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: 

• What the F#@k Just Happened at Burning Man? – Buck Down – Medium. “‘Burning Man … is not a cult you join — it’s a cult that joins you. One day you wake up and realize that 20 years have gone by, and pretty much your entire social circle, your significant other, and any children you happen to have had together are all traceable to this oddball festival out in the punishing Northern Nevada desert.’ Truer words have seldom been spoken, and most of my cult tells me 2022 was dreadful. Not in the usual ‘it was hot and uncomfortable’ way, but in a more profound, existential way. This post grapples with why.” (Alistair for Hugh).
• The Paper of Record Meets an Ephemeral Web: An Examination of Linkrot and Content Drift within The New York Times – SSRN. “That’s a long title, but it’s a great paper from three smart Internet scholars. Link rot is real, and the vast majority of links in important legal documents don’t work any more. The Internet Archive is scarcely a good solution, either, with many sites having tags that tell search engines not to crawl or index them. Serious consequences for brands, governments, and more. Read this before it disappears!” (Alistair for Mitch).
• A Tale of Cancellation – A conversation with Meg Smaker – Making Sense Podcast. “The incredible story of a real-life cancellation, not of a wealthy and powerful man, but a first-time feature documentary maker who spent months interviewing inmates of a ‘terrorist rehab centre’ in Saudi Arabia, to give a human portrait of some men who did awful things. Meg Smaker‘s own life should be made into a film: She’s been kidnapped in Columbia by a group that beheads its victims, has navigated through multiple warlord-controlled sections of Mogadishu, she’s been a firefighter in California and a firefighting instructor in Yemen. But the most stressful thing that happened to her was when her film, The UnRedacted — selected by Sundance, up for an award by SXSW — was subject of a cancellation campaign by multiple parties, none of whom seems to have ever seen the movie.” (Hugh for Alistair).
• Most new managers suck at managing – Zain Khan – Twitter. “A great thread for new managers, and old ones too, for how to lead people”. (Hugh for Mitch).
• What is viral jazz? – WRTI – NPR Music. “It doesn’t take much to get me to try out a new form of music. All new forms of music come from somewhere. So… if you’re offering me up jazz… and it’s weird… and you add in the word ‘viral’, that’s a pretty good hook for me. Open you ears… and open your mind. Now, I’m not sure this is an actual genre (yet!) so much as a way to describe something a little bit different… then again, that’s usually the exact place where a new genre (or sub-genre) emerges from. Go and explore, and let me know what you think. Long live viral jazz!” (Mitch for Alistair).
• Inside a highly lucrative, ethically questionable essay-writing service – Input Magazine. “Yes, you should worry about these new AI writing platforms that can pump out some pretty human sounding documents. It’s not perfect, but they’re learning quickly and getting there. I also saw a reddit article on how to beat software that can catch someone trying to cheat in school. The concept is pretty simple: Input the text into Google Translate then translate your native writing into Chinese, then to Spanish, then to Hebrew then back into English (or any combo of multiple languages that you choose), give it a quick cleaning up and ‘voila!’ it’s completely different copy from the original source. With that, we all remember that one person in high school (or college) who would write your essays for you (for a price). Well, forget AI and Google Translate tricks, what happens when that buddying writer from school goes corporate? ‘Killer Papers, based in Canada, is one of a number of so-called essay mills that write papers for clients in exchange for money. And as kids head back to school this fall, business in the industry is about to pick up. ‘A slow month is August, and a busy month is October,’ Kevin says. He now has around 60 writers who produce between 200 and a thousand papers a month, with prices ranging from $17.50 to $32 per page. Though Kevin is coy about sharing specific numbers, he will allow that the site’s revenue is in ‘the low seven figures.’ Whoa!” (Mitch for Hugh).  

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