The best comment was a tattoo of the story. Actually, numerous tattoos of the story, from people I've never met.

Years ago I tried out a story format of pairing an illustration with a short essay going deeper into the ideas behind it. I didn't get much engagement from the…

“Our worth as individuals isn’t our personal integrity or sense of virtue, but our ability to advertise our relevance on the platforms of multinational tech corporations.” ~Barrett Swanson

I find the impact of social media on our interactions, wellbeing, and personhood endlessly fascinating, because platforms shape everything around me. Barrett…

What impact could advances in web3¹ have on the creator economy? Drew Austin explores this in the essay Paid in Full. Here he compares content in the Web 2.0 world with what’s possible in web3:

Web 2.0’s incentives emphasized quantity — more posts, more content, more engagement, more followers. Everything…

There’s a couple cool web confs this week.

Update (6/5/21): I’ve included links to the talks for both conferences below.

The Future of the Browser

Join creatives, developers and leaders for a one day unconference about the future of personal agency, decentralization, protocols and payments, identity and who we are as a species.

Thrown by…

It's definitely been up and down for me in terms of writing, I think because of just so much screen time. I tried handwriting drafts in a journal, but that didn't really catch on for me. Still, I feel like I've been able to write more this past year than before just from staying at home. Most of the writing I've been doing has been in support of some inquiry. Like, what am I curious about right now? How can I support that curiosity? I found that if I feel curious and if I'm learning, I feel better about things in general. Writing (and reading) has been super helpful for that.

Open Thread

In our latest open thread, we asked “How Do You Connect With Your Readers Beyond Publishing?” This can be a difficult area to figure out and manage. In the responses, a common thread surfaced — connecting with your readers outside of publishing helps support the publishing itself.

Here’s a few…

Medium in Conversation

What’s the biggest challenge in your creative work? Often it can be finding time to focus, make some progress, and go deep. This is especially crucial for writing, yet that space to focus feels like a rare luxury.

This Wednesday, May 5th at 5pm PT / 8 pm ET join…

I used to have a tough time reading long-form articles on the internet. Part of my job at Medium is to encourage writers to publish long-form articles on the internet, so this was hard to admit. If you recommended an article to me, I’ll bookmark it into a folder called…