A few weeks ago, I saw a video clip of a teenager asking VP Kamala Harris a question: “You’re a good public speaker — how are you so good?”

I’ve been thinking about Harris’ answer ever since:

“When you’re standing up to speak, remember that it’s not about you… The most important thing is that everyone knows what you know, because they need to know what you know… You know something that you have to share with people that they need to know.”

I’ve found this to be encouraging, but felt there was one nuance missing that I couldn’t quite put my finger on — until I found this recent story by communication consultant Karol Ward, LCSW.

She says many of her clients think they haven’t earned the right to speak — or don’t have the authority to identify that “need to know” information Harris references. When they stand up in front of a room, they feel like they don’t deserve to be there in the first place.

To shake yourself out of that negative self-perception, she recommends asking yourself these questions:

• What would you notice, or feel, if you had the right to be in the room?
• How would you be standing, sitting, or speaking if you had the right to be in the room?
• What would other people say to you if you had the right to be in the room?
• What is one step you could take today if you knew you had the right to be in the room?

As these questions illuminate, the path to building a confident public speaking skill involves persuading yourself just as much as your audience, and giving honor to your own expertise. As Ward says: “When you recognize the value of who you are, there are lots of rooms waiting for you.”

What else we’re reading

• When I first read the headline of one of Alex Rowe’s latest meditations on gaming, “I Love A Good Video Game Door,” the classic Resident Evil door animation popped into my mind, as well as the dramatic vault doors of Fallout, and then the soothing swish of them in my first true gaming love, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Doors! I love them, too. But beyond the aesthetics, Rowe explains how their placements, mechanics, and qualities (locked or unlocked? huge or small? hidden or obvious?) add a tremendous level of complexity that we often take for granted, and especially help segment “open word” games into differently sized spaces, which helps avoid monotony and gives a more concrete form of progression to nonlinear gameplay.
• Aimee Liu shares an annotation crafted by one of her MFA students to shed light on just how meaningful the practice can be for any writer. “The goal of any annotation is to help you figure out how an author accomplishes something that you’re struggling to do in your own work,” says Liu. An example: By identifying one passage as using the literary technique of “litany” (prayerful, repetitive chanting), Liu’s student gave herself an easy reference to develop the device in her own work.

Your responses to Wednesday’s newsletter on why AI bugs us…

On Wednesday, we sent out a newsletter about the philosophy of AI. You had lots of thoughts, including some thoughtful disagreement (we’re big fans of that):

Disagree with that statement. AI bothers us not because we have trouble accepting that there are different kinds of beings. There are already millions of kinds in terms of other lifeforms, some quite strange on this planet.

AI bothers us because we know deep down that it is technology out of control, that supersedes the purely biological with the technological, and that going forward with AI is a nearly irrevocable step away from harmony with nature.

Siemers sounds like the type of philosopher trying to fit AI into a theory, rather than someone who actually understands technology. — Jason Polak, mathematician and wildlife photographer

AI bothers us because we keep focusing on the intelligence side and not the artificial side. Yuval Noah Harari calls it “alien intelligence.” I agree. He points out that we have never had a technology that can make decisions without human intervention. Even bombs needed someone to press a button. — Carlyn Beccia, author, illustrator, and speaker

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on “radical attention”

Writer Brenna Lee provides a new take on mindful listening that she calls “radical attention,” which emphasizes a focus on reality, instead of inner fantasy, when we are listening to or learning from others:

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Harris Sockel

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

Public speaking tip: Believe you know something worth sharing was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are so many gems hidden across the Mediumverse, some of which may even be written by you, containing wisdom that can help all of us live better.

But finding them isn’t always easy! Over 1 million times a month, a writer presses “publish” to share their story with the world. So, we started a newsletter: Every weekday, we share a hand-picked selection of stories that complete and complement conversations happening in the world.

We’re calling it The Medium Newsletter. It’s already reaching over a million readers every weekday, making it one of the most-read newsletters on the internet.

Subscribe and browse the archive here.

Our mission is Medium’s: to deepen our collective understanding. Each story contains the type of writing I’ve come to think of as uniquely Medium-y: first-person stories from people with something deeply human to share.

