PicoBlog

When beginning a long journey down the Mississippi River, paddlers are greeted by an iconic sign. It reads: Here 1475 ft above the ocean the Mighty Mississippi begins to flow on its winding way 2552 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. The problem with this sign: it’s incorrect. The Mississippi River is not 2,552 miles long, and it hasn’t been since the 1930s. The modern Mississippi River is over 200 miles shorter than what the sign indicates!

This Newsletter is free for everyone. I send this email to you weekly. If you would also like to receive it, join the 10,000 other learners today.  Don’t want to read this article? Listen via podcast instead on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. Before 2016 I had never thought of meditating. I didn’t know much about it and sort of guessed it was for hippies or some ultra-religious tradition for monks, and not for a normal guy like me.

Alex Bantock of Preoptima recently asked, “How much is 1 tonne of carbon dioxide?” which, like my title, is kind of obvious: a tonne. The problem is, how do you describe something so literally nebulous as a cloud of CO2? How do you get people to understand how big and heavy it is? Preoptima tried it with volume, a big cube of gas, but also with weight, comparing it to grand pianos and walruses.

You’re reading Wait, Really? — a newsletter unpacking what's in the culture, with a feminist spin. Want to get it in your inbox? Sign up below. When longtime pals Marjorie Ingall and Susan McCarthy started a blog tracking public apologies a decade ago, it seemed the word “sorry” was having a moment. This was the heyday of the political sex scandal: Anthony Weiner had been caught sexting with underage girls; Eliot Spitzer was linked to a high-end prostitution ring; Mark “I was hiking the Appalachian Trail” Sanford, former governor of South Carolina, tearfully admitted to cheating on his wife after turning up with another woman in Argentina.

Note: You are receiving this email because you subscribed to my newsletter. You can unsubscribe anytime by scrolling to the bottom of this email and clicking the unsubscribe link. Hi everyone! I won't tell you what I was watching, but the other day I saw something that sparked this question in me: How do octopuses mate with each other? However you think they're doing it, you're probably wrong—unless you're a Marine biologist and know the answer.

You might be wondering how often you should change guitar strings? The most common advice is to change your guitar strings every three months. I like to round up to 100 days to make it more of a milestone. Changing strings usually involves a trip to a music store, plenty of browsing, getting distracted and maybe a little excited before finally making a decision. Because it’s an infrequent chore, restringing usually ends up being the highlight of my day.

On January 11, 2024, NISA announced their newest expansion club into the league: Georgia Lions FC. NISA Executive Vice President Josh Prutch vouched for the new team as an “established organization that is well-led, well-run, and well-connected in the community”. And at the time of the announcement, every indication from the club seemed to prove that he was correct. The club grew from the East Atlanta Dutch Lions USL2 club, previously East Atlanta FC, in Conyers, Georgia.

Note to readers: I’ve broadened the Expanding Dan Podcast to include audio stories in addition to music mixes. Before launching the podcast, I had published two audio stories: the first featured Michael McDonald on his origins with Steely Dan (that one also includes a video); in the other, Elliott Randall discussed his “Reelin’ in the Years” solo. In this one, drummer Ed Greene talks about “I Got the News.” Enjoy!By the time he was summoned to a Los Angeles recording studio at the behest of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, Ed Greene had become one of the most in-demand session drummers in the world, owing to his masterful ability to lay down deep grooves with remarkable R&B feel.

Welcome back to the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast. Wealth managers are increasingly participating in private markets, and for good reason. Today’s podcast is with an expert allocator in the alts space, Phil Huber, who has not only been actively investing in private markets as the CIO of $18B Savant Wealth, but has also authored a book about how advisors can approach private markets. This podcast is a must-listen for any allocator, particularly in the wealth management space, as Phil shares actionable insights for how LPs can go about building a strategy for investing in private markets and how GPs and alternative asset managers can work with the private wealth space.