Espresso Shots 3-29-26

It's that time again for my weekly update, which includes a short collection of noteworthy finds, posts that inspire, as well as a few reflections from the past week or two. I'll aim to land these in your inbox by the weekend, in time to pair with your morning coffee (or your preferred cup of inspiration).

The Latest Drippings ☕️

• The Inner Life We're Trading Away. An important think piece for the week around the cultural biases that mistake 'doing' instead of 'being' as a measure of intelligence. 'We reward doing far more readily than we value being, or experience. Particularly nowadays, and over the last 200 years in these capitalist societies we value work that relates to intelligence, whether physical or intellectual — first blue-collar work and now white-collar work. What matters is not what you think, dream, or imagine; it’s what you do. That’s how we pay you. That’s how we value your contribution to society for the most part.' Another good reminder (and validates some of the thinking I've seen around cognitive skills regressing) to be consistently exercising the brain: 'In the absence of conscious practice reflective self-consciousness can atrophy like any faculty of the mind. If you don’t cultivate it, it’s like a muscle you never use. The capability may remain there; the potential may remain, but it will atrophy.'
• Willingness to Look Stupid Is a Genuine Moat in Creative Work. I'd say it a little differently - lean into childlike-curiosity. 'I don’t think young people are smarter than old people. I don’t think they work that much harder either. It mostly just seems that nobody really expects much of young people, so they're free to follow their curiosity into weird, silly, and seemingly-bad-but-actually-good ideas. They're not afraid of looking stupid. Good Ideas, and I mean this in the broadest sense – research directions, startup ideas, premises for a novel – almost always sound stupid at first. They often make the person who came up with them look stupid. So if a truly good idea always starts out by looking unserious, then the only way to have one is to get comfortable producing stupid things.'
• The Worst Airport in America. Another reason I have been trying to avoid any travel: airports are a total mess. The answer to which airport is the worst made me laugh. But I didn't know this fact: 'All airports are depressing and scary; some go above and beyond. For example, at least seven American airports are named after people who died in plane crashes.'
• The "You Think You're Better Than Me?" Coffee Index. A fun little game if you're into coffee to test your knowledge of the bean. I can certainly relate to this: 'That pavlovian glee the second the machine starts warming up. That hold-the-mug-with-two-hands-close-to-your-chest-and-nestle-up-on-the-couch-like-you’re-a-guest-on-The-Drew-Barrymore-Show feeling (that show puts Pat McAfee’s level of in-studio comfort to shame).'
• Does College Radio Even Matter Anymore?. Mainstream radio is just so.... blah. Over the last several months, I've turned to tools like TuneIn and Broadcasts to switch up my listening habits and make an intentional pivot to streaming radio across college and international stations. (Side note: Radio.Garden is super cool). What I discovered was a real joy - lots of new bands I would have never otherwise heard about. It's true: college radio is not dead.
• The Future Smells Like Paper. 'Screens have no smell. No texture. No resistance. They exist in permanent present tense, refreshing endlessly, never aging, never bearing marks of use. This makes them powerful. It also makes them incomplete.' While I do love digital ink (especially this new XteInk X4), there's a special magic that just can't be replicated with real pen and paper. 'The printed book demands engagement with its materiality. You feel the weight of how much you've read and how much remains. The spine cracks. Pages have texture, some smooth, some rough depending on paper stock and how many hands held them before yours. There's a scent that changes as the book ages. These aren't bugs in the system. They are the system.'
• Thoughts on Slowing the Fuck Down. I've always despised the thinking behind 'move fast and break things'. More often than not, you end up with lots of broken things. I prefer the path of continuous learning and reinvention, because tech/life is evolving at crazy speeds right now and by slapping tech on broken systems... well... you know where that goes. And with AI, the world is screaming for faster and faster, not 'rethinking'. 'This is where your experience and taste come in, something the current SOTA models simply cannot yet replace. And slowing the fuck down and suffering some friction is what allows you to learn and grow.'
