Matt Shumer’s Something Big Is Happening has made the rounds over the last couple of weeks, but just in case you haven’t seen it, I think it’s very much worth reading. He’s an AI startup founder writing for the non-technical people in his life:

AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.

Previous waves of automation always left somewhere to go. The uncomfortable implication here is that the escape routes are closing as fast as they open.

There are too many quotes worth commenting on, but this observation about what we tell our kids feels important:

The people most likely to thrive are the ones who are deeply curious, adaptable, and effective at using AI to do things they actually care about. Teach your kids to be builders and learners, not to optimize for a career path that might not exist by the time they graduate.

Predictions about the pace of change tend to be simultaneously too aggressive and too conservative in ways that are hard to anticipate. But the direction feels right, and the practical advice is sound: use the tools seriously, don’t assume they can’t do something just because it seems too hard, and spend your energy adapting rather than debating whether this is real.

Isabel Woodford has a research-heavy essay in The Atlantic about why dads and daughters crave closeness but struggle to find it. 28% of American women are estranged from their father, and even where relationships are intact, they tend to be thinner—more transactional, less emotionally honest—than daughters want.

At the root of the modern father-daughter divide seems to be a mismatch in expectations. Fathers, generally speaking, have for generations been less involved than mothers in their kids’ (and especially their daughters‘) lives. But lots of children today expect more: more emotional support and more egalitarian treatment. Many fathers, though, appear to have struggled to adjust to their daughters’ expectations. The result isn’t a relationship that has suddenly ruptured so much as one that has failed to fully adapt.

And the psychological explanation that cuts deepest:

“What generates closeness is another person’s vulnerability,” Coleman explained, and dads may not be ready for that.

Daughters aren’t asking for grand gestures or dramatic change—they’re asking for their fathers to show up emotionally. Which turns out to be hard for a lot of men who were raised to see that kind of openness as weakness.

Daniel Parris wrote a statistical analysis of when rock became “classic rock”, and it’s not the story I expected.

He assumed the genre emerged organically from music nerds debating on message boards and in the pages of Rolling Stone. Instead:

What I found was a deliberate realignment engineered by music executives chasing an ephemeral advertising demographic. Like many entertainment industry decisions, it was a small (mostly male) group of executives quietly deciding the future of popular culture behind closed doors.

The data shows two concentrated periods when stations rapidly switched to classic rock: the mid–1980s (to capture aging Boomers entering their peak earning years) and the mid–1990s (after the Telecommunications Act enabled Clear Channel to buy up local stations and prioritize low-risk, high-profit formats).

The kicker is that this rebrand was designed around economic incentives that have since eroded. Radio isn’t the default distribution channel anymore. On streaming, music can just exist without being packaged for a hyper-valuable consumer cohort.

Another reminder that so much of what feels like culture is really just business decisions made in conference rooms.

I’m late to this one, but I like Liz Pelly’s take on Spotify Wrapped. It’s not just about music—it’s about what happens when we let corporations automate our memories:

Spotify Wrapped now feels like just another example of something personal and precious that is being automated away from us; another example of a supposedly unbearable task of thinking and writing being “offloaded” in order to make life more frictionless.

The post is essentially about friction—and why we need it. She argues that working through the process of remembering what mattered to us and thinking critically about our year is what keeps us sharp and curious. When we just accept what a streaming service tells us about our taste, we’re not just outsourcing a task. We’re losing our own sense of what connected with us and why.

It encourages music fans to believe that the records they streamed the most must be the ones they liked the most, which is surely not always the case.

Her suggestion is straightforward: write your own list. It doesn’t have to be polished—a notes app screenshot, a handwritten list, whatever. Just something that came from you, not from an algorithm optimizing for engagement metrics.

