WSJ: “Sociology, the discipline tasked with pursuing the answers, would seem well poised to take these issues on. For decades, its analyses informed policy on issues ranging from criminal justice to immigration to urban development. It introduced groundbreaking concepts like “white-collar crime,” “gentrification,” “unintended consequences” and “cultural capital.” At various points, sociologists proposed and critiqued affirmative action, inspired and lambasted welfare reform, diagnosed and dismissed the breakdown of the nuclear family. Yet today, sociologists are embroiled in an ideological and existential battle of their own—one that is increasingly public and at least in part of their own making. The study of people, in other words, has a people problem.”
Fareed Zakaria: “A revolution is unfolding. Voters everywhere are furious…Free societies often look weakest in the midst of great technological upheaval because they move slowly and argue constantly. Yet over time they have usually adapted better than autocracies precisely because they can learn, correct mistakes and change course without violence or repression. Democratic leaders should not try to outrace technology; they can’t. But they should prove, through relentless focus and competence, that democracies can deliver. Then people will understand that the friction of accountability and the weight of legitimacy are not bugs in the system. They are the features that keep us free.”
NYTimes: “Given its patchwork construction and graphic patterns, a soccer ball can have two types of symmetry: reflection symmetry and rotation symmetry. Reflection symmetry means what it sounds like: that the object “has two identical halves that are mirror images of each other,” in Dr. Schattschneider’s words. Rotation symmetry means an object looks exactly the same as its starting position after a rotation of less than 360 degrees. For instance, a square looks identical four times when rotated every 90 degrees about its center. A perfect cube has a total of 24 such rotational symmetries — rotating around various axes piercing face-to-face, corner-to-corner, and edge-to-edge. The Platonic solids — the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron, from left, below — are the foundation of mathematical symmetry, especially in spheres.”
SaaStr: “Pull the last 100+ emails your team sent to your best-fit accounts. Skip the ones that closed. Read the ones that never got a reply. If they read like the two I got, the problem isn’t the market, the pricing, or the competition. The problem is a team spending your most expensive asset, qualified attention, on emails any AI would flag as forgettable. Those are winnable deals, lost at the cheapest and most fixable step in the funnel. You don’t need more leads to fix it. You need the team to treat the leads already raising their hands like they’re worth ten minutes.”
