Espresso Shots 6-28-26

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

• Om Malik, 1966-2026. I never met Om Malik in person, but was deeply saddened this week to read about his passing after long struggles with heart problems. I had known of Om from his powerful online presence, but he became a source of inspiration when, back in 2019, I had my first heart attack (number two would hit me 16 months later). He publicly wrote about what his "re-birthday, and what it was like to mentally reconfigure oneself afterward in The Story of Stent. 'It taught me the lessons we learn late in life early: excess, perfection, and accumulation are fair-weather friends. I learned that by giving time to play its hand, I would stop being impatient. Life, as it turned out, has been much better than how I had planned it. And more importantly, you are better off finding comfort in the company of imperfection.' So while I never met him face to face, we, as do all heart attack survivors, share a strange bond forged in facing mortality and coming out the other side. John Gruber wrote a touching tribute that's also a worthwhile read. Rest in peace, Om, you will be missed.
• Surrender as a Non-Stupid Life Strategy. One of my recurring conversations with my friends of late is about what I often call Life 3.0, and part of that journey is reflecting on the decisions and paths one has chosen. Some really good takeaways in this blog post, 'A large percentage of human suffering is anticipatory tension, or dreading a future experience such that you actualize its potential suffering in the now. Anticipatory tension is using the illusion of knowledge to generate the illusion of control. Much of what people call planning is this.'
• A Room You Can't See. 'Your music library became endless. Something quiet disappeared when it did.' Watch the short video here in which Terry is trying to figure out if the music changed, or if he did.
• Democracy Is Bullshit. As usual, David Pinsof causes me to pause and think, which is why I love his writing. In Democracy is Bullshit, he dives into the key differences between groups and crowds and why democracy may be flawed as it prioritizes group identity over individual rationality. 'A lot of people mistakenly think democracy is awesome because they confuse groups with crowds. They think everyone getting their voice heard is good for the nation because everyone has unique perspectives and interests. But that is not how democracies work. Democracies do not combine the wisdom and experiences of every individual the way a crowd does. Not even close. Instead, what democracies do is obliterate those unique perspectives and force everyone to pick sides between two dumb groups. Or, in the case of non-U.S. democracies, several dumb groups.' It's a good read, and a good lesson on how behaviors are incentivized by systems. 'Democracy is a bad incentive structure that generally produces bad results, albeit less bad than the results of autocracy.'
• The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week (gift link). Echoing back to last week's link, Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting, this study looks into why some leaders continue to support remote work, and others resist it. 'The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.' I prefer remote work, but it has coordination and quick-decision challenges, especially among more junior employees. But, it's an interesting study to say the least.
• The Doomers Are All Right. A fascinating look at the world, especially if you believe it's about to end. This post leans towards the view that artificial intelligence could lead to human extinction. 'There's not much use worrying about a thing if the outcome is determined. You're just going to burn a whole bunch of emotional energy, not making any changes out in the world. It's only worth worrying about things if you're in a position of control over them. So go out and check if you're in a position of control, and if you are, control them.' Memento Mori. Of course, the best advice can be summed up as 'Drink the good whiskey, drink the good wine.'
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff on Learning From Uncertainty. Anne-Laure Le Cunff's book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World continues to be an excellent reference of knowledge. In one of her posts about uncertainty, 'Uncertainty creates space for growth and discovery. Through metacognition, emotional regulation, and social connection, understanding and adapting your brain's automatic response will help you work with uncertainty rather than against it. Your brain might prefer certainty, but it's fully equipped to handle the unknown. The real question isn't whether you can handle uncertainty; it's what you’ll discover when you approach it with an experimental mindset.'
• The Dialogue Dividend. The power of a five-minute hallway conversation (walking does cure almost anything, doesn't it?). 'There is a considerable difference between thinking about implementing a decision and thinking about understanding a problem. The first benefits from isolation. The second, rarely does. When you say something out loud, you commit to it. The thought that was comfortable as a vague impression has to become a sentence, and sentences have structure. They have a subject and a predicate. They make claims that can be evaluated. The act of speaking forces a kind of precision that internal monologue never requires.'
