Every Friday I highlight the most interesting or entertaining items from my media diet from the past week.

Articles:

• Asking Questions (aaronkharris.com): An exploration on why children ask such great questions and why adults don’t.
• The Coronavirus Crisis Proves the Internet Should Be a Public Utility (qz.com): “The pandemic has illuminated the interconnectedness of everyone and everything…your ignorance of infectious disease could lead to my demise and vice versa.”
• Meaning and Subtext: What Makes Dialogue Work (binge-writing.com): I love a good fiction writing blog. This one delivers on specific techniques with loads of concrete examples.
• Next Frontier in Microsoft, Google, Amazon Cloud Battle is Over a World Without Code (cnbc.com): No-code solutions may present a huge flourishing of apps as the barrier to entry drops significantly.
• Signaling as a Service (julian.digital): “We think and say that we do something for a specific reason, but in reality, there’s a hidden, selfish motive: to show off and increase our social status.”
• What Does It Really Cost to Run a Restaurant? (eater.com): Eye-opening account about the financial realities of running a restaurant. Clearly demonstrates why restaurants have been hit so hard during the COVID-19 crisis.
• What Everyone’s Getting Wrong about the Toilet Paper Shortage (medium.com): Author’s posits that there are two markets for toilet paper: commercial and consumer. Now that so many of us are sheltering-in-place, consumer usage is approaching 100% of the commercial:consumer consumption.
• When to Assume Neural Networks Can Solve a Problem (cerebralab.com): Nice guide on appropriate and viable applications for machine learning algorithms.
• Where America Didn’t Stay Home Even as the Virus Spread (nytimes.com): NYT maps show that the American response to COVID-19 was too disjointed and too slow. The toll in April will be terrible.
• The Woman Who Lives 200,000 Years in the Past (outsideonline.com): A British-expat leads immersive “Stone Age” classes in far flung locales where she teaches fire starting, shelter construction, bow making, foraging and more.

Podcasts:

• Joe Exotic: Tiger King (wondery.com): A 6-part miniseries about Joe “Exotic” Shriebvogel (aka “The Tiger King”) and his feud with fellow big-cat enthusiast Carole Baskin. Over-the-top, trashy and ridiculous but utterly compelling.