Christopher Wink

Improving gender equality at home

Becoming an equal partner is the man’s glass ceiling.

Most American households are dual-income earners, and even in these, men contribute less domestically than women. Gender plays an outsized role. But even in same-sex relationships, one partner seems entirely aloof of what the other does domestically. Culture seems to make this all difficult to overcome, so a manual helps.

That’s the spirit of the 2022 book Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home, written by Kate Mangino, who has a PhD in social development.

“It is harder and more time-consuming to be a good mother than to be a good father, and it is easier for a woman to fail in motherhood than for a man to fail in fatherhood,” Mangino writes. “We have set the caregiving bar too high for mothers and too low for fathers.”

Mangino makes great effort to speak to relationships with different genders, while reflecting that close to 90% of American households have those in a male and female roles. Those “male-coded” and “female-coded” dynamics are a theme. I found the book challenging at times — sometimes productively, and a few times because I just flatly disagreed with the author’s framing. But I respect and appreciate Mangino’s contribution. It helped me marriage, and will help others. I recommend it. Buy it here.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

We didn’t remove gatekeepers; we replaced them with algorithms.

I joined CURRENTLY, the slick video interview series from the creative agency [Electric Kite], hosted by principal Kevin Renton, to talk about local journalism, entrepreneurship and how we build healthier information ecosystems. (I wrote more about it on Technical.ly here)

Themes we hit: why geography still matters online; why “friction” is a feature of community; how luck shapes entrepreneurial outcomes; and why journalism is a strategy you attach to sustainable business models.

Below the full video, and a few points I want to stand out.

How to write short

All writers are either putter-inners, or the taker-outers.

We either write sparingly, and then add more in. Or, we over-write, and then edit down. (Count me as an over-writer). It helps to know who we are, so we can then focus on how to keep tight and clear prose.

That’s from the 2013 book How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times by the journalist and journalism scholar Roy Peter Clark. Below I share my notes for future reference.

Storytelling isn’t just an output of stuff you do, it’s an input into why you do it

In my practice, storytelling has a definition and a strategy. Helpfully the research is clearer too: gathering people’s lived experiences, sharing them and then collecting the feedback to share back — on and on — gets you closer to the truth. That definition: Storytelling is a process that uses character and plot to share ways to navigate a complex world.

In Covid’s Wake

Before the covid-19 outbreak, public health officials around the world largely agreed that containment of a flu pandemic is largely futile so better to focus on the most at risk populations: speak honestly, encourage healthy behaviors and work fast on a vaccine.

It didn’t all go to plan. In the United States, the Trump administration successfully oversaw a historic vaccine development, while injecting hostile politics into the system. Meanwhile, left-leaning states over-relied on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as widespread masking and extended school closures, that had limited gains for considerable cost. Right-leaning states contributed to vaccine skepticism, which led to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.

The new book In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us, written by Princeton University political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, attempts to put forward an unimpassioned assessment of the American-led public health response. I simplified their assessment of a handful of the most prominent public health measures into the chart below, and in a social video here.

*My summary of In Covid’s Wake interpretation*

It’s one of my favorite nonfiction books of the year. Below I share my notes for future reference.

In 2018, Hans Rosling argued the world is getting better than most of us think. Was he wrong?

Viewing the world as a binary between rich and poor is too simple to be helpful.

A century of economic development has created a far bigger middle, so better to simplify with a four-level (quartile) income split. Despite this success, most people when surveyed assume the world is getting worse. It’s important to understand in what ways progress is being made.

That’s from the 2018 book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, which argues people consistently misunderstand global trends, believing the world is worse off than it is due to inherent biases and misinformation.

My career-long reporting on entrepreneurship has always colored my belief that most people on most days want to make their lives a little better, and so that creates a better place over time. But this book is a canonical example of arguing too many of us overlook remarkable progress we must understand.

The book’s authors, Swedish husband-wife team Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, and Ola’s father Hans, are insistent that theirs is not a naive or overly optimistic view, though this sort of “globalization has made the world richer and healthier” writing has become deeply unfashionable. Progressive advocates and activists I know deride a class of often-Boomer liberal writer as apologists for an entrenched world order by throwing facts and figures at people.

Still Rosling and team argued they were never apologizing for elites who could rest-easy, but rather doing research to put into context what had worked, so as to motivate the best behaviors to be continued. After Hans’s passing, the husband-wife duo continue leading a research nonprofit called Gapminder. It didn’t help that Rosling gave prominent talks at the World Economic Forum in Davos and at TED, often seen as the heart of this global liberal order.

