I don’t get enough sleep. I bet you don’t either. The NIH helpfully reminds us that lack of sleep is a problem, causing high blood pressure, stroke, obesity, lack of productivity and an increased likelihood of death. If you tend to jolt awake in the middle of the night (like I often do), thinking about these facts doesn’t exactly help you chill out. I was therefore thrilled to learn that there might be something off with the current prescription for seven hours of uninterrupted sleep.

As historian Robert Ekirch writes, sleeping for one uninterrupted interval is simply a function of artificial light and the industrial revolution. Before electricity and factories, segmented sleep — sleeping in two intervals — was all the rage. Benjamin Franklin was a fan: Between “first sleep” and “second sleep” he would get naked, throw open the windows and take cold air baths. The French called the period between the two sleeps “dorveille,” while the English called it “the watch.” Both terms sound ancient and spooky in a cool way, which made me search for other people who embrace this period of sleeplessness. On Medium, Ron Geraci describes this state as “an odd, placid form of being awake–more aware but less alert…a ripe sentience that allowed clear but limited thought and wanted stillness.”

Reading this helped me reframe what I previously defined as insomnia. Now, when I wake up in the middle of the night, instead of stressing out about NIH factoids, I remind myself I might be conscious in a way that is only available to me in that moment. I allow my mind to wander, to think in a way that still feels sort of like a dream. This has paid off: I have an army of Monarch butterflies in my garden because one night I decided the next day I was going to plant milkweed everywhere (just one example of my more recent dream-like decisions).

There doesn’t seem to be a scientific consensus about whether biphasic sleep is a good thing, but that’s okay. For me, the knowledge that there is more than one way of looking at periods of sleeplessness has made the NIH’s dire warnings less scary, and makes me want to give a shout out to the true sleep rebels, our beloved night owls. While they don’t necessarily have “two sleeps,” they do find themselves hyper-focused in the middle of the night. A self-described night owl, Stefanie Morejon, writes on Medium that her behavior is perhaps evolutionary, essential for human survival. “Somebody,” she writes, “had to stay awake to keep the fires burning, to protect the community and keep the night creatures at bay.”

— Adeline Dimond

🐦 Elsewhere on Medium…

A watch of nightingales. A muster of peacocks. A murder of crows. These delightfully unexpected collective nouns, or “terms of venery,” date back to a 1486 book about hunting. Most people don’t realize English contains collective nouns for groups of humans, too, e.g. “a promise of bartenders” and “a hastiness of cooks” (!). We really need to start coining more of these. A… draft of Medium writers? That’s not great. Someone should fix that. If you have ideas, let me know. (Jack Shepherd)

📖 Worth remembering

To tell a good story, start super small. (Katie E. Lawrence)

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It’s not (always) insomnia, it’s segmented sleep was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, government officials and pundits have begun reexamining the use of fluoride in public drinking water. The anti-fluoridation crowd often points to published studies that claim to connect fluoride to a myriad of health risks, including increased cancer rates and, a hot topic right now, lower IQ scores in children.

There is plenty about fluoride’s use in drinking water that can sound like the stuff of conspiracy theories (so much so that it was once invoked in anti-communist propaganda). The fluoride added to our drinking water is often sourced from phosphate companies, which produce fertilizers. Because it is a naturally occurring chemical made of fluorine minerals (it’s in the periodic table of elements!), fluoride is essentially a byproduct of their mining practices. So, critics are also concerned about the quality of fluoride produced in that way, as well as the pollution caused by those industries. (This also why you may sometimes hear it referred to as “an industrial waste.”)

Fluoridated water is also used to fuel the conversation about “governmental overreach” or personal choice, as it is difficult or impossible for some to truly opt out of public water that has been fluoridated.

Even so, many public health officials are confident that the kind and level of fluoride recommended by regulatory agencies is safe. Critics call those studies about negative health effects and IQ scores unreplicable or irrelevant, as they often are examining a level of fluoride that is at least two times over the suggested maximum amount. (Too much of a good thing may be bad for you? You don’t say…)

Fluoridated water (within healthy limits) is also a public good. “After all, the promise of fluoridation was never just about preventing cavities — it was about ensuring that everyone, regardless of income, education, or race, could maintain basic dental health,” says Dr. Jess Steier, a public health scientist, in a story on Medium.

