John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged media · everything

perell.com

50 Ideas That Changed My Life

This is a collection of fifty conceptual frameworks and decision-making principles spanning economics, psychology, physics, and strategy—designed as mental models to improve thinking and life decisions. The ideas range from logical concepts like Occam's Razor and opportunity cost to behavioral insights like preference falsification and mimetic desire, arranged to illustrate how understanding systems, human nature, and hidden patterns can reveal overlooked opportunities and avoid common pitfalls. The author presents these as guiding principles that sharpen critical thinking by revealing what's counterintuitive, hidden in plain sight, or systematically ignored by conventional wisdom.

Permalink productivityphilosophycreativityadvice

www.nytimes.com

How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World

Rupert Murdoch suffered a serious spinal injury in January 2018 that forced his adult children to contemplate succession for the first time, raising questions about who would control his sprawling global media empire and its outsized political influence across the English-speaking world. The piece traces how Murdoch built this empire by using his outlets to support favored political candidates and then leveraging those relationships to remove regulatory obstacles to his expansion, a formula his father Keith pioneered in Australia and that Rupert perfected across Britain and America, particularly through Fox News's role in amplifying right-wing populism including Trump's rise. The narrative reveals deep tensions between Murdoch's sons—the idealistic, centrist James who wanted to modernize the company and his more conservative older brother Lachlan, whom Murdoch ultimately favored—and explains how the controlling family trust structure means that Murdoch's death would trigger a power struggle that could reshape global politics.

Permalink united statespoliticsbusinessfamily

www.buzzfeednews.com

The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time

The 2010s marked the shift from the internet as a discrete destination to an omnipresent algorithmic feed woven into daily life, with platforms like Instagram and Twitter replacing chronological timelines with engagement-based algorithms that fundamentally altered how information, politics, and culture reach us. This transformation—enabled by smartphones, streaming services, and social media's evolution—created a disorienting temporal experience where past and present collapse, making figures like Trump the ideal vessel for such a system while spawning cultural backlash (vintage watches, vinyl records, digital detox rhetoric) that ultimately fails because the internet has become inseparable from physical reality. The essay argues that what defines the decade isn't any single technology but the complete merger of our online and offline identities, creating a perpetual state of algorithmic fragmentation that keeps us perpetually scrolling, reacting, and unable to escape.

Permalink social mediatechnologyculturestreaming

The Atlantic

Inside the Meltdown at CNN

Tim Alberta's profile chronicles Chris Licht's troubled tenure as CNN's new leader, examining his ambitious but largely failed effort to reorient the network toward ideological centrism and win back Republican audiences. Through extensive reporting and interviews, Alberta documents how Licht's grand pronouncements about fixing CNN's perceived liberal bias alienated his own newsroom while failing to attract the conservative viewers he courted, culminating in a disastrous May 2023 Trump town hall that showcased his strategic miscalculations. The piece portrays a well-intentioned but isolated executive caught between his corporate overseers' demands and his staff's open hostility, ultimately revealing the limits of one man's ability to reshape a major news organization through force of will alone.

Permalink politicsnewsbusinessmedia

Baekdal

Print vs. iPad vs. Web (by @baekdal) #analysis

The piece argues that iPad magazine apps, including the Wired app it praises for its visual design but criticizes for overloading the reader, are still print magazines in digital form and miss what the iPad could be. The author contends the iPad is "the next web," a mobile, live, connected medium, and that publishers should stop treating it as a new printing surface. The closing argument is that Apple's closed ecosystem (monthly downloads, locked-in sharing, iAds, Ping) works against that connected future, so the real shift is from disconnected to connected rather than from paper to screen.

Permalink designmediadigitalipad

SB Nation

EDSBS » 52 REASONS ESPN/ABC/DISNEY SUCKS

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Permalink entertainmentsportsmediacriticism