Desperate to Be Micro-Famous

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Desperate to Be Micro-Famous   The pivotal scene in Kristoffer Borgli’s black comedy, “Sick of Myself,” is one that, in any other film, would be a frightening harbinger of what’s to come. We see Signe, a fashionable young barista from Oslo (played by Kristine Kujath Thorp), making a coffee during her shift. She glances down at her arm and notices a grizzly rash beginning to crawl up the inside of her elbow, as if she has been infected by the Cordyceps-ravaged zombies from “The Last of Us.” But, in this satire of tech-addled millennial and Zoomer culture, the rash is auspicious, a sign of triumph. The unusual skin condition will be Signe’s ticket to a kind of micro-celebrity that she’s been desperately striving for; she has inflicted the rash upon herself. Borgli has created in Signe a stand-in for a generation who will literally do anything, to the point of self-mutilation, to achieve notoriety.Signe’s quest for attention has been prompted by her live-in boyfriend, Thomas (Eirik Sæther), a fine artist who has recently gained an elevated status. He is showing at prestigious galleries, receiving interest from major institutions, and being featured on the cover of magazines. He’s reached a level of niche acclaim that Signe shamelessly desires, and Thomas compounds her insecurities by neglecting her as he becomes increasingly ensnared in the trappings of his career. One day, despondent and deprived of validation, Signe reads a tabloid report about a prescription drug with a sedative effect that also causes a grotesque skin condition. When she gets ahold of the black-market medication, she starts taking huge quantities in secret, until the symptoms set in and the skin condition begins to ravage her upper body. Though Signe’s antics, in the not too distant past, would have been considered a cut-and-dried case of Munchausen syndrome, they can now be understood as a response to the modern pressure to brand oneself. Continued here

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The Double Flame: Octavio Paz on Love   Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.We love to forget ourselves, but also to remember what we are: mortal creatures lustful of meaning, radiant with life, eternally alone and eternally longing for home — home in ourselves and home in each other. “I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other,” Rilke wrote in his exquisite reckoning with the interplay of freedom and togetherness in love — Rilke, who also knew that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”The delicate, eternal, life-magnifying relationship between love and death, between union and freedom, is what Nobel laureate Octavio Paz (March 31, 1914–April 19, 1998) explores throughout his timeless book The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism (public library), composed in the final years of his long life. Continued here

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The Power of Small Wins   What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step forward every day. In an analysis of knowledge workers’ diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life (the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that is critical to performance) than making progress in meaningful work. If a person is motivated and happy at the end of the workday, it’s a good bet that he or she achieved something, however small. If the person drags out of the office disengaged and joyless, a setback is likely to blame. Continued here

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What Is Psychological Safety?   What exactly is psychological safety? It’s a term that’s used a lot but is often misunderstood. In this piece, the author answers the following questions with input from Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, who coined the phrase “team psychological safety”: 1) What is psychological safety? 2) Why is psychological safety important? 3) How has the idea evolved? 4) How do you know if your team has it? 5) How do you create psychological safety? 6) What are common misconceptions? Continued here

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You Need Two Leadership Gears   The debate about the best way to lead has been raging for years: Should you empower your people and get out of their way, or take charge and push them to do great work? The answer, say the authors, is to do both. Their research shows that effective leaders routinely shift between these two seemingly opposing modes—and build teams whose members are good at switching back and forth too. Continued here

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Pillars of Resilient Digital Transformation - SPONSORED CONTENT FROM Red Hat   The acceleration of digital transformation because of the pandemic recast the position of the chief information officer (CIO) to that of a big-picture strategist. From ensuring ongoing alignment of IT and business demands to leading the transition to full digital enablement, the CIO role requires expert proficiency in a broad range of both technology and management skills. Continued here

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Moving Beyond Islands of Experimentation to AI Everywhere   Companies in a wide range of sectors are making significant investments in AI — and are increasingly concerned with how to scale use of the technology to gain benefits from it across their organizations. Too many companies stall out on their AI journey and have difficulty getting past pilot projects or point solutions. That’s not necessarily because the technology is so complex. Our research finds that companies fail to extract the potential business value from AI not for lack of technical expertise but rather due to structural and process issues.We took an in-depth look at the AI scaling journey of 10 market-leading legacy companies with three to eight years of AI implementation experience across diverse industries, including consumer packaged goods, pharmaceuticals, banking, insurance, security services, and automotive. These companies were at different stages of progress, ranging from relatively nascent capabilities to extremely sophisticated. How they organized their efforts at each stage had implications for what they were able to accomplish. We found that AI projects in enterprises generally begin as what we call islands of experimentation (IOE) before coming together around a corporate center of excellence (COE). Only a small number then move to a sophisticated federation of expertise (FOE) model built on a centralized base of knowledge, systems, processes, and tools, and on decentralized embedded capabilities.AI initiatives often begin with small, specialized teams exploring specific problems, but these decentralized IOEs make a limited impact. For example, a global pharmaceutical company in our study developed a machine learning tool to predict the next best action for its sales force. Although this tool was successfully launched in one country, it did not spread further because of the company’s highly decentralized structure. Attempts to launch the tool in another country where it would have benefited the company’s operations failed. Eventually, the company realized that the tool was not used widely enough to generate sufficient ROI on the project, and the initiative was killed. Continued here

