Jason Snell, writing for Macworld, has a few thought on the news that Apple plans to fund original podcasts:

The great thing about podcasts—and I say this as both a listener and a creator of podcasts—is that it is, like the web, a free and open ecosystem for content. You can listen to any podcast in any podcast player. If Apple creates podcasts that can only be listened to in Apple’s own app, it is furthering a potential future where your favorite shows are scattered across multiple services and siloed in different apps.

The idea of a cable package of podcasts is the same problem people are having regarding all the streaming packages. People don’t want to pay for all the shows they want to watch by paying for 12 different streaming services that offer everything. The very idea of Apple-only or Spotify-only podcasts is understandable, but it will kill the current ecosystem.

I want to simplify my life. This is difficult for me. One of the best things I can do is a self-evaluation to clear out the chaos. However, being honest with myself is troublesome. I’d rather have someone else tell me the hard truths. Ultimately, that feels expensive.

Simplifying also means thinking about the costs that come in the form of time, pressure, stress, as well as finances.

It all takes thinking time and preparation time. I’m not sure when I can carve out the clutter to get to the simple.

It’s hard to walk the line of being informed, being outraged at the news, and not caring. I don’t get on Facebook much anymore because it’s designed to suck my attention, and I don’t want to be sucked in anymore. It’s easy to stay on the 24-hour news cycle and get outraged. Just as easy, you can watch a wasteland of “reality” TV. Better yet, get into arguments on the internet or spend all your time telling others what’s wrong with them.

I have more important things to worry about. I prefer my focus to be laser beam tight. I pay attention to what’s important.

Are you?

I’m terrible at meeting my goals. I set monstrous goals and always fall short. What I should do is take the time to figure out the process of achieving the big goal. What are the smaller goals that I can do every day to finish a big goal?

Time to make a real plan. Execute the plan day by day. Achieve success. Seems easy enough.

It’s hard to walk the line of being informed, being outraged at the news, and not caring. I don’t get on Facebook much anymore because it’s designed to suck my attention and I don’t want to be sucked in anymore. It’s easy to stay on the 24 hour news cycle and get outraged. Just as easy, you can watch a wasteland of “reality” TV. Better yet, get into arguments on the internet or spend all your time telling others what’s wrong with them.

I have more important things to worry about. I prefer my focus to be laser beam tight. I pay attention to what’s important.

Are you?

Ringo joined Paul on stage. It was magic.

They played “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Helter Skelter” and shut up those aren’t tears in my eyes.

Peace and love everybody.

Jamie Varon, in an Instagram post, tries to redefine what a good life looks and feels like.

I kinda sorta love this.

Bryan Walsh, in the new GEN publication on Medium, has a fascinating interview with Chuck Klosterman ostensibly about his new book of short fiction, Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction. Of course, it dives into the commercial challenge of short stories, the sophistication of readers, consuming text, and a career writing.

My favorite quote is at the end.

I feel incredibly fortunate that I entered journalism when there was essentially no internet and I will leave when the internet is all there is. I completely saw this evolution and experienced it in totality. I think if there’s ever a point in my life when I want to write about it, I’ll be in a good position to do so. So, I’m glad. Is it weird? Of course it’s weird, but I’m glad that I was there for all the weirdness.

Donnie Kwak, writing in The Ringer, has a fun, inspirational story about the newest St. Louis Cardinal, Tommy Edman.

In short: Tommy is a rookie with a total of 55 MLB plate appearances. These are early days yet, and pro sports could care less about your feel-good stories. But seeing Tommy shine on the biggest stage has already brought me so much joy. For his entire life, he singularly dedicated himself to get to the highest level of his profession, and through practice and hard work and perseverance, he reached it. His family’s euphoria while watching him thrive is amplified by the elation of countless Cards fans after a big Tommy play. They’re cheering for Tommy—and in some tiny way, they’re cheering for his mom, his dad, for all of us. Long may it continue. My cousin made it to the big leagues, and I wouldn’t bet against him sticking around.

What a warm, joyful story.

M. G. Siegler has an idea for Netflix.

What if a show like Stranger Things started as a binge show, but then morphed into weekly, appointment viewing as it proved its popularity? So, once Stranger Things became a sensation after season 1, and people were nice and hooked, season 2 would go to the installment-model, with a new episode coming out at the same time each week. Or, if Netflix wasn’t confident enough in a show after just one season, they could wait to switch to the new model for season 3 (two season “trials” seem to be the norm for Netflix).

