Thursday, April 30, 2015

Twitter has a huge problem — and it’s all in your head

Read more about focus and overwhelm on Washington Post.

HBR Tip of the Day: Set Goals with Your Spouse

HRB post this morning:
It’s easier to achieve our goals when we’re not trying to go it alone. For many of us, our closest and most trusted companion is a spouse. Yet many couples rarely plan or set goals together – and this can actually make it harder to achieve them. To improve your odds of success, set joint and individual goals together and put them on paper. Write out your specific goals for the year and the habits you hope to develop. Then discuss how both of you can help the other achieve each goal. Break these annual resolutions into habits, monthly and weekly goals, and daily to-dos. Then write down what you hope to achieve as a couple. Joint goals help align your personal and professional pursuits. This “contract” increases accountability and allows your partner to think about specific ways in which they can act to support you.
Read +John Coleman and Jackie's post.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Lake Michigan is So Clear Right Now its Shipwrecks Are Visible From the Air

A Coast Guard patrol spotted the wrecks in shallow waters that are only clear after the lake's ice melts and before summer sediment swirls and algae blooms. Read more in the Smithsonian.

What’s the Best Way to Teach Sex Ed Today?

"In response to what they see as outdated sex education, recent graduates of the University of Tennessee are building a sex ed app that teenagers and young adults can use to ask questions anonymously — and get answers from volunteer experts and Planned Parenthood educators. But can an app provide the necessary guidance? Should technology play a role in teaching kids about health and sexuality?"

Read more in the NYT.

The Untold Story of Silk Road

How a 29 year old idealist built a global drug bazaar and became a murderous kingpin.

Read more in WIRED.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League school?

"High-achieving, low-income students, often the first in their families to attend college, struggle to feel they belong on elite campuses."

Read more in the Boston Globe.

See Your Company Through the Eyes of a Hacker

Read more in HBR.

4 Founders & Harvard MBAs on Finding Startup Traction & MBAs-as-Entrepreneurs

Favorite quote:
You can’t come into any experience with the mindset of, “I’m going to start a company.” Maybe you can say, “I’m going to solve a problem,” and then the question is when do you find a problem that’s worth solving. But the value of being in business school is to get to know the faculty and the other students, and if you’re finding yourself spending all your time in the Innovation Lab, you’re missing out on all the other stuff.
Read more in NextView Ventures.

Thanks, +Jamie Wilkie 

It’s Healthy to Let Your Mind Wander


Read more in NY Mag.

Thanks, +Brandon Kearse 

Nearly 1 in 10 Americans have severe anger issues and access to guns

Read more in the WashingtonPost.

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

And... I just locked my keys in my car

Hope I never need it, but this new Honk app looks pretty sweet:
Honk is a new app for on-demand roadside assistance--no membership required. All you have to do is open Honk, say what you need (a jump start, tire change, tow, etc.) and they’ll hook you up with help. 
Honk partners with local mechanics and towing companies across the country and promises service in less than 30 minutes. (God bless ’em, but we once waited for AAA for four hours. No joke.) 
With Honk, you’ll get an in-app quote before booking a service, and payments typically start around $50. (We got a $75 quote for a lockout and $100 for a tow.) 
The best part? The app uses GPS to pinpoint your exact location, so you never have to explain to Mo from A&D Motors that you’re somewhere between exits 22 and 30 on I-84.
Found by of PureWow 

Imgur // Street Art Collection



Check out the full collection on Imgur.

Thanks, Willis

10 tips to be an effective design thinker

Favorite one: An acceptance of the messy (design thinking is not neat)

Read more in Kellogg's MMM blog.

What Founders Should Know Before They Raise VC and Why We Chose Not To

Bhavin Parikh advises founders to understand VC economics and expectations before fundraising and shares why he chose "a more controlled growth path." Read more in Magoosh.

