Subscriber Links Roundup #2 (May 10, 2023)

Second batch

Reminders:

I’m speaking at the Danube Institute in Budapest this Friday (May 12). If you’d like to attend, please RSVP here.

I’m delivering a series of lectures on the psychology of social status in Miami on May 31-June 2. If you’d like to attend, please complete this form.

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First batch of subscriber writing links here.

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Aseem Asthana, Should your surgeon be skilled or polite? The answer determines AI’s impact on jobs

Introducing the Jobs Impact Quotient, a quantitive framework to asses the impact of AI and Robotics on jobs. It is open-source, testable and falsifiable.

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Nandini Saxena, Women of Color & Dating

Women of Color & Dating is a three-part series going into how WOC, and specifically South Asian Women, can win in all areas of life, by building caliber and discernment.

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Christopher Gage, The War on Humour 

Here's an essay I wrote on Chris Rock, the epidemic of humourlessness, the effects of our current anti-humour culture, and what Freud thought about it all.

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Jarred Kotzin, Appreciating Pencils

This essay is an investigation into the roots of humanity's natural resistance to gratitude and optimism and what the implications might be if we fail to upskill in both departments.

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Thomas J Bevan, Ghost Lap

A short piece of fiction about grief, memory and Gran Tourismo

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Hina Husain, Pakistani child sex abuse is an open secret

Reflections and reporting about the on-going child sexual abuse scandal in the UK (one of the largest instances of child exploitation in modern history), and how political correctness has been used to deny justice to victims. 

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Caleb Ontiveros, Why Stoicism is True

A defense of the ancient Greco-Roman philosophy.

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Ned Nadima, Dating Theory for the 21st Century

A simple formula to approach the dating world in the modern Age

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Michael Ryan, Religious Groups in China Need International Support

Discusses the revolutionary potential of Christianity within a Chinese context. 

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B.C. Kowalski, The time the New York Times tried to cancel Wausau, and the aftermath

In this piece, I wrote about what happened when the NY Times came to town to cover a controversial issue, and what happened in the aftermath of that coverage. 

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Anna Jorgensen, We Put Her In The Trunk Where She Was Safer

My sister, brother and I were trying to drop off my mother’s ashes to the cemetery, but she wasn’t ready to go yet.

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Raghul Chandrasekar, A Systematic Approach to Learning Art Appreciation

A beginner's guide to understanding what the big deal is behind a painting of a fruit basket.

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Adrian Conway, Adrian’s Fiction 

Am principally a fiction writer with an abiding interest in how psychology forms the landscape for all story and character.

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Josh Kalsbeek, LMFT On Secrets

3 types of secrets I've learned the hard way as an addict and a psychotherapist.

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Joel Addo, contigo; with you. Love.

A blog post on my thoughts on love.

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Robert Godwin, www.onecosmos.blogspot.com

Endless commentary on the author’s own book, One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind, and Spirit, or in other words, the synthesis of all reality.

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Corin Wagen, Domain Arbitrage

Why scientific innovation depends on cross-pollination between domains; and how the scientific establishment disincentivizes this. 

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Ronen Ainbinder, The Power of Incentives in Sports

An analysis of the role of incentives within the realm of professional sports – how much can they influence the quality of a professional tournament, league winner, cup, title, or medal?

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The Bildung Life, On the internal state of narcissists

The circumstantial nature of the birth of narcissists.

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Matt Osborne, Death's Head: The Career Of Francis Baron Von Trenck And The Meaning Of The Totenkopf

A deeper dive into the origins and spirit of a dire symbol

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Ryan Bruno, Meaning, Purpose, and Pain

This piece is about our tendency to believe that painful experiences “happen for a reason”, and how this tendency makes such experiences feel more meaningful.

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Jochen Weber, Accepting the Sting 

Overcoming the experience of being stuck in a painful situation requires to genuinely look at one's pain in order to communicate about the problem honestly to the people who need to change their behavior.

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Connor Wood, My Mother, the Hippie

A Substack post about growing up with a chaotic, hippie mother who eventually took her own life, but who also helped lay the trail of breadcrumbs that led to my conversion to "weird" Christianity.

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Fr. Wah, Homilies short, if not sweet

​I am a modestly-educated Catholic priest of a missionary community who used to live in China, posting my Sunday homilies here.

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Frederic Himebaugh (as author Frederick Gero Heimbach), Roommates

Published only yesterday by White Cat Publications, "Roommates" is a very short story of humor/horror/steampunk which gives some missing background on one of the most famous short stories of US literature.

