A year of stories and sourdough

There are two things I love to create and share. Bread and stories. At this time of year, I head to the kitchen for my regular ritual of baking sourdough bread and sharing it with my colleagues, friends and family. Geography plays a role, the closer you are to my physical location, the more likely you are to get snacks ??. Most Fridays throughout the year, I also pass along great stories to my team at Microsoft, some of which they have had a hand in and others that simply inspired me. I can’t physically share bread with everyone (much as I wish I could), but I thought I’d share a few of my favorite readings from this year.

Don’t Fear the Artichoke. Cook It Whole., Gabrielle Hamilton, The New York Times Magazine

I’ll start at the intersection of food and stories with food writing in the NYT Magazine. So many things to love about this one in particular. It starts with humans, and the way humans can be vain and unpredictable and maybe capable of hope. It makes a hard turn into wonderful descriptors of an artichoke.

The Kingdom of Copper, S. A. Chakraborty and The Winter of the Witch, Katherine Arden

I also love to share the experience of reading fiction. Back to back this year I read two wildly different fantasy novels, The Kingdom of Copper and The Winter of the Witch. My youngest tends to read these books with me, and so I love that both have strong and headstrong female leads, and that both are set in cultures far from ours. I was reading The Winter of the Witch and kept putting it down…bad things happened to our heroine, I hated the bad guy, and yet I was just swept up. If I needed a reminder of the power of story, I got it over several hundred pages.

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, Paul Scharre

Back to non-fiction, I read Army of None, a look at the role of AI in the military. It’s a sobering book, but a good grounding in some of the challenges related to technology and the military.

You’re Hired. Now Wear This Headset to Learn the Job., Karen Weise, The New York Times

I really appreciated this story looking at technology and front line workers. Front page of the NYT business section, great photos, great quotes. It is always a challenge to try and tell a story that has customers front and center, and it requires a lot of work, patience, and a reporter who spends the time teasing out weaker signals.

One Small Act, Microsoft Life

The One Small Act stories centered around people from a Microsoft employee's past, like Tareq Humphrey, who shaped who they are, which helps build trust in the products and services we build. The stories about teachers, parents, and support figures tugged on the heartstrings for sure.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, Anand Giridharadas

This story is a bit of a broadside against the bromide that tech and tech CEOs and VCs and billionaires are all for good. He’s been (sort of oddly) embraced by the Valley elite, but his message is pretty sobering.

Dear Younger Me, Lauren Fleshman

Fleshman is an awesome writer, and her piece Dear Younger Me is a must read that looks at the challenges young women in sports face, and in the end what is most important. There is community there, specifically, the pursuit of a healthy community of runners and coaches who are more focused on what an athlete can do, not what that athlete looks like, or how much they weigh. I read this in 2018, and again this year, and have sent it to many people who have young runners in their lives.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow

This story involves magical doors and whatnot, so probably is not super relevant to my work…but still. When we wrestle words into the right shapes, soundbites and tweets and longform, something magic does happen. But how, us being non-magic and all, do we get better at this art? By noticing words, by opening our eyes, by interrogating text we see.

FT Person of the Year: Satya Nadella, The Financial Times (subscription required)

I confess a bit of bias on this one. But this story was just published as I was finishing this post, and I’m including it because it really peels back the onion on what could have been a simple story on financial performance. While this story reflects the strong business results Microsoft has had during the past several years under Satya’s leadership, it goes beyond the business results and looks at the “why” behind the momentum: learning constantly; having a sense of humility; and focusing on the success of others.

As we close out the first decade of the 21st century (or is it? Someone who works on my corridor is passionate that it is NEXT YEAR that the decade begins, but he also detests ketchup, so you decide), I hope 2020 and the coming decade will be filled with great stories for all of us, and that we lift our eyes from the moment to see them.

fxs