The Sunday Digest:

Hello and happy Sunday!

Slow news week, eh? If you’re anything like us, perhaps you’d like to take a break from the doomscrolling and settle into a nice, edifying read. If that’s the case we’ve got you covered.

This week in Everything, we’re exploring problems with the ways businesses prioritize their efforts, the Coinbase memo, this week in news from the passion economy, and the virtues of spatial methods for organizing knowledge.

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Everything Index - Week of 9/28

• Articles we published — 3
• Podcasts we released — 3
• Tesla Stock Price — +2%
  (Change since last week)
• Chamath’s Number — 14
  (Number of articles on Google News for “Chamath SPAC” from this week)
• People Who Are Wrong — 0
  (Number of times Rabois tweeted the word “wrong” this week)
• Days Until the Election — 31

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This Week’s Top Posts

Ranked by the % of people who rated the post “amazing” in our feedback forms.

1. 🔮Intangible Returns by Nathan Baschez in Divinations (1,511 words) 🔒
2. 💝Passion Economy News: Casey Newton goes Indie, SignalFire’s Creator Economy Market Map, Newsletter Curation, and More in Means of Creation (2,184 words)
3. ⚡️Spatial Organization by Dan Shipper in Superorganizers (1,333 words) 🔒
4. 💞#31 - Talk Therapy is a Mission-Based Podcast🎧 by Dan Shipper & Nathan Baschez in Talk Therapy (17 min)
5. 💝Ankur Nagpal, CEO of Teachable, on empowering course creators, new formats, and COVID acceleration on Means of Creation (50 min)
6. 💞#32 - Are We Prioritizing Correctly? by Dan Shipper & Nathan Baschez in Talk Therapy (14 min)

Noted

Tidbits from our little corners of the world.

PHOTO OF THE WEEK

This gigantic bookshelf is beautiful, to be sure. But it’s not just a beautiful object. The meaning of it is beautiful, too. Here’s the headline from the photo essay it came from: “My wife recently passed away. I used my time off to build her the giant bookshelf she always wanted.”

NEWS

• Coinbase attempts to escape polarization — but gets mired in it instead.
  Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, attempted to address employee dissatisfaction with his commitment to running an “apolitical” company in a public memo. Reactions were…polarized:

  https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1310733340861894657

  https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1310583298666696705

  https://twitter.com/dickc/status/1311022395491196928

  https://twitter.com/eoghan/status/1310868898972151808

  https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1310736467161833472

  Two days later, Armstrong announced that Coinbase would offer severance packages to employees who were dissatisfied with the updated mission statement.
  
  (For a longer take, here’s Ben Thompson going blunt on value, responsibility, and corporate response to the world at large.)

  Listen to Dan and Nathan discuss the Coinbase memo on Talk Therapy:

  Listen Now

MORE NEWS

• Compact nuclear fusion reactors are looking more plausible
• Palantir and Asana went public
• Axios launches local newsletters
• Triller fudged their metrics
• Google commits $1b to publishers
• Knowledge database Golden raises $14.5mil seed round, Marc Andreessen joins board

SMART ARTICLES FROM GOOD PEOPLE

• Byrne Hobart on good and bad S-Curves
• Sari Azout on how our tools shape us
• Dan Stern on how our interfaces with reality warp our perceptions
• Nikhil Krishnan on why workflow > tech
• Mario Gabriele on demystifying Palantir

JAM OF THE WEEK

If you like The Strokes you’ll like this:

TWEETS OF THE WEEK

🔥 Burn of the week 🔥

https://twitter.com/cFidd/status/1312146631882469378

Thread of the week:

https://twitter.com/jessicamckellar/status/1311349439479463937

Come for the graphic, stay for the Elon Musk hot take in the replies:

https://twitter.com/UniverCurious/status/1310730294664859648

Power Tip:

https://twitter.com/pjux/status/1311785525477470208

Any other week, this would at least be the fifth most popular story:

https://twitter.com/tylercowen/status/1310998308597489664

SF follows NY:

https://twitter.com/anthemos/status/1311681220711911424

At risk of putting the Digest out of business:

https://twitter.com/thatguyBG/status/1312050647798341632

80 million…how cute:

https://twitter.com/drose_999/status/1312215292609662977

COMMUNITY FEEDBACK

Some of the best feedback we received in our forms this week:

• “What strategies actually work for prioritizing? Pick the low-hanging fruit? Cherrypick the big ROI’s? Or do you do it through your people, because if the people aren’t up to it, the “upgrade” is going to fail anyway? And how does a business then guard against the solo “expert” employee with extreme job security? The issues are endless!” (on #32 - Are We Prioritizing Correctly?)
• “Amazing but I disagree that you cannot do it in Roam Research. Just take all menu items in a list and tag each item on like #Meat #Sandwiches and you can then use the sort/filter tool or open the graph view. Is there something I'm missing?” (on Spatial Organization)

Keep ‘em coming!

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This post was written by Babe Howard and edited by Nathan Baschez.