Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?
My friends: Alistair Croll (Just Evil Enough, Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, Interesting Bits, HBS, chair of Strata, Startupfest, FWD50, and Scaletechconf; author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (Rebus Foundation, PressBooks, LibriVox) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see.”
Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:
- The Rise And Fall Of ‘The Resistance’ – Taylor Lorenz – YouTube. “Taylor Lorenz unpacks eight years of ‘resistance’ influencers. The revolution will not be tweeted, and neither will its opposition, apparently.” (Alistair for Hugh).
- Optical Toys. “Okay, that was heavy. Gonna try to lighten things up a bit. Here’s something to remind us all that perception is unreliable, but shapes our reality – a gallery of optical illusions. With explanations. Ow, my brain.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- Musician Who Died In 2021 Resurrected As Clump Of Brain Matter, Now Composing New Music – Frank Landymore – Futurism. “Someone needs to make a neo-noir movie or novel about this.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- Young Americans’ Favorite Podcasts Reveal A Stark Partisan Split – Erica Pandey – Axios. “Interesting data on podcast listening habits of Gen Z-ers, referenced against their political leaning. Not surprising, but we are living in the podcast age now.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- Can A.I. Writing Be More Than a Gimmick? – Anna Wiener – The New Yorker. “Here’s the real headline: Searches isn’t another ‘AI‑will‑steal‑our‑jobs’ yarn – it’s a master class in how sharp humans bend silicon to their will. Vauhini Vara lets GPT‑3 riff, and the bot coughs up decent, derivative prose… but that friction – those almost‑right sentences – cracks her story wide open. That’s the gig. I don’t fire up ChatGPT for a tidy first draft. I launch it like a grenade into my complacency. It tosses back lazy tropes, unexpected pivots, even beautiful nonsense, and I mine the rubble for gems I didn’t know were hiding. AI supplies velocity… I supply direction. Together we build a second brain that argues with me, asks the awkward question, forces me to slash the fluff and dig in on the unmet insight. Vara ends up reclaiming her own voice – stripped of cliché, humming with lived truth – precisely because the machine kept trying to fake it. That’s the lesson for every leader, creator, or brand: AI is not the writer. It’s the sparring partner. Without a human in the ring, the fight is boring. With AI, the punches land harder and the story hits the reader right in the gut… now I’ll leave it to you to guess if AI wrote this for me… if it inspired me… or if I did this all on my own, without AI’s help…” (Mitch for Alistair).
- How A Michigan Town United To Move 10,000 Books One By One For Local Store – Dayton Daily News. “Don’t let the daily news chaos fool you. Good people… neighbors… community… still thrive. Just give them a reason to do good… and they will… in droves. Now, add in a local bookstore… or our love for books and just watch us grow, connect and spread love…” (Mitch for Hugh).
Feel free to share these links and add your picks on X, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.
Before you go… ThinkersOne is a new way for organizations to buy bite-sized and personalized thought leadership video content (live and recorded) from the best Thinkers in the world. If you’re looking to add excitement and big smarts to your meetings, corporate events, company off-sites, “lunch & learns” and beyond, check it out.
Mitch Joel Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.