So though I’m familiar with the arguments and Rosling’s reputation, I wanted to read what he described as the best distillation of his research.

Books like this (and one that came out the same year by Steven Pinker) tend to have two flaws: They overlook how many people are only focused on their personal life not broad global trends, and even many academics consider what these authors describe as an exceptional century, not an enduring trend. For example does slowing productivity and an aging secular business cycle, helped by geopolitical uncertainty and AI technology, portend a reversal of standards for most of us? Economic mobility and wealth equality reached notable highs during the author’s life, but declined since: so is he describing a world that is already changing again?

As they wrote: “Things can be both bad and better.”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Audience isn’t a business model

[Originally a social post]

Audience isn’t a business model.

This is one of those things that people get so wrong about media. I’m seeing it all over again with the current obsession with influencers and creators. I just saw a very well-intentioned chart for ‘news creators’ that had a row for “business model” and the options were “profit” or “non for profit.”

Those aren’t business models!?!?

Empire of AI

If there’s even a small chance of a really big thing happening, should you do it?

“The need to be first or to perish” is what set in motion the explosion of consumer use of artificial intelligence. That argument raised billions of dollars, set off one of the largest infrastructure investments in American history and set off a global arms race.

The company that set off the arms race is OpenAI, and its cofounder and public face Sam Altman. Altman wielded this argument widely: If OpenAI doesn’t race toward the possibility of superintelligence than an existing incumbent like Google will, or China will. But no one else, nowhere else, could have done this. At least not now.

Or so the argument goes in Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI published this year and written by journalist Karen Hao.

One Chinese researcher told Hao that no one would have been funded outside Silicon Valley with over $1 billion without a clear purpose, so we created the risk and the solution. As she writes: “everything OpenAI did was the opposite of inevitable.”

Altman shares a birthday with the legendary physicist Robert Oppenheimer (“father of the atomic bomb”). Altman loves the comparison of OpenAI to the Manhattan project, though Hao notes that “he never seemed to add that Oppenheimer spent the second half of his life plagued by regret and campaigning against the spread of his own creation.”

At an industry event in December 2024, Altman’s cofounder and one-time chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said that “we have but one internet,” in referring to the source material that the AI industry has already primarily digested. Having consumed all of us, they seek more, Hao argues, in preferring the “empire” metaphor of the AI industry. The book is exhaustive and critical. A very worthwhile read for those following the industry, even though it goes into even greater detail on internal politics than I needed. It reads as authoritative.

Below I share my notes for future reference.

Algospeak

Are algorithms creating a new kind of language development, or just speeding the method we’ve always had?

“Words aren’t just diffusing from human to human anymore: they’re now moving from human to algorithm and back to human.” That’s from Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language, the new, charming and insightful linguistics book by Adam Aleksic, a Harvard-trained, 20-something influencer creating under the ‘etymology nerd’ handle.

As he writes: “Algorithms are the culprits, influencers are the accomplices, language is the weapon and you, dear reader are the victim”

Below I share my notes for future reference.

How countries go broke

The American-led political order that started in 1945 at the conclusion of the Second World War is 80 years old and due for a major reordering.

That’s from How Countries Go Broke, the most recent in the “Principles” series by Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge fund manager who has written a collection of books on economic systems and investment strategy. I read “The Changing World Order” a few years back.

This, like others in the series, is backed what Dalio vaguely refers to a research team he employs. This makes sense, that a billionaire investor would employ research to develop an ever more detailed view of the world, but he’s become best known for a more expansive view than current economic conditions. Beyond his Bridgewater hedge fund, Dalio pumps out content now that attempts to put today into a broader historical context. No doubt simplified, his “big cycle” is the idea that eternally human qualities result in governments following predictable patterns, of relying on a hard, fixed currency before devaluing it long enough until there is a collapse.

He argues we’re something like 90%-95% through this pattern. Dalio has a reputation of prescience, if not precision: His prediction of a coming internet bubble bursting came five years too early (a half decade of earnings). I struggle with this. The books and research are compelling and interesting, but exactly because they’re comfortingly simple, they also read is unhelpful in any specific or actionable way. The interpretation is nonetheless welcome.

Below I share my notes for future reference.