And yet: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Trump administration’s nominee for head of the Department of Health and Human Services, has said one of his first official acts will be to “advise all U.S. water systems to remove fluoride from public water.” Here’s a punch list of facts and resources I’m keeping an eye on in the midst of it all:

• The recommended amount of fluoride to be added to public water is 0.7 parts per million. Overly fluoridated water (above 1.5 parts per million) is not endorsed by any health professional.
• Internationally, many cities that have defluoridated their water also provide free dental healthcare or provide fluoride in other ways, such as in salt.
• The act of fluoridating municipal water is not federally mandated. One way to find out whether your local water system has fluoride is to check the CDC’s website, My Water’s Fluoride, but some states may have their own resources.

Personally, I’d love to know more about how fluoride is purified before it enters our water systems. What about you? What concerns do you have about the dental health of our communities, and what solutions do you want to see?

— Carly Rose Gillis

More around the web

• Last week, Astro Bot (a video game about a robot obsessed with reclaiming parts of a Playstation 5 from a green alien) (yes, it’s that meta) was honored as The Game Award’s Game of the Year. Ben Ulansey shares some context as to why it grabbed the gaming community’s adoration in these times: “It’s a smile-inducing band-aid on a planet that feels sometimes like it’s bursting apart at its seams.” (Fanfare)
• I’ve been watching the FX show “Say Nothing,” which is based on the real story of two women volunteers for the IRA who performed a hunger strike while they were imprisoned by the British in the 1970s. John Oakes, author of The Fast: The History, Science, and Philosophy of Doing Without, adapted some of his research into a post for the Hell World newsletter. In it, he explores the history of this political action, describing it as “jiu-jitsu politics that inverts the power structure and can undermine authority more effectively than a bomb.”
• Sonification is the act of bringing infographics to life through sound. It’s a part of pursuing a “multi-modal” strategy of learning, which can be especially effective in improving memorization skills. Don’t believe me? Give a listen to the examples featured in this Medium story by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) for an unforgettable way of learning about the intensity of black holes or how galaxies are formed.

A dose of practical wisdom

I recently attended a webinar that featured a conversation with Amy Blankson, author of The Future Of Happiness, who shared a few extremely useful strategies for managing stress and increasing optimism in day-to-day life. My favorite: scroll through your phone’s contact list and find seven people in your social circle that you appreciate and text one person per day to thank them. The list and the scope helps with decision fatigue; once you have the list in front of you, you’ll find it hard to not do it. (I’m on day 5, and it’s working!)

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Fluoride: a chemical byproduct with a complicated past (and future) was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ever since turning 38, my favorite line to deliver with confidence is: “Actually, I’m almost 40.” I smirk, ready to feed off people trying to shhh this fact away as if they were swatting a fly off my head. “But you look so young!!” And thank you, that was the point of this statement — my quest to look and feel younger as I round a new decade.

Aging is something I think about constantly. The World Health Organization has confirmed people are living longer, which makes me entertain the idea of taking The Substance even more. I think about aging when someone tells me about their high-interest savings account or that they need to call a roofer or that they just booked a trip to Japan or even that it’s a Tuesday night and they have plans. How old are they to be doing this stuff? Am I that age too? Have I passed that age? I need to contextualize myself as a single, childless renter in the midst of whatever story they’re telling me so I can feel slightly better about the clock ticking down to a colonoscopy appointment. My compulsion to defend the choices I’ve made is also not innate — comparing ourselves to others is actually a socially conditioned construct. Studies show there is a “strong correlation between frequent comparison and heightened levels of depression and anxiety” (about aging, among other things). It’s so fun.

However, just like therapist Crystal Jackson on Medium, part of me is ready for the “Freedom of the Feral Forties.” As Jackson writes, this is the decade for writing your own rules, getting weirder, and becoming even more yourself. “The clock cannot be stopped,” she explains, “I’m suddenly curious to see myself at all the ages I’m fortunate enough to reach.”

I’m also very aware that getting older comes with its downsides. My mom always says “there’s nothing golden about your golden years” and Rodney Lacroix’s “Countdown to Extinction: A Top Ten List of the Worst Parts of Getting Old” is proof (and it has me wondering if my mom is getting paid to ghostwrite these days).

The scariest thing about aging, to me, is not my lack of a Roth IRA but the compounding loss I experience each year. More and more parents of close and childhood friends are dying. Friends are leaving doctor’s offices with scary, ugly diagnoses. All the pets my friends got in their twenties are now crossing the rainbow bridge. I’ve never experienced as much tangential loss as I have this year alone. As coach Ronke Babajide, Ph.D., observes in “That Thing We Always Forget About Aging,” every day brings us closer to losing the people closest to us. A poignant read that reminds me how limited time is for those close to me the more we blow out the candles.

