Theme: Social Media and Thinking and Stuff
Here's the next edition of our thematic exploration of stuff we read on the Internet. It's quite long, so if you see the "view entire message" link at the bottom of whatever you use to read email, you're going to have to click that to see the entire thing. And in case you didn't know, you can read this issue and all previous issues in their entirety on our website.
Yesterday came suddenly...
The next few issues will have some loose themes tying their content together.
Long ago when we could travel we spent time on airplanes going to remote and interesting places. There's a certain wistfulness and ennui that comes on the way to such a journey where you wonder about your place in the arc of history and the thousands of years full of broken humans trying to meet the needs of those they love. Something about going to sleep in one place and waking up in a completely different place always connects us to this deeper current. Someday we may travel again, but for now we can always still journey into the past. Join us.
To help you turn off the twitters and facebooks and disconnect we present to you a super light, super fun collection of links 100% guaranteed to not remind you of the rubber dumpster full of burnt popcorn burning outside all our windows right now.
Generation X Manages
We begin Issue 61 with a delightful look into the mind of your Gen-X boss. Enjoy! - C
Brian here... apropos of nothing I've been discussing with several other Gen-X'ers how amazing Gen-X bosses are. We've tried to distill this wisdom into a handy-dandy guide to how to manage like a Gen-X'er aka the Efficiently Indifferent Management System. I don't claim to follow this 100% of the time but consider this the platonic ideal of a manager born between 1960 and 1980.
H/T Wes B. & Joe D. & Scott B.
The Optimal Gen-X management system employee is Fire & Forget. I give you a task and we both walk away knowing it will be done without further involvement from me. All my best bosses have been Gen-X'ers (~1960-1980ish). If you like to be treated as an adult with a brain who can make decisions without a babysitter Gen-X bosses are for you. -B
Welcome to the 4th quarter of 2020 y'all! We're confident the next three months will be easy-going and uneventful.
Also, we want to take a moment to celebrate the 60th issue of this silly newsletter. Thanks for sticking around and casually perusing our intermittent deluge of Internet content. We recently passed a small but meaningful milestone in terms of total subscribers. If you would like to spread the Mark As Read joy to your friends, family, and enemies they can sign up here.
The first draft of this issue included approximately 7x as many words as the one you are now receiving. A lot of people, ourselves included, have a lot of anger and pain pent up inside right now for a lot of reasons. On the one hand, as centrists, we wanted to yell at the left and right and tell them to stop hating each other and also thought maybe it was time for the non-extremists to be louder in the dialogue. But on the other hand, as Christians, we both want to move towards pain and need and bring as much empathy to those around us as we can possibly squeeze out of our graciously justified yet still not completely sanctified souls. And while it felt good to yell and preach, we felt those thoughts needed to be refined in the fire of grace and charity a little longer.
Moving forward we may work those ideas into a Medium post, or you may see some version of them salted into future issues. But the best venue to hash out difficult things with other broken individuals is to do it in person, ideally over some sort of brown liquid in a glass. Let's all do more of that and less online shaming and tribal panicking.
Hopefully this issue brings some interesting challenges to our thinking as we explore (with humility) some more current aspects of the world around us than we usually do. One thing we are pretty sure of is we should all be less sure of everything. We invite you to take off your red or blue hats as you enter this space. We don't agree with everything in these articles but we think they are all interesting. We hope the curiosity in your brain will be kindled and at the end we all walk away less certain and more open to listening to all those around us.
We have been working really hard on an issue that is a slight departure from what we normally send out. We thought we'd have it ready last week, but after a thorough review from our editors (thanks Amanda and Katie) we think it still needs work.
Since we don't actually have deadlines, we'll fiddle with it until we deem it worthy of publication. Until that point, we did not want to leave you with nothing to read but silly Facebook rants. We proudly present to you the fifth (by our count) occurrence of a good old-fashioned Mark as Read Trash Fire.
That's right kids. This is the second issue in as many weeks. Look at us go!
In a couple weeks we're going to send out a newsletter about newsletters, featuring links to other newsletters. But we need help from you, dear reader. Send us your favorite email newsletters and, ideally, a couple sentences about why you love it.
And now, to this week's links.
We're going to publish this newsletter weekly. Hold on to your butts.
Empathy and Charity my brothers and sisters. To put ourselves in the mind of an other and feel their needs as no lower than our own. To assume good faith from those we speak with and about. We pray that these are not forever forgotten.