PicoBlog

Today has been a good day. I started the day with listening to Christmas songs while making breakfast, then followed that with many hours working on what will (hopefully) be my second book. I took a break for lunch and a 2-mile walk with Winnie. It’s 35 degrees today and the wind is biting and brutal, but the sky is that particular kind of bright blue that it only seems to be in fall and winter, and the sun is shining, so I’ll take it.

One of the fun things about being a writer is that your words don’t always reach the page as you wrote them. My computer’s acting up this morning, I’m moving a bunch of old files around to try and fix that, and came across this first draft of my Raptor R review from last year. Probably motivated by my own ego, I figured it might be worth sharing. I just drove the fastest internal combust engine off-road truck that will ever be sold in a showroom.

My husband isn’t a heavy-handed moralist, but he does have a tendency to go a little too “high” when I’m down on the ground with other earthly creatures of desire, pain, grief, and hunger. (He’s a reserved Presbyterian, descended from well-bred lawyers in Ithaca, New York, and I’m both a redhead and a Newark, New Jersey child of Russian/Polish Jewish immigrants, so you know….) We agree on the important things, like Trump and feminism and grammar.

Welcome to my personal newsletter. I’m publishing essays on digital technology and culture in the run-up to my January 2024 book FILTERWORLD: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Subscribe or read the archive here. Alert: Next Monday, I am going to send out a big update newsletter about Filterworld! Watch our for that and tell anyone who is interested to sign up. Artificial intelligence is looming over everything right now. It’s less an abstract threat than an imminent reality.

For the past few years I've kept a list in a treasured notebook to track the books I read. Adult books, that is. I quickly lose count of how many childrens books we devour in a year. I recently took a look at our library borrowing history and wasn't surprised that as a family we have loaned 1087 books since April 2021. Yep, we are family of bookworms. Personally, books are a great comfort and a constant feature in my daily rhythm.

This article is part of our ongoing series examining Napa Valley's wine industry. In previous installments we explored the far-reaching consequences of supply and demand imbalances, and we have highlighted escalating legal conflicts, community tensions and business failures. We also discussed how flawed or incomplete data can undermine strategic decision-making and affect long-term sustainability. Additionally, we considered the rising probability of mergers and acquisitions and the declining impact of China on tourism and wine consumption.

👋Hi, it’s Greg and Taylor. Welcome to our newsletter on how to make high-stakes professional and personal decisions in your 30s. Read time: 10 minutes The first week I met Greg, I was intimidated by his napkin math. Scott Galloway (our founder) had asked Greg to come to NYC to check out Section and the team. That week, Greg and I met for breakfast and he told me we needed to figure out if we could build a $100M/year business.

7/10 If Ridley Scott has such contempt for history, he should probably stop making historical epics. The hit-or-miss director has turned his grumpy old man act up to 11 after historians criticized inaccuracies in his new film Napoleon, telling them to “get a life”. Hey Ridley, they have lives: they’re historians, and unlike yourself, historians try to determine the truth about what happened in the past. While writers and filmmakers are entitled to some artistic license in interpreting the past to make a good story, there’s a certain point at which deviation from the facts makes a work of art useless in shedding light on history.

This weekend I attended my first NASCAR race.  For those unaccustomed to a race day, NASCAR is an experience. The main attraction of Dover International Speedway, the race I attended, is a one-mile oval loop, with dozens of cars racing at speeds of over 150 miles per hour.  For a self-proclaimed climate guy, NASCAR should be the antithesis of everything I stand for: cars burning rubber and fuel (getting, on average, four miles/gallon) for sport.