FLIP IT. Another way to look at the world, shared by Vicki, originally Tweeted by @MapScaping. All maps are flawed, but some are useful.
SHORTEN IT. Daryl Chen wrote a haiku every day for a week and wrote an article about it. It might seem silly, but that’s sort of the point.

cat ate my haiku
he licked his chops and said, it
could have been much verse
— Daryl

QUESTION IT. Based on this article about a idea of planting so many trees that the climate can’t help but recover, I asked on Twitter:
Buster @buster
What is the best case against this strategy?
Richard McN Douglas @maitrereynard
Yes yes yes. This doesn’t rely on new technology. It can be done right away. It shouldn’t be controversial - it should be really popular, across political and demographic divides. We need to make it happen, and we need to get on with it. https://t.co/jQRfvZ1vlC
July 5th 2019
4 Likes
And got a bunch of great replies, including this informative article from Betony:
Betony Jones @BetonyJones
Climate change policies that work: a simple guide ⁦@buster⁩ Climate change policy can be overwhelming. Here’s a guide to the policies that work.A new book from veteran energy analyst Hal Harvey simplifies decarbonization.vox.com
July 6th 2019
1 Like
Lesson learned: especially when something fits right into your confirmation bias sweet spot, instead of assuming it’s true ask “what’s the best case against this?”
CRITIQUE IT. This much-debated blog post by Mike Davidson criticizing Superhuman was a really great example (in my view) of how to provide direct feedback to a company without demonizing them. I annotated it with thoughts about the exact techniques he used, and why I thought they were so effective. One of those things is to not only criticise, but to also point super clearly to a path of repair, which, to their credit, Rahul and the Superhuman team seemed to be at least partially receptive to.
MINIMIZE IT. Who wants to buy a plot of land and order a bunch of micro pre-fab houses and found a new city? You can apparently get a house for $20,000 on Amazon with Free Shipping. If you prefer to pay closer to the cost of a real home, there are plenty of ways to do that too.
CONTINUE IT. There’s been a lot of discussion about this trend of life re-examination, and this story about Brian May (guitarist for Queen) finishing his PhD 37 years after he began it, is inspiring (hat tip to Nadja). One of the most active channels in the Rickshaw Discord community this week (reply if you want an invite!) has been in a new channel called #be-good-with-money. A few of us shared our work histories with salary numbers and have been comparing cost of living, mortgages, and all kinds of other weird numbers you normally wouldn’t share with strangers on the internet, except we’re all just having a mini-life-crisis/life-reevaluation together and it’s sorta fun. Here’s the first half of my career:
NOTICE IT. If you haven’t seen this amazing infographic, now you have (click to see the animation):
GET IT. Paul shared a link to this episode of Song Exploder, which is a really great podcast where musicians dissect songs they’ve written, letting people into the process that lead to their creation. The lovely episode with Big Thief’s song Cattails was relevant to a discussion because, in Paul’s words:

“Starting around six minutes in, one of the band members, Adrianne, describes a moment in the recording process when she and the band barely knew the song well enough to get through it and they were still performing it with the emotion that comes with creating something new. And that take got recorded and released. And this all reminded me of the first time I heard someone describe this—Brandi Carlile was interviewed by Elisabeth Moss at SxSW and called this "the rock n roll moment... when you know the song just well enough to get through it, but not so well that you know how cool it is. It only happens once.”

Thanks for reading. If this list of things isn’t interesting to you, you can unsubscribe here. If it is interesting, I’m always open to feedback and suggestions for improvement. If you’d like to join the Rickshaw Discord community where all these links were originally shared, just reply to this email and I’ll send you an invite.

Have a great week!

Buster

Your Rickshaw Weeklinks: Flip it, shorten it…

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