Or, if Netflix wanted to benefit from a long, holiday weekend (as they did with Stranger Things season 3 which was released on the 4th of July), they could release say, half the season all at once, binge-ready, and then stagger the rest of the episodes over several weeks to get the same effect. There’s actually a lot you could do here, once folks are hooked!

Again, I know this is antithetical to Netflix’s model. But I think this blend has potentially huge benefits. Both for us, as viewers, for the shows themselves, and for Netflix! Also, while this idea eight years ago proved to be a good one, I’m still waiting on that Firefly reboot, Netflix. Thanks.

The blend model is interesting.

Mark Manson with another of his long essays. This time it’s about change and how you can’t make anyone change. This is profoundly insightful and so, so me.

You can’t make somebody change. You can inspire them to change. You can educate them towards change. You can support them in their change.

But you can’t make them change.

That’s because making someone do something, even if it’s for their own good, requires either coercion or manipulation. It requires intervening in their life in a way that is a boundary violation, and it will therefore damage the relationship—in some cases more than it helps.

Personally, I need to make some serious changes. No one can make them for me.

Johnny Flores Jr., reporting for Yahoo Sports, has a story about the future of baseball.

On Wednesday, the independent Atlantic League, which is a partner of Major League Baseball, debuted the electronic strike zone during its All-Star game, making it the first American professional league to do so.

Home plate umpire Brian deBrauwere wore an earpiece that was connected to an iPhone in his pocket. The earpiece relayed balls and strikes after receiving it from a TrackMan computer system utilizing a Doppler radar and deBrauwere called them as he received them.

It worked pretty flawlessly. I can’t wait for it to come to Major League Baseball.

Brent Simmons:

Social media is a virus from outer space.

I’m increasingly thinking the same thing.

Ross O. Lincoln, writing for The Wrap, has a glowing obiturary for the late, great Rip Torn.

Known for his gravely drawl and sinister-looking smile, Torn excelled at playing shady, amoral characters and outright villains, as in his depiction of the evil wizard Maax in the fantasy film “The Beastmaster.” But he could also project no-nonsense authority, as he did playing the celestial attorney Bob Diamond in Albert Brooks’ “Defending Your Life,” or Zed in the first two “Men in Black” films. And in one of his most celebrated later roles, he combined those attributes in 2004’s “DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story,” as sleazy dodgeball legend Patches O’Houlihan, who delivers one of the film’s funniest lines: “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”

But it was the 1992-1998 HBO comedy “The Larry Sanders Show” for which Torn will be perhaps best remembered. For playing Artie, the doggedly loyal attack dog of a producer who runs the eponymous show and manages the fragile ego of its star, Torn was widely acclaimed. He received six Emmy nominations, winning once in 1996, and over the show’s run was also nominated for two American Comedy awards (winning one), an American Television Award, and four Cable Ace awards (winning one), among many other accolades.

Definitely one of the great character actors of all time. I had completely forgotten he was in The Beastmaster.

I bet Rip smelled the Glenlivet on God’s breath [HT: Austin Kleon].

Nicholas Bate lists the distractions we all need to manage –

1. Wonderful drugs distract us from basic self-care.

2. Screens from conversation.

3. Instant food from deep nutrition.

4. Share-holder demands from long-term strategy.

5. Gyms from simply being a mover.

6. The cheap immersive download from reading.

7. Air-con from deserts, mountains and shores.

Ken White, writing in The Atlantic, outlines the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein and they are horrifying. What Epstein’s legal team managed to get when faced with extensive, detailed allegations was not remotely normal.

Epstein’s team secured the deal of the millennium, one utterly unlike anything else I’ve seen in 25 years of practicing federal criminal law. Epstein agreed to plead guilty to state charges, register as a sex offender, and spend 13 months in county jail, during which time he was allowed to spend 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, out of the jail on “work release.” In exchange, the Southern District of Florida abandoned its criminal investigation of Epstein’s conduct, agreed not to prosecute him federally, and—incredibly—agreed not to prosecute anyone else who helped him procure underage girls for sex. This is not normal; it is astounding.

This time though it looks like Epstein is not getting off so easily.

The feds, as is their habit, raided Epstein’s New York home while he was being arrested. In their motion asking the court to detain Epstein without bail, the government claimed that it had seized hundreds of photos of nude women or girls, some of whom appeared underage, kept on CDs thoughtfully labeled with things like “Girl pics nude.” The clonking sound you heard was 10,000 criminal-defense attorneys banging their heads on their desks. Such materials are not just potentially devastating evidence in Epstein’s prosecution. If Epstein had pornographic images of minors, he can expect the feds to add child-pornography charges to the indictment—and those charges are much easier to prove, without the challenges of a 15-year-old case.

