What's Cool This LDW

Ruminating on all the best the internet has shown me this week

By luck or fate or some other reason, you’ve found yourself reading an email from Thinking Is Cool, *the* podcast to listen to if you want to have better conversations. If this email was forwarded to you, sign up for regular correspondence from me, Kinsey G., right here:

Mornin! For those of a certain school of thought, today is sadly the final Friday of the summer, the swan song of a season. For those of the Kinsey Grant school of thought, thank God. I’m going to enjoy this weekend to the fullest extent before I assume my final form: spending the entire fall pretending to be Sarah Jessica Parker’s character from Hocus Pocus.

It’s the Friday before a long weekend. Let’s get in, have some fun, get out, and get a lobster roll.

What’s Cool This LDW

Thinking about the nexus of journalist x creator. I was recently speaking with another semi-reluctant member of this creator economy, someone who does a tremendous service interviewing experts and distilling their complex concepts for non-experts, and we spent a great deal of our Google Hangout hobnobbing about our one finite resource: time.

It got me thinking: Journalism (well, good journalism) and efficiency are not conducive to one another. Developing sources, doing research, and building relationships are all part of the journalistic process...and they all take a tremendous amount of time. But being an independent creator is at least partially a game of efficiency—you need to publish regularly across platforms to keep up with your peers.

It makes me wonder—can the core tenets of what we consider “good journalism” survive in a creator economy driven by algorithms that reward more more than they reward better? I'm hopeful that it can. But it's a difficult balance to strike.

Other Cool Things:

  1. Changing your mind in public.

  2. This piece by Emma Turetsky entitled “TikTok Made Me Gay.” It’s a funny and honest telling of the experience more than a few of us likely had over the last year. Favorite line? “Internalized homophobia had gotten the best of me, and it took the TikTok overlord’s interference to look myself in the eyes and say, “Wait, what?”

  3. Not using speakerphone in the airport like you guys please I don’t want to hear about what Calista told Jacob in last week’s team meeting while I’m waiting on my 6:43 am flight to board.

  4. This phenomenon the very talented Dan Runcie calls The OutKast Edge

And now a word from our very cool partner:

If you say, “work hard play harder,” I have one question for you: Who are you trying to impress? I’m a firm believer in what I consider to be a much better mantra to live by: “think hard, sleep harder.”

Thinking? That usually comes pretty easily for me. Sleeping? Let’s just say I kept CVS in business with all the melatonin I used to take. But now, that’s all in the past...thanks to Pluto, the genius company behind the only custom-built pillow out there, the pillow based on your body stats, how you sleep, and what you like.

Here’s how Pluto works: You take a short questionnaire to arm Pluto with insight into your body stats, your sleeping patterns and positions, and your existing preferences. Pluto then makes a perfectly supple, perfectly breathable pillow and ships it straight to you (for free!) with a 100-night risk-free trial.

Use this link—www.plutopillow.com/thinking—to automatically grab an additional $10 off your first purchase of a Pluto Pillow. Trust me on this one. Pluto changed the game for me, and it can for you too.

Thanks for reading! Couple of important things:

  1. Next week’s episode of Thinking Is Cool will be out on Tuesday instead of Monday since no one listens to podcasts on Labor Day.

  2. Wear sunscreen if you plan to be outside this weekend and don’t forget to reapply.

  3. I’ll be live on Instagram tomorrow at noon eastern for a short n sweet recap of this week’s episode. Listen to the episode here and follow me here.

Enjoy your weekend and send anything interesting you find on the internet my way.

Xo,

Kinsey