Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Does Facebook Make You Depressed?

Against the surge of reports “proving” that social media leads to anxiety and depression comes a thorough, peer-reviewed study of more than a million people across 72 countries. The research reviews more than a decade of data and finds “no evidence suggesting that the global penetration of social media is associated with widespread psychological harm.” Worth reposting:

Empirical evidence for harms due to social media is, on balance, more speculative than conclusive. Recent results on the associations between social media use and well-being are mixed and depend on arbitrary analytic choices. Other studies have reported that there have been few if any changes in associations linking technology use to mental health in this period of social media's global adoption. A general lack of validated measures, poorly specified causal models, and inadequate data have yielded a large number of low-quality studies.

2. The Headline Is the Punchline

The founder of The Onion describes the single insight that turned the satirical paper from another humor column to a viral sensation:

Before The Onion, way too much humor writing was presented as a big block of gray copy. Why would anyone be incentivized to read that? The headline wasn’t even funny. The funny part was the punchline at the end.  And I thought, “No, you’ve got to flip that.” You have to make the headline funny, and then everything after that should get funnier and funnier. So, if you just want to read the headline, get a chuckle, and go about your day, God bless you. But if you want to read on, we’re going to make that as easy for you as possible, and we’re going to reward you by making the jokes funnier the further you go. It’s all about rolling out the red carpet for the reader to make it easy for them to come into this.

3. How to Work with Me

Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of the wildly successful payment company Stripe, has written a book filled with recommendations on how to lead teams and grow companies. One piece of advice that stands out: bosses should write and share memos on “how I want you to work with me.” She describes it in an interview with Elad Gill:

I think that founders should write a guide to working with them. It would be one of the pieces I’m describing, to clarify the founder’s role: “What do I want to be involved in? When do I want to hear from you? What are my preferred communication modes? What makes me impatient? Don’t surprise me with X.” That’s super powerful. Because the problem is, people learn it in the moment, and by then it’s too late.

4. Another Great Wall of China

China is isolating itself, writes Ian Johnson in a powerful broadside in Foreign Affairs. He chides the economists who argue that “if only Beijing would tweak its economic management, it could mitigate the worst outcomes.” He sees a much deeper problem:

What most analysis overlooks is the extent to which Chinese economic problems are part of a broader process of political ossification and ideological hardening. For anyone who has observed the country closely over the past few decades, it is difficult to miss the signs of a new national stasis, or what Chinese people call neijuan. Often translated as “involution,” it refers to life twisting inward without real progress. The government has created its own universe of mobile phone apps and software, an impressive feat but one that is aimed at insulating Chinese people from the outside world rather than connecting them to it.

5. Power to Some People

There is no single villain responsible for spiraling costs of concert tickets – not Ticketmaster, reselling sites, or bots. Pitchfork takes a broad look at summer ticket prices and concludes with the bitter fact that live music is simply no longer for the masses:

 The high-profile debate over scoring tickets reflects a stark reality around class divide in the United States in particular: While somebody out there could expect to pay as much as $43,622 for a single Drake ticket, fewer than two in three Americans would be able to pay a $400 emergency expense in cash, and nearly 75 percent of millennials live paycheck to paycheck. Are pop tours still a populist artform when large swaths of average music fans can no longer afford to attend them?

The piece is filled with excellent, if depressing, infographics on ticket prices. 

6. The Ideological Hegemony of a Bifurcated Barbieland?

Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College, fellow of the British Academy, and author of legendary books on strategy, offers his take on – that’s right – the Barbie movie. Parody or hot take?

The story picks up on important themes in contemporary strategic literature, such as the emphasis on narrative and the value of an ideological hegemony as opposed to brute force in sustaining a durable political system. Barbieland, as depicted in the movie, is sharply bifurcated between the female Barbies and the male Kens. The females enjoy constitutional control, in charge of both the presidency and the judiciary. It can, however, be noted that this is largely role-playing as in the absence of any social, economic and political change, these roles do not actually require decision-making and the exercise of power. They are there to show that a matriarchy is possible rather than demonstrate one in action.

Websites Worth Reading

Comment Is Freed: Strategy and policy substack

The Melt: Old classics substack

First iMac Launch Presentation: 25th anniversary of the iMac

Feeds We Follow

@chughesjohnson: Stripe’s former Chief Operating Officer

@exploreorg: Great grizzly bear cam

@TheTennisLetter: How to follow the US Open