Tim Hartford: “I don’t love PowerPoint, but as a technology there is nothing much wrong with it. It can do pretty much anything that you can do with a computer-choreographed barrage of slide projectors, and much more besides. And it can do it more flexibly, more reliably and much, much more cheaply. Yet that is the trap. A great talk starts with a message. Everything else — whether a joke, a story, a statistic or a picture — should be chosen to support the message. It’s always been easy to forget that. In a world of PowerPoint on tap, it can be impossible to remember it.”
HBR: “In the content-based model of short-video platforms such as Douyin and Kuaishou, the provider produces a large amount of interesting video content while hanging the relevant SKUs on the little yellow cart below the content. Interacting with the content, users experience resonance and build emotional attachments, which feel like friendship or even love, generating a motivation to buy. In this approach, customers buy for engagement and fun rather than to fulfill a need — because the product resonates with the content they are viewing or because they are fans of certain influencers. And if they realize after the purchase that the item is not something they actually need, they still feel satisfied by the experience. What’s more, people only have a fixed amount of time to spend online each day, and they are spending more and more of it on short videos/live streaming. According to a new data.ai survey, people spend on average four to five hours on content browsing of this kind, with TikTok taking up half of this time. The necessary consequence is that they spend less and less time browsing and buying products on traditional e-commerce platforms.”
David French: “During the early pandemic, when Zoom calls were a brand-new thing to many of us, I received an unusual invitation from a reader, who wrote that he and his old college friends all read me and would I mind joining one of their weekly Zooms? It sounded fun, so I said yes. When I joined I was struck by the obvious joy of their friendship — the inside jokes, the easy camaraderie. They were much younger than me, in their 30s, and before we signed off, they asked if I had any last thoughts.Stay together, I said. It’s going to get hard. Your kids are young. Your careers are just starting to take off. But stay together. Be there, even when it’s hard. Even when it’s inconvenient. After I got off the call, I kicked myself for not remembering a quote by C.S. Lewis: “Friendship is unnecessary,” he wrote, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.””
Raquel Vasquez Gilliland: “See what the land has to say to you — be it a wide hillside of bluestem grass or a single window box filled with petunias. If the practice of listening to the earth and the beings that inhabit it feels inauthentic, consider that humans have long been in dialogue with the natural world. Indeed their survival depended on their connection with the land and discerning what it had to say. When they died, what was left of them in turn nurtured it, too. It could be that newly sprouted blooms or subtle shifts in sunlight signaled the changing of seasons — giving them instructions. Perhaps your ancestors, as mine most likely did, believed that the world around them was populated with sentient beings that communicated with them. I like to think that the stories my grandmother still tells when I sit at her table have inklings of those the animals, trees and rivers shared with our ancestors. Paying attention to what the land has to say is how I honor this legacy. The language of the lands that make this earth are the mismatched puzzle pieces connecting us to the knowledge our ancestors drew from the land — as generous as a song to a rose, and as soft as the feathers of doves.”
