It’s Tuesday, 28 July, 2026 in Portland, Oregon. My brain is mush.
\nHow People Work, Live! is the live show about how to people. It’s based on my How People Work, my workshop that helps teams deliver better, faster, which itself is built on my last 20 years of working in tech.
\nEach show I’m joined by a very special guest and any number of interesting people (that’s you) to find out how to get hard results by learning and applying soft skills. Why? Well, because this marketing copy says that success isn’t just about what you do and whether you’re good at it -- it’s also about how well you work with other people.
\nSpoilers: other people are EVERYWHERE. I mean, come on.
\nThe show page has got previous recorded episodes (you can see those on YouTube, too), as well as details of upcoming shows you can register for.
\nComing up next is How People Work, Live! ... with Russell Davies. Who’s Russell? Why, let me tell you:
\n\n\nRussell Davies is a writer and strategist who has spent over 40 years thinking about what happens when marketing and services meet the internet. He's worked on communications and digital strategies for organisations like Honda, Nike, Microsoft, Apple, the Government Digital Service and the Co-op. He's currently Marketing and Product Director for The Modern House.
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So come see Russell and me on Friday 31 July at 9am Pacific, 12pm New (“He’s Just Doing Things?”) York, and 5pm “Madchester”.
\nThere’s lots more after that, too. Check out the show page for more.
\nHey, I can write a short thing. Five things that caught my attention and a brief explanation why. No rambling, no thinking-out-loud -- just what’s important.
\nHA. I wrote that! Not an LLM! Ugh, I feel gross.
\nFIRST.
\nArs Technica: A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months1 is a story about a subpoena for user information that only had one underscore in it rather than two underscores.
\nCaught my attention because, uh, can someone please explain to me how using AI in policing would’ve helped prevent this.
\nSECOND
\nI recently learned about historical questions and found a PDF from Harvard’s Department of History on Writing a History Paper2. History was one of my favorite subjects. Ish. Kind of. Also one of the ones where I could roll up and write the homework essay at like 11pm and get an A for it the next day. Anyway, I liked this on Common Problems in Question Posing:
\nThe Deceptively Simple Question
\nA question that demands a simple answer to a complex question.
\nExample: When did women achieve equality?
\nThe Fictional Question
\nExample: If Hitler had been accepted to art school, would World War II have happened?
\nThe Stacked Question, or, The Embedded Assumption
\nExample: Why did the Carter presidency fail?
\nThe Semantic Question\n A question that hinges on the definition of terms.\n Example: Are all radical revolutions violent?
\nExample: Was World War I inevitable?\n6. The Opinion or Ethical Question
\nExample: Was Truman wrong to authorize the use of the atomic bomb?\n7. The Anachronistic Question
\nExample: How good was ancient Athens’ record on civil rights?
\nThis scratches all my “oh right, critical thinking skills” itches.
\nAnyway, I thought the entire thing was worth reading.
\nTHIRD
\nThe Wrap had a piece analysing Star Trek’s fall from grace in Paramount’s streaming plans3. I mean sure, I read it because of the Star Trek but what really caught my attention was the attempt at breaking out the affect of Star Trek on the streamer’s revenue. I haven’t seen that before, but presumed that it must clearly exist otherwise how would you decide whether or not to invest in a show? I mean surely there must be data before Netflix decides to invest in a show and then, uh, cancel it after one season?
\nAnyway, it’s in that article, with a couple of charts; the first one showing (purporting to show?) global streaming revenue tied to Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Discovery, and the second chart titled “Legacy Star Trek Titles Global Revenue Contribution on Paramount+ Quarterly Actual vs. Estimated Without Spillover Impact\nfrom Strange New Worlds S2” which, you know. I love it.
\nFOURTH
\nShittyRigs is an Instagram account4 that is fascinating. I mean it’s fascinating if you’re interested in how film and tv are made. It’s an account of all the shitty rigs used in, uh, film and tv production? But here “shitty” is “way that people figured out how to get the shot” and my gestalt understanding of “rigging” is “how you position everything and move it around to get the shot that you want” from moving the camera through to positioning the lights. Anyway, it’s great. I’ve been meaning to post this for ages. My TikToks and Reel FYPs are full of backstage production accounts, videos of people who do multi-cam live event/tv direction, and click tracks. Fantastic stuff.
\nFIFTH AND FINAL
\nClive Thompson wrote The Joy of Typing5 TWELVE YEARS AGO and I can’t remember why it crossed my feed again recently. Maybe Clive posted it? Anyway, it caught my attention because:
\nLook, here’s a pull quote:
\n\n\nIn other words, by facilitating students’ ability to put letters and words on the page, they increased their ability to produce text that was creative and original, more technically accurate, more logically sequenced and better organized and showed greater pragmatic awareness and sensitivity to audience … These differences were not trivial.
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Wonderful stuff.
\nThat’s it. Five links! No mess, no fuss, not even any gross AI writing, just me pretending to be gross AI writing.
\nHow are you doing?
\nBest,
\nDan
\nA missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months - Ars Technica (archive.is), Nate Anderson, Ars Technica, 27 July 2026 ↩
\n[Writing a History Paper (PDF)](https://history.fas.harvard.edu/sites/g/files/omnuum4421/files/history/files/research_question.pdf, Kristin Poling, Harvard Department of History, 2008/2009 (Twitter was a toddler!) ↩
\nHow ‘Star Trek’ Fell From Streaming Anchor to Stuck in Limbo | Analysis (archive link), Roger Cheng, The Wrap, 23 July 2026 ↩
\nThe Joy of Typing. How racing along at 60 words a minute… | by Clive Thompson | The Message | Medium (archive.is), Clive Thompson, 20 June 2014 ↩
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