That ranges from artist and designer James Buckhouse’s guide to finishing what you start, to essayist jen murphy parker’s reflection on dropping her kids off at college, advertising exec Marcus Wesson’s insights on political campaign typography, or Niklas Göke’s research into the 365 most famous quotes of all time.

Each newsletter is our attempt to connect what’s happening on Medium with what’s happening in the world and in people’s lives. We always begin with Medium stories that deepen understanding in some way — meaning they motivate, inform, inspire, and connect you to new knowledge, deep human wisdom, and fascinating conversations happening across Medium and beyond.

Why The Medium Newsletter matters to you

Receiving this email puts you at the center of a conversation we’re having daily with over a million people. If you’re a writer, appearing in the newsletter means your ideas will get in front of all of those people and possibly more.

Here are a few of your responses we’ve gotten so far:

• “You’ve expanded my reading here and for that I’m grateful.”
• “Thank you for drawing our attention to the emoji story in the Medium archive that I would have missed if you hadn’t mentioned it. What a gem.”
• “Thank you for these timely recommendations”
• “Very useful”
• “Highly motivational”
• “This was an incredible piece and embodies why so many of us are on Medium at all. The depth and honesty of writing here is a breath of fresh air in the current media environment.”
• “This story is like a prized slice of wit in a world gone mad.”

Behind the scenes: How we make it

Every day, a team of us here at Medium HQ — our entire curation team, Scott Lamb, Carly Rose Gillis, and I — scour Medium for stories that help people level up in their personal or professional lives, deepen understanding about a timely topic, or stories that just feel uniquely human and worth sharing.

Why do we hand-craft an email every day? Because we’re obsessed with finding great writing and sharing it. We live for discovering new ideas and giving everyone a platform to share their ideas with the world (it’s why we work here). Making this newsletter day in and day out has helped us get to know all of you a bit better — and it’s only been ~160 issues!

We’re always looking for new voices and new perspectives. We keep tabs on who we feature so we can showcase a wide range of writers. Our sources include:

• Our curators, who share notable stories that come in via the Boost Nomination Program and elsewhere on the platform
• Dashboards that show us recently Boosted stories; most-read stories within the last week, month, or year; most-highlighted stories; stories by writers publishing on Medium for the first time; stories by the most referrers from Reddit, X, Facebook, and other social platforms (including email and dark social), and more dashboards we’re creating every day; we’re always looking for new ways to trawl Medium for undiscovered stories and writers
• Medium employees — 90+ engineers, designers, product managers, marketers, communicators, accountants, and people ops professionals — who are reading Medium all the time and recommending stories that move them
• Topic pages, especially for timely topics (e.g. Paralympics)
• Tips from our readers

If you have a story suggestion, pitch us by emailing tips@medium.com with a link to one story you think would be a good fit for the newsletter and 2–3 sentences explaining how it deepens understanding of a topic.

It’s okay if you’re the author (there’s no shame in self-promotion if you’re proud of your story), but we also love to hear from avid readers who are unearthing voices we haven’t heard from yet. Elements of a strong pitch include:

• Your name and a brief description of who you are
• A link to the story you’re recommending
• 1–2 sentences about why this story is important: How does it deepen understanding of a topic? In the words of our Boost guidelines, we’re looking for stories where “there’s a clear and compelling reason why this particular writer is writing about this particular topic, and why the reader should be interested in what they have to say.”

I know that’s pretty broad. To make it more concrete, here’s an example of a strong pitch, which we ended up featuring in issue #148:

It’s something I wrote, but I believe I’ve broken a story even the BBC hasn’t figured out.

The Kamala Harris rally that Trump accused of being AI?

The photos are definitely real, but a Harris staffer has used an AI UPSCALER on the photo, which makes it appear fake and flat, even though it’s real.

I’ve done side by side comparisons with the images BBC Verify received from the Harris campaign, and traced the provenance of the image. Check it out :)

https://medium.com/@JimTheAIWhisperer/how-ai-upscaling-sparked-trumps-accusations-that-kamala-harris-rally-crowds-in-michigan-were-ai-generated-2de8497fbcf9?sk=9a77f2dbdaea936a17918fd4e5ad7432

Being able to spot what’s AI and what’s not AI (and what’s just had a tweak for post production) is going to be such an important part of this election cycle, so I think it’s a pressing story!

