Betterment

Jason Rodriguez is a slightly jaded—but ultimately hopeful—tech worker. Working at GitHub.

Jason Rodriguez is a slightly jaded—but ultimately hopeful—tech worker. Working at GitHub.

Plenty of people have been talking about the rifts between liberals and conservatives and between men and women. But there’s a fault line out there that is just as divisive and may be responsible for more relational estrangement than any other — despite the fact that it remains almost entirely unrecognized and understood: The division […]

Humans are well overdue for a technological revolution – not a profit-driven one like we’re having now, a human-centric one. Sci-fi is wonderful for having your brain run wild. Over the…

A candid post about some of the things that kept me, my employees, and our company from achieving our full potential.

What if there was one piece of fitness equipment that was affordable, didn’t take up much space, could get you both strong and flexible, and was fun to use? While that might sound too good to be true, my guest, Pat Flynn, would say you can find all those benefits in the old-school kettlebell. Pat, […]

Mark Twain noted that “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Around 500 BC, Rome got rid of its kings and became a Republic. Ditching

Writing a book is good for you. It clarifies your thinking and it’s generous as well. You might not publish it professionally, but sharing it with people you want to teach and lead is a usefu…

Jason Rodriguez is a slightly jaded—but ultimately hopeful—tech worker. Working at GitHub.

A bureaucracy recently asked me to submit a few documents. They were very specific and the person on the phone said that the subject line of the email I sent should be blank. This is really unsettl…

IT people are notoriously bad at explaining technology issues in business terms. So it should be no surprise when the people funding the projects don’t want to spend money on things that sound like gibberish to them. There are real product gaps that they want fixed and they have no time for “cleaning up technical debt” or “doing automation” or “upgrading framework X to version 2”.

Everyone needs more chances, more benefit of the doubt, more opportunity. But what turns a chance into a big break is what we do with it once the chance arrives.

On Thursday, we learned the devastating news: Absolute Bagels had closed. Suddenly and, apparently, for good. A Saturday morning trip up to the bagel shop on the Upper West Side has been a weekly ritual for Kin since we moved here. He'd buy a dozen bagels – a couple for Saturday

Like all good metaphors, it might be practical too. Your ‘shoes’ are the point of greatest leverage. The spot where you have traction and engage with the world most directly. For a free…

If 2023 felt odd then 2024 felt even weirder. My theme was “Frequency” and in 2024 it proved hard to tune into the right frequency.

The Ancient Greek philosopher Democritus is credited with coming up with the theory of atoms (the Greek word for “indivisible”) circa 400 BC. In the end,

That’s the tempting question. How much hustle, hoopla and initiative do we need to get this idea ignited in the marketplace… But the much better question is: How much kindling do we hav…

If attention is what you seek and attention is what you measure, it’s likely you’ll create drama. And drama is inherently short-lived. The managing director of Jaguar said, “We&#8…

Casey Newton on Platformer: The Phony Comforts of AI Skepticism The most persuasive way you can demonstrate the reality of AI, though, is to describe how it is already being used today. Not in speculative sci-fi scenarios, but in everyday offices and laboratories and schoolrooms. And not in the ways

No project is going to exactly match every hope you have for it. And even before you ship the work, you’ve already succeeded. No project is totally worthless. So, given that failure and succe…

The more you try to show, the less people see. The more you try to say, the less they hear. The more you try to explain, the less they understand. The

One of the things that happens during moments of crisis is that people look to existing institutions—whether governments, nonprofits, churches, or the like—for guidance on what to do.

We spend a lot of time in our own heads, certain that our path and our method make sense. We often become more certain in the face of criticism or even suggestions. This confidence is essential, as…

Coming to the end of the year is always a time for reflection. This has been an interesting year for me … with more highs than lows, but the lows have been very low. Getting older is often about th…

In The Dispossessed, the people of Annares—a moon colony founded by exiled anarchists—speak a language called Pravic. It is an invented language, created by the first settlers, who the protagonist ...

Writing in Practicing New Worlds, Andrea Ritchie documents a pattern of crisis response that, far from interrupting the crisis, merely serves to lengthen it. I will quote at length here:

There are many ways to ask and answer this question. Authorship used to be rare, but now, all of us write something. If you’re putting your words on a social media platform, you might be surp…

Tom Brady is an elite athlete. Few have even approached the stats he had playing football. And Catherine Walker, NSTA Science Teacher of the Year, is an elite, because her pedagogy and understandin…