Your Mid-Week Experiment
Lots of Austin Kleon content this week
Thanks to everyone who reached out about last weekend’s essay about Moms for Liberty, a rightwing front group to undermine public education. You might also want to check out Jen Psaki’s segment on same. We’ve got an unusually large amount of good stuff for you this week, so enough about me and on with the stuff to read, listen to, and watch.
Let’s get to it:
Austin Kleon has good advice for staying creative. I particularly like “Forget the noun, do the verb.” (Austin Kleon)
He also has some thoughtful insights into the relationship laziness can have to productivity, though it confirms my suspicion that Ohio would irritate me. (Austin Kleon)
John Warner even cites Kleon in his smart essay on setting up a creative practice. Of note is a bit about how AI, absent fresh inputs, degrades. “I’m increasingly confident that AI isn’t going to replace us. It already seems clear that it needs us more than we need it.” (Biblioracle)
Apparently everything changed for young people starting in 2012 when smartphones became ubiquitous. A long read, and not a happy one. (The Atlantic)
What if what we think we know about how different generations think and behave is a cognitive bias? “[W]hat might really matter at work are not actual differences between generations but people’s beliefs that these differences exist.” (Harvard Business Review)
Did you know restaurants now adjust their menus to be more delivery-friendly — even if you’re dining in the restaurant? (GrubHub)
Did you know Domino’s essentially created the pizza delivery industry? (The Atlantic)
Did you know that there are two times when personalities change a lot — before 30 and after 60? (The Atlantic)
Did you know that changing land-use codes to widen access to home ownership could make getting married less-dependent on already having wealth? (some study)
Is anyone else having a digital identity crisis on Threads? (embedded)
This is a marvelous and data-driven takedown of influencer marketing that involves the author’s butt going viral. No, for real. (Mark Ritson)
The train sequence was genuinely distressing, as was a lot of the dialogue, though in two opposite ways.
Loving season 2 of The Bear, though the Christmas dinner episode about killed me.
The Netflix documentary about WHAM! was a perfect encapsulation of their moment and everything it contained: George’s emergence as a songwriter while he concealed his sexuality, Andrew as an unbelievably stellar friend, and a band that made good, soul-inflected pop songs that took over the damn world for four years.
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is how I have fun.
Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. The New York Times bestseller is 44% off and the same price as a paperback now!