PicoBlog

I answer questions about product, management, strategy, leadership, culture & careers. (It's free, and I'm the former VP/CPO of Netflix/Chegg.) By Gibson Biddle's "Ask Gib" product newsletter · Over 32,000 subscribersNo thanks“A bit of strategy mixed with product management from someone who had a key role in Netflix rise” ncG1vNJzZmiZo6C0qq6NrKybq6SWsKx6wqikaA%3D%3D

For many years while my husband’s Aunt Helen was alive, we got stressed out thinking about what to buy her, her husband and daughter for Christmas. They were a family that had all the material things they wanted, but loved the “oooh” and “aaah” moments after wrapping paper and bows were removed and the Christmas gifts were revealed. Even though they lived in coastal California where the weather was moderate in December, they enjoyed lighting a fire and casting the wrapping paper into the fire for an extra colorful blaze.

Introduction So I was inspired to make a superhero story. What may surprise you is I don’t really like superheroes, or at least, I don’t like modern superheroes. I find them hopelessly out of touch even when they aren’t deconstructionist subversions of the genre. This project then is what I’ll call a reconstructionist narrative. It starts in a world where superheroes have all been deconstructed and then tries to build virtue and goodness despite the awful conditions.

Good morning! I spent weeks reporting and writing this feature, which is running simultaneously in this newsletter and at MetsMerized Online. It’s a tribute to a great Met and Brooklyn Dodger, and a case that I frankly can’t believe we’re still having to make. Thanks to everyone who talked to me for this story, and everyone who connected me with other people who talked to me for this story — fingers crossed for Gil!

There is so much to learn about my new home. It has been a little overwhelming learning new words and about different foods at the market and on the menu. My knowledge about Venetian artists like Tintoretto and Titian and Tiepolo is elementary. Not to mention getting from point A to point B efficiently. One subject I focused on first is Venice’s lagoon islands. The city of Venice is made up of 118 islands that are connected by over 400 bridges.

I’d been warned — specifically by my brother, publisher/editor of Drum! magazine, and by many references I’d seen in other interviews: Ginger Baker could be a nasty S.O.B. Maybe you’ve seen this documented on film, a minute into the documentary Beware of Mr. Baker, where the reclusive drummer assaults and bloodies an unwelcome reporter with his cane. Fortunately, I would be a safe distance away when the time came for our phone chat.

My high school experience is bookended by two movies, Clueless (1995) and Mean Girls (2004), both heavy hitters in the teen movie genre. While Clueless has always been my favourite of the two, Mean Girls seems to have usurped its place as the most iconic, most beloved, most quotable and most memeable high school movie ever made. If Clueless, however, presented a rose-tinted (albeit satirical) portrayal of the possibilities for friendship and romance in high school, Mean Girls was exactly the catharsis I needed after six years of social misery.

… let’s just dive straight into the hellfire, shall we. Rep. Jennifer Decker — the white GOP architect of the House’s anti-DEI bill — proudly, albeit kinda lowkey nervously, shared that she (allegedly) took a Black studies course in college a few weeks ago on KET. And the writings she studied were “not DEI concepts at all” — a statement that should inspire some level of hope, but not security.

We used to be a country, a real country, where romantic comedies were a film genre that was a pillar of Hollywood and not its punchline, where they were made with the finest, award-winning caliber of talent. We had writers like Charlie Chaplin and Preston Sturges and Dalton Trumbo, James L. Brooks and Richard Curtis pen them. We had the some of the best cinematographers like Charles Lang and Michael Ballhaus, Sven Nykvist and László Kovács beautifully and inventively shoot them.