It happened on Medium: June Roundup
Most-read stories, most popular highlights, and some old perspectives on new issues
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. (No elephants were harmed in the writing of this newsletter.) Eating an elephant is an intimidating prospect, but if you break it down into small, achievable steps, suddenly you’ve got yourself a meal.
That’s how I felt when I joined Medium a few months ago and learned about our “ladder to the moon” philosophy — ultimately, our “moon” is to have millions of Medium members and deepen the world’s understanding. The moon is a lofty goal! But you can get there by adding one rung at a time.
Felicia C. Sullivan used this method to write her book while working a full-time job. “You build a house brick by brick. You rely on drawings, schematics, measurements, and plans and make adjustments as you go. No one wakes one day and — poof — there’s the house,” she writes.
Darius Foroux uses the same tactic to improve his productivity. In his article on saving time, he drops a few small yet effective productivity nuggets. My favorite? The pre-bedtime setup. “I like to plan my day the previous night. It just takes a few minutes. And it makes a huge impact on how focused I am in the morning,” he writes.
Big goals can feel like elephant-sized challenges. I hope these stories remind you that it’s not only OK but good and effective to break them down into bite-sized chunks.
Medium by the numbers…
In June 2024…
- You read 262 million minutes on Medium — that’s 181,944 days, 26,000 weeks, almost 6,000 months, or 498 years!
- You created 71k Lists
- 2,756 stories were Boosted. 1,926 of those came from the publication editors in the Boost Nomination Program.
June’s most highlighted passages
“How can we show you a story that you will be happy to have paid to read?” — Our CEO Tony Stubblebine on the challenges and triumphs of building a paywalled platform in his story, “Be part of a better internet”.
“Don’t care how bright a man’s reputation shines, there is nothing one man can do to warrant earning the annual salary of his employees in four hours. That’s not earning. It’s exploiting. The phrase wage slave is no joke.” — Linda Caroll highlights how the average CEO will outearn their average employee’s annual salary by midday on New Year’s Day in her story, “If Boomers Had It So Good, Why Are They Greeters At Walmart?”
“Donald Trump is just a criminal — a charge for which the evidence is abundant?” — entrepreneur and strategist Reid Hoffman pushes back against David Sacks in his story, “A reply to David Sacks on his support of Trump”
“[C]ommunication in the workplace is not about what you find interesting to share, but what the audience needs to hear.” — Strategy and Analytics leader Torsten Walbaum on why you need to tell a story with data in his story, “What 10 Years at Uber, Meta and Startups Taught Me About Data Analytics”
The top 10 most-read stories on Medium
- “Total War: ROME II and Creative Assembly — My Statement Ten Years On,” by Julian McKinlay, game developer
- “How I Use ChatGPT As A Data Scientist,” by Egor Howell, Data Scientist at Gousto
- “Building LLM Apps: A Clear Step-By-Step Guide,” by Almog Baku, tech entrepreneur and developer in Towards Data Science
- “Let’s Talk About The Real Reason For All These Tech Layoffs,” by Joe Procopio, startup founder and consultant, in Entrepreneurship Handbook
- “Goodbye, Social Media,” by Laura Blankenship, educational leader, in Tech and Me
- “Round 2: A Survey of Causal Inference Applications at Netflix,” by Mihir Tendulkar, Simon Ejdemyr, et al in the Netflix TechBlog
- “The Physics of Sharks vs. Batteries. Could An Electric Boat Kill You?” by Rhett Allain, physics faculty and technical consultant for CBS MacGyver and MythBusters.
- “Stop Wasting Your Time,” by John Gorman, writer and creative director
- “Riemann’s Novel Lecture that Changed the Course of Geometry,” by Merry Janson, mathematics coach, in Cantor’s Paradise
- “Why Doesn’t My Girlfriend Want to Have Sex With Me?” by Rachel M.J, psychology researcher, in Heart Affairs
Most popular stories from the Medium archive
I wanted to highlight some older perspectives from our archives on issues we’re still seeing today — politics, AI, climate change, just to name a few. Here are some evergreen stories that you read, clapped for, and highlighted in June 2024.
“A $9B AI fail” by Gianluca Mauro, founder of AI Academy. In November 2021, before the AI-splosion, he explained how Zillow set billions of dollars on fire with their flawed AI model — but he highlights a few key factors in its fall that had nothing to do with AI. Does this warning sound familiar?
“[D]on’t focus too much on how cool and shiny the hammer is. Focus on what you want to build with it, and please pay attention to how you hit that nail.”