Jim

Your pitch doesn’t have to be about politics or anything in the news, although it can be; what’s important is to explain why the story you’re pitching matters.

Another, lesser-known way to be featured in the newsletter: read it and leave a thoughtful response (here’s an example). Productive disagreement is one of my favorite parts of the internet, so don’t be shy about disagreeing with something you see in a newsletter! Please correct us. I read every single response and comment, even if I can’t respond to them all, and occasionally feature thoughtful ones in the newsletter itself.

What now?

Subscribe: https://blog.medium.com/newsletter

Read. Start a conversation in the responses. Take an idea we’ve started in a newsletter and use it as a prompt to write something new. And, if you’ve found a story more of us should be reading, pitch us! I’ll see you in our next issue.

Subscribe to the Medium Newsletter: Get motivated, stay informed, learn something new was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Recently, it struck me that my experience visiting the 9/11 Memorial now must be similar to what the Vietnam Memorial is like for those who lived through that war,” writes Claudette Scheffold in an essay published earlier this week. Scheffold’s dad was an FDNY first responder; he died that day, and the reflecting pools that draw more than 2 million visitors a year are where she goes to remember him.

“The first thing that hits me as I get close to the Memorial is the tourists,” Scheffold explains, and I’ve felt the same thing whenever I visit. We’re at a weird juncture in history now, when 9/11 is super immediate for some of us, yet it’s capital-H History for pretty much an entire generation. What I appreciate about Scheffold’s story is that she doesn’t judge the tourists with selfie sticks; she sees them as markers of time passing.

Anniversaries serve an important psychological purpose: They’re like checkpoints in time, reminders to pull over and remember the people we used to be. I revisit two stories again and again on 9/11. One of them is Michael Wright’s miraculous survival story — the North Tower collapsed on top of him, and he was shocked to find himself alive. Then, there’s Alison Cupp Relyea’s tale of living in Manhattan during and after 2001. It’s sort of a meta reflection, an essay about how her memories of that day have evolved over time. Every 9/11, she explains, is marked by “some other memory, a mix of sadness, nostalgia, loss, gratitude and hope that almost seems to define the word anniversary.”

💬 Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on talking it out

If you’re stuck on a problem, as Avi Siegel advises, try explaining it to an inanimate object or pet, like a rubber duck. (Programmers have been doing this for decades; it’s called Rubber Duck Debugging.) Literally teach them the problem from the very beginning — explain what’s working, what’s not, and why. You’ll probably stumble upon an answer as you go.

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

Anniversaries are reminders to check in on our past selves was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here are three pieces of wisdom to take with you this week.

1. If you keep putting something off, Drew Morrison explains, don’t blame yourself — instead, figure out why.

• Do you fear failure?
• Is the task boring or uninteresting for you?
• Are you overwhelmed by it?
• Do you feel like you’re not prepared or qualified to do it?
• Are you distracted by something else you care about more?

Once you know why you’re procrastinating, you can solve the root problem instead of thinking you’re just lazy.

2. A core human behavior is something known as “evaluation apprehension.” It’s that thing you’ve felt when you’re on Zoom and someone’s audio is slightly weird. Everyone looks at each other like: Should we say something? Often, no one does… and the problem gets worse.

Humans are afraid of overreacting to ambiguity, so we freeze. This can be disastrous in some situations — i.e. creating a business strategy, or even figuring out when to get help if someone’s in danger. Catherine Sanderson, Author & Psychology Professor, explains how clocking your social fears (what are you nervous to do or say around others?) can help you overcome them.

