Writings

Consensus reality—our broad, shared understanding of what is real and true—has shattered, and we’re experiencing a Cambrian explosion of subjective, bespoke realities. A deluge of content, sorted by incentivized algorithms and shared instantaneously between aligned believers, has enabled us to immerse ourselves in environments tailored to our own beliefs and populated with our own preferred facts. On the eve of the second Trump administration, I just finished reading Renée DiResta’s Invisible R

One of my favorite 2024 listens is 99% Invisible’s Power Broker Breakdown - a podcast series that functions as a distributed book club celebrating the book’s 50th anniversary. Hosts Roman Mars and Elliott Kalan break the 1200+ page book into 12 episodes that they released each month throughout the year. The format was great and I wonder what other book-host combos would benefit from it.  Each episode is about 2.5 hours long. While I don’t usually listen to podcasts that long, they broke it up w

Recently, many government norms we’ve taken for granted as “how America works” have been exposed to be just that - norms. They’ve proven to be malleable (and in some cases optional). For those of us who only know this country, it can be challenging to know what to make of it. While we’ve learned about other democracies’ deterioration and collapse through history, those moments feel far removed from the 🇺🇸 Democracy 🎇 we‘ve enjoyed here.  Anne Applebaum, a staff writer for The Atlantic, is on

Over the past year, I’ve regularly switched between the different LLMs for my day-to-day work to keep up with their evolution. While they’re quickly getting more capable, I feel their incredible value remains inaccessible to normal people. I expect that over the next 6-12 months, we’ll see many companies focus on the experience layer that sits between the user and the LLM. This is where users have a clear path to this new value without needing to know the what the model is doing behind the scen

Earlier this week, I took my mom to see The Wild Robot and I loved it. It explores aspiration, acceptance, and resilience in a funny and moving way, and the visual storytelling is beautiful. I'm a sucker for both animal and robot-with-feelings stories, so this film is right in my wheelhouse. This movie hit hard as a parent who regularly thinks about our kids (now 14 and 11) growing up and heading out on their own. I hadn't read the book it's based on, but I'm happy to learn there are two

CVS certainly isn’t alone in this but my experience attempting to unsubscribe from one of their emails over the weekend made me frustrated enough to want to vent here. This “Oh no! Our unsubscribe button must be broken” is so transparently shady to me. I love that I’m welcome to call Customer Care. Call someone?! To unsubscribe from an email?! No thanks! I’m left with no recourse other than smashing that Gmail Spam button and just wait for the next newsletter that I can’t unsubscribe from to sho

Last week my son and I saw Transformers One and both really enjoyed it - and not just because I went in with pretty low expectations based on the live action Transformers movies I’ve seen. It legitimately does a great job telling the origin stories of Optimus Prime and Megatron and as someone who grew up in the 80s during the Transformers action figure heyday, it felt new while also staying true to that original IP. Watching it also reminded me of the original Megatron action figure that transf

Lenny Rachitsky has, over the past 5+ years built what I consider to be the best community and content around "Product" writ large - covering various aspects of the craft of product management, strategies for product growth and finally, and often most interesting to me, valuable perspectives on the psychology of being a product manager/product leader. It all started with a great subscription newsletter and a subscriber-only Slack community. The subscription only costs $150 per year and if being