“Why (almost) everything reported about the Cambridge Analytica Facebook ‘hacking’ controversy is wrong,” by Chris Kavanagh, cognitive anthropologist. Published in March 2018, Kavanagh went in-depth on a story most people are only familiar with through headlines.
“Political targeting and disinformation campaigns, including those promoted by Russia, certainly had an impact on recent elections but were they the critical factor? Did they have a bigger impact than Comey announcing he was ‘reopening’ the Hillary email investigation the week before the US election? Or Brexiteers claiming that £250 million was being stolen from the NHS by the EU every week? Colour me skeptical.”
“Why We Don’t Care Enough About Climate Change To Change Our Ways,” by Tabitha Whiting, climate tech content strategist. Although Whiting published this story back in April 2019, her searing indictment of climate journalism still rings true today — and she offers some solutions that governments and individuals have already started taking, five years later.
“Catastrophic climate change journalism disables us. It makes us feel as though a dystopian future of drought, floods, famine, and poverty is inevitable.”
Boosted stories by new writers
What sets Medium apart from any other platform where you can read online? One of the biggest differences is our human curation system called the Boost, where we serve you hand-picked insightful, expert, thoughtful deep perspectives.
Every month, boost nominators search for the very best of Medium to bring to our readers and members, on topics all across the spectrum. Here are some of my favorites from new Medium writers in June.
“Who Cares About Your Carbon Footprint?” by Khadra, chemistry student, in The New Climate
“It is good to reflect on how your actions may contribute to emissions and seek to implement realistic goals to render it. That’s a great thing, even. Nonetheless, individual change will not lead to a substantial decrease in global carbon emissions.”
“Hot Tub Pot Lucks and Nudist Parents,” by Sharon Back, writer and storyteller, in ENGAGE
“I swore that I’d never be like [my mom]. I’d be normal and blend in like beige wall paint. I would get married to a regular man and have two kids and stay married forever. We’d have parties with our clothes on. I would make regular food with at least four ingredients. And I would never ever embarrass MY kids.
I didn’t keep my vow.”
“Domestic Tranquility and the Warriors of Peace,” by Joe Dunman, Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law, in I Taught the Law
“Right now, the pacifying effects of consumer capitalism are waning…I personally fear that the number of people mad at an unresponsive system will grow so large that the entire system will collapse into another civil war — perhaps with less clearly defined warring sides, but war nonetheless.”
Celebrating Juneteenth and Pride Month
Here in the U.S., we celebrated Juneteenth and Pride in June. Juneteenth, for those who might not know, “is to celebrate the date enslaved people in Texas found out they were free,” writes author William Spivey. But, as he notes, “nobody was freed on Freedom Day; enslaved people were literally told to go back to their plantations and hope to extract wages from their former enslavers.”
Coming in with another perspective, Raphael E. Rogers, Professor of Practice in Education, Clark University, writes about how Juneteenth should be a learning opportunity. “Educators can make Juneteenth about so much more than the end of slavery. Teaching lessons about the holiday offers an abundance of opportunities about what it means to fight for freedom and maintain a sense of self-determination in the face of oppression,” he writes.
I can’t mention Pride Month without mentioning Marsha P. Johnson. Johnson, a Black transgender woman (although she described herself as “a gay person, a transvestite, and a drag queen,” according to the National Women’s History Museum; she predated the term “transgender”) was at the forefront of not just the Pride movement, but specifically campaigned to do more to include transgender and LGBTQ+ people of color in the gay rights movement. As Ishmael Bishop writes, “Johnson’s work transcended race, class, and gender in ways that the larger and whiter LGBTQ movement continues to not.”
I was fascinated to learn about the Compton Cafeteria Uprising, which predates the Stonewall Uprising by three years, from writer Dre Cáceres. “[T]his Pride Month, we must also have a sense of urgency, because the fight for queer liberation is not at an end,” she concludes.
There are so many great stories on Medium about both Pride and Juneteenth. Start with our Staff Picks for Pride Month and Juneteenth, and if you want to go deeper, you can check out the tag pages for Pride and Juneteenth.
New publications on Medium
Here are some of my favorite new publications that landed on Medium in June. Have a look if they strike your fancy!
- Life Without Children: The home for stories about not having children, whether by choice or circumstance. Submissions for new writers are open here.
- The Peregrine Journal: A place to share what you’ve learned along the journey as you’ve built your home in a foreign land. Submissions for new writers are open here.
- Pixel Chronicles: Deep analyses, comprehensive guides, and the latest updates on the most popular and upcoming games. Submissions for new writers are open here.
For more great stories from Medium’s writers and publications, check out our Staff Picks. To learn something new from Medium writers every weekday, subscribe to our latest newsletter, the Medium Newsletter.
