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:

• Portlandia – Birthday Loan – Terrible Television – YouTube. “Portlandia makes me nostalgic. I miss the time when good-natured ribbiing aimed at countercultural idealists didn’t come with a size of existential dread. Someone took the segments of a sketch spread across an episode into a single video and it’s genius. ‘I’m a birthday loan officer. I know what Tapas are.’ Also, please sell me a group bill reconciler with that kind of confidence.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Xenotransplantation Of A Porcine Kidney For End-Stage Kidney Disease – The New England Journal Of Medicine. “Yup, I win the ‘most different links’ award by a long mile. Take a pig’s kidney, edit its genes 69 times to remove antigens, inactivate pig retroviruses, and insert human genes, and insert it in a human patient. In this case, a 62-year-old man on hemodialysis. He immediately stopped needing dialysis. He died of unrelated causes soon after, but the message is nevertheless true. We’re so busy talking about AI we often forget the other advances we’re making: gene editing could immediately fix organ donation shortages.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• W.A.S.T.E. Not – Madeleine Adams – The Baffler. “‘Trash is the hidden foundation of modern civilization.’ Cultural historian, John Scanlan, explores how waste defines us.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• The Entangled Brain – Luiz Pessoa – Aeon. “The brain, contends neuroscientist Luiz Pessoa, operates not like a machine with various areas controlling specific functions, but rather like a self-organizing (and self-dissembling) network of independent but connected systems and neurons. Much like a murmur of starlings. ‘When thousands of starlings swoop and swirl in the evening sky, creating patterns called murmurations, no single bird is choreographing this aerial ballet. Each bird follows simple rules of interaction with its closest neighbours, yet out of these local interactions emerges a complex, coordinated dance.’” (Hugh for Mitch).
• Getting Started With Reader – Daniel Doyon – Readwise. “I recently found out that Pocket is shutting down, and it hit me harder than I care to admit. It’s the place where I go to choose what to share here, what to talk about on my weekly radio hits and so much more. Over a decade ago, I wrote a love letter to the app – not for what it did, but for what it enabled: a calm, intentional space to save the ideas I didn’t want to lose. Pocket wasn’t just a read-it-later tool… it was my digital second brain, my private corner of the internet where curiosity could linger (and it was my private space of ’saved digital intelligence’). It changed the way I consumed content, thought about writing and even paused to reflect. So yes, I’m still grieving. But in the rubble of that news, I found something surprisingly hopeful: Reader by Readwise. Not just a replacement – a reinvention. Reader feels like someone took all the best ideas from Pocket and layered in thoughtfulness, sync, notes, and context. It’s not just where I save things.. it’s where I think through them (and it easily sucked in all of saves from Pocket). So thank you, Pocket… you were perfect for the time. And welcome, Reader – let’s see where this new habit takes us. Oh, I should also mention that Reader was brought to my attention (after I posted about it on LinkedIn) by Patrick Tanguay at Sentiers and that he has this code where you can get an extra 30 days free if you want to dive in as well.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• A Day In The Life Of A Kiosk – Helena Kardova – Monocle. “This beutiful little mini-documentary from Monocle, stopped me in my tracks. It’s a quiet, tribute to something that feels both lost and deeply embedded in who I am – the magazine stand (we had full on magazine stores where I live… but only a few still exist). As a former magazine publisher, journalist, as someone who used to spend hours flipping through local and imported titles at the local shop, as someone who had to go in every time I walked by, this one hit hard. It reminded me that before we ‘subscribed’ to everything with a click, we discovered things – by smell, by feel, by the way a cover called to us. I now read most of my magazines online (shoutout to PressReader, which makes it a joy), but this story transported me back to when every issue felt like a small miracle at just the right moment in time. A dispatch from a very different world. If you love print, storytelling, design or just the idea that a humble kiosk can still be a cultural beacon – take five minutes and watch this. It’s a nostalgic reminder that even in an all-digital world, analog hearts still beat.” (Mitch for Hugh).

Feel free to share these links and add your picks on X, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.

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