— Beth Alexandroff

⚡ What else we’re reading…

• Evin Ibrahim and her husband, who is Syrian, react to the fall of former president Bashar al-Assad: “I actually feel myself wanting to help rebuild my country.” (Age of Empathy)
• Complementary colors (opposite on the color wheel, e.g. blue and orange) tend to dominate design, but “halfway color combos” (blue-green and purple) can feel more emotional and evocative. (Ruxandra Duru, Bootcamp)
• It’s easy to be cynical about blatantly commercial awareness days (today is Maple Syrup Day, FYI, and everything I can find about it sounds like SEO bait). But! Dan Brotzel spent 365 days celebrating fake holidays and it kind of changed his life? He leaned into the silliness of Talk Like a Pirate Day, took full advantage of Eat a Bagel Day, and used some Days as excuses to chat up people he’d never meet otherwise. “On their respective Days, I had wonderful conversations with all sorts: a hermit, a lighthouse keeper, a town crier, a stationery fetishist.” (Human Parts)

🧠 Your daily dose of practical wisdom

The “fundamental attribution error” is our human tendency to think everyone’s out to get us — basically, we overemphasize personal intentions and underemphasize how much everyone’s just responding to their circumstances. Most things are not about you.

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

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Aging makes you more yourself was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Medium is a great home for academic writers. It’s easy to write and publish your work quickly; there’s an engaged audience of thoughtful, curious readers; and our features are geared towards helping you find your community.

While there’s nothing stopping you from copy-paste-publishing your doctorate thesis on Medium, we’ve found that the best-received academic work on Medium has a few elements in common. This guide will walk you through a few points to keep in mind as you adapt your writing to find a new audience on Medium.

Why publish your academic work on Medium?

A lot of academic writing never gets published. What does get published often doesn’t get a big readership, especially not beyond its niche audience. If it does happen to make headlines, it’s often misunderstood. This is frustrating when all you want to do is share your research with readers who are most likely to be interested in it.

Another way to get your writing to the public is to publish it yourself — and many scholars do just that, sharing their work on social media platforms like X and Threads, or hosting their own blogs. The problem with those methods is that it can be tough to build an audience that will read that work. Plus, research doesn’t always lend itself well to a character-limited format.

That’s what makes Medium such a great platform to publish your academic work. We already have 100 million monthly readers who love thoughtful, nuanced discussions. We have niche, specific publications that have built a community about topics as specialized as the convergence of politics, policy, and ideas to paleontology. And our editor is incredibly simple to use — just type and hit publish.

I loved how former academic and current science communicator Silvia PM, PhD put it in her post about how she’d use Medium as a tool to connect with people beyond the academic bubble. “If I had a lab again, I’d see Medium as more than just another social media platform, I’d see it as a bridge. A bridge between science and society, between data and decision-making, and between curiosity and understanding. A bridge to support a successful career for myself and my students.”

Here’s what to keep in mind as you adapt your work to fit well on Medium.

Pick a single point

No matter if you’re thinking about publishing your dissertation or your lab presentation slides on Medium, it’s worth deciding on a single point you want to drive home and focusing on that. If you’re thinking of your thesis, pick a single chapter. If you’re adapting a paper, clearly define its main argument.

For example, I wrote my Masters dissertation on trends in bird species extinction and extirpation during the Anthropocene — a pretty wide subject matter! If I wanted to repurpose that research and writing for Medium, I’d start not just with a single chapter, but a single finding within a chapter. In my case, I found a strong correlation between bird body mass and the likelihood of the species not just surviving but expanding into new countries, and could write about that. Another possible example is taking the abstract of your research paper, or an excerpt that summarizes the findings simply.

Read over the work you’re thinking of repurposing and mine it for ideas. Jot down as many as you feel are compelling, but then pick just one to focus on for publishing on Medium.

Remember the audience

You’re already used to changing how you present your ideas depending on who you’re presenting to. If you’re a postdoc writing a grant proposal to get funding for your idea, you’ll handle that differently from writing up that research into a paper you’re submitting to Nature Cell Biology, for instance, or presenting it to your labmates.

Adapting your work to Medium is no different. We’re home to curious, intelligent readers who like getting deep dives rather than hot takes. But those readers aren’t going to share your background knowledge in your subject matter.

As an experiment, pretend you’re sharing this with a sibling or a parent — someone who cares a lot about what you do and may already be familiar with the main notes, but who won’t capture the nuance without you explaining it. Read it aloud and see how it sounds.

It’s also good to consider the visual look of your Medium story. While academic work tends to be on the denser side, both in terms of the style and the paragraph length, we find readers on Medium like some white space to have a chance to digest new ideas as they read.

