Spotify bought the rights to Joe Rogan’s podcast in 2020 for $100 million, and full episodes became exclusively available on Spotify on September 1, 2020. I don’t listen to the podcast but have had the feeling that I hear about Rogan and his show less than I used to, and I wanted to know what […]
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What People Talk About When They Talk About Sally Rooney Books
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I recently finished Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You. One of the characters in the book is a novelist who is adjusting to life in the public eye and can’t understand why strangers on the internet feel the need to analyze and comment on her life. It’s easy to imagine that Rooney herself shares […]
Quantifying what Republicans and Democrats talked about at the DNC and the RNC
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We took the toughest, boldest, strongest, and hardest hitting action against China in American history by far. President Trump, RNC Night 4 Donald Trump has had a love fest with dictators, including China and Russia. He hasn’t been standing up to them at all. Rose G, DNC Night 3 I didn’t watch much of either […]
My Email Open Rate Data and 4 Things I learned about Copywriting
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I am sharing data on my email open rates because 1) I always appreciate seeing data from other blogs and websites; the desire to benchmark oneself is hard to suppress and 2) if you are reading this, there is a decent chance you contributed to the data! I have been reading a book about copywriting, […]
Quantifying the Poker Boom
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Since reading Maria Konnikova’s terrific new book The Biggest Bluff, I have been on a poker kick. She describes her journey to the World Series of Poker Main Event, poker’s biggest stage, and what it is like to be there. This got me interested in the tournament and its history. I knew poker got incredibly […]
Drinking, Cursing, and Cardigans: Taylor Swift Lyrics Over Time
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Edit 12/12/2020: Ms. Swift has been much more productive than I have this year and released another album, so this is updated with Evermore lyrics Several years ago, I listened to Taylor Swift’s Reputation album and noticed lots of references to alcohol. I was in my early 20s and it reminded me of the self-conscious […]
The New York Times’ coverage of the Coronavirus
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I used the New York Times API to see how it has covered the Coronavirus since the crisis began. My feeling was that for about a month, from mid-March to mid-April, it was all anyone could talk or think about. And since then, it still dominates the public consciousness but people are, understandably, tired of […]
Which companies have the most likable CEOs?
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Glassdoor asks employees whether they’d recommend a company to a friend and whether they approve of the CEO. For the most part, you would expect those two numbers to match closely. And for the most part they do, but there are some interesting ways in which they don’t. I looked at data from Glassdoor for […]
What does the messiness in M&A integration actually look like?
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I recently finished the Disney CEO Bob Iger’s book which was pretty good. The most interesting parts of the book were his stories about Disney’s big acquisitions. Disney swallowed up Pixar, Lucas Films, and Marvel Studios under his leadership. It even came close to buying Twitter, until Iger got cold feet and worried about the […]
DMing your way into an analytics job
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I often see messages from people asking for help getting a job in data. Usually the message reads something like this: “Hi, I just graduated from the masters in data science program at ________ and I noticed there’s an open data science role at ________. Could you help me out with a referral? These messages […]