Here’s What’s Trending on Medium This Week: August 13–19
Your window into the stories resonating with readers right now
Every day, thousands of writers turn to Medium to share their stories and ideas — from data science deep-dives to humor, illustration, productivity advice, sports, and more. Here, anyone with an insightful perspective can potentially reach thousands (or millions) of readers, helping us learn more about ourselves and each other.
To give you a sense of which stories are having that kind of impact, we thought we’d share a handful of the trending stories on Medium each week. This is not a comprehensive list, just a selection — and we hope it will give you a snapshot into what’s happening across the platform. (If you notice a few repeats from last week, that’s because they’re still topping the charts.)
Curious what else is resonating widely across Medium? Browse the “trending” tab on any tag page.
1. “Relativity for Children” by Ella Alderson
Movement and time are connected.
The faster you move through space, the slower you move through time. If you could move at the speed of light, you would not experience the passage of time at all.
2. “How Nichelle Nichols Kicked in Hollywood’s Door With a Kiss” by Estacious(Charles White)
Black engineers, astronauts, and mathematicians owe Nichelle a debt that can only be repaid with continued excellence and advancement. The character Uhura is a testament to how a singular actress changed the landscape of Hollywood. She will be missed, but she did her work. She can rest now as we continue to reap the benefits of her 89 years on this plane of existence.
3. “This Is The Best Career Decision You Can Possibly Make” by Ryan Holiday
Be you. Be the only one of you in the whole world. Be the red. That’s where the fun is (without having to fake it). That’s where the money is (you can name your price). That’s where the value is (you can’t be replaced).
4. “I Made a Python Bot to Send ‘Good Night’ Texts to My GF” by Pythonians
I sit down to code after dinner and honestly, opening WhatsApp to text someone after that is very distracting. I mean, I gotta take care of hundreds of methods and classes in 3 different windows. WhatsApp web works without having the internet-connected nowadays, but one more tab on Chrome is a big jab at my poor RAM.
So, I thought about automating the whole process to give myself some relief. Yeah, I know, you’re going to call me a bad boyfriend, but I just made sending a boring good-night text so damn cool. I coded a bot to do it for me!
5. “The Product Culture Shift” by Camille Fournier
Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today. As someone who has done both these things, it doesn’t surprise me to see so many people struggling to make it work. Both of these shifts require going from a siloed, process, tech-focused mindset to a portfolio, usability, and customer-focused mindset. This is a hard transformation, and it’s easy for people who have spent their whole career building infrastructure to misunderstand what product and platform really mean. So I thought I’d share the secret to making this work.
6. “My Husband Tells Me What It’s Like to Be a Man, and It’s a Lot Like Being a Woman” by Jessica Wildfire
This is what men and women both do. We make up stories and stereotypes to help us explain why people act the way they do, and sometimes these stories do more harm than good. They create unfair expectations and roles that people feel compelled to play, or they cast other people in those roles, and it makes everything even harder.
7. “Yes, You Should Major in Theatre” by Matt Fotis
A theatre production is a lot like a company. There’s the director at the top and the actors are like the salespeople — the public facing folks. Just like a company, there’s more than just the salespeople — there’s A TON OF WORK that goes on behind-the-scenes. A theatrical production is one big team with lots of smaller sub-teams all working toward a common goal with the most fixed of hard deadlines and a grand public roll-out. Just like most corporate teams are made up of smaller divisions and teams, in a theatrical production it only works if every team simultaneously does their individual job AND works together toward the cohesive team goals.
8. “I spent $15 in DALL·E 2 credits creating this AI image, and here’s what I learned” by Joy Zhang
You’ve probably seen various cherry-picked images online showing what DALL·E 2 is capable of (provided the right creative prompt). In this article, I share a candid walkthrough of what it takes to create a usable image from scratch for the subject matter: “a llama playing basketball.” You might find it useful if you’re thinking of trying out DALL·E 2 yourself, or you’re just interested in understanding what it’s capable of.
9. “My Eight-Year-Old Stopped Disney World” by Riley McLynn
Sometimes we take the path of least resistance because we don’t want to rock the boat. I pride myself on being easy-going, but that isn’t the right approach in all situations. We teach our kids to stand up to peer pressure and do the right thing. But do we practice what we preach?
10. “Advice From My Century” by Barry Gander
You can no more ride foreseeable ‘trends’ than you can foretell the path of a tumbleweed. Your world is an Inadvertence Machine — a big rolling barrel of odd numbers, happenstance and incomplete solutions.
Prepare yourself instead for a life where you are able to inject happiness into the way you approach every changing situation. As important as the ‘trends’ in progress, are the attitudes with which we receive them.
Want to write a story that resonates with readers? Follow Creators Hub for perspectives on developing your craft, finding your audience, and building your writing career. If you’re just starting out, here are some useful resources.
