The 365 most famous quotes of all time, and more longreads for your weekend
🥂 We’ve arrived at our final destination: Friday
Issue #158: emails from *that* CEO and leading with conviction
By Harris Sockel
Here are three deep-dives for your weekend.
🏊 Snorkel Level
Drake just released an album via a burner Instagram account and a good old-fashioned website: 100gigs.org. Lyrically it’s a response to Kendrick Lamar, but business-wise, as Chris Harihar explains, it’s a rebellion against Big Streaming. Drake created his own streaming platform so he can own his data. It reminds me of a larger trend in media now: People are losing trust in the algorithms of yore, so they’re going indie.
🤿 Scuba Level
Rosie Hoggmascall chronicles how Spotify has cluttered its homepage over the last seven years, leaving its Scandinavian minimalist roots in the dust. 52% of Hoggmascall’s (and my) Spotify homepage is podcasts now; 48% is algorithmic recs; there’s little space left for discovery or personalization. Kyle Chayka covered this in The New Yorker recently: He finally quit Spotify because he felt trapped inside its algorithm. I highlighted this quote from Hoggmascall, which I feel deeply: “With Spotify’s recommendations, I’m becoming a stranger to my own tastes.”
🦑 The Mariana Trench
Niklas Göke catalogs the 365 most famous quotes of all time and verifies who said each one first. The result? A 22,000-word tome of wisdom in the form of a Medium post. A few of Göke’s sources are worth exploring on their own, like Quote Investigator®, which ferrets out the origins of popular sayings and cliches. Many of the quotes we attribute to famous people (looking at you, Mark Twain) were first spoken by less-famous people, or printed anonymously.
What I appreciate most about Göke’s resource is how it gives you a sense of enduring themes across philosophy, science, poetry, and politics. These are hard to sum up in a sentence, but I see themes of being true to yourself, fearlessness, and the importance of listening coming up again and again. I’m curious what you make of these quotes.
From the archive: Hey guys, just a few changes to the website…
Eight years ago, in the halcyon days of 2016, comedy writer Amanda Rosenberg went public with emails from a CEO who just had a few tiny changes to the website. I am not a designer, but I imagine it’s a cathartic read for anyone who’s been on the receiving end of capricious feedback from their boss. In the words of a former product manager at Amex who responded to the story: “This would be funny if it wasn’t so damn true.”
The popularity of this ^ post, along with other Rosenberg hits like “Emails From a CEO Who Just Had a Great Branding Idea” led to a book of comedic takes on living with bipolar disorder. Of comedy, Rosenberg has said:
Jokes all have a kernel of truth to them — a truth, no matter how dark, crude, or shameful, that we can all relate to. When we laugh at a joke it’s an expression of relief, like “thank fuck someone else said what I was thinking”.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Lead with conviction and confidence will follow.
Quiz: The week in review
Here are three questions related to this week’s issues. If you know the answers, email us: tips@medium.com. First to answer all three correctly will win a free Medium membership.
- Which part of the U.S. Constitution concerns the separation of church and state?
- According to engineer Marianne Bellotti, what’s the difference between a true tech company and a company that merely says they’re one but actually isn’t?
- What is the most mispronounced word in the world according to poli-sci professor Darren Zook?
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com