Revisit your title

We’re not about clickbait, and neither are our readers, so don’t worry — you won’t need to publish your work on Medium with a title like “Scientists Just Unveiled a Radical Approach to Tracking Dengue — Mosquitoes HATE Them!”

But, “A new lineage nomenclature to aid genomic surveillance of dengue virus,” might not mean much to your readers, either.

Try to aim for a middle ground: a title that explains your research in a way that’s clear to lay readers, and gives them a reason to read your work. It’s also good practice to tie this back to the “why” you worked on earlier.

In the paper I linked above, it might be relevant to highlight how to help scientists track dengue and prevent another global epidemic like COVID-19, or discuss how vaccines are developed for other diseases.

Looking for inspiration? I loved Andrea Corpolongo, Ph.D.’s article on how to write better titles for space articles.

Make it relevant

To you, of course your research is the most relevant and interesting thing! However, our readers will benefit from a bit of framing around why they’re going to be interested in it. You can do this in one of two ways:

• Position your research in terms of current events. If you’ve had a strong reaction to an article in the news, for example, based on your research, that’s a great direction to go in.
• Show how your research applies to a more evergreen topic. For example, Dr. Pine uses her expertise to explain how teeth fossils help us understand why human childhood lasts so long.

Include this positioning in the introduction to ensure readers immediately grasp why they should be interested in your work.

Include your authority

Medium readers want to know why they should trust the writer. Sharing your academic expertise — years you spent in your lab, any professional experience, your titles — can help them know why you’re an authority they can rely on.

It’s great to put this in your profile name and bio so readers can see it at a glance when they’re deciding whether to read your article. You can also weave it into your work. This can be explicit — “As a researcher in this subject for five years,” for example — but it doesn’t have to be. As long as your expertise is clear by your familiarity with your subject matter, you’ll build trust with your readers.

For example, Harlan Brothers starts his Medium story by writing, “Back in 2013, I had been thinking about prime numbers and novel ways of searching for hidden patterns in their progression.” This story is adapted from his much more technical paper in World Scientific, “Using IFS to Reveal Biases in the Distribution of Prime Numbers.”

Include (and explain!) any visuals

Feel free to reuse any slides, graphs, or other images from your academic work in your Medium story. Just make sure to explain it clearly — and add alt text to make sure visually impaired readers can still benefit from your visuals.

On Medium, most writers also choose to add a feature image to make their work more eye-catching and help give readers an idea of what their story is about at a glance. These show up on the homepage, app, email digests, and other story feeds. Feel free to grab a royalty-free photo from a site like Unsplash, or use an original image that relates directly to your research.

As an example, check out these simple-but-illustrative images Associate Professor F. Perry Wilson, MD MSCE used to explain why he thinks polygenic risk scores might be unreliable predictors.

Adapt your citation format

Citing your sources is a non-negotiable, rich academic tradition. However, on Medium, readers aren’t as used to having the text interrupted by citation parentheticals. To provide a smoother reader experience, you could opt for hyperlinks, or go for a numerical citation method like this [1] and include your references at the bottom of your story.

Use publications and tags

Medium has a few tools to help make sure your story finds the readers who are most likely to be interested in it: publications and tags.

First, let’s talk about publications. Publications are a great Medium tool to help your story reach its intended audience. Any Medium member can create a publication about any topic they like — and many academics on Medium already have, which you can check out on this list. You can also search through all Medium publications by keyword using the Chill Subs directory. Readers on Medium follow publications to get curated stories about those specific subjects.

If you don’t find a publication that looks like a good fit and think you might publish more than one piece on Medium, you can always create your own publication.

Publications, since they’re run by everyday Medium users, can have unique submission guidelines that vary from pub to pub. When you find a publication you’re interested in, check their submission guidelines to find the best way to be added as a writer. Once you’ve been added, you can submit your story to the pub using the top three dots and “submit to publication.” Here’s a help document with more information.

When you’re ready to submit or publish your story, you’ll have the chance to add five tags that describe what your story is about. That helps inform our recommendation system to guide your story to readers who are most likely to be interested in it. Go broad rather than narrow. For example, if you’re writing about paleontology, use “science” as a tag. You can check out our list of topics for inspiration.

Get feedback from your peers

While Medium doesn’t offer a real peer review, we do have two other sources for getting community input: private notes and comments.

If you want to get feedback on your story before going live, you can share a draft link with a friend. They’ll be able to leave private notes that only you and they can see with any thoughts, suggestions, and questions.