Great wealth insulates people from consequences, but not always, absolutely, or forever. And even the richest people in America lack the implacable, mindless power of the criminal-justice system. Now that Epstein’s past plea deal is public and radioactively controversial, he’s unlikely to get another one. Epstein will have the best criminal defense money can buy, again. But this time, that will probably not be enough to save him.

What a monster. I’m curious to know what deal Epstein might try to cut to save himself and throw others under the bus. I don’t really care who the pedophiles are, I’d just like them all to rot in jail.

Tarpley Hitt, writing for The Daily Beast, has a fun story taking you back to the crazy days of 1999 when the best-selling solo artist of all time tried to, I think, take a page from David Bowie and turn into someone completely different.

It didn’t work.

…twenty years out, the project seems anything but pretentious. It’s a snapshot that lays bare the painstaking lengths celebrities go to craft public personas, and the messy, sublimely idiotic insides of industry marketing. In some ways, it is a fitting project for our millennium: a systemic critique born entirely in the system, packed with fauxstalgia so absurd it verges on farce-but one no one quite gets.

I actually own the CD somewhere with the rest of my CDs. I remember actually liking “Unsigned Letter.”

Brent Simmons has a simple calendar hack.

My calendar hack is that I add two alerts for each thing. One ten minutes before, so I have plenty of time to prepare — and another five minutes before, because I will have forgotten about the previous alert.

This is me.

Ruth Graham, writing in Slate, has the definitive story on the bullshit of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven. Of course it wasn’t true, but so many rubes want it to be true they dropped hard earned cash to feel better about themselves.

The cover of The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven calls the book “a true story.” But the boy himself now says it was not true at all. Four years ago, Alex sent a letter to a conservative Christian blog dramatically renouncing the book. “I did not die. I did not go to Heaven,” he wrote. “I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. … People have profited from lies, and continue to.” Alex’s retraction also became a sensation, with reporters unable to resist the sudden, hilarious perfection of his last name: Malarkey.

The way everything just tore the family apart is heartbreaking.

Elizabeth Nelson, writing in The Ringer, takes us on a musical journey of that faraway time of 1985. Inspired by season three of Stranger Things, she reminds us all how incredible that year was for music.

I was in high school, and all these songs and artists take me back there. Personally, I was surprised by the ages of Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, and Tina Turner, as well as the young upstarts of Madonna and George Michael. I did not remember that “We Are The World” was created in 1985.

She ends her piece with a note about the differences between the stars of then and today.

Nostalgia is a potent cocktail and potentially dangerous in large doses. Like all businesses, the music industry is cyclical and susceptible to convulsive market forces and unforeseen technological shifts, developments that help to explain its vast contractions in recent years. Maybe, as Howard Jones put it in 1985, no one is to blame. But maybe there is some utility to looking back at the mid-’80s musical big tent as well. The paradox of the streaming era is that for all of its ostensible limitless access, it seems to create far fewer memorable and bankable stars. This is not a reflection on the current pool of talent, but it may be a referendum on how that talent is presented. If nothing else, the industry’s imperial phase is a reminder that big sellers need not emerge from careful market testing and microtargeted playlists. They gave us the full gamut-homegrown and exotic, ancient and modern, frothy and fretful-and we loved the unkempt lot if it. It was a wild world, but we are the world after all.

Will Leitch, writing in New York Magazine, makes the point that the political activism of the USWNT means their win was all the sweeter.

They spoke up, they stood their ground, they taunted, they danced, they sipped tea, they were joyously defiant from the very beginning. And that’s why they’ll go down in history in a way that even previous Women’s World Cup champions won’t. Previous generations have found activism, or even simply stating your viewpoint on matters of the world, a detriment: Something that got in the way of the game, of winning, of earning, of thriving. But this team and Rapinoe are legends now — and, even better, are role models now in a way that athletes actually should be role models, an investment that will only bear more fruit in the decades to come – because they demanded to be heard on the issues they cared about and then went out and kicked everybody’s ass to boot. They will be more beloved, and richer, and more successful, having spoken out than if they hadn’t. Activism was bold, but more than that, it was smart. This was so much more fun because of it.

Michael Wade asks a good question

What is your default mode?

Is it positive or negative? Does it tend to blame others or does it foster personal accountability? Is it quick to anger or is it less volatile? Is it universal and consistent or do you easily make exceptions for yourself or your allies? Is it feelings-based or thought-based? Does it promote self-discipline or self-indulgence?

The nature of your default mode is one of the most important influences in life and yet many people do not examine their mode. 

My advice is to know it well.

This is good advice I definitely need to take.