WSJ: “Streaming, now ubiquitous through Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music and social-media platforms like TikTok, has fragmented the listening experience, with fans able to delve into niches that may not be broadly popular. Long gone are the days when Top-40 radio hosts and MTV VJs set the agenda for the public at large. Spotify is beloved for its highly personalized recommendations. Making 640 million users feel like their tastes are understood requires a scale that only technology can offer, and algorithms construct or tweak many of its playlists to suit individual preferences. But making new music recommendations often requires a human touch, and [Sulinna] Ong’s work is central to persuading subscribers, who pay $12 a month for ad-free listening, to stick around. “AI machine learning is amazing at parsing large data sets, but when there is no data, for example, on a new release, on a new artist, what does it do?” Ong said during an interview in December. “If you are waiting for the data to show, you are by definition trend following, not trendsetting.””
Howard Marks: “A bubble or crash is more a state of mind than a quantitative calculation. In my view, a bubble not only reflects a rapid rise in stock prices, but it is a temporary mania characterized by – or, perhaps better, resulting from – the following: highly irrational exuberance (to borrow a term from former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan), outright adoration of the subject companies or assets, and a belief that they can’t miss, massive fear of being left behind if one fails to participate (‘‘FOMO’’), and resulting conviction that, for these stocks, “there’s no price too high.””
WSJ reviews “Matter”: “The greatest question is simply why matter exists. Where did everything come from and how did its energy originate? Aristotle’s answer was that there was no beginning—matter must always have existed since you can’t make something out of nothing. Mr. Tonelli asks us to imagine a large steel container from which all air is removed—a vacuum in the ordinary sense of the word. Even if we could extract every single atom, he says, there would still be so many things remaining, such as hordes of passing neutrinos. Shielding out all of those would still not be enough; quantum mechanics dictates that there would always be particles inside, however fleeting. Empty space is never truly empty; it is a quantum vacuum with energy of its own.”
Doris Kearns Goodwin on what makes a good leader: “It is a constellation of traits. It’s EQ and humility — acknowledging that you don’t know things and that you’ll make mistakes. It is sharing credit, having an ambition larger than yourself, compassion.”
NYTimes on getting started with a multimedia digital journal: “Keeping a digital diary requires a few basic steps: picking an app, writing an entry and adding new posts on a regular basis. And don’t let the fear of typing long contemplative dispatches on a small screen dissuade you. Just dictate your thoughts to your iPhone or Android phone with its transcription tools, although check its privacy policy if you’re nervous about your data…Journal apps make it easier to write about your life without the performative aspect of social media. And paying less attention to what everyone else is doing gives you more time to spend on yourself.”
