Agalia Tan

What I’m building is worth being real about.”

No one is media literate. The more you explain who you are and what you do, the better. Preface your newsletter with the explanation of wtf you’re writing, anyway, because your subscribers don’t remember. The “enhanced bios” of NYT, Vox, etc, are long because of SEO but they also make explicit the expertise that was once just assumed from professio... See more

even the consumer of the conversation — the podcast listener in this case — is kind of a virtual participant, because they are witnessing the dialogue happen. That's something I feel all the time as I listen to podcasts and subconsciously formulate my own (imagined) responses in real time, as if I'm also a guest. That effect is pretty potent. I int... See more

Over the past ten years, media companies have responded to their loss of audience by creating “viral” editorial that performs well inside the platform’s engagement-at-all-costs ecosystem. Predictably, however, quality editorial – the context journalists create for a living – rarely qualifies as viral.

“Having a shared set of narratives, concepts, and symbols is the basis, ultimately, for all culture — religious, national, ethnic, commercial, scientific, etc. How can you operate in biology if you’re not familiar with Darwin? How can you operate in tech if you’re not fluent in Aggregation Theory? You can’t. Even if you think the ideas are wrong, i

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Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actua... See more

We've convinced an entire generation that if work feels hard, they must be doing it wrong.