Found/Saved/Subscribed/Shared - Rosie Yakob

Hey,

How’s your week going? Found anything you just couldn’t wait to share or subscribe to? Tell us about it! That’s what that comments section is for. Just paste a link to THE ONE THING that you really enjoyed this week. No need for a description. Or context. Just the link.

OK. Last week, we chatted with Steve Bryant about what he’s found, shared, subscribed and saved recently. Today it’s the turn of Rosie Yakob.

Rosie is the co-founder of the nomadic creative consultancy, Genius Steals, which helps ignite innovation in companies around the world. The last time she had an apartment or home base was March 2013!

I'm still talking about XX by Rian Hughes, even though I read it several years ago. There have been things I've enjoyed since then, but when it comes to gifting to others, that's probably my top gifted fiction book (with The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt as my most frequently gifted non-fiction book.) It's a crazy wonderful sci-fi story about aliens and ideas, told through NASA transcripts, fake Wikipedia pages, and art. Rian Hughes, the author, was known as a British illustrator and graphic designer, and while XX was his first novel, he incorporates plenty of art into the pages.

This suggestion came my way via a friend made over the internet, Reuben Halper. We met IRL sometime back in 2016, and every time we find ourselves in the same city, we make sure to meet up for food, bevvies, and most importantly, conversation! Looking back through my email, he recommended this to me in February 2021 and I didn't get around to reading it until a few months later, but then my inbox is filled with me emailing and suggesting the book to others.

I save most things through my iPhone camera roll, though admittedly many things get lost because of that. Just yesterday I saved an image from the Readerly 'Recent Gists' email, which featured a summary of a book called "I Who Have Never Known Men." I took a screen grab on my phone of the email so that I could share it with a friend, and then when I sent it to her via iMessage a few hours later, that also prompted me to go ahead and put myself on the waitlist for the e-book at my local library using Libby. Saving a book I want to read most frequently happens through the Libby app, but occasionally I'll do it on Goodreads or in a saved note on my phone.

Meg Conley's newsletter 'Homeculture' on Substack and The Juggernaut are my two most recent subscriptions.

The Juggernaut has been targeting me on Instagram for a while with their content on South Asians, and every single article they've posted has intrigued me. But I didn't opt in for their free trial, instead I purchased a year up front having never read any of their stories. I knew from Instagram that the content sounded up my alley, and made the leap. Their daily email ends up being one of my most frequently read newsletters, with content like "The Black rulers of South Asia" and "The lost ritual of soi patano."

With Meg Conley and her Substack newsletter, "Homeculture," I had been a fan and subscriber since April 2022. It wasn't difficult to notice that her emails were the ones I was frequently forwarding and referencing within conversations amongst friends. The article in that newsletter edition that pushed me to become a paid subscriber was "This is a rant about rugs." I'd say it's one of her best, but that would imply there's a worst, and I haven't read anything by her that isn't smart and thought-provoking. At the top of her email, she points out the cost of her monthly subscription is $5, the equivalent to the cost of 12 minutes of child care. Each edition takes thousands of minutes to research, draft, write, record, edit, design and publish and I wanted to support her because I'd like to read more from her.

We have a Substack newsletter called Strands of Genius, which we send out every Tuesday and Thursday. Each Tuesday we include 3 links ourselves, and then each Thursday you hear from a guest curator. So, I'm regularly sharing links and stories in that capacity. And then below the links themselves, we also write about whatever topic we're thinking about when we draft the newsletter (this week, the Super Bowl ads!). We occasionally hear from people in response to the email or over Twitter, or even in the comments of Substack telling us what they thought. A big chunk of our new business inquires come as a reply to a newsletter we've sent, so there are certainly things that happen as a result of sharing.

Outside of our one-to-many publishing, but in this case, also connected... I often send articles to friends. Just recently, I sent the NY Times article about Rihanna's Super Bowl show to my friend Alex. She replied with a quote that made it into our newsletter, along with some of Ri Ri's best Twitter clap backs (which, of course, we also included).

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Thanks, Rosie!

That’s it for this week. Next week, we’ll be back with another creative mind letting us know what they’ve found, shared, subscribed and saved recently. Don’t forget to share this post with friends (share the love), and ask them to subscribe if they haven’t. See you then!