How quitting my corporate job for my startup dream f*cked my life up — Startups, Wanderlust & Life Hacking

Read Ali Mese's post in Medium.

Monday, April 20, 2015

The Most Popular Programming Languages in GitHub Since 2012


Read more in Loggly.

1.5 Million Missing Black Men

For every 100 black women not in jail, there are only 83 black men. The remaining men – 1.5 million of them – are, in a sense, missing.

Read the article and interactive in the NYT.

Latest Hang-Up in San Francisco: Does New Area Code Ring True?

Missing the 415 area code? Read more in the WSJ.

Thanks, +Katherine Stiner 

Public pensions own payday lender that is illegal in their own states

Public pension funds in New York and New Jersey are indirect owners of ACE Cash Express, the nation’s second-largest payday lender. It’s not illegal, but it sure borders on hypocritical. Read more in Fortune.

Meet the woman who tells everyone, ‘I have genital herpes’

An excerpt:
Seven months after Ella Dawson says she was diagnosed with genital herpes, she remembers a young man at a college party offering her a sip of his beer. “Don’t worry,” she recalled him saying. “I don’t have herpes or anything.” 
Dawson, 22, was just learning to shed the shame that came with her infection, which affects one in six Americans. She could already tell this sense of isolation was worse than any outbreak. So, she spoke up — and shared the tale in a Women’s Health essay, published this week:  'That’s funny,’ I said, with as warm a smile as I could manage. ‘Yeah, that’s really funny. Because I have genital herpes.’ His face crumbled. Not because I grossed him out — I could practically see the wheels turning in his brain as he realized he’d made an ignorant joke at someone else’s expense. The guy started apologizing profusely.
Read more in the Washington Post.

Sunday, April 19, 2015

What does Clinton’s ‘No Ceilings’ report actually have to say about the status of women in leadership?


Read more in the Washington Post. Check out the Clinton Foundation / Gate Foundation "No Ceilings" report here.

Thanks, +Jamie Wilkie 

It’s Healthy to Put a Good Spin on Your Life

How we construct personal narratives has a major impact on our mental well-being. Read more in the WSJ.

Thanks, +Zuhair Khan 

51 pretty shocking facts that make things harder for every woman you have ever met

Adam Mordecai of UpWorthy reflects on the following:
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, feminism is "the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities." That's it. That's all it is. Some of you might be saying to yourselves, "But don't feminists want to destroy us all and hate men and eat babies and stuff?" To which I respond: I think you are confusing feminism with Dr. Evil. They aren't really the same. So here to explain what feminism is really about is the brilliant Laci Green.  
We had our fact-checkers fact check the hell out of this, and yes, the math at 2:20 is real. And horrifying. If you can watch this and disagree with more than 10% of it, I'll be shocked.
Read his full UpWorthy post. And here's the video he references:


Thanks, +Rebekah Stevens 

Now Is The Perfect Time To Be A Female Entrepreneur

Boom.

Read more in TechCrunch.

Thanks, +Andrea Sparrey & +Melody Wang 

Anger Management: Why the Genius Founders Turned to Couples Therapy

Read more in the NYT.

Thanks, Fred

Unequal, Yet Happy

An excerpt:
Despite soaring inequality, worsened by the Great Recession, and recent grumbling about the 1 percent, Americans remain fairly happy. All of the wage gains since the downturn ended in 2009 have essentially gone to the top 1 percent, yet the proportion of Americans who say they are “thriving” has actually increased. 
So-called happiness inequality — the proportion of Americans who are either especially miserable or especially joyful — hit a 40-year low in 2010 by some measures. Men have historically been less happy than women, but that gap has disappeared. Whites have historically been happier than nonwhites, but that gap has narrowed, too. 
In fact, American happiness has not only stayed steady, but converged, since wages began stagnating in the mid-1970s. This is puzzling. It does not conform with economic theories that compare happiness to envy, and emphasize the impact of relative income for happiness — how we compare with the Joneses.
Read more in the NYT.

