We sent you 233 emails this year; here are your faves
🥳 It’s the Friday-est Friday of the year
Issue #233: ambiguity, art, and tab life
We’re about to take a much-needed vacation here at Medium HQ (though we still have a few issues coming your way next week!). Looking back, I sort of can’t believe we’ve been sending this newsletter daily for almost a year (!). Thank you for your comments, questions, emails, and (if you’re a writer on Medium) for publishing the stories we’ve all been reading, highlighting, and sharing.
Our first issue, which went out on January 31, states the mission we’ve stuck to since the beginning: Real humans (hi!) who work at Medium sharing human perspectives that deepen understanding about the world. We’ve featured over 800 writers and 1,000 stories this year. Over 2 million people subscribed. Here are the issues you loved this year…
- Our most-read issue: “Persuasive people don’t argue — they listen.” The title is a quote from Andy Murphy’s “16 Strange But Beautiful Paradoxes in Life.”
- Our most popular theme this year? Creativity. Thousands of you nodded along with designer Ida Persson’s advice for embracing ambiguity by exploring ideas that don’t immediately reveal themselves as hits.
- Decision-making was another big theme for us here in Newsletterland. We explored cognitive biases like action bias (we prefer doing something to doing nothing, even when inactivity would be more beneficial) and bikeshedding (fixating on trivial improvements while ignoring underlying issues).
- Lastly, we solved every problem with generative AI this year, didn’t we? Just kidding. But it was a huge topic in the newsletter. We explored how deepfakes are destroying the stock photo industry. We learned from an eighth-grader’s experiment to pit AI-generated poetry against human-written poetry. And we grappled with the age-old question: Can robots make art?
And before I go… maybe this is just me… but will anyone else remember summer 2024 for grainy, lo-res images such as this beaut?
If you played Zoom In, our slightly unhinged game in August, we see you. And we thank you. And maybe we’ll see you in the new year?
✨ What else we’re reading
- After a three-month trial, Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men were convicted of raping Gisèle Pelicot repeatedly over nearly a decade. As the judge read the verdict, Gisèle’s supporters gathered outside the courthouse, singing and chanting: “We are strong, we are proud, and feminist and radical and angry.”
- Alfred Hitchcock is often cited as the inventor of “spoiler warnings” because he (a) hid the final pages of his scripts from actors, and (b) insisted audiences not tell friends about his films’ endings. On Medium, Monia Ali thinks we’ve taken “spoiler alert” a little too far. I hear those two words all the time in reference to any plot device or narrative element (even if it’s not actually a spoiler). I think this happened over the last decade or so, probably in response to streaming and TV’s increasingly asynchronous viewership. (Fanfare)
- “Do you have kids?” might seem like an innocent conversation-starter, but as a former doula on Medium writes, it can imply social pressure to have them. (MD)
📄 A dose of practical wisdom
Google Docs just made it easier to write your novel, dissertation, or multi-episode miniseries: You can weave together multiple docs in a single window via document tabs (it’s on the left).
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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