The biggest daily challenge of social media is finding enough content to share. We call this “feeding the Content Monster.” There are two ways to do this: content creation and content curation.
~GUY KAWASAKI, author of The Art of Social Media.
BRANDING
Personal branding: a fine line between ego and enterprise success [The Art of Social Media
], Forbes | Tweet
With the growth of personal blogs, social media, and other online media, there has been a rapid rise in the number of individuals both within management, and the rank and file of organizations, who are building, and seeking to build, substantial online reputations.
BUSINESS
Anthony Bourdain boosts Xi’an famous foods [No Reservations
], WSJ | Tweet
In 2008, David Shi, the chef at Xi’an Famous Foods in Queens, New York, called his son, Jason Wang, and said in Chinese, “There’s a tall, old white dude here with a film crew; do you know who he is?” He snapped a photo of the guest—stooped over a plate of lamb burgers seasoned with cumin and dressed with hot peppers and pickled jalapeños—and sent it to Wang, then a student at Washington University in St. Louis. Wang didn’t recognize him, but after showing the photo to his suite mates, he learned his name: Anthony Bourdain.
Confirmed: Starbucks knows the next hot neighborhood before everybody else does, Quartz | Tweet
Starbucks’ mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.” Any college student downing venti caramel macchiatos to stay awake the night before a big exam can testify to Starbucks’, in a word, nurturing qualities. But as it turns out, Starbucks correlates with something else, too: rising home values.
THE MIND
Genetic Memory: How we know things we never learned [Extraordinary People
, Islands of Genius
], Scientific American | Tweet
I met my first savant 52 years ago and have been intrigued with that remarkable condition ever since. One of the most striking and consistent things in the many savants I have seen is that that they clearly know things they never learned.
Unconscious thought not so smart after all, Nature | Tweet
If you have to make a complex decision, will you do a better job if you absorb yourself in, say, a crossword puzzle instead of ruminating about your options? The idea that unconscious thought is sometimes more powerful than conscious thought is attractive, and echoes ideas popularized by books such as writer Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling Blink
RELATIONSHIPS
Why do some women prefer submissive men?, NCBI | Tweet
Equality between partners is considering a feature of the functional partnerships in westernized societies. However, the evolutionary consequences of how in-pair hierarchy influences reproduction are less known. Attraction of some high-ranking women towards low-ranking men represents a puzzle.
EDUCATION
Bending the cost curve, Inside Higher Ed | Tweet
Online education can “bend the cost curve” of an undergraduate degree, according to a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, but whether the lower tuition is caused by a boost in productivity — as opposed to more competition — is still undetermined.
SCIENCE
This battery has lasted 175 years and no one knows how, Motherboard | Tweet
There sits, in the Clarendon Laboratory at Oxford University, a bell that has been ringing, nonstop, for at least 175 years. It’s powered by a single battery that was installed in 1840. Researchers would love to know what the battery is made of, but they are afraid that opening the bell would ruin an experiment to see how long it will last.
WRITING
Are you leaving this crucial ingredient out of your book’s first chapter? [Outlining Your Novel Workbook], Helping Writers Become Authors | Tweet
Your book’s first chapter is hard. There’s so much you have to cram in there in order to get it to all work out.
Using extended metaphors in your writing, The Artist’s Road | Tweet
Welcome to my final post on crafting an extended metaphor that runs the length of your creative writing. These lessons apply for fiction as well as nonfiction, but for the purposes of this series I’ve focused on examples from my recently published memoir, Committed: A Memoir of the Artist’s Road
.