Thanks, +Alessia Bhargava 

Silicon Valley, please don’t forget the rest of America

Written by Andrew Yang, CEO of Venture for America. Read more in Quartz.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

‘Hunger Games’ Star Amandla Stenberg Asks ‘What If America Loved Black People As Much As Black Culture?’

The Hunger Game's Amandla Stenberg delivers a crash discourse on black culture with a fellow classmate for their history class.


And a little more about Amandla faced when she was cast as Rue.

Read more in LoveBScott.

The Expert (Short Comedy Sketch)


Snorted laughing watching this.

Thanks, Hillary

Best, Brightest — and Saddest?

An excerpt:
PALO ALTO, Calif. — I HAD heard about all of the dying, about all of the grief, and still I didn’t immediately understand what I was seeing when, at a railroad crossing here, I spotted a man in a blaring orange vest, the kind that road crews and public-safety workers wear. He wasn’t carrying any equipment. He wasn’t engaged in any obvious activity. He shuffled his feet, staring into the distance. 
Hours later, at the same crossing: an orange-vested woman. Like the man, she just stood there, without evident purpose. 
“They’re on the lookout,” a friend of mine who lives here explained. 
“For what?” I asked. 
“Suicides,” my friend said. 
Between May 2009 and January 2010, five Palo Alto teenagers ended their lives by stepping in front of trains. And since October of last year, another three Palo Alto teenagers have killed themselves that way, prompting longer hours by more sentries along the tracks. The Palo Alto Weekly refers to the deaths as a “suicide contagion.” 
And while mental health professionals are rightly careful not to oversimplify or trivialize the psychic distress behind them by focusing on any one possible factor, the contagion has prompted an emotional debate about the kinds of pressures felt by high school students in epicenters of overachievement.
Read Frank Bruni's post in the NYT.

Thanks, Kevin

Snapchat Sneakily Uses Its Own App To Poach Uber Engineers

Sneaky brilliant. Read more in Forbes.

IKEA Just Made It Crazy Easy To Add Wireless Charging To Your Furniture

Read more in Gizmodo.

Neil Sloane: the man who loved only integer sequences

The man who founded the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences 50 years ago has been called the most influential mathematician alive. To celebrate his 75th birthday, here he shares some recent favourites.

Read more in the Guardian.

Should You Get Married (Or Divorced) For Tax Reasons?

Happy Tax Season! Read more in FiveThirtyEight.

Thanks, +Joyce Yu 

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

The right way to pack a suitcase

Packing is an art -- and somehow over the past 5+ years, I've managed to pick up nearly all of these "tricks," haha.

Read more in Business Insider.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

11 Awkward Things About Email

So many good ones. My favorite is #1:
If someone you’re emailing with:
  • is making typos and you’re not
  • is skipping punctuation and you’re not
  • is skipping capitals and you’re not
  • is taking a long time to reply and you’re not
  • is responding to your long, well-written emails with much shorter responses
Then you’re their bitch.
Read the other 10 in WaitButWhy.

How to Declutter Your Mind and Unleash Your Willpower by Using “Bright-Line” Rules

An excerpt:
First, bright lines shift the conversation in your head from one of sacrifice to one of empowerment. When you don’t have a bright line established and you choose not to do something, the tendency is to say, “Oh, I can’t do it this time.” Conversely, when you do have a bright line clearly set, your response can simply be, “No thanks, I don’t do that.” Bright lines help you avoid making just-this-once exceptions. Instead, you are following a new identity that you have created for yourself
This is one of my favorite philosophies. I used to try to turn down shots when out with friends saying "I don't want one" or "I don't like shots." Ultimately, it was both easier to do and my friends respected it more when I say "I don't do shots." Identity shift - Bright-line answer.

Read more on James Clear's blog.

