We Like Nouns
Verbs? Not as much.
Michael E. Gruen
Human. More at michaelgruen.com
Latest posts
Seven Hours of Comedy
What goes into creating quality entertainment
On The Margin
Experiments in Layout
The Human DNS
Reach everyone everywhere without incumberance
Digital Zen Gardens
A practical suggestion for the “it’s too late to learn to code” crowd. Read more...
What Am I In For?
Playing War (the card game)... how long will this take? Read more...
AI Couldn't Help But Wonder
If we're going to anthropomorphize AIs, might as well just go all out. Read more...
Mission Statements
80s and 90s cartoon theme songs still have much to teach us. Read more...
What Gets Measured
And what's critically missing from Muller's 'The Tyranny of Metrics' Read more...
Cat Herding Distributed Teams
Introducing "Team, Assemble!", a tool that helps distributed teams meet up in person Read more...
Out of the Breach and into the Void
In the late 00s, I went looking for a low-stakes way to regain my confidence as a public speaker. A friend suggested Toastmasters. In my first meeting I was invited to speak on a “table topic”: “Will there ever be another act as large as the Beatles?” With the benefit of editing and rose-colored memories, my “speech” went something like this: In 1964, The Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Sho...…
Performance Culture
Last night we completed a six-season speed-run of Drive to Survive, a docuseries on Formula 1 that focuses on the dynamics between drivers, teams, and their leadership. Critics say it is manufactured-drama and semi-truths that are more entertaining than they are realistic. Of course that’s true. Fans, they say, should instead focus on the racing. To me, that’s what watching a Grand Prix is for....…
Writers Gonna Write
“You’d kill it on YouTube,” a colleague recently told me, “or in podcasting.” My immediate thought went to Bum Bag. The next thoughts were more measured. ⁂ We decorate space with art and time with music. Words can do both. And they can do neither. A few words, carefully chosen, can communicate complex concepts clearly. (Casual consonance is also kinda cool.) Readers choose pace and retention. S...…
On Goat Farming
For years I’ve been talking about building a goat farm in rural Vermont. Have I made any progress? No. I did, however, buy and read books on animal husbandry and Bovidae care. (An active goat is a happy goat!) Have I talked about it to anyone who would listen? Naturally. Goat farms are cosmopolitan cool and I’m asked about it often. I’ve got this agritourism thing all figured out in a farm-to-s...…
Instagram, meet Screen Time
Last fall I installed a widget on my iPhone’s home screen that shows me which apps I’ve used and for how long. I expected a ho-hum graph. Instead, horror: ~30 minutes of Safari ~25 minutes of Messages (E-mail, SMS, iMessage, Signal, etc.) ~20 minutes of Games (Crossword, Wordle, Chess.com, etc.) ~15 minutes of News (Reddit, BlueSky, NYT, etc.) ~10 minutes of others …and ~90+ (ninety!) minutes o...…
Situational Awareness (Selected Annotations)
The following are my selected annotations from Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness, a 165-page paper that, in ChatGPT-4’s own words: …argues that the rapid advancement and scaling of artificial general intelligence (AGI) will lead to superintelligence within the next decade. This progression will involve massive investments in computational infrastructure and significant national secu...…
The Shrinking Ship of Theseus
New Organizational Structures in the AI Age Read more...
Tacit Phone Time
Generally-accepted mores of society's smartphone addiction (and how I've responded to it) Read more...
Why Modern Hiring Processes Work
An Introduction to the Interview Circuit, a playbook for creating collaborative hiring experiences for both candidates and their future teams... without superfluous overhead Read more...
Cultivating High-Functioning Teams with User Guides
And where to use them. When positioned correctly, self-written user guides are an incredibly useful tool for building high-trust, highly-effective teams quickly... especially when distributed. Read more...