Worthwhile Content: June 2025
Some worthwhile reads, watches, and listens from the last month
World of Work:
This past month, I explained how to conduct your own Mini 360 review, wrote a two-part series on what happens to your brain when you lose your cool at work and what you can do about it, and published my piece on Unicorn Syndrome that I’d been writing for months. It was great to get such a warm response to the Unicorn piece — thank you!
Some other worthwhile content from June includes:
A study of call center employees in Turkey found positive benefits in remote work. I hesitate to draw conclusions as this sample doesn’t generalize to most jobs. However, one finding that I think is worthwhile was that in-person training at the start of remote employment led to greater productivity and lower turnover. There’s something there.
Shoutout to my friend Alix Pollack who recently led a team of noteworthy researchers and published impressive work on the risks to organizations that are now retreating from their DEI efforts.
A Welsh company that was already utilizing a four-day work week schedule has doubled-down on autonomy, letting employees schedule any 32 hours they want each week. It’s a neat experiment. While I’ve banged the one-size-does-not-fit-all drum when it comes to workplace policy (and I’ll continue to do so!), I strongly believe more organizations can and should move to four-day work weeks.
In this (potentially paywalled) article for The Economist, the folks at Culture X showcase a massive study comparing employee ratings of company leadership with company culture. You can look up the results for over 900 firms. Spoiler: I would not want to work at Hooters.
I don’t typically read Psychology Today, but this article Do Mindful Narcissists Exist? caught my attention and is worth yours. It’s a helpful reminder that there are different kinds of narcissism.
This intentionally-redundant survey is part of an exploratory factor analysis. If you have 10-15 minutes, I'd so appreciate it. It isn't hard or too long, just redundant by design. Thank you to the 40+ people who have already completed it!
AI & Work
This article in The Cut isn’t about AI, but I think it has interesting implications for the intelligence of machines. The title says enough: How Only Being Able to Use Logic to Make Decisions Destroyed a Man’s Life.
If you’re worried about AI coming for your job (hint: me), this article from the New York Times with 22 new jobs that AI could create may help lift your spirits.
I absolutely loved this piece, Critique of Pure Reasoning Models, from
. It brought me way back to sophomore epistemology class with a fascinating twist on a classic question: Are LLM outputs actually creating a priori new knowledge? The answer probably hinges on one’s agreement with Kant’s defense of the synthetic a priori. Okay, okay… sorry for nerding out and showing off. (Narrator: He wasn’t sorry).If you’re thinking about which AI tool to use,
‘s occasional quick guide is a lifesaver. Bookmark this one.When I think about whether AI can act like (or sufficiently mimic) humans, I often think back to this famous essay: What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, written in 1974.
General Interest
I really liked this episode of Star Talk (Neil Degrasse Tyson’s podcast) on the connection between your stomach and your brain. Your stomach does a lot of thinking. Which helps explain why I’d get such bad stomach aches before important* (*relatively speaking) athletic competitions.
I enjoyed this piece in The Atlantic about what it really means to score high on IQ tests. IQ tests are odd measures of one facet of intelligence and high scores are given mythical status in our achievement culture. By the way, when your friend tells you about someone with an IQ of 145, don’t believe them.
This was a really enjoyable episode of the Uncomfortable Conversations podcast about “The Gamefication of Everything” with
. Highly worth a listen.My dear friend Matt Fitzgerald is now on Substack. You should subscribe to his Substack and first check out this cool piece where he announces that he’s publishing the novel his father worked on for over 40 years. I already pre-ordered my copy.
Musings
Not enough musing lately! Turns out, we didn’t sell our house. So still working on that! But we are moving in early August, which has taken up most of my bandwidth. Hope to be musing more soon.
I’ve been really enjoying my week-long social media sabbaticals, the first week of every month! Join me starting today. Just delete your apps and reinstall them in a week. You won’t regret it.