When work isn’t enough to keep you off welfare and food stamps

An excerpt:
We often make assumptions about people on public assistance, about the woman in the checkout line with an EBT card, or the family who lives in public housing. We make assumptions about how they spend their resources (irresponsibly?), how they came to rely on aid (lack of hard work?), how they view their own public dependence (as a free ride rather than a humbling one?). 
We assume, at our most skeptical, that poor people need help above all because they haven't tried to help themselves — they haven't bothered to find work. 
The reality, though, is that a tremendous share of people who rely on government programs designed for the poor in fact work — they just don't make enough at it to cover their basic living expenses. According to the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education, 73 percent of people who benefit from major public assistance programs in the U.S. live in a working family where at least one adult earns the household some money.
Read more at the Washington Post.

Four Charts That Explain Who Goes to Business School

The author calls it "a peek into the ambitions and anxieties of prospective MBAs."

Note: Relatively poor data sample (e.g., generalization across everyone who took the GMAT). Read more in Bloomberg.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Mapping Migration in the United States

Read more in the NYT. Fascinating infographic.

Thanks, +Claire Packer 

A Social Network Designed to Combat Depression

This is brilliant. Read more about Robert Morris's story in WIRED.

Thanks, +Alessia Bhargava 

The Moral Bucket List

Favorite excerpt:
It occurred to me that there were two sets of virtues, the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral — whether you were kind, brave, honest or faithful. Were you capable of deep love?
Read David Brooks' piece in the NYT.

Thanks, Andrea S

Maria Popova: 7 Things I Learned




A short 4 min, but lovely set of reminders. Thanks, +Amira Choueiki Boland 

The True Cost of Leaning In


Nanny ($709/week) + Baby Nurse ($1,680/week) + Housekeeper ($125/week) = the true price of “having it all.” Hannah Seligson does the math. An excerpt:
How much do you have to spend on household help to replace a traditional at-home mom—someone to do the schlepping, cooking, cleaning, child care, and laundry? About $96,261, according to Investopedia. 
In all of the voluminous ink that has been spilled on Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, and on women and the barriers they face in cracking the glass ceiling, no one is saying what is glaringly obvious to anyone thinking about how to have a big career and a family: start saving for the army of help you’ll need to pull it off. In other words, a nanny, a housekeeper, and a baby nurse.
Read more in the DailyBeast.

Thanks, +Claire Packer 

Why a Harvard Professor Has Mixed Feelings When Students Take Jobs in Finance

Read more in the NYT.

Thanks, +Lucy McKinstry 

Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Karlie Kloss Announces #KodeWithKarlie Scholarship So Teen Girls Can Learn To Code


Check out more in HuffPo.

Obama to Call for End to ‘Conversion’ Therapies for Gay and Transgender Youth

Finally. Read more in the NYT.

For anyone who has recently seen the Imitation Game (phenomenal movie) will have heard this story one too many times.

Teaching Haskell to a 10 year old: Day 1

Read more in Superginbaby.

Is that a Banksy?

A digital guide to city murals:
1AM Mobile is a street art guide curated by a global community. As a community driven photography app, 1AM Mobile celebrates art in the streets by letting members capture and share what they see in the streets and also view and share what others members have contributed. In essence, 1AM Mobile aims to tell you what’s up in the streets and let you take part in documenting street art history.
Download the app at 1AM Mobile.

theSKIMM’S Guide to terror groups making headlines

Do you know the difference between al-Qaeda, the Taliban, AQAP, al-Shabab, ISIS and others? Check out the descriptions in theSKIMM.

Thanks, +Alexandra Wouk 

Why We Melt at Puppy Pictures

Cute babies elicit caregiving behavior in humans—but why do we have the same response to the cute young of other species?

Read more in the WSJ. Thanks, +Katherine Stiner 

Why Women Aren’t C.E.O.s, According to Women Who Almost Were

"It’s not a pipeline problem. It’s about loneliness, competition and deeply rooted barriers." Read more in the NYT .