Mitch's Blog

After more than two years at Fierce Network, my email address has finally gotten out to the directories that PR agencies buy, and I’m now getting literally dozens of pitches a day. Many of them are outrageously offtarget – I seem to have gotten on lists for healthcare, for job-hunting advice, and I get a small flow of emails from someone pitching interviews with a guy who claims to have resolved the apparent discrepancies between science and all the world’s religions.

I don’t even look at the bodies of my emails anymore. I just look at the subject lines and senders. If neither of those catch my eye, I’m moving on.

I’m not saying this to complain. I have a great job. When I see my colleagues complaining on LinkedIn about PR people, I cringe so hard I strain a muscle. Literally billions of people in the world would gladly change places with any one of us.

I’m just saying that if you’re a PR person pitching me – or any journalist or analyst – get to the point, get to the point, get to the point.

PS Religion and science cannot be reconciled, but they are complementary. Faith is belief in the absence of evidence. Faith and science solve different problems.

As for reconciling the different religions of the world: As a species, we’ve been fighting wars over that for at least 4,000 years. Maybe you can solve that problem, but I doubt it.

A new book argues that modern schooling is the cause of the increase in teen depression and suicides, and blaming phones and social media is junk science. www.theverge.com/policy/99…

Kids are depressed because they aren’t allowed to play independently and because of rigid schooling methods tied to the Common Core curriculum, says psychology researcher Peter Gray in his new book “Restoring Childhood.”

Gray says the concern and regulation over phones and social media is the latest in a long line of moral panics, which include video games, comic books and parents' fear that their kids will be abducted by strangers.

Yes, there is pornography and other stuff on the Internet that kids need to be protected from, but kids lose out when they’re heavily restricted in internet use. The internet lets kids benefit from contact with their peers, maps, being able to call 911 when they’re in danger and all the rest of the ways that adults benefit from the internet and mobile.

Gray, who grew up in the 1950s, notes that when he was a boy, parents routinely sent their kids out to do the grocery shopping and they were allowed to roam the streets independently. But first, parents gave their kids safety training — how to cross the street safely, not to get in cars with strangers offering candy, and so on. He says this attitude toward childrearing promoted mental health and safety, and advocates a similar philosophy toward kids' use of the Internet.

I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s and our parents had the same attitudes toward childrearing. We roamed freely for miles on our bicycles.

I found myself nodding along listening to this podcast.

Hamilton Nolan:

“Trans people are a tiny minority, trans people can easily be demonized, and so the Republican Party has made the decision to spend hundreds of millions of dollars raising the salience of ‘trans issues’ in political campaigns, because they wager that it is good fuel for stoking fear and bigotry, which will benefit them, as the Party of Scared Bigots. The fact that national political reporters and columnists and debate moderators will now treat questions about trans people and their rights as legitimate is proof that this rude, repellent, morally abhorrent campaign has been successful. Congrats, bigots: The political establishment has been completely unable to tell you to fuck off, which would have been the proper response from day one.”

100% yes to this.

Part of the reason I feel strongly on this issue is that bigots eventually come for the Jews, and it doesn’t take long. There are other reasons I support trans rights – because I have had trans friends, coworkers, acquaintances and creators I admire, and because it’s the right thing to do. But self-interest is part of it.

“After building up a large, passionate userbase over a very long time, it’s not really entirely mine anymore. I can’t just do whatever I want with it,” Marco writes.

He also sees the growth era of indie podcast apps as over. “The business is now about serving and retaining my existing customers for as long as possible…. This has been difficult for me to accept.”

I’ve enjoyed Overcast since it launched 12 years ago. Though I’ve tried other podcast apps, I keep coming back to Overcast.

But if I had started listening to podcasts recently, I’d probably just use the built-in iPhone podcast app. It seems like it’s good enough.

Marco has been an outstanding indie developer. He helped build Tumblr, launched Instapaper, Overcast, and his new Unforgetful reminders app is excellent. I wish him much prosperity, happiness and continued great work in the future.

(I can never remember the name of the “Unforgetful” app — I have to look at it on my phone homescreen to remind myself — which is ironic, considering the purpose of Unforgetful is not forgetting things.)

On Fresh Air: “A decade ago, [Casey] Gerald was a rising star, a Yale and Harvard graduate running a celebrated nonprofit. Then he shut it all down. His new book is an argument for forging a different path.”

Gerald “has walked away from his own success twice. The first time was in 2016, at the height of everything. He was a kid from Oak Cliff, a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Dallas, who had made it out the way America tells us to make it out - a football scholarship to Yale, a job at Lehman Brothers, an MBA from Harvard. He created a nonprofit that put him on magazine covers and TED stages, with a talk viewed millions of times. He opened for President Barack Obama at South By Southwest in 2016. And there was even a New York Magazine headline that asked, ‘Does Casey Gerald Know How To Fix America?'”

“And then just like that, he shut down his nonprofit, stopped answering the phone and disappeared. His memoir, ‘There Will Be No Miracles Here,’ was his first report back. Then he went quiet again. And now, after that second long silence, Casey Gerald has returned with a book that reads less like a memoir and more like a challenge. It’s called ‘The Great Refusal: A New Vision Of Resistance.’ It’s his attempt to make sense of the choice at the center of his own life - to stop trying to convince America that he deserves a place in it and take back the authority to decide what his life is for.”