Hello! It’s Victor! Happy Sunday! Here are links that kept me busy this month.
Mundanely interesting
- It’s raining newsletters (allelujah). Short of a looming “newsletter fatigue” mentioned by the article which hasn’t happened yet, the engagement in readership and feedback feels really different than social media. Chatting with friends after they’ve read my newsletter sometimes feels like the resurgence of an Internet Club, the link-sharing equivalent of a book club. It may be time to bring webrings back!
- Sexualisation is in the eye of the beholder: Amber Thomas made an excellent analysis of dress codes in US school handbooks. To the surprise of no one, they are disproportionately targeted at girls rather than boys, put the onus on them at the detriment of their education, and are truly the ones that sexualise students before most think of it.
- The CIA have developed a template list of questions to think about a problem from new angles. It’s been turned into a generic brainstorming techniques sheet, which is actually very versatile and worth printing next to your desk for helping you think about any kind of problem. It’s varied, and sometimes more efficient than to keep asking why.
- One of the perks for full-time employees at my other job is unlimited holidays. In results-oriented workplaces, the reasoning is that “if we don’t track the time you spend working, then why would we track the time you don’t?”. It’s a common perk for tech startups, but also at larger companies (chiefly Netflix, Evernote and Virgin America). And it's not just by charity to attract hires, but also to encourage creativity and prevent burnout: “By the time you need a vacation, it’s too late,” says the CEO of Buffer. “In the western world, we go to the doctor when we’re ill. Eastern medicine promotes the idea of going to the doctor when you’re healthy, to talk about preventative care, things we can keep improving. That’s the method I’ve started to think about for vacation. I want to plan ahead so I don’t ever want to fully deplete myself.”
- But does it work? Buffer in fact found out that this holiday policy (or rather, the lack of one) meant that people took less time off than they would have otherwise. The complete lack of guidance meant people were afraid to take more holidays and be perceived as slacking off more than peers, and there is an untold expectation behind “unlimited”. Nobody thinks taking 75% of your year off would be reasonable, but what is actually reasonable and expected is actually a range which varies by person and culturally (Americans take significantly less holidays than in France or Sweden for example, which can be an issue in remote global teams).
They ended up solving this by replacing it with a minimum holidays policy, and after a year worked out the numbers and how to make it work.
- FullContact even ran the experiment of actually paying employees $7,500 once a year to go on holidays somewhere, under the condition you actually go on holiday and log off from work. One of the benefits, they claim, is an incentive to reduce the “hero syndrome” from constant presence and encourage constant documentation.
- Gaze at this sentence for just about sixty seconds and then explain what makes it quite different from the average sentence.
- hint: watch Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek's fun TV quiz game.
- The YouTube series Borders by Johnny Harris/Vox is excellent, covering displacement, cultures, fences, heartbreaks, odd stories from different places.
- It’s Brexit month! With opinions over how to reach the optimum “satisfied populists/low fuckup” ratio dividing parties a little bit more every day, now is a good time to remake the case against “sensible” politics.

Wikipedia is the best website
- A list of redundant place names, with favourites like Mississippi River (big river river), Soviet Union (union union), River Avon (river river), Sahara desert (desert desert). Scottish readers will know the Dundee Law Hill (hill hill) and Eas Fors Waterfall (waterfall waterfall waterfall).