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Mike Coté, The New Tsar

This is a piece of geopolitical analysis that I am most proud of, a breakdown of the rationale behind Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and historical context thereof, initially published a few days after the invasion began.

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Ibrahim Oga, Ibrahim Oga's Belvedere

Ibrahim Oga's Belvedere newsletter is my unique way of seeing life, and intentionally a way to propagate a positive outlook towards life.

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Diana Fedorak, Children of Alpheios

Children of Alpheios is set on planet Eamine within a genetically engineered colony about a young mother who finds herself up against the colony's corporation when she discovers they want to exploit her baby's remarkable DNA anomaly.

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Gina Pottenge, With Gratitude to My Bullies

The premise of this long-form essay is that experiencing adolescent bullying has been a gift that has made me stronger as an adult in the face of pressure to conform to rapidly-changing societal norms that frequently go against my own common sense, my moral standards, and my freedom to make my own choices.

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Dr. Paul, Masterpieces of Art Reveal the Steps of Courtship

​​A painting in the London National Gallery reveals the first three universal steps of human courtship (which we can see play out in many modern films.)

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Will Bradley, How to Stop Yourself From Becoming Useless

Reflections on technological advancement, incremental self-improvement, and the societal redistribution of responsibility.

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John Raptis, Everything as a Service 

In the age where everything has become a transaction, we started treating our internal lives like we treat external services.

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Jay Rollins, Matches vs. Fights vs. Muggings

Most people conflate three types of physical confrontation, but sportfighting matches, street fights, and criminal assaults are a Venn diagram as opposed to a circle; the way one trains to repel a mugger is distinct from the way one trains to beat a sportfighter or to avoid/overcome a streetfighter.

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John Lyne, Multi-level Conspicuous Consumption

Similar to how the cells of a peacock self-organize to produce conspicuous sexual features, I explore how humans self-organize to produce group-level conspicuous sexual features.

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Trojan Centaur (pseudonym), Farewell

An appropriately pretentious goodbye song to academia.

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Bao Nguyen, Introducing the PM Whisperer

As a product manager with limited time on your hands, finding resources to develop your career can be challenging. That's why I've created the PM Whisperer: your one-stop shop for expert-vetted product management tips, career advice, and more.

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Nate Epps, God From The Machine

It's about AI, ChatGPT, and ties in the movie "Ex Machina."

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GD Dess, Cultural Dopes

Attempts to answer the question why we feel stuck culturally, why it feels like nothing is happening but the appearance of something happening.

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Douglas Burton, Children Groomed for Trans Lifestyle by Gender Ideology in Schools: Experts

Douglas Burton is a student of religion, politics and conflict.

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Jared Feuer, It's Not the End of the World As We Know It…and We’ll Be Fine

This is from a substack I co-write with a friend focusing on universal concepts of beauty and life that are lost in political tribalism - in the case of this column, apocalyptic thinking.

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Yogesh Upadhyaya, How to have some good political discussion. 

How to have some political discussion where everyone learns something.  

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JD Johanson, A scene “is a group of people who unblock each other at an accelerating rate.”

Groups of guys used to help unblock each other, and debug their efforts to meet women, but that scene seems to have died; individuals are rarely as good at skill mastery as individuals collaborating and competing in groups.

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Peter Starmüller, Peter’s Reflections and Wanderings | Peter Starmüller | Substack

My writings include personal experiences and reflections on creativity, identity, racism, dehumanisation and the dynamics of unhealthy disagreements.

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Ben Woestenburg, Scribbler

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Benjamin Fox, The Dōjima futures exchange

On the world's first futures exchange, in Edo era Japan.

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Tom Foydel, The Big Two Hearted Timber

I have an unusual connection to Earnest Hemingway, which I attempt to explain here.

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Ruth Gaskovski, The Great Forgetting - How 'critical thinking' and outsourcing of memory are withering culture, and how to turn the tide

The increased outsourcing of memory threatens not only the depths and distinctiveness of the self, but of the culture we all share: ‘Outsource memory, and culture withers.’ Memory is fighting a battle on two fronts: the ‘critical thinking’ machine of the educational system, and the easy lure of a tech exo-brain at our fingertips.

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Erik Brown, An Ancient Greek Solution For Dealing With Mass Killers

How the Greeks dealt with a malevolent character who burned down an ancient wonder of the world for fame; it resembles our troubles today with mass killers and gives us a possible solution.