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Some people talk their way through a task — checking in, workshopping, circling back. Others dive in and stay quiet until it’s done. Both approaches can produce results, but only one tends to get recognized.In a recent piece, software engineer tells the story of two colleagues assigned the same task. One posted upda...

Images created by , featuring “A Rare Win for Vitamin D Supplementation: Multiple Sclerosis” by The most powerful way we have to bring readers to your stories is through the Medium Digest, which is the personalized email we send to the 13+ million readers who have signed up to get it either daily or weekly.Each pers...

Insects can be scary (like wasps), gross (like cockroaches), and annoying (like the ants that somehow made their way into my two-pound honey jar last week). They’re also essential to our survival: Bugs great and small are crucial members of ecosystems across the globe, whether they’re pollinating suburban flowers or...

I’ve always been ambitious. But I’ve also always been suspicious of that ambition, wondering if it’s a genuine hunger or just a prettier name for insecurity. Maybe I’m just desperate to avoid feeling ordinary.Physician makes a thoughtful case for ordinariness. He traces our cultural obsession with greatness to the A...

In last week’s newsletter, highlighted a recent study about the decline of lingering in American cities. And as a New Yorker, this idea is close to my heart: Just as I’m always looking for ways to pursue boredom, I love opportunities to enjoy a city without having to, say, pay $6 for a matcha latte.The study that Ca...

We know readers want to have control over who they follow and how they get your stories. Writers want more of their readers to have a direct line to their writing. As we tested this new feature, we found that readers were much more likely to subscribe to get your story updates if they don’t have to provide an email ...

Image by The Medium Partner Program is how we pay writers for their stories. When you publish a story on Medium, you can choose to put it behind the paywall like this:Screenshot taken by ZulieWhen you paywall a story, only a paying Medium Member can read it. When a paying Medium Member reads your story, you earn som...

Humans have always been preoccupied with creating images of ourselves. Designer analyzes the history of portraiture from oil paintings of kings to Ghibli-style AI selfies of Sam Altman. Across time, we’ve adjusted how we appear to fit a certain ideal. What’s changed is scale. Today, self-portraits aren’t just person...

Some histories of Memorial Day in the U.S. are rooted in an 1868 proclamation, but the annual holiday can be traced back even further to 1865, when a crowd of 10,000 (most of whom were formerly enslaved Black citizens) gathered in Charleston, South Carolina, to honor fallen Union soldiers who fought for their freedo...

We’ve dedicated a few past issues to the decline of “third places,” which are venues for socializing that are not work or home. Think public libraries, parks, recreation centers — spaces that do not have a cost barrier and bring together people from different backgrounds.I hadn’t thought of sidewalks as third places...

Everything old is new again. That’s a core tenet of postmodernism, the mid-20th-century philosophy that upended ideas of originality and truth. It holds that contemporary culture is a remix, with endless layers of recycled stories, styles, and meanings. Nothing is truly original. Meaning depends on how we interpret ...

I grew up in Washington, D.C., surrounded by people who live and breathe politics. But I don’t remember any kind of shared civic spirit. Instead, I remember tribalism: reflexive opinions presented as inherently virtuous. And I could never bring myself to play along. For a long time, I saw my reluctance to participat...

Image created by Jason CombsPublications on Medium play a big role in helping find readers for your story. In this story, I’ll show you two ways to quickly find publications on Medium that are:ActiveAccepting submissionsIf you prefer watching, you can check out the video version here:What is a Medium publication?A p...

Photo taken by Pratibha Singh, modified by Jason CombsLast month, 350 people joined Draft Day 2025 in the live Zoom event, dug through their drafts folder on Medium, found a dusty draft, polished it up, and pressed publish on that story. Some did that more than once! Medium writers who participated in Draft Day publ...

In writing about the on-going enshittification of tech jobs last month, Cory Doctorow mentioned a phrase that has been pinging around my brain ever since: “Vocational awe.” He defined it as “the feeling that your work matters so much that you should accept all manner of tradeoffs and calamities to get the job done.”...

Image created by Jason CombsSo, you’re a designer. You make things clear. Make things beautiful. You wrestle with complex challenges for brands and users; you spend your days immersed in pixels, prototypes, and problems that need solving.How about words?Not just the microcopy you use in your designs — real thoughtfu...

Last week, Just Norah wrote in Rooted about the quest for healthier instant noodles. The pantry staple, pioneered by Japanese-Taiwanese inventor Momofuku Ando in the 1950s, is a beloved touchstone for home cooks in Asia, and across the globe. Recently, cooks and companies alike have attempted to curb the nutritional...

Meta recently released a research paper proposing an AI model called Audiobox-Aesthetics. It’s designed to predict how people might rate the aesthetic quality of audio by assigning scores across four categories: production quality, production complexity, content enjoyment, and content usefulness. Each clip would be ...

In April, biotech startup Colossal Biosciences unveiled two genetically engineered wolf pups, claiming they had brought the extinct dire wolf back to life. Time put the pups on its cover. The word Extinct was crossed out in red. The internet lost its mind.But two recent articles on Medium convincingly argue that the...

What happened to the five-minute song? Most hits today clock in at around three minutes, streamlined for maximum replay value and minimal risk of a skip.Culture writer Daniel Parris set out to answer a deceptively simple question: What’s the ideal song length? He expected a tidy number. Instead, he found a gap betwe...

Cognitive behavioral therapy calls them distortions: thoughts that lie, spiral, catastrophize. The ones that whisper you’re unlovable, a loser, an embarrassment. For writer and law student Chandrayan Gupta, they were relentless. Even after years of medication, depression clung to him. It wasn’t until he began CBT th...

“I need a deadline,” a friend of mine used to say when they were struggling to get something done. They knew they could do it, but if given seemingly infinite time they never would.I feel the same way. All the time. (Right now, actually, I’m writing this on a 30-minute deadline before a meeting.) My “timeboxing” hab...

When I first joined Medium, our CEO would occasionally Slack me about decisions I’d made. “I’m curious why…” he’d begin, before mentioning a story I’d curated or post I’d drafted. Honestly, this freaked me out at first. I took “I’m curious” to mean “I’m suspicious” or “I vehemently disagree but am trying to be polit...

When someone is labeled “liberal” or “conservative,” what does that actually tell you? In American media, these terms don’t describe beliefs. They signal identity. And that shorthand often obscures more than it reveals.History and politics writer George Dillard reflects on the death of Pope Francis and how quickly A...