The Sunday Digest: A Napkin Math team-up
Everything we published this week
Happy Sunday!
Boy, have we got content for you this week. In addition to a Superorganizers installment for the ages, an uber-timely episode of Means of Creation, and another gentle push towards better writing practices from Rachel Jepsen, this week marked an exciting new chapter in our newsletter-ing.
Evan Armstrong teamed up with Byrne Hobart of The Diff to write an epic case study of comms giant Twilio! The piece has been a huge hit with readers so far, and if you haven't been one of them, we hope today's the day you dive in. Let us know what you think—it's certainly something we're trying to do more often.
Enjoy!
What We Published
6 Articles, 1 podcast, and a live conversation
Walking as a Productivity System
by Kieran O'Hare in Superorganizers (9-minute read)
Superorganizers moves beyond screen-based systems for this fascinating look inside writer Craig Mod's life-centering passion for walking. And not just walks to the store or gym, either—we're talking long walks, hundreds of kilometers. Craig explains how his walks become a "platform for creative work," from planning to rules right on down to his "horizon goal" of making beautiful books.
Twilio’s Second Act
by Evan Armstrong in Napkin Math (16-minute read)
Evan's latest is an Every first: a cross-platform collaboration with The Diff's Byrne Hobart. It's also an in-depth look at cloud computing giant Twilio's next move after pioneering a developer-driven, API-powered business model: a series of acquisitions that might land the company "universal switchboard" status, connecting customers and companies in both directions.
Unstuck Yourself!
by Rachel Jepsen in The Long Conversation (8-minute read)
After two wonderfully expansive how-to's on voice-finding and shrugging off shame, Rachel moves to the next step: actually figuring out what to write. It's the most helpful bulletin board you've ever seen—but in newsletter form, packed with questions and actions you can point yourself towards to grasp your next great idea.
Where Singers Spill Song Secrets
by Fadeke Adegbuyi in Cybernaut (7-minute read)
In this week’s cyberbits, Fadeke zeros in on one corner of the internet where artists can explain themselves. Genius Verified. In contrast with the user-generated lyric explanations the platform became popular with, Verified’s annotations and videos of the artists explaining the basis (or, hilariously, lack thereof) behind their words have become wildly popular “lessons in lyricism,” as Fadeke puts it. But when does question-answering like this go beyond trivia, and become a symptom of a culture where we demand things be spelled out?
Regulate Who? The Weird Legal World of DeFi
by Nat Eliason in Almanack (5-minute read)
Anything with the word decentralized in its name doesn't necessarily lend itself to regulation. That's what Nat zeroes in on in his latest DeFi Friday, covering the recent removal of over 100 tokens from Ethereum. Since the crypto world isn't confined to the U.S., who has jurisdiction—and what can they actually do?
Playing Games to Earn a Living in the Metaverse
🎧 Means of Creation with Li Jin & Nathan Baschez (55-minute watch/listen)
Li and Nathan welcomed Yield Guild Games cofounder Gabby Dizon to their show to chat about blockchain-based gaming, one of the biggest disruptions to reach the gaming sector in quite some time. By allowing players to transfer in-game purchases between games, and looping cryptocurrencies into the transactions, the "play-to-earn" movement may be one of the most tangible forces working to create a middle class for creators.
#88 - Why your emotions don’t always mean what you think
🎧 Talk Therapy with Dan Shipper & Nathan Baschez ( and -minute listens)
When Nathan bought himself a brand-new fitness tracking device, he didn't expect it to key into his emotions, too. But that's exactly where he found himself prior to this conversation with Dan. As the duo use the gadget to better understand a recent management dust-up, they consider the value of understanding our emotions as evolving with distance, rather than being fixed in time.
Community Calendar
What's going down in our Discord this week.
Monday August 2nd, 10am ET/7am PT: Focused Work Pomodoros with Dan Shipper
Thursday August 5th, 11am-1pm ET/8am – 10am PT: Community Working Session with Rachel Jepsen
In this weekly two-hour event, our cameras are on, our tunes are flowing, and we're getting things done together! Executive editor Rachel will open each session with a ten-minute writing exercise to get us all in a creative flow. Then, participants can share in the #fireside-chat channel what they're hoping to accomplish during the session. Finishing an essay? Getting started on a new project? Tell us what you're working on!
Want to be looped in on upcoming community events? Check out our Discord server!
What’s Going On
News you might have caught or missed.
- Scarlett Johansson Sues Disney Over ‘Black Widow’ Streaming Release
- Amazon To Integrate Bitcoin Payments And Launch Its Own Token By 2022, Insider Confirms
- Facebook to lift political ad ban imposed after November election
- Google mandates vaccines for employees and delays its return to the office to October
What We’re Reading
Our favorite writing from beyond Every.
- Welcome to Gawker (Gawker)
- The Art of the Hollywood Memoir (The New Yorker)
- A People's History of Black Twitter, Part III (Wired)
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