Worthwhile: Self-Storage + Sinatra’s Comeback + Japanese Lost and Found

Worth Reading

Erica Pandey, writing for Axios, neatly captures our glut of stuff:

[T]he U.S. now has more self-storage facilities than McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger Kings, Starbucks and Walmarts combined. That's around 50,000 storage complexes.

Benjamin Schwarz, writing for the Atlantic way back in 2007, on Frank Sinatra’s place in music history:

Sinatra’s musical achievement—which constituted perhaps the last sustained occasion when elite and mass musical taste would coalesce—was really only a prolonged holding action made possible by his preternatural talent and charisma. As Will Friedwald, the most thorough analyst of Sinatra’s musicianship, wrote, Sinatra was, for all his popular appeal, “completely out of touch with American culture as it evolved from [the late 1940s] onwards.”.... [That] Sinatra’s artistic maturity coincided with the peak of Elvis’s appeal shows the extent to which Sinatra’s imperishable accomplishment was a cultural outlier. And though Sinatra’s second act clearly represented the justifiably bemoaned final triumph of grown-up pop-cultural taste, Sinatra himself helped hasten the inevitable triumph of youth culture.

Brie Wolfson, writing for Superorganizers, provides some useful spectra for thinking about management styles (and how to manage up):

Develop people: Managers motivated by developing people want you to do the best work of your career. They regularly check in on how you are doing and care a great deal about team and company culture, and your role in it. They’re your personal cheerleader.

Deliver outcomes: Managers motivated by delivering outcomes want you to drive excellent work to completion. They regularly check in on the status of your projects and care a great deal about the quality, progress, and outcomes of the work, and your role in it. They’re your personal work catalyst.

Worth Watching

Kottke shares a fascinating case study in social trust from Japan’s lost and found system. I need 1) a Smithian analysis of the “societal eye” and 2) more information about the Japanese model of policing.

Worth Trying

I’ve long been dragging emails to labels in Gmail. Turns out that it also works in reverse. In either direction, I find Gmail labels essential for email management.[via]