Here’s What’s Trending on Medium This Week: August 20–26
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 what’s having that kind of impact, we thought we’d share a handful of stories that are resonating widely across the platform right now. In this roundup: an astrophysicist proves the Big Bang theory using a TV set; a startup founder battles bots; and a sleep scientists reflects on why it’s so hard to get some shut-eye in a hospital.
Curious what else is resonating widely across Medium? Browse the “trending” tab on any tag page.
1. “The Working Parent’s Guide to Screen Time” by Alexandra Samuel, author of Remote, Inc.
Screen time can be your greatest adversary as a remote-working parent — if screen struggles lead to meltdowns, behavioral issues and conflicts that are exhausting and destabilizing for the whole household. That’s the struggle we’ve had in our own household, and it’s led me to reconsider, revise and update a lot of the tech parenting strategies and parental controls I have written about over the years…
2. “How to Prove the Big Bang With an Old TV Set” by Ethan Siegel, astrophysicist and NASA columnist
When it comes to the question of how our Universe came to be, science was late to the game. For innumerable generations, it was philosophers, theologians and poets who pontificated on the matter of our cosmic origins. But all of that changed in the 20th century, when theoretical, experimental, and observational developments in physics and astronomy finally brought these questions into the realm of testable science.
When the dust settled, the combination of cosmic expansion, the primeval abundances of the light elements, the Universe’s large-scale structure, and the cosmic microwave background all combined to anoint the Big Bang as the hot, dense, expanding origin of our modern Universe. While it wasn’t until the mid-1960s that the cosmic microwave background was detected, a careful observer could have detected it in the most unlikely of places: on a run-of-the-mill television set…
3. “Sleep… nature’s healer. So why is it the last thing you’ll find at a hospital?” by Sara_Mednick, professor of cognitive neuroscience at U.C. Irvine
I’m a cognitive neuroscientist in the department of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine. I would like to tell you a personal story that illustrates both the central theme of my research, which is to understand the importance of sleep, and one of the critical health problems that we face in our culture today, namely that medical science is in “sleep denial”…
4. “38 Lessons Learned Raising 38 Million Pounds” by Ilana Wisby, entrepreneur and CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits
It has been a crazy summer for the Prime Minister and a crazy summer for me — for totally different reasons. When opening that letter, however, I felt an unusual kind-of kinship with anyone daring to call themselves a leader in a world that judges you so starkly for both your results and your conduct in equal measure.
So why did a letter from a Head of State provoke me into something short of a minor emotional meltdown? Was it simply the exhaustion following a long and arduous fundraise, or was it something deeper?
5. “I Have a New Relationship With Death” by Holy Sh*t I Have Cancer
You know the old trope about having a devil sitting on one shoulder trying to lead you astray, while an angel sits on the other shoulder trying to nudge you to the path of righteousness? I have a version of that going on, except it’s Thanatos, also known as Death, on one shoulder while Elpis, the spirit of hope, sits on the other.
They are both talking to me constantly, interrupting each other, trying to hold my attention. I try to tune them out because I am working full time through chemo and don’t have the bandwidth for their antics, but still there they are, nattering away…
6. “I Was Eddie Munson, And You Hated Me” by Benjamin Sledge, author and combat veteran
It wasn’t that it hurt getting shoved into lockers, but that it confirmed I was “the freak.” When checked into a metal grey locker while walking to class, some jock would sneer, “Watch where you’re going, freak!” Sometimes they’d call me “faggot” or “queer” depending on how malicious teens wanted to be. As the kid who liked guitar, metal bands, skateboards, and wore “alternative” clothes, my appearance and hobbies often attracted the vultures.
Early in the 1990s, I’d grown my hair down to my shoulders to reflect the hairstyles of the bands I loved. The one difference was that I parted it down the middle and straightened it each morning. The result was that it looked like I wore a brown mop on my head. My brother reminded me each morning that I looked like a girl standing in front of the mirror with a round brush and blow-dryer. Besides the “butt cut” (due to its resemblance to a butt crack with the hard part in the middle), I wore standard grunge and metal clothes: flared or ripped up JNCO jeans and shirts sporting band names or the naughty monkey, Curious George. Despite the humidity and punishing Oklahoma sun, I wore black jeans to cover my stick legs during the summer…
7. “We Flooded Our Dating App With Bots… To Scam Scammers” by Brian Weinreich, start-up founder and CEO
My co-founder Zach and I recently started a video dating app, and as user numbers grew, so did the number of scammers harassing people for money.
We are a teeny 3-person startup. We have resources like two staplers, a handful of pens, and a computer charger. We couldn’t “throw money at the problem.” Here’s what we did instead…
8. “If I Could Speak Again” by Cai Emmons, novelist
AKV9 will not be administered to ALS patients until, at the earliest, 2024. It is impossible to say now how far the disease will have progressed in me by then, if I will even be alive, not to mention how effective the treatment will really be. But if my voice were to be restored — miracle that that would be — I would certainly respond by talking up a storm, experimenting with volume, tone, inflection. I would shout and whisper and sing…
9. “Agile Projects Have Become Waterfall Projects With Sprints” by Ben “The Hosk” Hosking, software developer
Agile promised to deliver software faster and customers to return on investment quicker. When you hype any project mythology up more than a Lady Gaga concert, disappointment is likely in 99 percent of Agile projects…
10. “Can Machines Learn How to Behave?” by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, VP and Fellow at Google Research
Love, friendship, care for others, empathy, altruism, fairness and justice, and so on aren’t a modern veneer of “rational” invention painted over a savage, Hobbesian nature. We’re far from ruthless optimizers out to do nothing but maximize our pleasures or the number of our offspring. Neither were we once, per Rousseau, noble savages with fundamentally “pure” drives (whatever that may mean) latterly corrupted by modernity. We’re just highly social, talkative animals who invent things, and these qualities have taken us a long way since the retreat of the glaciers 10,000 years ago.
We’re on the brink of inventing machines that can be social and inventive with us. The challenge we face now is twofold: that of deciding how these machines should behave, and that of figuring out how we should behave.
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