Here’s What’s Trending on Medium This Week: May 14–20, 2022
A window into the perspectives and ideas resonating most widely with readers right now
Every day, thousands of writers turn to Medium to share their stories and ideas — from programming advice to personal essays to presidential statements. Here, anyone with an insightful perspective can potentially reach millions of readers, changing how all of us understand the world.
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 this week. This is not a comprehensive list, just a selection — and you may recognize a few of these from last week (that’s because they’re still making rounds — popular stories tend to have a long shelf life).
Curious what else is gaining traction across Medium? Browse the “trending” tab on any tag page (for example, medium.com/tag/technology).
1. “On Design Thinking” by Nick Foster
Reducing and simplifying complex systems is a commonplace tactic in education, as it aids the comprehension and absorption of a topic, but in order to be effective it has a duty to convey the complex truths which lie below the surface. Design Thinking education willfully ignores these complexities, preferring to wrap Design into a digestible package, and in so doing establishing it as a simple, reproducible and processional endeavor. This approach dramatically simplifies the highly complex, nuanced, non-linear reality of Design to a grotesque degree.
2. “Welcome home, Wesley Crusher” by Wil Wheaton
I love Wesley Crusher. I cherish Wesley Crusher. I am fiercely proud of Wesley Crusher. It is an honor and a privilege to be the actor who played him. But that wasn’t always true. For far too long, I allowed my opinion of Wesley, and my opinion of myself, to be defined by others. And it hurt so much, I almost walked away from Star Trek entirely, just to get away from it.
3. “Weapons of Mass Distraction” by Scott Galloway
The most successful players in the Attention Economy are WMDs: weapons of mass distraction. Meta is a half-trillion-dollar business predicated on diverting attention away from physical life to its apps — advertising generates 98% of its revenue. Google started as a simple digital billboard appended to an industry-leading search bar; it’s morphed into a digital Times Square masquerading as a search engine.
4. “I’m Retiring from Aunthood” by Yael Wolfe
As I sit here writing this on Mother’s Day, my phone is pinging every few minutes. I’m not looking at it because I’m the only one in the group text thread who isn’t included in these Happy Mother’s Day messages. I’m the only one who doesn’t have kids. I’m the only one who doesn’t have presents to show everyone, like my sister’s new t-shirt, adorned with photos of the kids that says, “We love Mom!”
5. “The kids are not ok” by Julia Steinberger
Today I went to give a climate talk at my old high school in Geneva — and was given a masterclass in our failings. This is the story of a day that shook me up.
I have given climate talks at high schools before. In 2019, I was invited by the first Geneva climate strikers to go around the high schools on the morning of their first strike. I went, with a friend, racing on our bikes from school to school to school, as many as we could reach during the morning. Back then, the mood was electric, excited, engaged….
Fast forward three years (and a pandemic) later, and the mood could not have been more different.
6. “How to Take a Break From Yourself” by Markham Heid
Do new things in new places. Shake yourself up, if only for an hour or two at a time. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, it follows that doing the same thing over and over and expecting to think differently is a form of insanity. You can’t change your mind unless you change your behavior.
Where I live in southwest Germany, it stays light out now until nine o’clock. On a balmy Tuesday evening last week — a time when I’d normally be at home checking email, watching TV, or doing laundry — I decided to bag all that and ride my bike. I ended up at a small lake. I took a swim and air-dried, watching the sun go down.
7. “The Assassination of Amber Heard” by Hannah Summers
Amber Heard never claimed to be a perfect victim. She never said she didn’t fight back or hit Johnny — in fact in her 2016 deposition, she admitted to just that. When you are living in an abusive situation, your brain is in constant panic mode. You become the most toxic version of yourself. Like an animal backed into a corner, you do what it takes to survive. Amber was recorded saying to Johnny, “Please, I’m begging you to stop. I feel like I have a heart attack almost every day. You’re killing me.”
8. “Stop Saying ‘This Isn’t Who We Are’” by Meghann French
My Facebook feed is full of outrage — How dare this man bring his hate into our community? — with a side of cold comfort — He came from halfway across the state. He isn’t one of us. This isn’t who we are. We are the City of Good Neighbors. We are a city of love.
I think about the woman I met on Election Day more than twenty years ago, a woman who, during an otherwise perfectly pleasant conversation, thought nothing of openly revealing her racism to someone she’d just met.
She was one of us. This is who she was.
9. “I Will NEVER Work for Another Startup Again” by Vee H
Toxic work environments within startup companies are actually quite easy to develop. Why? Well, there’s this notion that startup life includes working day and night, as well as all weekend. When it’s all hands on deck, you don’t necessarily need a job description because you likely won’t follow it anyway. This was all true at my startup.
10. “About those kill-switched Ukrainian tractors” by Cory Doctorow
Here’s a delicious story: CNN reports that Russian looters, collaborating with the Russian military, stole 27 pieces of John Deere farm equipment from a dealership in Melitopol, Ukraine, collectively valued at $5,000,000. The equipment was shipped to Chechnya, but it will avail the thieves naught, because the John Deere dealership reached out over the internet and bricked these tractors, using an in-built kill-switch.
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