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: 

• The Ontology of the Grocery Store – Gustavus Adolphus College. “My daughter went to the grocery store by herself a few weeks back. When she returned, she said she got everything she wanted except the cans of tuna. ‘I looked all over the fish section,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t find any.’ How do we know what goes where in the grocery store? Is salsa with chips or international food? Are marshmallows a baking ingredient or a candy, or do they belong next to cookies for S’Mores? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the emergent, collective consensus of how a grocery store is arranged makes no real sense. There’s no class for it, at least not one I remember. It’s a kind of cultural sensemaking. Surely, I thought, someone must have looked into this! And it turns out they have.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The Metaverse Is Not a Place – O’Reilly. “Americans spend more than six hours a day online. It’s a place we already hang out, whether we have fancy VR goggles or not. But, is it a place at all? Breathless virtual real estate developers would say yes, hoping for a land rush in which they can monetize artificial scarcity. But in this piece, Tim O’Reilly suggests it’s a communications medium, one we’re already using as a species. He talks about concepts like stored time, and modulating the hierarchy of communication. As with most things he writes, it manages to be both prescient, and obvious in hindsight.” (Alistair for Mitch).
• MBS’s $500 Billion Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder – Businessweek. “The bananas project from the Saudi crown prince, to build a utopian and/or dystopian metropolis for millions in the middle of the desert. This story is really incredible.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Explicit Content – History Today. “On the shifting rudeness of words over history, and how we choose what offends.” (Hugh for Mitch).
• Is humanity smart enough to survive itself? – Jeanette Winterson – TED 2022. “I believe that I mentioned this TED Talk in passing. Well, it’s now live and I’m hopeful that everyone will take the 18 minutes to watch it. Embarrassingly, I had not head of Jeanette Winterson before (she’s a literary giant), so her biography at the conference and the set-up for this talk didn’t initially strike me as a ‘must-see’ while attending the TED conference this past year in Vancouver. To say that this talk is ‘delightful’ or ‘brilliant’ isn’t enough or fair. How can humans and machines truly work together or meld together? This philosophical take will hopefully change your brain… for the better.” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Neil Gaiman on the Secret History of ‘The Sandman’ & Killing a Bad Script by Leaking It Online – Rolling Stone. “When it comes to watching creators talk about their art, I could watch people like Brian Eno, Susan Cain and Neil Gaiman all night and day. When word broke that Gaiman’s famed series, The Sandman (a legendary comic book), was getting a Netflix deal, I was skeptical. With all of Gaiman’s success, I still believe that it has been very difficult to transpose his words to screen. Well, it looks like The Sandman, is a huge hit and this conversation about his art (and beyond) is a joy to watch… and inspiring too…” (Mitch for Hugh).

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