Natalia Quintero wrote about what she’s learned from talking to more than 100 companies about AI implementation. This part about the problem with early adopters and isolated workflows stood out:

AI doesn’t spread like other software. Think about Asana. If one person decides to organize their team’s tasks there, everyone benefits automatically because the work is more organized, and someone on the team has taken responsibility for that organization. You don’t need to learn the tool to get value from your colleague using it. AI doesn’t work that way. If you develop workflows around how you work, that value doesn’t automatically translate to the rest of the company. Your prompts, your GPTs, your automations—they’re built around your context, your processes, and your way of thinking. They don’t transfer.

That’s the adoption problem in a nutshell. A power user’s AI setup is like their personal note-taking system—valuable for them but not portable. It explains why enterprise rollouts don’t work the way everyone expects.

The recruiting firm example is good: they trained 10 champions who built tools their peers wanted to use. One person automated scheduling coordination (saving 2–10 hours per task), and suddenly 30 others got curious. Peer-to-peer beats top-down mandates.

(If you’re curious about my setup, I wrote about it here)

Eli Stark-Elster has a piece that reframes the “kids and screens” debate in a way I haven’t seen before. The usual narrative blames addictive tech design, but he offers an alternative:

Why do our children spend more time in Fortnite than forests? Usually, we blame the change on tech companies. They make their platforms as addicting as possible, and the youth simply can’t resist — once a toddler locks eyes with an iPad, game over.

I want to suggest an alternative: digital space is the only place left where children can grow up without us.

The argument is that kids have always needed spaces away from adult supervision. We’ve just paved over the forests and creeks where they used to find it.

What makes this more than speculation is the research he cites: 72% of 8 to 12-year-olds say they’d rather spend time together in person, without screens. 61% wish they had more time to play with friends without adults around. The kids don’t actually want to be on screens all day. They’re looking for something we’ve taken away.

It seems like what they want is to wander together in a forest. But they can’t. So they boot up Fortnite or TikTok instead.

I’m still sitting with this one. It doesn’t let tech companies off the hook, but it does suggest that “just take away the iPad” isn’t addressing the real problem.

I like this alternative to the “Disagree and Commit” saying:

“Disagree and let’s see” allows you to stay aligned with the team without forcing you to pretend you had conviction you didn’t have. It lets you walk into a room with your team and be honest:

“Here’s the path that was chosen. It wasn’t my first pick, but here’s the experiment we’re running, and here’s what we’re trying to learn.”

That’s a much more authentic stance for most leaders than repeating something with a tight smile and hoping no one notices your doubt.

Source: “Disagree and Let’s See” →

Lorin Hochstein is a big name in the LFI (Learning From Incidents) space. He often writes about post-incident reviews, and he has a very interesting write-up of the Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025 blog post. I especially loved this part:

Companies generally err on the side of saying less rather than more. After all, if you provide more detail, you open yourself up to criticism that the failure was due to poor engineering. The fewer details you provide, the fewer things people can call you out on. It’s not hard to find people online criticizing Cloudflare online using the details they provided as the basis for their criticism.

I think it would advance our industry if people held the opposite view: the more details that are provided an incident writeup, the higher esteem we should hold that organization. I respect Cloudflare is an engineering organization a lot more precisely because they are willing to provide these sorts of details. I don’t want to hear what Cloudflare should have done from people who weren’t there, I want to hear us hold other companies up to Cloudflare’s standard for describing the details of a failure mode and the inherently confusing nature of incident response.

Source: Brief thoughts on the recent Cloudflare outage →

This is an essay I think everyone should read, front to back. It’s about all the things we are living through right now, but it’s especially about work (and AI):

I’m not sure hiring can ever be much more efficient, because neither side has reason to show themselves as they really are, warts and all. Idealistically, both would come straight; pragmatically, it is a game of chicken. Candidates polish résumés and present curated versions of their abilities, listing outcomes and impact statistics with dubious accuracy and provenance. Companies do the same, putting culture and mission front and center while hiding systematic dysfunctions and looming existential risks. When neither side is forthcoming, you’re left with proxies: a famous logo on a resume, a polished culture deck.

Source: Selling Lemons →