Once your story is published, you might get comments from readers. You can always edit your story after publishing to address anything your commenters brought up, or you can reply in a comment thread with them.

Of course, you’re in full control of your comment section. If you want to turn comments off entirely, that’s up to you. You can also hide individual comments if they’re not adding anything to the conversation.

Share with others

Many academics use Medium as a quick place to publish and then share with their own students, classmates, or peers. You can always post your work on our open platform and share a link to X, via email, or any other social media platform you want.

Decide whether to paywall

When you publish on Medium, you’ll choose whether or not to paywall your story. Our paywall exists because we don’t have ads. Instead, we’re supported by paying members. When a paying Medium member reads a story, a portion of their membership goes to the writer.

If you want your writing to be freely accessible by everyone, don’t paywall it. If you’d like to earn some money for your writing, you can paywall it as long as you’re a Medium member.

You don’t have to choose between the two. If you want to paywall your story but still share it with other friends or family who don’t have Medium membership, you can share your story with a friend link. Anyone with a friend link can bypass the paywall.

Have fun

Last but not least, have fun. Medium readers respond to your genuine passion and interest in your subject. They may not be experts, but they love hearing from people who are.

The academic pieces that do best on Medium are those where your personality comes through and you’re enthused about your research — that enthusiasm is contagious to our readers.

Use cases

Here are some of the kinds of academic writing that can be adapted and repurposed on Medium:

• Chapters or specific ideas from dissertations and theses
• Published work
• An excerpt from your book
• Papers that didn’t end up published
• Papers that were published
• Social media threads
• Lab presentations
• Conference presentations
• An idea you might want to flesh out before you commit to writing a whole paper on it
• A response to work someone else published

In short, almost any kind of writing, published or not, can be turned into a great, valuable Medium story. Hopefully, this guide gives you a starting point and some guidance on how to turn your academic writing into a Medium story.

How to publish your academic writing on Medium was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In T-15 days it will be 2025. Years are artificial, human-created markers of time, but they serve a purpose — they give life shape.

I try to take some time during “dead week” (the week between Christmas and New Year’s) to figure out where I’m going and what I can do better. On Friday, I shared leadership coach Tutti Taygerly’s year-end questionnaire, which is basically a list of journaling prompts. A few: Which relationships of yours grew the most this year? Where did you build unexpected trust? Which behaviors have you let go of?

Inspired by that, I went looking for more succinct ways to take stock of your year. Rochelle Deans suggests looking back through wherever you naturally document your life (texts, sent emails, posts to your social media platform of choice, your photos app) and identifying highlights and lowlights.

Or, if you want a mnemonic, business strategist Dev Singh has a dead-simple acronym, the Four Ls:

• Loved: When did you feel most alive this year? What did you genuinely enjoy?
• Longed: What did you want this year? What didn’t materialize? What disappointed you?
• Loathed: What did you hate? What felt like a waste of time?
• Lessons: What did you learn? What do you still have to learn?

Lastly, in a Medium story from a few years back, executive coach Andrea Mignolo encouraged everyone to write a letter for yourself to read a year from now (i.e., at the end of 2025). There’s really no wrong way to write this. You can tell your future self what you’re committed to, excited about, or nervous about. Seal it up and don’t open it until this time next year.

Whatever your end-of-year ritual (or none), remember: How you end the year is how the next one begins.

— Harris Sockel

📖 2 of my open tabs

• The new rules of media: Most people are less obsessed with “news” and “newness” than journalists think. (One Thing)
• A response to last Wednesday’s issue on ChatGPT’s favorite words, which should really be a Medium post of its own: William Bennett, who taught a course on sci-fi at Tufts, articulates ChatGPT’s Achilles heel better than I could. GPT fails at subtext because subtext depends on “being aware of other selves,” or creating a “we” situation where both you and I have something unspoken at stake.

🥚 Your daily dose of practical wisdom

To boil eggs whose shells slide off elegantly, please for the love of breakfast listen to J. Kenji Lopez Alt, who’s done more tests on egg boiling than anyone. Gently nestle them into about one inch of boiling water and leave them there, lid on, for nine minutes. (This changed my life. I’d been doing it wrong for years.)

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

How to take stock of the year that was was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last Saturday, before we knew the name of the lead suspect in Brian Thompson’s murder, a writer on Medium named Burt came across a flyer for a lookalike contest in downtown New York City. It asked people to come dressed as the United Healthcare CEO assassin, offering the winner a cash prize. Burt figured his jacket looked enough like the one in the news photos and decided to go.

