Month: June 2019

“This has become the central question with all the big tech companies: Can we trust their information as they go deeper and deeper into our lives? …

“Here in San Francisco, people dream of a completely automated, human-free future, but I don’t share that dream,” Andrew Sean Greer, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Less, was counterfeited on Amazon, told me. “Humans are bothersome and inefficient — and the only way to keep a grip on reality.”

—David Streitfeld, in a fascinating/worrying piece about Amazon’s algorithm weirdness and the book-like products that result

“Otherwise, my top recommendation for talent development in any endeavor is usually the same: market the activity more widely and diversify the entry and development pipelines such that you give a chance to as many people with as many different trajectories as possible. I think when we push early selection and specialization, especially in sports, we do the opposite of that. We allow only kids with a narrow developmental trajectory and timing to make it. So you are essentially de-selecting people before they even have a chance to develop.” —science writer David Epstein, lifted from here

What would you spend $200,000 on if you had it? Can you communicate vision and probity in a spreadsheet?

Because it’s been too long:

Had a great conversation about the business of freelance editing and the present of traditional book publishing with Matthew Sharpe.

Got a fat envelope from the New York Department of State with a letter saying they’d rejected our name change application and why don’t I include a daytime phone number on my application next time, so they can better assist me? This letter was wrapped around the return of my application on which I’d added, in bold black ink, on an official State Department-issued form that did not contain a line for a phone number, my daytime phone number.

Now back to decks, which will focus on the MVP a.k.a. product at launch date because some readers were overwhelmed by the big picture.

And here’s a picture of Gypsy Rose Lee, sourced by Jed Bickman because if there’s ever and anywhere a B+W image of someone seated at a typewriter, he will find it and download it.