Alex Blumberg: Your Best Selling Points Are the Mistakes You've Made

Startups often have "creation myths" about their early days. But real life is much messier than that. To prove this, former This American Life producer Alex Blumberg recorded nearly every painstaking moment in creating his new podcasting company, Gimlet Media. With plenty of audio examples, Blumberg highlights the ups and downs of turning your creative art into a business, culminating in a cringe-worthy pitch to a venture capitalist.

"The story that you tell, it's like you're killing it all the time," says Blumberg. "But deep inside every single person who has ever tried to start a business, I'm sure, has had a pitch like that—if not worse."

How to Sound Design Your Life

The Foley Artist sees a master sound designer at work on a fashion film. If you’ve ever wanted to see the chasm between the finished product and the extraordinary lengths taken to produce it, this short is for you. 

The Fracking of Attention

Martin Weigel, Head of Planning at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, has written a keenly observed essay on the role we play everyday in, well, fracking people's attentions: 

So attention is personal – what we attend to defines our reality.

Attention is finite – it is a scarce and thus valuable resource – not just to those who wish to monetise it, but to those to whom it belongs.

And attention is hackable – the world is overpopulated with those skilled in the art of capturing and redirecting attention for their own purposes.

Surely then, we have a responsibility – dare one say, an ethical duty – to the audience.

And to the attention we see to hack.

We Are Internet: A Series Featuring 17 Visionaries & Their Perspectives On The Future Of Media & The Internet

We Are Internet: a series about how the futures of media are being reinvented. The series begins today.

Does Watching Good TV Make You a Better Person?

Melissa Dahl in The Science of Us, reports on a study that complements a previous one that asserted that reading novels also made you more empathetic: 

If you ever feel vaguely guilty about the vast amounts of television you watch, might I suggest you cling to the findings of this study, published last week in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. In it, the authors claim that watching high-quality television dramas — things like Mad Men or The West Wing — can increase your emotional intelligence. That is, watching good TV makes you more empathetic.