I love stories like this. Turns out there’s a sort-of movement of music being released on floppy disk… I will have to watch it from afar with admiration though. I’m already collecting vinyl and CDs so this is probably not a good idea for me.

There are almost 2,300 floppy releases listed on Discogs.com, most of which are electronic, but other genres include hip-hop, a smattering of classical and jazz, a bunch of metal subgenres, and “non-music” like experimental field recordings from Norway and spoken word from China. In 2018, Rolling Stone covered a “mini-boom” of vaporwave releases on floppies, noting that the lo-fi, lobit nature of vaporwave was an obvious match for the storage constraints of the 3.5-inch.

Here’s Lorin Hochstein with another great post about the practice of learning from software incidents. He asks, What if everybody did everything right?

An alternative lens for making sense of an incident is to ask the question “how did this incident happen, assuming that everybody did everything right?” In other words, assume that everybody whose actions contributed to the incident made the best possible decision based on the information they had, and the constraints and incentives that were imposed upon them.

I know there was a different The Cut essay that got more attention recently, but The Lure of Divorce is the one I actually read all the way through. A heartbreaking and beautiful story, so well written.

I didn’t read any of the internet commentary on it, but apparently it wasn’t great (shocking!). John Warner’s take on it resonates with me:

I have some things to say about the disturbing tendency of some readers to respond to attempts at interesting and true expression by leading with their moral as opposed to their aesthetic judgement.

This is an excellent read from McKinsey. It turns out that, unsurprisingly, organizational health is (still) the key to long-term performance:

McKinsey’s Organizational Health Index (OHI) continues to show, for instance, that, over the long term, healthy organizations deliver three times the total shareholder returns (TSR) of unhealthy organizations, regardless of industry. Other findings point to greater resilience and higher financial performance in healthy organizations, even as the world around them has become that much more complicated.

This bit particularly resonated with me:

According to the OHI research, companies with leaders who take decisive actions—and who commit to those decisions once they are made—are 4.2 times more likely to be healthy, as compared with their peers.

But it’s not enough just to be fast with those decisions; our OHI research shows that decisive leaders who empower their employees (giving those closest to the work the autonomy to make their own decisions) are 85 percent more likely to improve the quality of organizational decisions, as compared with their peers.

I’ve long been a fan of the adage “move decision-making to those closest to the data”. This research shows how important that continues to be for companies to succeed and employees to remain happy and fulfilled.

I love JJ Skolnik’s essay Love + Work for Flaming Hydra (paywalled but well worth it—this newsletter is great). JJ used to work at Bandcamp and reflects on “loving your work” when it doesn’t love you back. And he has some wonderful reflections on the meaning of music too:

Underground music is vital because it is an experience that cannot be replicated in capitalist language. No matter how much one tries to distill it down to a matter of commodity exchange—there is nothing that can capture the joy of a bunch of freaks making the music they want to make and sharing that in community with one another. This is true no matter how much money is poured into it. Money isn’t what makes it grow.

This post is like watching “Portlandia” as a Portlander (or HBO’s “Silicon Valley” as a tech worker). It’s obviously satire but too close to reality to be funny… My Comments Are in the Google Doc Linked in the Dropbox I Sent in the Slack:

You still don’t see the link? It’s right there on the bottom of the Slack thread from yesterday about which shared drive folders link to Dropbox folders that contain all the shared PDFs. Oh, my mistake; it’s actually at the bottom of a thread about what everyone had for lunch yesterday. Here I’ll send it to you again. I just replied to an email to Jeff with the link and asked him to forward it to you. The subject line is ‘Email.’

This essay on How Group Chats Rule the World (NYT Gift Link) is really great, and I agree with all of it.

The group chat can sustain indefinitely this thin wire of connectedness. Some might argue that this feeling is a deception, another screen-based way to stave off loneliness; I would say instead that it glows with potential. Because there is no practical end to the group chat, it can be a means of keeping the lights on, constellating a set of people who would otherwise be entirely separate.

You know an essay is going to be good when this is the preamble:

I am writing this piece in good faith (that you, as a reader, like to think more about the culture that surrounds you, whether it’s culture you love or hate or are ambivalent about) and that you are in turn reading in good faith (that I do not hate Taylor Swift, that this is not a takedown, that we’re talking about Swift’s image but we’re also talking about people’s reaction to that image).

But yes, this is a really timely and poignant piece by Anne Helen Peterson about Taylor Swift and the impossible trajectory of celebrity:

But sometimes, when you keep on winning — awards, sure, but also in your career — it doesn’t matter who you are or how hard you worked for those achievements. People are going to find it harder to root for you. It’s when domination turns into over-saturation: when honest missteps become weaponized, when the interpersonal comes to feel emblematic, when every move becomes overdetermined.