3. I loved this essay from HR expert Jessica Zwaan on how to tie compensation to performance, a notoriously intimidating and vague enterprise. If you want to earn more money, take effective, independent, and consistent steps toward growing your skills. The outcome of your efforts will tell you (and your boss) whether you’re progressing, misfiring, stalling, or merely persisting:

🎭 Also today: the definition of comedy

I remember going to friends’ improv shows a decade ago (when we were all a little younger and had more time for extracurriculars), laughing at their jokes a little too hard and then debriefing the whole thing with them over drinks afterward. So I appreciated James Taylor Foreman’s essay about his time grinding it out at The Groundlings, LA’s 50-year-old comedy school whose alumni include Jennifer Coolidge and Kristen Wiig. “It’s an upside-down kingdom,” he writes. “Whoever is willing to artfully debase themselves the most courageously is paradoxically raised to the highest.” There’s wisdom in here about creativity generally: If you want to make great things, you can’t set out to glorify yourself — good art is generous.

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

To stop procrastinating, ask yourself why you’re doing it was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If someone cornered me at a bar and asked me what the most popular topic on Medium is right now, I’d probably say AI. (I don’t know why I phrased that so weirdly. Someone actually did ask me this at a bar recently, but I was not cornered and they were very nice about it.)

So far this year, data scientist Stephanie Kirmer reminded us that generative AI still isn’t profitable; Margaret Efron listed words that scream “I used AI to write this” (looking at you, “robust”); and Jim the AI Whisperer went straight to the heart of the matter, explaining why ChatGPT is obsessed with saying “delve” (its training data relies on British English).

But there’s a deeper conversation happening, too. Writers are grappling with what AI means — existentially, for us humans. How does it change the way we see our humanity?

Paul Siemers, PhD who studies the philosophy of technology, delves (sorry) into this question in his essay, “The Ontological Shock of AI.” Ontology is the philosophy of existence. Siemens traces how our understanding of ourselves has evolved through the last few thousand years. Early humans thought everything was alive in some way; over the last 200-ish years, we’ve started to divide the world into two categories: living and non-living things.

Siemers believes AI challenges that binary. “We must abandon rigid human/thing dualism and accept that there can be other kinds of beings,” he contends. It’s always unsettling when your internal categories don’t match reality… and that might be a tiny bit of what the world is feeling right now.

Elsewhere on Medium: two of the most human stories we could find

• Novelist and marketing exec Felicia C. Sullivan remembers her Columbia MFA as “botched surgery where the attending doctors learned their trade by binge watching the Discovery Channel.” Woof. Sullivan realizes, looking back, that she didn’t need a $110K MFA to be a writer; she just needed a library card, discipline, and a few trusted friends who also cared about writing.
• Katharine Esty PhD, who turned 90 this summer and published a practical guide to being in your 80s, looks backwards and forwards in time. Her life story is a tribute to reinvention, and it inspired me deeply!

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on semesters

Live life not in days or weeks, but in “semesters” — 15–17 weeks is just long enough to complete a meaningful chunk of work, but not so long that you’ll give up.

And the winner of Friday’s quiz is…

Sargas (a two-time winner!) for the following answers:

1. Which part of the U.S. Constitution concerns the separation of church and state? The non-establishment clause of the First Amendment. It doesn’t prevent religion from affecting how people campaign, vote, or fulfill their civic duties; instead, it protects religious freedoms and prohibits the establishment of a national church.
2. According to engineer Marianne Bellotti, what’s the difference between a true tech company and a company that merely says they’re one but actually isn’t? True tech companies plan for the long-term maintenance of their infrastructure.
3. What is the most mispronounced word in the world according to poli-sci professor Darren Zook? Karaoke. The correct pronunciation based on its Japanese origins and according to Zook “would rhyme with ‘la la’ (as in ‘La La Land’) and ‘okay,’ so we get ‘la la okay.’”

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

A philosopher on why AI bugs us was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here are three deep-dives for your weekend.

🏊 Snorkel Level

Drake just released an album via a burner Instagram account and a good old-fashioned website: 100gigs.org. Lyrically it’s a response to Kendrick Lamar, but business-wise, as Chris Harihar explains, it’s a rebellion against Big Streaming. Drake created his own streaming platform so he can own his data. It reminds me of a larger trend in media now: People are losing trust in the algorithms of yore, so they’re going indie.