“I felt frustrated with the extensive media coverage of the shooting and the singling out of the shooter considering the recent unsolved white supremacist stabbing of migrants in the city,” he told me when I asked why he went. As Burt describes it, he participated not to glorify the murderer but to critique the media.

On Medium, Burt recounts that none of the contestants celebrated the assassin. Most of them didn’t even really look like him. They responded to journalists facetiously (joking about the event being organized by the FBI and saying Soros paid them to be there, when in reality the organizer was anonymous and never showed up). “It was a quickly formed in-group: you either knew what was up and how blatantly unserious the whole thing was, or you assumed some sort of odd malevolence or antisocial behavior,” Burt writes. Here’s a video. He won the competition.

Later that day, though, the media framed it differently. The New York Post wrote “New Yorkers mockingly celebrated the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO…” The Daily Mail: “Outrage as New York park hosts vile lookalike event…”

I see this pattern a lot: Something relatively innocuous happens and it’s covered in a way that inspires outrage or indignation. At the lookalike contest, in Burt’s experience, eight strangers in hoodies gathered for a pretty uneventful stunt to poke fun at celebrity lookalike culture. The bemused crowd was described as “outraged.” Another example is TPOT, or “This Part of Twitter,” a community of intellectually curious people posting memes about technology and self-optimization on X. It’s mostly innocuous, but since we’ve discovered Luigi Mangione’s association with it, people think the entire movement is suspect.

“Decorum is often a rhetorical and fabricated means for the media [giving them] the right to pretend that they have the higher ground,” writes Burt, reflecting on how his participation in the event was covered.

It’s a predictable pattern, I think. (It’s also a reason to watch less news.) Have you noticed this? Where and how?

— Harris Sockel

💭 One more story: a year-end ritual

I never do this but always promise myself I will: Actually take time to reflect on your year, in writing. This weekend or next, maybe I’ll finally try leadership coach Tutti Taygerly’s year-end ritual. By hand, write your answers to the following questions…

• Work: What are the 3 projects you’re most proud of finishing this year (at work, in life, anywhere)? What would you change if you had to do them again?
• Relationships: Which three of your relationships grew the most this year? Where did you build unexpected trust? Who gave you the most support?
• You: What behaviors have you let go of? Which new ones have you adopted? What negative patterns have you successfully broken? What are you proudest of learning? What new identities have you adopted?

🤍 Worth remembering

“There’s a fine line between taking on a worthwhile challenge and taking on unnecessary stress.” — John Gorman, “Stop Wasting Your Time”

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

Media manipulation, lookalike contests, and fabricated outrage was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re testing an important change that gives publication editors the power to Feature stories to their publication followers. This change is live for many publications today; our goal is to have it available to all publications by the end of the next week.

Each publication will be able to feature stories to their followers. Our system will recommend these stories more highly in Digest emails, on the homepage For You feed, in the publication story page, and anywhere else a publication’s followers see its stories. This gives publication editors a way to use their experience to share the stories they think their readers will find valuable.

Publication editors can feature one story every seven days. If you’re an editor and have more questions about the details of this new feature, we’ve preemptively answered many of them in our help center.

Humans first

We’re building a humans-first platform. This feature is part of our philosophy of building a better internet. Featured Stories are another way that the Medium feed is curated by real humans with subject-matter expertise, not just algorithms.

Medium readers want substance and deeper understanding. It is now common on Medium that the top recommendations for readers have been vetted by at least two humans ahead of you — checking for quality, authenticity, depth, research, impact, and all of the things that make it likely that a story you read here will deepen your understanding of the world. (It’s also this human vetting that does the heroic work of holding back the AI slop from taking over your feeds.)

The bigger picture

When readers come to Medium, we aim to recommend high-quality stories through the human curation that powers our systems. A big part of this is our Boost program, which helps us work directly with publication editors to find great writing across all corners of Medium. More than one million people pay for a Medium membership because they get a reliably great reading experience here.

Our systems are based on human curation because writing is inherently human. That’s what we mean by putting humans first. You write to think and to develop your ideas for readers, not for an algorithm. Reading is just as human. Readers look for good stories in order to better understand the world. When writing is done well — with context, knowledge, and nuance — then a writer’s wisdom passes onto their readers.

But a shared, universal definition of what makes a story good does not exist. Quality is subjective because humans are unique.

Story Featuring is a way to recognize and celebrate the expertise and unique perspectives that editors bring to Medium.

Publications are the heart of community on Medium. Publication editors recognize, curate, and share ideas with their communities. They serve an important role to help connect readers with great writing and help stories find the right audience. Now, they can do that with more power.