• Before You Automate It, Ask Whether You Should Even Be Doing It in the First Place. Good advice for well, pretty much anything.
• Speed Is a Tactic, Not a Virtue. Along the same lines: 'You won’t find those things by going faster. You’ll find them by thinking harder.'
• Rule #23: Be Inefficient on Purpose. This week, Scott asks a great question: 'What activity in your life earns your undivided time? Do you even have one anymore? There is so much cultural and technological pressure to do as many things as possible as fast as possible that even the idea of doing one thing at a time on purpose now feels strange.' But really, the nugget is the concept of being time poor or time rich. 'One measure of a good life is to be time rich. To make decisions so that you have all the time you want for the important things you choose. This is rare. It requires focus, autonomy and commitment. Instead most of us get lost in the cult of busy and live lives that are time poor. We always feel late and rushed. We feel we are behind and not doing enough, despite working as hard as we can.' Definitely something I need to work on is how to readjust my balance here.
• Some Things Just Take Time. I guess the theme of this week is time :) 'There’s a reason we have cooling-off periods for some important decisions in one’s life. We recognize that people need time to think about what they’re doing, and that doing something right once doesn’t mean much because you need to be able to do it over a longer period of time.' Important reminder: 'The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.'
• The Beat Sheet. I highly recommend Dave Gray's 'Visual Frameworks', so I really appreciated this week's post on the mess we suffer. 'It’s a particular struggle for visual thinkers, because when we look at a topic, there are so many possible starting points, and there’s no single clear path through it. Each path forks and divides in interesting ways. Sometimes they go nowhere or run into dead ends, or they double back into loops and crisscross each other, until the sequence gets lost in all the wandering, tangled up like an out-of-control fishing line.' The solution? The Beat Sheet. 'A beat sheet is a simple document that tells the story of an entire film in a couple of pages. It tells you whether the story works. It reveals the weak links that might break the chain of the story. Before a single scene is shot. A beat sheet is not a hierarchy. It’s flat: a numbered list of complete sentences. No hierarchy, no sub-points, no Roman numerals. Just a sequence. Each beat is a claim, a turn, or a structural move. One job per beat.'
• The Onion Had a Very Good Year. I've always loved The Onion, and have been a "paper" subscriber since they offered it. Their return in 2024 has been somewhat incredible: 'The 38-year-old satirical news publication, wrested from the grips of private equity in 2024 by a group including Twilio cofounder Jeff Lawson and former NBC News disinfo reporter Ben Collins, has built an audience of 29.5 million. And it’s the print version, not the site, that’s driving business. With 65,000 paying print subscribers, in 50 states and 50 countries, The Onion is, by some estimates, the country’s 12th-largest print newspaper, above The Boston Globe. Overall annual revenue grew 300% in 2025.'
• Gardening as Resistance: Notes on Building Paradise. This post asks, 'Does gardening offer an antidote to the hurried pace of modern life?' Perhaps! The author makes an interesting point about cultivating beauty. 'Gardening situates you in a different kind of time, the antithesis of the agitating present of social media. Time becomes circular, not chronological; minutes stretch into hours; some actions don’t bear fruit for decades. The gardener is not immune to attrition and loss, but is daily confronted by the ongoing good news of fecundity. A peony returns, alien pink shoots thrusting from bare soil. The fennel self-seeds; there is an abundance of cosmos out of nowhere.'
• The Liberating Effect of Uncertainty. 'None of us really knows what we want, at least not with the certainty we pretend to have. We think we do. We make plans as if we do. But research consistently shows that humans are surprisingly poor predictors of their future desires and happiness.' As usual, Anne-Laure Le Cunff makes an interesting point in this piece on the beautiful uncertainty of not knowing.
• Scientists Narrow Down the Hunt for Aliens to 45 Planets. Of the 6000 planets that have been discovered, most of these worlds are inhospitable to life. Apparently, only 45 of them are within 'the region where liquid water might exist on the surface.'

Amor Fati ✌🏻