racist, and fucked up as we are.
Whitman College and the Decline of Economic Diversity. Some interesting data showing the impact of Whitman’s shift from need-blind admissions to need-sensitive. It appears my years at Whitman, 2006 through 2010, came right at the tail end of their well-funded aid programs. I know without the tens of thousands of dollars Whitman granted me there’s no way I feasibly could have attended.