At Medium, everything we do connects to humans, from our membership model to our curation systems to our community of readers. What matters isn’t an updated functionality in our product; it’s how you all use these features, and how the stories we all read will change as a result. I used the word test in the introduction of this story because there’s more coming. If you have feedback, we’re listening — leave a response here to share.

Introducing Featured Stories for Publications was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s talk about business models on the internet for a second, shall we?

You might be thinking “dear god, please not that” because the phrase “business model” doesn’t exactly fill the synapses with joy. But so much depends upon a business model, and for the vast majority of internet businesses, there are just two models: Sell things (this can include subscriptions) or sell ads. Many successful companies mix both.

I’m following a thread here that we picked up last in issue #223, discussing the future of social media. Bluesky, one of the fastest growing internet companies out there, doesn’t have a business model yet, but is going to need one soon. They’ve announced they’re starting with subscriptions, but their CEO hasn’t ruled out advertising.

That’s a good thing, as John Battelle argues, depending on what they mean by “advertising.” The biggest internet companies — Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple — are also ad companies with a very specific approach, one that’s given rise to surveillance capitalism and enshittification. And while subscription models are extremely powerful for many businesses (shoutout to the million-plus Medium members who make this company and a better internet possible!), they’re not right for all businesses just on their own. The upside when advertisers, consumers, and companies are aligned can be huge (see every top media company, from Disney to Netflix) though often it’s the consumers who end up getting squeezed out.

To remedy that, Battelle lays out some concrete suggestions for what Bluesky might do:

• Learn from what has (and hasn’t) worked in the past. Put simply, don’t create ads that annoy or confuse people. Ask your users and potential advertisers what they want, and what can work in your context, and study past platforms (e.g., Google AdWords, Twitter Amplify, etc).
• Lean into openness: Center developers and keep the data free.
• Don’t get greedy: Ignore the temptation of massive capital and instead build patiently and sustainably.

What’s interesting about this isn’t just what Bluesky might do (though I’m interested to see that), but what might happen if they do and are successful. Could this usher in a new era of very different advertising online?

— Scott Lamb

✍️ A few short sentences about some great recent stories

• If you’re an academic, finding venues beyond peer reviewed journals to share your research isn’t just good for your own career. It can help attract funding, recruit talent, and help you mentor your students. (Silvia PM, PhD)
• This is reassuring, and I think right: A game expert explains why AI just isn’t good at certain types of puzzles and games. It’s good at prediction, but weak at the associations you must be able to make to succeed at a game like Connections or the crossword. (Sam Liberty)
• TIL: The traditional French Christmas cake, the Bûche de Noël, was inspired by earlier pagan rituals of keeping a log burning during the winter solstice. (Linda Lum)

✨ Your daily dose of practical wisdom on getting good sleep

For better sleep, some slightly counterintuitive advice: Start prepping for sleep from the moment you get up — get outside, get exercise, address your anxiety.

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Harris Sockel & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

Bluesky is considering ads; here’s why that might not be a bad thing was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Following up on last week’s issue re: two years of ChatGPT, I’ve been thinking about something. How do you know, on a word or sentence level, when someone’s used it? What are the tells? What separates “this is kinda formulaic writing” from “this is definitely AI”?

As you may remember from a previous newsletter, GPT loves to “delve.” Its preference for overly formal, vaguely British language is a well-documented result of being trained by workers in Nigeria, where “delve” is used in a business context far more than in the U.S. or anywhere else. A few more tells, via Jordan Gibbs who analyzed 1 million words from the machine and published his results on Medium:

• Tirelessly
• Cannot
• Reimagined
• Intertwine
• Intricate
• Tapestry
• Expanse
• Kaleidoscopic

A more recent analysis corroborates these findings, and adds a few more words. Pivotal. Vital. Comprehensive. ChatGPT also imitates certain syntax patterns common among smart-sounding writing, like em dashes and colons in titles.

There’s a deeper pattern I’ve noticed, though: ChatGPT can’t write well in first-person. By “well” I don’t just mean clearly. I mean the type of first-person writing where you feel like there’s a real human behind the words. (This is a great example of writing that felt 100% human to me.) One way humans do that — show other people we’re human, not automatons — is by telling jokes, but ChatGPT kind of fails at being funny. I mean, it’s fine at dad jokes (one-liners, puns, predictable humor) but it’s terrible at a type of humor that is uniquely human: subtext. Humor that says more than what words alone convey. An example: Sarah Cooper’s 10 tricks to appear smart in meetings, which communicates nuanced subtext about corporate conformity.

