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Just had a great coffee break with this great poem. 😌

Hot off the presses, I did an interview with our very own Kelly about social media, reading, and where Readup's heading for her weekly newsletter. More Kelly -->

Has everybody seen The Social Dilemma? It's still trending on Netflix which is super good news for Readup. The movement is growing!

PS Free is Evil on track to AOTD. Gogogo!

CLARITY

So next level. I love that he flew coach!

“Chuck was a cornerstone in terms of inspiration for the Giving Pledge,” says Warren Buffett. “He’s a model for us all. It’s going to take me 12 years after my death to get done what he’s doing within his lifetime.”

Great. I wonder what it would have been like to read this particular sentence in 2017, when it was published:

SARS got more attention than the massive decline in HIV mortality.

Optimism FTW

👍👍🆙 Meanwhile, Readup is building algorithms that are non-addictive, 100% transparent, and legit really good for your mental health.

Love this. Lots to think about. I’m a free-for-all eater and my life is a free-for-all. 🤪

Love this article, love the comments.

I recently met a teacher who teaches Javascript in a high school and told me that he basically just puts the students in front of computers on some "Learn Javascript" program while he's in the corner available to admin everything and troubleshoot problems. He doesn't know Javascript and has never built anything in Javascript. The whole thing sounded fake, sad and weird. We need real teachers teaching real things. This work can't be outsourced to robots.

In the US, the entire education system is in disrepair. Alt titles for this article include:

• Robots Are Coming For Your Children
• Don't Let Screens Destroy Your Soul
• Creativity Itself Is Under Attack

:P

This is exactly what I was looking for after reading this other one by Nir Eyal. The war against the robots (to save our souls) isn’t a society-wide thing. Everyone fights the battle in their own heart. Also, addiction doesn’t impact everybody in even remotely the same way.

Excellent writing. Lots to think about.

Amazing.

Date says 2016 (because that's when EFF republished it) but it was originally written in 1996. Fun, interesting read.

Upvote.

In terms of currency, I agree that crypto is going to take everything over. State-controlled currency will be the hallmark of fascism.

The opposite of fascism isn't "laissez-faire attitudes" - it's freedom! Borders falling, changing everywhere - definitely. USA falling apart into individual countries - definitely.

I don't think that humans are going to check out, give up, at scale. This horrifies me:

Some people will choose to permanently live in VRs while machines keep their muscles from atrophying. Their "geographic footprint" will decrease, allowing for more people to inhabit the planet. Millions of artificial worlds will be created to handle the overwhelming geographic footprints of society.

I don't think it will happen because there is just something so special about a tree. Regardless, this is a battle that will take place inside every human heart and soul. Crazyyyyy.

lmfaooooo

Ahh.. God bless you @chrissetiana for posting this. 🙏

I often resist self-helpy stuff like this, but whatever, I think a lot of people need to hear this. I know I sure do/did.

Perseverance and grit don’t mean sh*t when things are going well, but they mean the world when things aren’t.

The bigger the challenge, the bigger the opportunity for growth. So cliche, but so true.

This is a few years old, but still quite informative, and really beautifully written.

I just got on PrEP a few weeks ago. The newer version is called Descovy and it has fewer side effects than Truvada, but it’s still pretty brutal on the system, especially for the first few days. In terms of getting a prescription, my experience was nothing like the one the author had. It was actually extremely easy for me to get. And free, which is pretty incredible because I don’t have any kind of health insurance right now.

I still have mixed feelings about taking a powerful drug like this every day — but it’s nice to be able to love whoever you want to love, in any way you want, even if they have HIV. I wouldn’t say that I have 100% peace of mind, especially since it’s hard for me to remember to take it every day, but I’m def more at ease overall than I was before I got started.

And all of these experiences sure as hell changed the way I think about COVID, although that’s a topic for another day.

Beautiful profile on one of my all-time favorite poets, ending with my all-time favorite poem.

I live a few blocks away from where Elizabeth Bishop once lived, a home that is now abandoned. Sometimes, late at night, I haunt her porch and sneak around the back yard. I have One Art memorized and sometimes I recite it to myself like an incantation. It’s also a good party trick, depending on the crowd.

Thing is: The art of losing IS hard to master. I have gone back and forth on that for over a decade, but as far as I can tell, the poem is a lie.

This is both weird and sad.

Is anybody anywhere remotely surprised by this? 🙄

This is a CRAZY story. I love bizarre stuff like this.

I can’t stop thinking about how exciting it would be to live in castle ruins in the middle of an overgrown forest in the middle of a huge city as royalty. What a life.

This was inspiring. I wish I read this before I went to the grocery store today. I’ve been eating such plain food these last few months. Good food writing always makes me want to be a little bit more adventurous in the kitchen.

I had a feeling that Elizabeth Bishop would come up in this article, though I was very surprised that “The Fish” is mentioned as her best. I think “One Art” is better (one of the best poems of all time) and it fits this example perfectly as she wrote it near the very end of her life.

Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them.

