It’s been a few months since the last PM and all I can say it that, even as the world opens up, for me it feels like a time to still hold on to the things that became important during the worst days of the pandemic. So here’s bumper edition of PM to partially make up for the time apart.

Let’s get into it!

• Articles

  • Belonging, or lack of it, is the main reason why The Great Migration is happening. My favorite, and the best people strategist out there, offers a framework for how to foster a sense of belonging at your company. You’ll need to read this…

  • What really happened between Google and it's star AI expert who'd worked at Apple and also under Fei Fei Li?

  • Your child might never have gotten a chance to enjoy ‘Goodnight Moon’.

  • And yet we say there is no money in water…

  • How do you satisfy the unfillable desire of ‘Wanting’?

  • He who owns the land, ones the wealth. They say. But what if he who owns the wealth, Bill Gates, decides to then own all the land?

  • 'Unsustainable things can last longer than you think' and ‘What is the modern version of cigarettes, which were doctor-recommended just a few generations ago?’

  • Five superpowers you need in business (and maybe life) but for the right reasons (unlike the example in the first one).

  • Your company, yes yours, is paying a high tax for its dysfunction.

  • While unsurprising, this history of the KKK’s at Harvard is actually still kinda surprising.

  • Upside decay means that an organization doesn’t get any lucky breaks. Upside decay hits low-probability events hardest because so many things have to go right. And the more you choose unvirtue over virtue, the more upside decay is likely.

  • According to the Minneapolis Fed, the failure of our society solving the housing crisis is less about the industry’s failure to adopt technology. So, why can’t we solve the housing crisis? One guess (PDF).

  • We use it every day but most of us actually do not know how a web server works. Well, now you have no excuse.

  • Some dives into business model that reveal us that OpenDoor is a mortgage company and Katerra (who came in to disrupt construction) blew up with thousands of jobs lost. Pair this one with the line from the upside decay article that suggests ‘Upside decay hits low-probability events hardest because so many things have to go right.’

  • Even though he is out of the NBA playoffs, Kevin Durant showed us he’s one of the greats. Sam Anderson of the NYT reveals a lot more than we see when ‘Easy $’ is doing his best work.

  • When a Charizard Pokemon card sells for $150k, and I watch my son trading his cards willy nilly with his friends, I have to dig into the world of Pokemon card collectors. And who best to focus on but King Pokemon.

  • When Wall Street Becomes Your Landlord’. This is one of those ‘this won’t end well’ stories that most of us can write without too much creativity required. (Longread). And even Soho is trying to figure out how to stop the slide towards becoming totally unwelcome to the non-wealthy.

  • For a week in February, chess got more streaming hours on Twitch than Fortnite and LoL. Yes, chess.

  Books

  • ‘Friday Black’ takes our present reality to its grotesque and logical conclusion. The tales of our regular experiences in America become explosively violent in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s hands because we have become truly numb. Familiar yet dystopian. Fantastic.

  • ‘A Particular Kind of Black Man’ by Tope Folarin follows in a line of recent novels that mine the lives of the author and leave you wondering if its autobiographical. You root for the protagonist but wonder how things will work out.

  • ‘Standpipe’ by David Hardin is an earnest book about the Flint water disaster. To avoid repeating a story we all know, Hardin weaves the story of his family and his part in the work. Like reading diary entries from a man grieving for his family and a community he starts to know.

  • Through the lens of ‘Four Lost Cities’ Annalee Newitz traces the falls of Catalhoyuk, Pompei, Angkor And Cahokia (now East St Louis) to inform our decisions about the future of cities. While the book reveals new information about places we think we know, I found it dug too deep into parts that didn’t add more than a moral sheen over some conclusions drawn.

  • I flipped though ‘The Rap Year Book’ by Shea Serrano before reading the introduction. And my reactions went something like ‘Still Tippin by Mike Jones as the rap song for 2004???!! Drake and not Raekwon in 2009?!. And then I read the introduction and realized the criteria is ‘Most Important’ according to Shea. So the disagreement is the point. Fun ‘book’ that is bound to tickle any rap fan.

  Podcast

  I was on Max Chpopvsky’s ‘Moral of the Story’ podcast sharing and breaking down a particular pivotal story for me. I hope you enjoy it. 

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  Hope you’re having a great start to the summer! I should be able to get through the backlog in a few issues.

  Thanks for reading!

  Seyi