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Double Smile,
All The Way |
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Behzod notices a new behavior as he slows down for the holidays.
With the holidays coming up, life is both speeding up and slowing down. There’s a rush to get things done by the end of the year and simultaneously a desire for a more reflective time — either with yourself or with the people that you love the most. I feel the tension between these two speeds and I’ve been trying to do my best to move quickly in places where it’s necessary, otherwise defaulting to a slower more contemplative pace.
As I’ve slowed down, I’ve started to notice something new — a double smile. I will smile because something makes me happy, and then I'll smile (bigger) because I'm smiling. It feels like a strange meta moment of acknowledging joy in a situation, which honestly feels like an achievement every time given what's happened over the last two years.
The holidays last year did not feel like a time for joy or celebration for me. It was a time of unknowns which traditionally involves so much togetherness and was instead filled with so much isolation. Yet this holiday season feels different, both because people have been vaccinated in many parts of the world and are more able to move about freely, and we have, to some degree, figured out how to endure this new normal (for some definition of endure).
I hope that as we go into this holiday season, all of you are having moments of joy in your life that bring you smiles, and maybe you'll catch yourself in those moments and appreciate them for what they are. Maybe you too will smile a second time.
- Behzod
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The Bulletin
Listen and see the latest from MAEKAN and the community. |
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Making It Up 192: Better sleep and supply chain issues
Charis and Eugene talk about the allure of better sleep fueling an industry of sleep-related products. They also discuss how a rise in online shopping in combination with pandemic factors has lead to supply chain issues.
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| For Your A-10-tion |
The best links from across the Internet.
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1. 🤑 Lawrence Yeo On The Nothingness Of Money
This is a visually engaging, if sobering, deep dive into orienting our focus on money (or at least evening it out) at different stages of our lives including near the end. As Yeo writes:
“The key is to take that exact feeling and remind yourself of it whenever money hijacks your attention. That when you’re fixated on its pursuit, you can break the spell by understanding how laughable it is to be remembered for it. That in the end, it will have very little to say about the person you are.”
2. 🎮 Looking Back On The 20-Year-Old Gamecube
Developers, marketers and engineers look back on the commercial shortcomings of Nintendo’s purple box-shaped console, particularly due to its inability to differentiate from competitors — especially ones who were allowing their consoles to play other media like CDs and DVDs.
3. 🎟️ Pro Sports Considers NFT Ticket Stubs
In the wake of smartphone-based digital tickets replacing real ones, NFTs attached to purchased tickets are already being tested by the NFL as mementos. Eventually, NFTs could become the tickets themselves. Because their authenticity is assured through blockchain, this would ultimately help stamp out fraud, scams, and potentially resellers.
4. 🧠 Fighting Climate Change Through Worldbuilding
In the face of the climate crisis, Mary Annaïse Heglar invites us to remain optimistic about the future and use the art of world-building to envision a world we want to build and live in.
“We need to apply world-building to the planet we live on. While artists might be the most accomplished at this, they can’t do it alone this time. We’re all going to have to push our imaginations. Here’s one way to start: Close your eyes and think of the world as you see it. Remember that world-building begins with the main character. (That’s you!) So ask yourself: Who are you, and what do you stand for? And now, what do the people around you stand for?”
5. 📱 Fairphone Offering Uncommon Longevity For Its Android Support
The company, known for its approachable to sustainable and repairable phones has shown that it is possible for OEMs to support devices years after we’d expect them to — they just need to be willing to do so. Fairphone recently announced the release of Android 10 for its 6-year-old Fairphone 2 (and Android 11 for Fairphone 3) early next year,
“For Fairphone, shipping Android updates for this long has meant going outside the normal update support structure. The Fairphone 2 uses a Snapdragon 801 SoC, and Qualcomm only supported that chip up to Android 6. Without Qualcomm’s help, Fairphone had to enlist the help of the Lineage OS Android community to get the phone updated. The difference between Fairphone and an aftermarket ROM is that Fairphone is still passing all of Google’s CTS tests and officially licensing the Play Store, which is a huge undertaking.”
6. 👕 The SSENSE of Success
Now valued at $4.1 billion, the online fashion and lifestyle retailer has become a cultural cornerstone for millennials and Gen Z alike. Nathan Taylor Pemberton recounts the brand’s rise to success through its humble beginnings in Montreal helmed by CEO Rami Atallah. One part if their success is their framework around art and commerce.
“Our growth is a result of our having two strong approaches — the art of it and the science of it,” said Krishna Nikhil, the chief merchandising and marketing officer. “We don’t blend art and science. If you blend, you get mush. We toggle.”
7. ✅ Grammar is a Billion Dollar Business
Speaking of billionaires, a recent funding round for Grammarly opened the doors to the club for founders Max Lytvyn and Alex Shevchenko, who actually go way back. Interestingly, the idea for Grammarly (which was initially called Sentenceworks) came from their first company MyDropBox, which started in college as a means of checking for plagiarism. Per Jemima McEvoy’s article in Forbes:
“We had built a product to help keep plagiarism out of students’ writing,” Lyvtyn wrote in a blog post in March. “This led us to ask a serious underlying question: Why do people choose to plagiarize in the first place? Could it be that they were finding it difficult to communicate what they meant in their own voice?”
8. 🦃 No Laughing Matter: Why Deep Frying Frozen Turkeys Ruins Holidays
While it is possible to deep fry properly thawed and dried turkeys, deep frying even partially frozen ones often turns holidays into hospital visits. Chemist and Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Richmond Kristine Nolin offers a simple but life-saving explanation for how differences in density create conditions that turn a big bird into a big bomb.
9. 🚀 Virgin Galactic announces first raffle winner for two tickets to space
Following the company’s first commercial space flight, Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson recently announced the company would be raffling tickets for future flights through the Omaze platform. Through the first such raffle, Keisha S. from Antigua beat out over several hundred thousand entries from more than 200 countries to secure a ticket for herself and her daughter, an astrophysics student.
10. 🤖 The ‘Dronut’ Is The First Bi-Rotor Drone
Cleo Robotics is a Boston-based company specializing in “unconventional robotic systems” (surprisingly, not Boston Dynamics this time), and they’ve designed the aptly-named drone. It’s shaped like a fat donut with its two rotors sitting inside the donut hole. This otherworldly design is to make it better for entering confined or high-risk areas where traditionally exposed and protruding rotors would be dangerous, such as in the oil and gas industry the founders came from.
Albert Dros’ “The Dark Woods” re-imagines the dreariness of foggy forests
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