🤿 Scuba Level

Rosie Hoggmascall chronicles how Spotify has cluttered its homepage over the last seven years, leaving its Scandinavian minimalist roots in the dust. 52% of Hoggmascall’s (and my) Spotify homepage is podcasts now; 48% is algorithmic recs; there’s little space left for discovery or personalization. Kyle Chayka covered this in The New Yorker recently: He finally quit Spotify because he felt trapped inside its algorithm. I highlighted this quote from Hoggmascall, which I feel deeply: “With Spotify’s recommendations, I’m becoming a stranger to my own tastes.”

🦑 The Mariana Trench

Niklas Göke catalogs the 365 most famous quotes of all time and verifies who said each one first. The result? A 22,000-word tome of wisdom in the form of a Medium post. A few of Göke’s sources are worth exploring on their own, like Quote Investigator®, which ferrets out the origins of popular sayings and cliches. Many of the quotes we attribute to famous people (looking at you, Mark Twain) were first spoken by less-famous people, or printed anonymously.

What I appreciate most about Göke’s resource is how it gives you a sense of enduring themes across philosophy, science, poetry, and politics. These are hard to sum up in a sentence, but I see themes of being true to yourself, fearlessness, and the importance of listening coming up again and again. I’m curious what you make of these quotes.

From the archive: Hey guys, just a few changes to the website…

Eight years ago, in the halcyon days of 2016, comedy writer Amanda Rosenberg went public with emails from a CEO who just had a few tiny changes to the website. I am not a designer, but I imagine it’s a cathartic read for anyone who’s been on the receiving end of capricious feedback from their boss. In the words of a former product manager at Amex who responded to the story: “This would be funny if it wasn’t so damn true.”

The popularity of this ^ post, along with other Rosenberg hits like “Emails From a CEO Who Just Had a Great Branding Idea” led to a book of comedic takes on living with bipolar disorder. Of comedy, Rosenberg has said:

Jokes all have a kernel of truth to them — a truth, no matter how dark, crude, or shameful, that we can all relate to. When we laugh at a joke it’s an expression of relief, like “thank fuck someone else said what I was thinking”.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom

Lead with conviction and confidence will follow.

Quiz: The week in review

Here are three questions related to this week’s issues. If you know the answers, email us: tips@medium.com. First to answer all three correctly will win a free Medium membership.

1. Which part of the U.S. Constitution concerns the separation of church and state?
2. According to engineer Marianne Bellotti, what’s the difference between a true tech company and a company that merely says they’re one but actually isn’t?
3. What is the most mispronounced word in the world according to poli-sci professor Darren Zook?

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

The 365 most famous quotes of all time, and more longreads for your weekend was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One thing I love about Medium is how multifaceted our knowledge base is, and how many writers from all different stripes come to write here. We’re trying to build the world’s best (and best-organized) library of incredible writing, across as many topics as possible. There’s so much of it that sometimes I forget exactly how much expertise, compassion, care, and knowledge we’re home to.

6.8k attendees and I were vividly reminded on Medium Day 2024. I attended six incredible and diverse talks, ranging from sports writing to an exploration of fascia, and learned something new in each one.

You know what else is easy to forget? Behind every blog post and story, there’s a real person. At every talk I attended, I was blown away by the speakers’ expertise and experience, how much they cared about their audience, and how open and willing they were to share it all — for free!

All in all, we had 6.8k attendees from 59 countries across the world. It was an incredible experience, and I can’t wait to do it all again next year. I hope to see you there! If you want to catch any replays, you can watch them on MediumDay.com if you registered. We’re also uploading the talks to our YouTube channel.

– Zulie @ Medium, Product Storyteller @ Medium

Medium by the numbers…

I love to understand how readers share stories and bring new readers to Medium. For this month’s By the Numbers section, here’s a peek into how readers found stories on Medium.

• You shared stories over 700k times on desktop and mobile, including sharing stories over 126k times on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
• Readers came to Medium stories over 9 million times from stories shared on X.
• Readers read stories recommended in their Daily Digest emails close to 5 million times.

First-person perspectives from the DNC and back-to-school season

There are some kinds of stories you can only really find on Medium — the stories from someone who was there, who did that, who experienced something first-hand and came to Medium to write all about it. (I liked how John Polonis put it, commenting on this story: “This is what makes Medium so powerful — insightful stories like this one about learned experiences. Going out in the world, doing things you’re passionate in, and then writing about it.”)

