…unless you’re into reading the songwriting credits in tiny print on album liners, you might not know how many hits Dan has had a hand in since then. Dan co-wrote Adele’s “Someone Like You” and the Dixie Chicks’ “Not Ready to Make Nice.” He’s also co-written with the likes of Taylor Swift, Chris Stapleton and John Legend.
…Dan told me about what it’s actually like to write with other people–to dive into a stranger’s emotional territory–and how it feels to watch a song you’ve co-written become a huge smash for someone else.
Over the years we in the tech sector have gotten used to being well-regarded. After all, we make people’s lives better, on balance. That’s changing. At the moment it’s rumblings from thought leaders, not pervasive popular anger. The other thing that’s new is that they’re thought leaders who are progressives and liberals; just like most of us in the tech professions.
Franklin Foer on how Silicon Valley is threatening our humanity
Fears about the “existential threat of big tech” usually focus on autonomous weapons and how to control superintelligence before it has the power to control us. That’s not so for Franklin Foer, The Atlantic staff writer and former New Republic editor-in-chief. His new book World Without Mind is out this week, and it’s about a different type of existential threat.
He thinks that the big tech companies–Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon–are “destroying the possibility of contemplation” and making us turn away from the intellectual work that, he says, makes us human.
Charles Duhigg on Self-Motivation, Mental Models, and Getting Stuff Done
Charles is, by any measure, a very productive person–he wrote a bestseller while working full-time and raising a family. And even though success begat success, he started to feel like he was treading water and didn’t want to come home every day after work to spend another five hours answering emails.
So he started calling researchers who study productivity as well as very productive people he admired to learn why some people manage to do so much while others struggle to reach the inbox zero promised land. Those phone calls and conversations are what led to his second book, Smarter Better Faster.