• The New 20% Time, Minus the Time. A look back at Google's 20% time, 'In 2005, a 20% project was a block of time. You took a day, or stole an afternoon here and there, and went deep on something that wasn't your day-to-day. The unit was hours. The scarce thing was a stretch of uninterrupted concentration long enough to hold a hard problem in your head.' Today, some claim that AI will give you time back, but does it? 'Maybe those benefits come back to us as room to explore and make things. Maybe they pool with the people who can already afford to point a swarm of agents at whatever they want. Or maybe they just get turned back into pressure on workers. Fifty years of productivity gains have accrued to the top, not those doing the work. I want this one to break the pattern. I can’t, with a straight face, say it will.'
• Why 40 Per Cent of People Are Avoiding the News, According to a Psychologist. Whenever I get the urge to watch the news, I watch Food Network. I've watched Guy Fieri visit so many Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives to avoid the 'waterfall of perpetual bad news.' Turns out, globally, this is not unique - almost 40%, the highest number ever recorded, do the same. This post explores the psychology behind it. 'News fatigue is not laziness, weakness, or a generational decline in civic interest. It's the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate. In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.' The fix is somewhat straightforward: manage the consumption and the sources.
• Tinfoil Pigeons. SUPER COOL website, a live radar of the aircraft above you. 'You heard a jet. You looked up. You asked the eternal question: what plane is flying over my house? Tinfoil Pigeons answers it. Every airliner, cargo hauler, helicopter and suspiciously quiet turboprop broadcasts its position over ADS-B, and our scope listens. Enter a postcode or town — anywhere in the world — or use your location, and the flights overhead appear as blips, sweep after sweep, exactly where they really are.'
• C.C. Filson: The Man, the Coat, and the Company He Left Behind. One of my favorite Northwest brands is Filson. A really interesting bio on the man who founded the company, as Seattle is the 'Gateway to Alaska'. 'Promising ‘unfailing goods’, Filson operated on complete two-way honesty. Prospectors unable to visit Seattle could write him a letter describing their requirements and have complete outfits assembled and shipped north. As one customer remarked at the time: "Just write and tell Filson what you want and pay his bill when the goods come. He trusts you, and you can bank on him."' If you've never visited the flagship store in Seattle, it's worth the visit.
• A Paean to Inside Macintosh. This post is a great retrospective on what the author calls 'the greatest technical documentation I've ever seen.' 'Inside Macintosh was nothing less than a book of magic spells. If you wanted a window with scroll bars, all you had to do was write some Pascal code and make a few procedure calls. You didn’t have to be a genius. Apple supplied the geniuses and they had written the code for you. It was built in. And Inside Macintosh calmly told you all about it. Just laid out the secrets of the universe right there before you. I was stunned by the detail and clarity of the documentation, and the promises it made on behalf of the software.' After reading this one, I scoured the Internet for a copy of Inside Macintosh (Promotional Edition).
• Kurt Vonnegut's Life-Advice to His Children. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you already know that I'm a huge Vonnegut fan. In this delightful collection of letters, he has some amazing advice. 'You’re learning now that you do not inhabit a solid, reliable, social structure — that the older you get people around you are worried, moody, goofy human beings who themselves were little kids only a few days ago. So home can fall apart and schools can fall apart, usually for childish reasons, and what have you got? ... You’re dismayed at having lost a year, maybe, because the school fell apart. Well — I feel as though I’ve lost the years since Slaughterhouse-Five was published, but that’s malarky. Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them. Neither was the year in which Jim had to stay motionless in bed while he got over TB. Neither was the hear in which Mark went crazy, then put himself together again. Those years were adventures. Planned years are not.'
• Walking the Brooklyn Bridge. In a stark contrast to Craig Mod's usual posts across Japan, Craig walks the Brooklyn Bridge. 'Holy foot traffic. Just: Obscene crowds, all jostling for selfies. The world, one giant selfie jostle. Eventually, right before the machines turn off our light of meat-based consciousness, we’ll do some Borgesian space selfie and be done with it all. But for now, we selfie on the ground, with great desperation, preening for the screen, to be uploaded to god only knows where for god only knows what audience. The volume of media captured defies comprehension. It is empyrean in volume, flip-flopping beyond theory into the theology of bytes, for how could so many selfies be contained within the physics of our world?'

Amor Fati ✌🏻