Each day, we all awaken to a familiar horror story. Behind the mere six-inch screen of our smartphones lurks an army of dodgy characters, constantly conspiring to steal our precious attention.
As you ride a subway train, glance around at your fellow passengers. Heads bowed low, eyes mindlessly fixated on the screens in their hands, index fingers twitching or swiping. Don’t they bear an uncanny resemblance to the zombies in that movie you watched over the weekend? And then, when you look into the mirror, you realize you belong to the same species, with the screen in your own hand blinking back at you.
There will be enough autopsy reports of the 2024 US election to fill thousands of episodes of podcasts in the upcoming weeks or even months. While so many podcasters and journalists mourn the loss of Democratic Party, nitpick election data so that they can better understand who voted whom and how the demographic shift might be a telltale sign of the future trends for US politics, I couldn’t help but wondering: Do they really think a black woman can appeal to the voters of rule Pennsylvania? if not, aren’t all those fancy data analysis and deep economics policies comparisons total bullshit?
Of all the tricks memory masters utilize to fight the fleeting nature of human memory, “the memory palace technique” is probably the most prominant one. It works by associate information with familiar spatial environment (such as your home or your bedroom). People who are specially good at this can sometimes memorize things that are simply unimaginable for us uninitiated.
On the face of it, The process of a second language acquisition is, for the most part, a game of memorization. There is no doubt that a good memory will help you tremendously in this department. But we don’t have a lot of memory masters who speak a lot of languages, do we? So surely there is more to language learning than meets the eye?
All asians share the same parents. This is the conclusion I reached after reading the autobiographies of two Asian actors: Jimmy O Yang’s How to American and Simu Liu’s We Were Dreamers.
Although the two characters can’t be more different from each other – Jimmy the comedian will make you crack up every few lines, while at times Simu’s brutal honesty and vulnerability put you on the edge of tears – the core theme of both stories is one and the same: the clash between the expectations of Asian parents and a kind of black-sheep kid who has a slightly different dream.
Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.
– Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
When a company or organization is facing a media crisis, a dirty trick that public relations professionals have up their sleeves is to flood the news outlets with all kinds of unrelated information, so that “the bad piece” may get totally lost in all the noises.
When starting a dialogue, it helps to think of the discussion as a negotiation where the prize is figuring out what everyone wants.
– Charles Duhigg, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection
The other day, I was baited into a heated debate online with a stranger. I’m not going to delve into the details of the debate, but I said something I ought not to have, and my opponent did the same, and I ended up blacklisting him (or her).
Time is undoubtedly the sole resource you possess that grants you an upper hand against Jeff Bezos, provided that you are younger than him. In case you aren’t, well, then perhaps you have a better hairline?
It’s quite astonishing to consider that you hold something which even the wealthiest individual on earth isn’t going to obtain any more of. This implies that if we were in a fictitious world where everything is valued in relation to time, then you would undoubtedly be among those who possess greater purchasing power than Jeff Bezos.