November 2012 Articles

Sometime this past year, I ventured out for an eighteen-and-over night of dubstep.

Nights on dance oors are now rare, as I can hardly stay up past 11 pm. But my friends offered me a ticket, so I went, and drank some beers to keep myself oiled. I stood in the middle of the dance oor, amongst teenagers grinding their bodies against each other and as the bass seeped into my skin.

All I could think about was how old I felt.

But the sound…

There’s just something about dubstep. It is unlike the music I used to go out and dance to. Good dubstep wraps around you. You get lost inside it. Or, it can get lost inside you.

It morphs and shapeshifts, it clings to your body, it transforms into the moment.

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.

In 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope is scheduled to launch. The Webb is a massive, space- based infrared observatory, an unprecedented savant in the search for stretched light. Its infrared sensors will be sensitive enough to measure the chemical properties of every object in the Ultra Deep Field – even the red dots.

“Our knowledge of this deep core of the Universe is about to get extremely detailed,” Stiavelli told me. The Webb will also see more ancient objects, galaxies too old and faint to be picked up by the Hubble. Its Ultra Deep Field could be freckled with red dots, and may well reach back to the cosmic dark ages.

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.

How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama’s reelection

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.

America’s archive of audio recordings remains quietly out of range of hearing.

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.

A while back, I was talking with fellow HBR blogger Boris Groysberg. When he discovered I was writing a book on professional reinvention, he asked for my thoughts about Rachael Ray, the perky Food Network star and the subject of one of his Harvard Business School case studies. Reading the case study, I realized Ray’s experience provides a perfect template for the elusive process – which any professional can learn from – of how to develop a world-class reputation and become dominant in your field.

1. Skills development comes first
2. Build your platform
3. Embrace luck – and make your own

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.

A few years ago, I had a job that involved listening to a ton of podcasts…

The people who were interesting told good stories. They were also inquisitive: willing to work to expand their social and intellectual range. Most important, interesting people were also the best listeners. They knew when to ask questions. This was the set of people whose shows I would subscribe to, whose writing I would seek out, and whose friendship I would crave. In other words, those people were the opposite of boring.

Here are the three things they taught me.

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.

The biographer has two lives: The one she leads, and the one she ultimately understands. The rst is a muddle of misgivings and misapprehensions, hesitations and half-chances, devoted to the baggage carousel or the Net ix queue or wherever the empty calories of existence are served.

The second – the life the biographer pins to the page – has themes. It has chapters, a beginning, middle and end. Intentions align with actions, which bloom into logical consequences. The biographer is as cleareyed about the second as she is clueless about the rst: It’s the kids-of-the-psychiatrist conundrum. In one realm you’re moving forward in ignorance. In the other you’re moving backward with something resembling omniscience. What manifests as suspense on the page feels disconcertingly like anxiety in real life.

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.

As a 56-year-old investment manager and mother of four grown children, I read many articles about the issues facing women with demanding careers as well as families, such as Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article in The Atlantic and the Wall Street Journal piece about the lack of women in nance, assessing how closely the experience described mirrors my own. While most of these pieces explain how the pressure from competing forces results in many women leaving the workforce, they fail to mention a very signi cant issue: the impact on those of us who remain behind.

Over three decades, I have watched my female colleagues vanish from the full-time job market, and I miss their competence and camaraderie.

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.

The Obama campaign raised $690 million online. The majority of it came from the fundraising emails that peppered inboxes for the last two years. They employed a team of 20 writers and a sophisticated analytics system to measure and improve their effectiveness. Now, they’re starting to spill the secrets they learned during the campaign. And as revealed in a new report from Joshua Green*, there was a high-powered viral media out t lurking in Chicago. The lessons from the campaign aren’t just a recipe for making money, but for winning eyeballs in the brutal deathmatch to grab your attention on the Internet. What we can learn is how the Obama campaign ne-tuned its content for maximum Internet impact, i.e., how it channeled its inner BuzzFeed.

This link has been posted in retrospect from a collection of articles I compiled in 2012 using the iOS app, Instapaper.