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Special announcement! I have returned to producing a blog. It is aptly named The Sundry Letter, over at sundryletter.com. This newsletter will be a relay of what I post on the blog. Thank you for reading!

You’re actually a terrible lie detector, but here’s how to get better Art Markman for Fast Company:

So if you’re in a high-stakes situation, it makes sense to try and be more vigilant about whether you’re hearing the truth. But even then, many of us look for the wrong signals. In fact, researchers have found that when we consciously try to catch someone in a lie, we get much worse at it. Our unconscious lie-detection instincts are more reliable than our conscious ones.

Oddly enough, I really thought the inverse was true. 

Land ownership and digital products Maximum geek alert. Here’s Rebekah Cox, original designer of the News Feed pattern for Facebook and Quora, using the image of physical land ownership to explain the digital platform wars: 

Land ownership couldn’t exist without violence. Violence to take the land and violence—or at least the threat of violence—to keep the land. Systems have been created to keep that violence to a minimum: courts, property lines, rules, regulations, police, lawyers, deeds, sales, etc. New laws are created to compensate for new abuses: height restrictions, offsets, building permits, etc. But where lawyers fail, sheriffs are there with guns for enforcement.

There is no digital land equivalent. Products like Facebook and Twitter are platforms and the foundation on which you build your parcel is your profile but for the most part it grows without harming others. Your gaining friends and followers and likes and retweets should not detract from other’s opportunity to do so. By and large, the ‘battles’ are between the major platforms themselves. Snapchat innovates, Facebook-owned Instagram clones. Actual violence is avoided entirely.

*Thanks and have a nice week, 

Ulysse*