For example, many of us watched or read coverage of the DNC this month. Isaac Saul, executive editor at Tangle, was there, taking notes and names to share with Medium readers. One of the most surprising things he noticed? “The DNC rolled out the blue carpet for content creators and influencers, who received private lounges, free food and booze, and loads of access to big-name politicians. Reporters, meanwhile, were stuffed into nosebleed seats, left fighting for credentials, and battled shoddy internet and poor access to politicians.”

Meanwhile, it’s also back-to-school season here in the States. I haven’t got any college kids of my own, but I still loved writer jen murphy parker’s reflections on college tours, weaving in thoughts on how college seems to have changed in the intervening generation, how hard it can be to let your children go be grown-ups, and a few life lessons along the way.

“I tell my daughter we will go ask if we can join — there’s no harm in asking…The tour is excellent led by two students who dimensionalize their experience so fully that I feel I’m an enrolled student by the end… And [my daughter] admits I was, this one time, right. And I hope she remembers not just that, but that it’s always worth asking.”

August’s most highlighted passages

“The value of research doesn’t come from elevating people who are already shouting. It comes from finding the people who are not being heard, and adding their voices to the conversation.” — Pavel Samsonov, problem designer at AWS, in his story, “Nike’s $25B blunder shows us the limits of ‘data-driven’” published in UX Collective

“In short, almost all countries supported by Stripe are now supported with our latest expansion.” — Elvina Fan, Senior Operations Associate at Medium, in her post, “We’ve added 77 countries to the Medium Partner Program” published in The Medium Blog

“Treat people fairly, give them the benefit of the doubt, and if you need to reprimand someone always do it privately.” — Malky McEwan, writer and former police officer, in his story, “How to Challenge People Who Say, ‘It Was Just a Joke,” published in E3 — Entertain, Enlighten, Empower

10 of the most-read stories in August 2024

• The shortest, strangest engineering interview I’ve ever done,” by Daniel Brain, CTO and Co-founder of OneText
• “What’s new in Flutter 3.24,” by Kevin Chisholm, Technical Program Manager for Dart and Flutter at Google, in Flutter
• “Grokking, a New Form of Reasoning,” by Ignacio de Gregorio, tech writer
• “To My Unmasked Friend in the Fifth Year of COVID,” by Anna Holmes, YA / adult fantasy author and disability rights advocate
• “Why Would She Wear THAT to the Gym?” by Kelsey Schaefer, social media marketing consultant and CEO at Inspired Idiots, in Modern Women
• “Burning Man turns to DJs to sell tickets,” by Adriana Roberts, DJ and performer, in The Bold Italic
• “The UX job market REALLY sucks right now,” by Melody Koh 🤔, senior product designer, at Prototypr
• “The problem with growth: why everything is failing now,” by Joanna Weber, UX researcher and product developer at The Adaptavist Group, in UX Collective
• “Good Retry, Bad Retry: An Incident Story,” by Denis Isaev, engineering director at Yandex Cloud, in Yandex
• Musk Has Won — DEI Is Dead, Tech Is Bringing Back the Booth Bunny,” by Ronke Babajide, Manager System Engineering at Fortinet, in Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs

Most shared stories in August 2024

These stories found readers on both Medium and far beyond it.

“you cannot make someone love you by loving them harder,” by iris ୨୧, writer

“Suicide is About Wanting to Live,” by odawni, mental health writer, in Speaking Bipolar

“LLM Architectures Explained: NLP Fundamentals (Part 1),” by Vipra Singh, Developer Lead, Generative AI at Capgemini

Boosted stories by new writers

At Medium, we rely on human curators and community editors to help us find and recommend the stories that make Medium worth paying for. When we find those stories, we give them a Boost to help recommend them to more readers.

Here are a few of our favorite Boosted stories, written by brand-new writers to Medium.

“Selling Food as ‘The Great Inconvenience’ in Your Life,” by nutritionist Ruby in Rooted. A great story covering the intersection of food, nutrition, marketing, and history.

