This morning I’m enjoying Seth Godin’s classic on Customer Service. Hat tip: Andrew Spittle.

This week I spoke with TechCrunch about one facet of distributed work that differs from physical offices — the idea of “office politics.” I can’t claim that distributed work will solve everyone’s personal differences, but I do think it relieves some of the pressures that might come from forced cohabitation and environments that are prone to interruption. They also have some great points from Jason Fried and and Wade Foster.

• The Atlantic on today’s masculinity being stifling and imagining a better boyhood.
  
• When Deportation is a Death Sentence is one of the most devastating articles I’ve read in a long time.
  
• A review of the Cy Twombly show, he has an amazing museum in Houston and I enjoy learning more about him.
  
• The Great Anthropologists: Margaret Mead, so fascinating.
  
• Dating columnist reveals how ‘Sex and the City’ ruined her life, has a happy ending.
  
• Barbearians at the Gate “A journey through a quixotic New Hampshire town teeming with libertarians, fake news, guns, and—possibly—furry invaders.” Amazing.
  
• Lena Dunham Explores Alone Time After a Break-Up
  
• My Adventures with the Trip Doctors, aka “Michael Pollan takes psychedelics.” See also: Interview with Longreads.
  
• Kanye West and Why the Myth of “Genius” Must Die.
  
• Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds, also well-covered in a great book I just finished, Black Box Thinking.
  
• Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll — wow.
  
• The Work Required to Have an Opinion, wisdom from Charlie Munger.

You probably haven’t thought much about beer cans, Abstract Aluminum Space, the Midwest Premium, and how it all ties into Goldman Sachs, so you should read how the Goldman Sachs aluminum conspiracy lawsuit is over.

I really enjoyed Tom Critchlow's post Small b blogging.

Kinsey Wilson is joining Automattic to run WordPress.com. Poynter covers the news and has a great interview with Kinsey.

Next to the very real news of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU issues, it was lovely to come across Ken Shirriff's story of getting past password protection on some old Xerox Alta disk packs from the 1970s.

As further proof for why 2018 is going to be the year of blogging, two of the comments are from people who actually know about the old disks!

"I designed chips at PARC as a summer intern. You have a couple of disks from Doug Fairbairn, who was also in Lynn Conway's group."

and

I'm flabbergasted. That's my Alto disk you broke into!

The APL stuff is surely related to some work I did with Leo Guibas, showing why lazy evaluation would be a really good idea for implementing APL: see Compilation and delayed evaluation in APL, published January 1978. (That paper gives me an enviable Erdős number of 3, since Leo is a 2.) I'm sure it's not a complete APL implementation, just a proof of concept. It happens that my very first part-time job at PARC, in 1973, involved writing decision analysis software in APL — on a timesharing system!

Given the AATFDAFD hint, I'd guess the real password is ADDATADFAD. This derives from a project I did with Jef Raskin at UCSD in 1974. (He mentioned it in this interview.) The Data General Nova we were working with produced some garbled message with ADDATADFAD where it should have said ADDITIONAL, and it was a running joke ever after. Strange, the things that occupy some brain cells for over 40 years.

Thanks for an amusing blast from the past.

— Doug Wyatt (Xerox PARC 1973-1994)

Fast Company Design has written Tech Has A Diversity Problem–So This Designer Went To Kentucky, about John Maeda's work pairing some of the top designers in the world with students in Paintsville, Kentucky. 

In the lead-up to WordCamp US we're in right now I chatted with Brian Krogsgard at Post Status in an hour podcast and we spoke about the core releases this year, Gutenberg, React, WooCommerce, and WordPress.org. On the 29th I'll be talking to WP Tavern, so tune in then as well. For something completely different, I was on the new OFF RCRD podcast with Cory Levy about the earliest days at Automattic and entrepreneurship.

Nautilus Magazine has an interesting look at the question of Is Matter Conscious? Worth reading to learn what the word "panpsychism" means. Hat tip: John Vechey.

The illustrious Chance the Rapper was looking for a new intern.

I'm looking for an intern, someone with experience in putting together decks and writing proposals

— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) March 27, 2017

Some people responded with regular resumes, replying as images, but Negele “Hopsey” Hospedales decided to make a website on WordPress.com:

https://twitter.com/Hospey/status/846612517723947008

The happy ending is written up in Billboard: he got the gig and went on tour with Chance. Hospey wrote a great article on it himself: How To Work For Your Favourite Rapper.

I’m glad the New York Times is covering how to safely cut an avocado, because I’ve messed that up 100% of the time I’ve tried to handle an avocado in the past month. It makes you almost want to forgive them for that green pea guacamole thing.

As a computer accessory enthusiast, I’m excited that Verge did an in-depth profile of Anker, which makes some of the best chargers, cables, and batteries around. It also makes me more curious about the story behind Aukey and Jackery.

My colleague Sara has reached one million words posted to our internal sites, and has some tips for distributed work and communication. I just checked my stats, I’m only at 867k.

Dave Winer has one rule that matters and a number of other good points on making standards and protocols.

Inc. writes The Job Interview Will Soon Be Dead. Here’s What the Top Companies Are Replacing It With, and looks at how our brains mislead us in interviews and how Menlo Innovations and Automattic approach it.

Joseph O’Neill has an amazing and funny poetry-related short story Pardon Edward Snowden in the New Yorker which pokes fun at itself quite a bit.

You might need a reason to smile today. If so, Kanye’s poem for Frank Ocean’s Boys Don’t Cry zine, illustrated by Dami Lee at the Verge, might be that reason.

“Putting a computer in your brain is no longer science fiction.” Pretty awesome work from (WordPress-powered) Bryan Johnson and Theodore Berger, (WP-powered) Kernel.