PicoBlog

Whenever I’m asked for the single best piece of writing advice, I always answer with two words: “Finish things.” This is the best writing advice I was given but also more or less the first writing advice I ever received. In college, I had a friend whose father was an established author and was passing through the city for a festival. He took a few of us out to dinner on the publisher’s dime—this used to be common, believe it or not—along with his agent and a few other people.

NAPA VALLEY, Calif. — The vestiges of La Onda are nearly gone now. The grand stages have been dismantled, the colorful flags and food stalls taken down and carted away. But what’s left from the first Latin music festival that took place at the Napa Expo on June 1 and 2 is a feeling, a message that still resonates like a dusting of glitter in the air: Something grand happened here.

Happy New Year! We kicked off the new year last night at the LCD Soundsystem show at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Normally we spend New Year’s Eve at home, but when my son, who is home from college, noticed that LCD Soundsystem was playing, he talked us into it. I’m happy he did. It was a great show and a nice way to ring in the new year.

Happy last week of January, everyone! I mean, I guess next week is technically the last week, but who cares about reality when it gets dark at 4pm? Today, I’m thrilled to be running an interview with one of the wisest developmental psychologists I know: Dr. Aliza Pressman, whom you might know from her popular podcast, Raising Good Humans. (Which I was a guest on, once up on a time!

My mother introduced me to The Flasher—acquired in one of her legendary shopping sprees—in 1977. I was 25 and had my own apartment on Chicago’s North Side. Mom lived in our family home on the Southwest Side with my alcoholic father and combatively drug-addled brother. Born in 1931 and raised Catholic, she’d been taught to accept and bear “life’s crosses.” Shopping helped her. Laughter helped even more. Saying she had something to show me, she opened her lingerie drawer and pulled the mustachioed doll from a brown paper bag.

This article was originally published in TRENCH on 04/04/2024. In May 2023, Raf Saperra landed in New York City for the very first time, having admired the Big Apple from afar since childhood. After the release of his explosive debut mixtape,Ruff Around The Edgez, followed by a month off for Ramadan, the South Londoner was ready to make his next move forging groundbreaking Punjabi music. Joined by producers Bobby Kang and Taj Aulakh, the trio drove across the city’s boroughs, stopping at Airbnbs, friends’ neighbourhoods and music studios, armed with laptops to make beats.

According to some experts, chess grandmasters need to learn over 300,000 “chunks” of information. While you won’t need all of those chunks every game, you’ll certainly need more than a couple, which raises a problem. How are you supposed to hold all of them in your mind at once? If you have to think about them, you won’t be able to. Many people think of chess as the ultimate thinking game, but thinking is overrated (at least conscious thinking).

It is a Silicon Valley truism that great businesses don’t start with a great idea; they start with an idea and then test and pivot their way to what works in the market. Instead of the traditional corporate reflex to plan, plan, plan, and then build; digital start-ups succeed through a constant process of experimentation. Whether in business or science, the aim of experimentation is the same: to validate (i.e., prove or disprove) your key hypotheses and assumptions.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the fox and the chicken. Perhaps you’re familiar with the scenario, or some variant of it; versions of it have been around for centuries, sometimes with other animals or entities swapped in. Regardless—it’s a logic puzzle that seems simple, but can be tricky to solve without careful consideration. The premise: you are a farmer who has to transport a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across a river.