“Mr. Vance: Childless Teachers Are a Thing.” by Kim Stillwell, an educator of over 30 years. A thoughtful rebuttal to the idea that you need to be a parent to have a stake in our country’s future and a reminder that a woman’s worth goes far beyond her ability to birth and raise a child.

“‘You Can’t Eat Technology.’” by Adam DeMartino, the former CEO and co-founder of mushroom startup Smallhold. A fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how a farming startup tried to play the VC game by branding as a tech startup and failed because, as DeMartino says, “[w]e could have taken a slower, more sustainable growth path, but we chose the fast lane.”

For more great stories from Medium’s writers and publications, check out our Staff Picks. To learn something new from Medium writers every weekday, subscribe to our newsletter, the Medium Newsletter.

It Happened on Medium: August 2024 roundup was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last weekend, computer scientist and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham published an instantly viral essay on how to lead (and not lead!) a team. It’s called “Founder Mode” and I’m oversimplifying it wildly, but he essentially says (don’t @ me): Micromanagement can be good.

Conventional management orthodoxy is “hire great people, give them autonomy, and get out of their way!” but Graham thinks that’s terrible advice for founders. He doesn’t mince words, calling most professional managers “fakers” and “liars.” The more diplomatic way to put this is they’re better at managing up than managing down. Leaders in Founder Mode, on the other hand, work with whoever is closest to the problem — even if that person is at the bottom of the org chart.

Graham got the idea from Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, who claims delegating to professional managers nearly tanked his company. On Medium, CTO Zakwan Jaroucheh describes Founder Mode as staying as close to your product as possible; he recalls a time when outsourcing a component to a third-party didn’t work, so he started coding it himself, which led to a slew of breakthroughs. Investor Amir Shevat disagrees with Graham’s essay and sees Founder Mode as a cop-out: an excuse for leaders who haven’t done the work of hiring people they trust.

I’d be remiss to ignore all the memes, most of which predicted CEOs will use “Founder Mode” as a tacit excuse to steamroll their employees. Chesky himself acknowledged how gendered this conversation is — women with hands-on leadership styles are perceived differently than men. Either way, the essay seemed to unlock a new conversation about when micromanagement might actually be useful.

⚡ Lighting round: Memorable, recent Medium stories in 1 sentence or less.

• Here are two perspectives on the war in Gaza, one from a writer in Israel processing the ongoing protests against the Israeli government (“We were a country divided before this happened, with unrest and protests and anger and disillusionment”) and one from a Palestinian American (“I still feel conflicted at times about being open with my Palestinian identity”).
• Translator Yuri Minamide explains why Murakami is so popular in the U.S.: His writing style came about via translation; the novelist was dissatisfied with how his stories sounded in Japanese, so he translated them to English and then back, which gave them a whole new sound.
• Engineering leader Marianne Bellotti lists the best questions to ask when you’re interviewing for a job, including: “Let’s say I’m the person you hire. 6 months have gone by, what’s different?”

💥 One piece of practical wisdom: about breaking through

If you’re still curious about cognitive biases after last week’s deep-dive, let me introduce you to the breakthrough fallacy. We trace major changes in our lives back to isolated turning points, when in reality those changes were likely “contextual, circumstantial, slow and arduous, and in some cases, possibly not even conscious.”

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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

The essay that rebranded micromanagement was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

English is a very strange language. I’m grateful to be a native speaker because the nuances of our bizarre idioms (“freezer burn”? “cold turkey”?) feel almost designed to confuse outsiders. Early in my career, I taught English as a second language and remember how stumped everyone was by the way “bomb,” “tomb,” and “comb” are spelled almost the same but pronounced completely differently.

See, English is actually three languages standing on each other’s shoulders and wearing a trench coat. (Mostly German, Latin, and Greek.) “Comb” is Germanic whereas “bomb” and “tomb” are Latinate, though their pronunciations diverged during the Middle Ages and people still aren’t totally sure why.

It’s even more complex than that, though, because (as we shared in issue #152) modern U.S. English also incorporates African, Arabic, and Japanese-derived words like karaoke (meaning “empty orchestra” in Japanese) or zombie (meaning “ghost” in Kikongo).