Journalist Will Lockett writes: “As ChatGPT doesn’t actually know what it is writing, it can’t have the self-aware, helicopter view of writing needed to create great subtext.” ChatGPT might be able to riff on a theme, but it doesn’t have the societal and self-awareness to come up with those themes in the first place.

— Harris Sockel

🖋️ Also today: Nikki Giovanni. Sora. Luigi.

• Nikki Giovanni — poet, teacher, activist, and Grammy nominee — passed away on Monday. She was 81. At the peak of her career, in the ’60s and ’70s, Giovanni openly admitted that most people don’t read poetry, so she recorded her 1971 debut album, Truth Is on Its Way, with a Gospel choir. “At the time,” writes Duke Professor Mark Anthony Neal, “I didn’t fully understand the genius of Giovanni’s vision — she was blatantly trying to bring the profane in conversation with the sacred, two decades before Kirk Franklin and later Kanye West would bring ghetto theodicy to the top of the pop charts.”
• OpenAI launched a new tool, Sora, that allows you to input a few sentences and generate a video. We can all be filmmakers now, even without a camera. (Maybe we’ll feed a few of these newsletters to Sora so you can… watch them?)
• Luigi Mangione — suspected UnitedHealth CEO assassin — emailed a friend earlier this year to rail against the lack of civil disobedience in Japan, which seems foreboding (to me).

✨ Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on creativity

A gem from one of my favorite books (which I really need to read again), Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks: “When you no longer demand perfection from your creative work, your relationships, or anything else, that’s when you’re free to plunge energetically into them.”

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

ChatGPT’s favorite words & punctuation was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s rewind to 1876. On Valentine’s Day that year, a quirky inventor in Boston submitted a patent for what would become the phone. He wasn’t the only one—Elisha Gray submitted a similar patent the same day, and contested Bell’s. Patents in the late 1800s grew nearly 400% (and so did patent litigation).

That was the beginning of the Gilded Age (roughly 1870 to 1900 in the U.S.), a period of explosive economic, cultural, and technological change in nearly every dimension of life. New tools changed how we connect, communicate, and make art: the telephone, phonograph, trains, cars, the Kodak camera. The creators of these tools (or those who built infrastructure to help them scale) lived in Gothic villas with armies of staff that insulated them from the world. The top 4,000 families in the U.S. were as rich as everyone else combined.

Today, instead of the telephone and phonograph, we have lightning-fast user-generated video and AI-enhanced art. Instead of The Breakers, industry titans live in hyperminimalist glass-and-concrete mansions in northern California. Global income inequality is even more pronounced than it was 150 years ago. In the U.S., income inequality is higher than in any of the G7 nations. The divide between the <1% and everyone else is getting wider.

Mark Twain, who coined the term “Gilded Age” in an 1870s satirical novel, chose the word “gilded” instead of “gold” to signify that the sheen was only skin deep, like body paint instead of lasting wealth. Underneath the surface of progress and glamour, a lot of people were unhappy and angry. Anarchists expressed their rage by throwing bombs and assassinating industrialists. Railroad workers went on strike, and so did farmers.

The parallels between then and now, once you’re aware of them, are hard to unsee: lookalike contests (a form of cheap entertainment that imitates/idolizes people in power) in place of small-town Vaudeville impersonators; the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson and its revolution-tinged fallout, an echo of the attempted assassination of anti-union steel magnate Henry Clay Frick by a labor activist; the rise of labor unions — which some credit as helping to end the first Gilded Age.

I’m borrowing some of this argument from sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Is this what it feels like to live through the second Gilded Age?

— Harris Sockel

⚡ 1 story, 1 sentence

• ChatGPT is known to evade questions about names appearing on U.S. terrorism watch lists. (Cassie Kozyrkov)
• The idea that “55% of communication is nonverbal” took off 20 years ago, but it’s a misinterpretation of experiment results — and as it turns out, the importance of nonverbal communication changes based on context. (Elaine Hilides)
• I love this ode to minuscule, make-or-break details by software engineer John Salvatier: “The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understand for success.”

🧠 Your daily dose of practical wisdom

Everything you write deserves three rounds of edits. The first round is for you, second round is for your fans, and third round is for your haters. (Neil Strauss via Tony Stubblebine)

Deepen your understanding every day with the Medium Newsletter. Sign up here.

Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis

Questions, feedback, or story suggestions? Email us: tips@medium.com

Like what you see in this newsletter but not already a Medium member? Read without limits or ads, fund great writers, and join a community that believes in human storytelling.

The second Gilded Age: Why the 2020s feel like the 1890s was originally published in The Medium Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.