This is all so true. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is another example. One day the guy tells his wife: I’m not going to do anything for the family. I’m just going to write. Figure out what to do with the kids. How to make money. and she basically said, Ok. Go.

And yes, proximity to greatness can be super crucial. Bishop had Lowell. Thoreau and Melville had Emerson. Foer had Oates. The list goes on and on.

Then again: whatever! There are so many Emily Dickinson types, mega loners, all over the place throughout history. Seriously: The only rule is that there are no rules.

This Pulitzer-prize nominated piece is extremely disturbing. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

A few months ago, Orta was released because of COVID-19. But I wonder if it was actually because of the powerful reporting in this story.

Holy crap. Everybody needs to stop watching this stuff.

Context and factual data are often considered too cumbersome for the audience. There may be some truth to that (our education system really should improve the critical thinking skills of Americans) – but another hard truth is that it is the job of journalists to teach and inform, which means they might need to figure out a better way to do that. They could contemplate more creative methods for captivating an audience. Just about anything would improve the current process, which can be pretty rudimentary (think basing today’s content on whatever rated well yesterday, or look to see what’s trending online today).

Wow. Also this is disturbing:

A very capable senior producer once said: “Our viewers don’t consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.”

I don’t know about that. Some people surely watch the “news” and genuinely believe that they are getting good information versus addicting entertainment. Really scary situation we’re in. I’m pretty sure it’s only old people who are impacted, but still, old people vote in droves. What a nightmare. 🙉

Yes! Lots to chew on here. I’m very glad I read this. The timing feels perfect for me, and I suspect many others will feel the same way as these are timeless topics.

Self-preoccupation is a prison, as every self-absorbed person finally knows. Commitments to larger purposes can get you out of prison.

Oh my gosh. I could barely handle this. I’m borderline weepy and it was only a 6 minuter lol. The world is beautiful!

The judge is a superstar for knowing that kids need real parents, not state agencies acting as parents. It’s inspiring when people obliterate red tape and it ends up working out so well.

Excellent! I've been wanting to read about the Sweden situation for months and this zippy little article is dense with cultural insights that really help explain the situation. The way these Scandinavian countries hit such epic home-runs every now and again is (1) truly admirable and (2) becoming a meme at this point. 😂

You wouldn’t catch the British or American equivalents of Anders Tegnell seriously discussing the importance of Easter skiing holidays or graduation parties for school leavers, as he did. In the debate in the UK, pubs are put in simplistic opposition to schools as a “nice to have” as opposed to a necessity, and ministers score virtue points for cancelling their holidays.

That is so right on. It's about candor. It's about honesty, vulnerability, and having the guts and conviction to have real conversations, in public, instead of just joining (and hiding behind) the pseudo-virtuous mob. Us 'Mericans sure do love our mobs, which might not be that big of a deal if we weren't downright deluded about being a nation of rugged individualists and independent thinkers.

Upvote. I always love a good, big idea.

I did the yoga teacher training at Yoga to the People and taught and assisted on both coasts. I’m extremely sad to see it go. It was a staple for me in NYC and SF/Berkeley.

This is a loss.

BethAnn is like a digital version of Rachel Dolezal. This story is nuts.

To be honest, I couldn’t stop LOLing every time someone was like “I remember thinking, ‘Is this BethAnn?’” Lolol. It’s BethAnn!

“I was pretty shocked,” said Erica Smith, a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University. “I had never had particularly great experiences with @Sciencing_Bi, but I thought that she was a whole real human who had just died. I was surprised by how hard it hit me. I ate a pint of ice cream about it.”

I wonder how many times someone accomplished a fake death and just disappeared and nobody ever knew the truth that the person wasn’t real.

💯✌️💥 Oh wow yes! Breezy and delightful. Deep, but delightful.

Applicable to life beyond programming too. Loved it.

Humans don’t scale.

Time and attention are finite.

Reposting. This is the paragraph that I can’t stop thinking about:

Reading through the Roman bot’s responses, it’s hard not to feel like the texts captured him at a particularly low moment. Ask about Stampsy and it responds: “This is not [the] Stampsy I want it to be. So far it’s just a piece of shit and not the product I want.” Based on his friends’ descriptions of his final years, this strikes me as a candid self-assessment. But I couldn’t help but wish I had been talking to a younger version of the man — the one who friends say dreamed of someday becoming the cultural minister of Belarus, and inaugurating a democratically elected president with what he promised would be the greatest party ever thrown.

It’s crazy to think that we are what we say, but that’s what this has me thinking — that we are the words we use. And it makes me want to use more positive language, everywhere. I’m horrified to think of what a bot of me would say if it was trained on the language I’ve been using for the last few months. Lots of practical life lessons in this article, and in all real life sci-fi stories like this.

Totally my jam, I can’t recommend this enough.

Fascinating. 🆙👍✅

Interesting, but I think I oppose any organization that solely exists to create negative ads. I'm not even sure if this helps or hurts Trump.

I did some slow breathing in a huge empty church this morning and it was awesome.

Every single word of this short story is absolutely perfect.