Recently on Medium, Robin Wilding explored just how weird English can get:

Foul fowls of goose become geese
and yet moose are never meese
multiple mouse are mice
but house are never hice

It’s a funny poem because it lists all the absurd rules we just, sort of, live with — often without knowing why they exist in the first place! English is sort of like a very old codebase. It’s the residue of millions of decisions made by overlapping groups of people over time… it’s optimized for flexibility and expansiveness, not ease of use.

Lastly, if you’re wondering about moose vs. goose: moose entered English pretty recently from Algonquin (the indigenous language of what is now Eastern Canada), whereas goose is a much older English word, because geese actually exist in England.

⚡ Lightning round: great, recent Medium stories in one sentence or less

• I was floored by this strange tale of an engineering interview gone wrong (the punchline comes about halfway through… wait for it), which includes a useful lesson: If you’re giving a candidate an assignment, pay them a fair hourly rate and make the task as close as possible to what they’d do on the job.
• One tip for spending less than the 37 minutes most Americans do on meal prep daily: always cut more vegetables than you need and store them for next time so you’ll never have to start from scratch, as Kaki Okumura explains.
• Every Eras tour concert contains Easter eggs, like when Taylor points the mic at backup dancer Kam who replaces a lyric with a word in the host country’s language — just one example of Swift’s obsession with building community amongst her fans, as Dana DuBois (who flew to Munich to see Swift last month) writes.

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on good distractions

Distraction isn’t always bad! If you keep getting distracted by the same idea or pursuit, it might be a sign of interest — your subconscious trying to tell you what you should be doing more of.

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

English is three languages wearing a trench coat was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most writers (and artists of all stripes) are great starters and terrible finishers. Years ago, someone told me the best piece of writing advice they ever heard was “finish things.” Just finish them!

But how?

Artist and designer James Buckhouse, who founded the Sequoia Design Lab and got his start punching up scripts for Shrek and the Matrix trilogy, posted on Medium last year about this very question, and I’ve been turning his conclusions over in my head ever since.

Buckhouse spoke to his most creative friends — Oscar winners, CEOs, artists, an arctic explorer — about how they navigate the tension between starting and finishing. All of them said they cherish deadlines (“deadlines=lifelines”).

They also helped him land on a mantra: creative diligence. From what I gather, creative diligence is about combining curiosity with action to get things done. It’s the technique Buckhouse believes drove Leonardo da Vinci, who always began a project by asking himself how something worked. (He dissected horses before designing a horse sculpture.) Writing a poem? Read 100 great poems and dissect them one by one to learn why they’re effective.

And if you get stuck? Stop. Ask yourself what exactly isn’t working. If you’re writing something, maybe it’s the structure, or a single word or sentence that led you down a blind alley.

One last piece of related advice, from this story by Buckhouse about the definition of creativity: “Art is not about decadence, hipness or living life on the edge, art is about pushing your mind as far as it will go and then to observe what is on the other side.” Creativity emerges from curiosity.

🔒 From the archive: How to be unhackable

Data scientist and researcher Dylan Hudson explains why all our “tricks” to make passwords less crackable (use at least one capital letter! put some p*nctua%tion in there!) don’t actually work: humans are pretty similar, and our passwords tend to be, too. If you’re not going to use a password generator like 1Password, the next best options are to:

• Use nonsensical phrases (“parkinglot-bathtub-arboretum”)
• Place capital letters in the middle (“parkingLot-bathtub-ARBORetum”)
• Use non-sequential numbers and an array of symbols (“parkingLot%bath395tub@@&ARBORetum”)
• Don’t use any identifying information about you or the site/service (do NOT put “facebook” in your Facebook password)

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on clocking your flaws

It’s far easier for us to recognize others’ weaknesses than to see our own. What’s obvious to others (so-and-so always talks too much, or they always need to be right, or they’re too defensive) can be invisible to us, and you can’t work on what you don’t name.

To figure out your flaws, identify patterns. If you tend to always run into the same problems, chances are they’re pointing toward an underlying weakness.

Learn something new every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

How to finish that thing you’ve been working on was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.