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The perks and perils of remote-work gossip   While some might associate workplace gossip with a toxic office culture, many studies show its benefits: confiding in colleagues can deepen trust and improve mental health. And though a quick grumble about a bad manager may be harder when employees no longer share an office, our innate need to seek – and share – information about others persists in the pandemic era of hybrid work. In fact, office gossip has become a crucial means of connection for many employees in virtual work arrangements.“We’re the descendants of busybodies,” says Frank McAndrew, professor of psychology at Knox College in Illinois, US. “It was in our ancestors’ interests to know what everyone else was doing in order to be socially successful – to find out who they could and couldn’t trust.” Continued here

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Asada: The true essence of Mexican barbecue   Carne asada, as many people know it, is grilled marinated steak, often eaten in a taco or burrito. But in Mexico and Los Angeles, carne asada is also a social event. The asada is in essence a barbecue, where a smoking grill serves as the focal point for anywhere from six to 60 people gathered on a warm night in a back garden or at the local park. The meal includes sizzling marinated meats, seafood, rice, beans, salsas and ice-cold beer cocktails.For the Mexican communities living in Los Angeles, asadas are a joyful nod to their heritage and a time to gather. "Asadas are about love, friendship, family and community," said Bricia Lopez, author of the new cookbook Asada: The Art of Mexican Grilling. "Every Mexican household has a big asada. It's a moment for us to get together with family." Continued here

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Hichkas: The songs that defied the Iranian government   In the early-to-mid 2000's, Soroush Lashkari, better known as Hichkas (the Persian word for "nobody") was recording grainy rap videos on the streets of Tehran. Since he didn't have any lighting at night, he and his friends would shoot their videos by walking in front of the tail-lights of a car driving in reverse. As hip-hop is a largely illegal genre of music in Iran, he would sell his work covertly, through personal emails, attempting to screen out undercover government agents by calling buyers first and delivering CDs to their door. Despite the government branding hip-hop as "Satanism", Iranian rap spread via the internet and grew over the following decade to become one of the most popular genres of music among the country's youth, with Hichkas considered its pioneer.In her book Soundtrack of the Revolution, which examines how music and politics are intertwined in Iran, Nahid Siamdoust argues that the popularity of hip-hop in Iran can be linked to its connection with Iran's centuries-old poetry tradition, and rap's power of personal expression lends itself to critique and protest. Not all Iranian rap is tied directly to resistance and politics: there are lighter-themed subcategories that focus on social issues, rather than direct political critique. Today, however, as the ongoing Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran has heightened political tensions to a level not seen in decades, the messaging in Iranian hip-hop has become increasingly radical and rappers themselves have become some of the most celebrated and loudest political voices in the movement. Continued here

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Ghosted: The films 'too bad for the cinema'   When directors are promoting their films, they usually talk about how happy they are to have put their own personal vision on screen. Not so Dexter Fletcher, when he was promoting Ghosted, an Apple TV+ action comedy starring Chris Evans and Ana de Armas. Discussing the film on Alex Zane's A Trip to the Movies podcast, Fletcher mentioned his plans for an opening sequence in which De Armas would drive through the mountains for three minutes. Executives at Apple Studios vetoed the sequence because, they said, if "something doesn't happen in the first 30 seconds, the data shows that people will turn off".Fletcher didn't mind. "You can't make a film for streaming the same way you make a theatrical [ie, a film intended for a cinema release]," he insisted. "You can't. There's different metrics and there's a different approach. There has to be, even for the reason that people can turn off very quickly... What is a cinematic experience for me as a filmmaker... becomes, 'Ok, I've got to adjust to retain my audience'." Continued here

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Jerry Springer may have perfected the art of chasing ratings, but his predecessors laid the groundwork   In a widely quoted New York Times column, the paper of record called his TV program “an electronic peepshow.” The Times’ media critic, Jack Gould, accused him of “making a commercial virtue of cheap sensationalism” and exploiting the worst in human behavior, just to get ratings. But this was not a critique about controversial talk show host Jerry Springer, who died on April 27, 2023. It was a column about an equally controversial talk show host named Joe Pyne, who pioneered an opinionated and confrontational style of program, first on radio and then on TV, where he insulted callers and argued with guests. Continued here