The Everything Sunday Digest

This week’s Everything Sunday Digest is sponsored by the Techmeme Ride Home podcast, the daily tech news podcast of record. Click here to subscribe, or just search “Techmeme Ride Home” in your podcast app of choice! As long-time fans of the show, we’re thrilled to have them as our first ever sponsor :)

Hello and happy Sunday! 

We’re continuing our Sunday Digest experiment with another round of rankings of everything we published this week. We also have some reading suggestions from the team at the end!

Do you like the new Sunday digest format? Do you hate it? We’d love to hear from you! Please let us know what you think using the feedback form at the end of this email.

Enjoy!

What we published this week

We published 5 new articles this week totaling ~9,000 words, an update to a file organization system, and two podcast episodes.

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This Week’s Top Posts

(Ranked by the % of people who said the post was “amazing” in our feedback forms.)

1. ⚡️New for Members: Sparkle v. 0.6, by Dan Shipper in Superorganizers (903 words)
   
2. 📐Uber and Lyft Live Once Again by Adam Keesling in Napkin Math (1,958 words)
   

3. 💞#23 - Designing our visual identity 🎧, by Dan Shipper & Nathan Baschez in Talk Therapy (41 min)

4. 💝 The Art of Unbundling, with Greg Isenberg, by Li Jin & Nathan Baschez in Means of Creation (1,126 words)

5. 💞#24 - Are we a media or tech company? 🎧, by Dan Shipper & Nathan Baschez in Talk Therapy (15 min)

6. 🔮 Instagram can’t recreate TikTok’s magic, by Neer Sharma & Nathan Baschez in Divinations (2,313 words)

7. ⚡️How the Head of Growth at Superhuman Does His Email, by Dan Shipper and Ephrat Livni in Superorganizers (3,103 words)

⚡️ Reading suggestions from Superorganizers

What Is an Emotion? William James’s Revolutionary 1884 Theory of How Our Bodies Affect Our Feelings, by Maria Popova in Brain Pickings (1,471 words)

Palantir: On Business, Cults, and Politics, by Barry Schwartz in The Diff (3,580 words)

You want people to do the right thing? Save them the guilt trip, by Claudia R Schenider in Psyche (1,227 words)

“As the son of a Jewish mother I’m always interested in the positive and negative effects of guilt in my life — so this article was an interesting eye opener for me. If you want to motivate someone, it’s much better to use positive reinforcement than it is to use guilt.”

Video of the week: You’ve Got a Friend in Me: Violin Cover in The Awesomer

Tech News Story of the Week: TikTok and... Walmart?

Sponsored by — and excerpted from — the Techmeme Ride Home podcast

First, we thought it was crazy when Microsoft wanted to buy TikTok. Then, we thought it was crazy when Oracle wanted to buy TikTok. Now, we’re hearing that Wal-Mart is very serious about it as well, leading us to question the current nature of our reality.

The reporting here is a bit confused: Wal-Mart’s current goal is to team up with Microsoft in their bid for TikTok, but before that, we’re hearing that Wal-Mart wanted to put together a consortium that would allow it to own the app and be the exclusive e-commerce and payments provider inside TikTok.

But Wal-Mart’s dream was shot down by the U.S. government, who wanted the lead buyer of TikTok to be a technology company, because that would “better fit with its national-security rationale for forcing [a sale].”

For more on this story, and the rest of this week’s most important tech news, listen to the Techmeme Ride Home podcast!

About the Techmeme Ride Home podcast

When the New Yorker magazine asked Mark Zuckerberg how he gets his news he said the one news source he definitely follows is Techmeme. (Also, the New Yorker did not ask, but just so you know, Nathan Baschez also loves it.)

For more than two years and nearly 700 episodes, The Techmeme Ride Home has been Silicon Valley’s favorite tech news podcast. Click here to subscribe, or just search “Techmeme Ride Home” in your podcast app of choice!

How did you feel about this week’s digest?

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This issue was written by Saanya Jain and edited by Nathan Baschez. Thanks, and see you next Sunday :)