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Welcome to day two of “Wish I Wish I Knew” week, where we’re sharing everything we’d tell our past selves if we could go back in time. Today, we’ve got a brief but worthwhile addition to yesterday’s topic (career wisdom) from a slightly different angle: Srinivas Rao’s list of 40 things he wishes he’d known about bui...

A few weeks ago, we spotlighted the very Medium genre of “what I wish I knew” — stories from people across all walks of life (therapists, data scientists, DIY home renovators, UX designers, parents…) who were using Medium as an opportunity to share hard-earned lessons with the world (and with themselves).While we we...

Next Tuesday marks the beginning of National Poetry Month here in the U.S., a holi-month that began in 1996, when the Academy of American Poets gathered a group of publishers and poetry lovers to strategize about how they might raise poetry’s profile in culture. One of their first initiatives involved giving away 10...

Most workplaces are (at least somewhat) hierarchical. Even flat org structures usually give rise to unspoken hierarchies, and prevailing wisdom for getting promoted tends to go something like this: Try your best and (generally) follow your boss’s directions.On Medium, Julie Zhuo (former VP of product design at Faceb...

In issue #282, we featured a story by product designer Ben Snyder, who used AI to build a rudimentary game in which you (an ostrich) must jump over a barrage of obstacles, and if you don’t you die. Snyder and his kids built the game with Replit and v0, two apps that let you “blink software into reality,” as Pete Sen...

A few weeks ago, while casually browsing the Medium app, I came across a story that made me stop drinking water from plastic bottles. (If you’d rather live in blissful ignorance about your plastic usage, maybe don’t read any further.) F. Perry Wilson, MD, associate professor of medicine and public health at Yale, co...

A tariff is a “tax placed on goods when they cross national borders.” Example: the “The Chicken Tax,” a term that confusingly describes tit-for-tat tariffs that partially remain in place today. In the early 1960s, European countries levied a tariff on U.S. chickens, so that European farmers weren’t priced out of the...

Here at Medium, there’s a type of story we sometimes refer to as the “Medium version.” Usually, it’s a personal perspective on news. Not a take; a story from a primary source — someone who’s lived through something most of us have only heard about second- or thirdhand.On Wednesday, Jasmine Mooney published one of th...

☀️ Today is the spring equinox, aka the first day of spring here in the Northern Hemisphere (and the first day of fall for our friends below the equator). The sun hovers directly above the equator, meaning equal parts day and night for all of us.When TV shows jump the shark + cleaning your windows (Issue #292)Pierz ...

Last Tuesday, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, announced a new AI model that is “good at creative writing.” He posted a short story written by the model, claiming it “got the vibe of metafiction so right.” (Prompt: “Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief.)” Metafiction is a genre of fiction th...

How do you discover new writers on Medium? I love that a pretty big part of my job is being an enthusiastic Medium reader / fan girl. I’m lucky — in my role, I check in with my colleagues to ask “what have you read recently?,” and I always use those moments to get their tips and tricks on finding new writers on the...

Last year, in issue #62, we featured Admiral Cloudberg, aka Kyra Dempsey, the aviation expert who’s published over 300 plane crash investigations on Medium. If you dig deep into Dempsey’s archive, you’ll see that most of these tragedies are the result of miscommunication, misperception, or bad UX (often, all three)....

🇮🇪 Happy St. Patrick’s Day! To celebrate, here are some lesser-known facts about Irish topics I found on Medium. I hope you’ll find them to be “good craic” (pronounced ‘crack;’ an Irish slang term for a delightful and fun experience):A popular Irish dish served at celebrations is colcannon (mashed potatoes and cooke...

One of my favorite things about Medium: The best stories give you a window into people’s idiosyncratic, highly specific lives — and, usually, the more specific their stories are, the more familiar they feel, too.One example: Veteran psychotherapist Ira Israel’s 36 lessons from his career as a marriage counselor. He ...

Last month, Nichola Raihani — British psychologist and author of The Social Instinct, a book about the history of human cooperation — published a fascinating story on Medium. It made me think differently about why (in the U.S., at least) we’re so divided politically.A Gallup poll released in January reveals that peo...

This morning, before I opened up Medium to write this, I ate two (scrambled) eggs. Each one cost $1. A dozen cost $12 at the bodega down the street. (This is more than the average cost of $4.95, probably because I got the bougie cage-free eggs, and because the bodega needs to pay its rent.)Two years ago, eggs were, ...

“We need to understand what problem we’re solving,” is a refrain I’ve heard in countless product strategy meetings — at Medium and in every company I’ve been part of.This is especially true in software design, where, typically, you work backwards from a problem toward potential solutions. Product management, as Ujjw...

It’s just starting to feel like spring where I am (temperatures in the mid-50s, sort of San Francisco-ish even though I’m on the East Coast!). After a very dark, sleet-y, dry winter that had me applying moisturizer every hour, I am glad to finally participate in my favorite pastime: popping in my AirPods and running...

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote a newsletter on the anti-establishment origins of International Women’s Day, and by extension, Women’s History Month. One notable point of origin for both holidays? The historic 1908 workers’ protest, when 15,000 women marched in New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay, ...

There’s an essay I read a while back, by Sasha Chapin, about what might be the key to the universe (or at least some parts of it): responsiveness.He begins with a viral video of someone ordering dinner at a halal truck (1.6 million hearts) and uses this as a jumping off point to make an argument about charisma: it’s...

Are you worried that AI might someday take your current job?I am, a bit. I run the Content team at Medium, which means we do a lot of writing in various forms — particularly writing marketing copy, one of the main use cases for LLMs like ChatGPT. But also? Like a lot of the claims around tech trends, it feels like h...

I have a friend — whom I am absolutely not going to name, for obvious reasons — that works in U.S. federal government. Last week, they emailed Elon Musk their requisite approx. five “bullets” listing their accomplishments for the week. He will apparently feed the responses to an LLM, creating an automated portrait o...

In 2019, around this time of year, Jenny Harrington published what is literally the most moving essay I have ever read — a tribute to her eight-year-old son, Ewan, who passed away from leukemia. I still remember where I was when I first read it. I was in the middle of Medium’s office at the time, at my standing desk...

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Senate confirmed RFK Jr. as our new Secretary of Health and Human Services. Notably, he doesn’t seem to believe the Covid vaccine saved lives.Vaccine hesitancy has risen in the U.S. over the last few years. Belief in vaccine safety fell from 77% in 2021 to 71% in 2023 — not a giant drop, but ...