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 (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: 

• Lauren Dobson-Hughes: Are we actually a country? – The Line. “Nice guys finish last, or so the saying goes. In Canada’s case, we’re not last by a long stretch—but we are in the middle of the pack – vaccine-wise – and relying on our good nature isn’t a particularly defensible strategy. So says this Macleans op-ed, which asks some serious questions about Canada as a country. European-minded, attached to the US, we’re a country of compromise, and that’s being tested by global health and commercial pressures.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• Michael Levin – The Electrical Blueprints That Orchestrate Life – TED. “I’ve been an avid reader of Robert Sapolsky, the polymath Stanford professor whose life work has been to unify emergent complexity — from a neural impulse, to the endocrine system, to social pressures, to natural selection. In that time, new technologies like brain imaging, and research into bacterial biomes, have reshaped what we think make us us. This interview by Michael Levin takes that to the next level—the electrical, rather than chemical, signaling between cells. A hundred years from now, we’ll look back on today the same way we look back at nineteenth-century medicine, and see just how much of our current understanding is brutal and uninformed. As Sapolsky says, ‘Free will is just biology we haven’t discovered yet.’” (Alistair for Mitch).
• 8 year olds have to go through this – reddit. “I’ve never heard of reduced price lunch, a federally supported program in the US where kids who live (substantially) below the poverty line are eligible for lunch at $0.40/day. Turns out sometimes when their parents don’t have anything, kids don’t even have $0.40 per day. And when that happens, the kids are not allowed to eat. The stories in the comments in this thread are just incredible: about the lunch lady who was fired because she regularly covered the cost for kids who didn’t have their 40 cents. One person writes about a time they didn’t have their $0.40 and, ‘they made me sit at the last table in the cafeteria, had one of those big cardboard dividers put around me, and had half a warm tuna sandwich and 5 brown apple slices.’ Sometimes you wonder a little bit about the sanity of the systems that run the most powerful and wealthy country world.” (Hugh for Alistair). 
• Teacher “farts” on Zoom – Emma Ginder – YouTube. “There comes a time, after a year of lockdown and masks and endless stats about infections and hospitalizations and vaccines, after isolation and 20,000 Zoom calls, when the only thing that can make things better is kids’ reactions to a teacher farting on a Zoom call.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• Can Clubhouse Keep The Party Goin? The Verge. “With each passing week, I find my feelings for Clubhouse vacillate between loving the live interactions, meeting new people, getting more ‘live’ reps in for my communication skills, and not loving the weird ‘influencers’ who command million of followers on the platform that are both not compelling to listen to and hold court as if Clubhouse is already an established media entity with cultural norms (and with those many followers there are usually only a few hundred people in these rooms talking about the future of NFTs, how to 10x your business, or how to master Instagram). It can be both lovely and sad in the same experience. I’m not alone. And, as with all of the cycles that social media platforms go through, many are asking whether there’s a ‘there’ there. I’m still spending time on the platform, and I’m having some great engagements, but I wonder if the thrill is gone (or fleeting) and/or if those who aren’t pre-disposed to spend their time studying our digital culture are really going to stick with it?” (Mitch for Alistair). 
• Floating Wizard Desk – David Lundell – YouTube. “I’m not in the least bit handy. Like… not at all. A door in my home recently broke, and not only could I not fix it… I didn’t even know who to call (what is the name of a person who fixes doors?). It’s that bad. Now, if I was handy… I would would do amazing projects like this…” (Mitch for Hugh).

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

Are you interested in what’s next? How to decode the future? I publish between 2-3 times per week and then the Six Pixels of Separation Podcast comes out every Sunday. Feel free to subscribe (and tell your friends ;):