Written by Nemo Oudeis
on February 6, 2020

Curated Media Vol 1

The best of media of early 2020. Everything is worth a read - good writng & good content. Enjoy!

Avalance School (NYT)

A man at the end of the table asked the class if anyone had seen the 2014 movie “Force Majeure.” I was the only person who had. Another man asked what the movie was about. I didn’t say it was about the ongoing shame and denial experienced by a husband who abandoned his wife and children during an avalanche scare. I didn’t say, “Much like this course so far, it’s a referendum on masculinity.” All-female groups, Ryan told us before lunch, make better decisions in risky situations than all-male groups or mixed-gender groups. When asked why women became less smart in the company of men, Ryan speculated that “women, around men, feel uncomfortable speaking up.” I did not say, and not because I was uncomfortable speaking up, that in my experience as a midlevel skier who had more than once been taken up slopes I could not descend — for example, a deep-powdered backcountry slope under which lurked many cliffs, that two male friends, insanely enough (in retrospect), insisted I could ski — I do and did speak up, often repeatedly. I was just never heard.

Dayana Tortorici does an amazing job telling her story in and out of Instagram “addiction” and inteactions with strangers on the internet in general. So many quotable sentences, I'm impressed with her writing.

The best practitioners had better boundaries than I did. “I never search my name on Twitter, of course not, it’s none of my business what people say about me,”

World records are meaningless in a culture defined by historical amnesia and the relentless invention of categories, I thought, and double tapped to like the egg.

How was this even possible, this eternal volley between mimesis and life, mimesis and life, through which you could discover a stranger who felt like a friend, but a friend from whom you needed nothing?

“What happened?” he said. “She talked so much she passed out?” “We were talking about the internet,” said Sarah. “She got a little excited.” “Ah,” he said. “The internet again!”

WHEN SHE DIED IMMEDIATELY AFTER GETTING A BRAZILIAN BUTT LIFT.

This would be the place to speak about René Girard, about influencers, about the mise en abyme of mimetic desire: we want what other people want because other people want it, and it’s penciled-in eyebrows all the way down, down to the depths of the nth circle of hell where we all die immediately of a Brazilian butt lift, over and over again. But what is there to say? We know it, we know it, we know it. Still we keep scrolling, deeper down the well of our bottomless need.

It’s hard to tell what is creepier: the feeling that someone is somewhere out there, following your every step, or the fact that no one is, just the tracking device you carry with you in your pocket.

A violent defense (New Yorker)

This story of a woman defending herself and her brother against a man that raped and beaten her and is now facing life in prison for it - fuck that makes you angry.

How the Agile Manifesto came about (Atlantic)

A slightly amusing account of how the agile manifesto came into existence almost 20 years ago.

[Jon Kern] compares Agile to yoga, arguing his practice is personal and that he doesn’t “try to tell other people how to practice.

The only concern with the term ‘agile came from Martin Fowler (a Brit for those who don’t know him), who allowed that most Americans didn’t know how to pronounce the word ‘agile.’

Ward Cunningham. He points to the first value of the Agile Manifesto. ‘It says, ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.’ How did [Agile] become a process-and-tools business?’

The Elements of value (HBR)

A neat mental model for disecting what kind of value a product delivers. This can be a tool to understanding how an existing product generates value as well as for hypotesizing how/if a product currently in development will deliver value. Something that I don't see enough in enterprise software development.