PicoBlog

In the early 1970s, Russ Regan had a dream. In this dream, the music of the Beatles accompanied scenes from World War II. For most people, having such a dream would be the end of the story, but then most people aren’t longtime music executives in charge of 20th Century Records, a record label owned by Fox.  “I dreamt it, actually wrote it all down. I woke up in the middle of the night, wrote these different things down,” Regantold Ear Candy Mag in 2005, “and we made a sort of a documentary movie about World War II with the Beatles’ music.

Around 20 years ago, I worked for a company building device drivers, for DVD-RAM drives, for pre-MacOS X Macintosh’s and Windows 2000-era PCs. What are DVD-RAM drives, you ask? Well. Imagine a DVD that you stick in a caddy (like CD-ROMs in Ye Olden Times) that you then load into the slot on the drive. You can then use the DVD-RAM disk… just as you would a hard drive, or a floppy, or a flash drive.

Dear Sisters, So you might have come across the terms ENM before, usually in someone’s bio on a dating app as you’re swiping through. ENM stands for “ethical non-monogamy,” and honestly I do find it a little sad that most people feel inclined to have to add the ethical part to it. This simply comes from the huge stigma surrounding non-monogamy. Anything besides monogamy is seen as wrong and unethical…is there a way to do it ethically?

Welcome to another edition of  ProductiveGrowth 🌱, monthly stories about productivity, leadership, motivation, and anything else that allows us to work less and achieve more. First time reading?  Sign up here.  Osmosis Weekly is a newsletter that breaks down how humans get influenced: persuasion, manipulation, habits, beliefs, and decisions. Every Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. PST, Colin Chung sends you insights from what he's reading on human behavior, marketing, and storytelling. 

I am irritated. Not a super unique state of mind for me, to be honest. In the present case, I’m irritated by the annual “best books of the year” lists. My irritation contains multitudes. I’ve always been irritated by lists that call something the “best” as though this is an objective measurement when even the people who are making the lists know that this is ridiculous. When I do my own year-end wrap-up in my Chicago Tribune column I call it the “Biblioracle Book Awards” to make it clear that what I have to say is entirely idiosyncratic and subjective.

I might be killing this newsletter here giving you the moment everyone has been waiting for, with what is likely the best cinnamon roll in New York City. Likely because it is the best cinnamon roll of the 72 that I’ve officially tasted, but there are 4-8* more that need to be rated. Well, if that’s the case, so be it, let’s roll (get it?????). I ate it again this morning, and it was still pretty dang good.

Hey all! A lot has happened in this past year! Many dumbphone releases, my book got published, and we have more to come! That's why every year, I do a video around August about the best dumbphones. This year is no different. It is my opinion on what you should get and this year I am going to do it by price. There is a text version included in this email as well.

With the recent news that the land under Bolton’s Spicy Chicken and Fish has been sold to developers, I figured I better get out to East Nashville and eat what is inarguably the best fish sandwich in America. Bolton’s, if you don’t already know, is one of the OG Nashville hot chicken shacks, one of only two, along with Prince’s, to survive from the days before the Nashville Hot Chicken-pocalypse.

There was a time when Michael Laudor was one of the most prominent mentally ill people in the United States, and by extension, the world. The youngest son of an upper-middle-class family in Westchester county, Laudor was marked as a brilliant mind from childhood, frequently referred to as a genius. He breezed through the curriculum in high school, impressing everyone around him with his eccentric and sharp mind. He finished his undergraduate education at Yale in three years, then got a job with the prestigious (and well-remunerative) financial firm Bain Capital.