São Paulo: The City With No Outdoor Advertisements

Ads are everywhere — on every corner, in your browser, and even staring you in the face while you're 35,000 feet in the air. There is no escaping them these days, and it pains me to see people plaster an ad anywhere there’s a blank space. It feels like nothing can be done about this ever-present nuisance of ads, but São Paulo had other ideas and in 2006, they passed the Clean City Law to outlaw the use of all outdoor advertisements. Since then Paris removed a third of their outdoor ads, Grenoble has replaced ads with trees, and Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, and Alaska have all gone billboard-free. It just goes to show the change you can make when you think outside the frame.

In September 2006, the mayor of São Paulo passed the so-called “Clean City Law" that outlawed the use of all outdoor advertisements, including on billboards, transit, and in front of stores. Within a year, 15,000 billboards were taken down and store signs had to be shrunk so as not to violate the new law. Outdoor video screens and ads on buses were stripped. Even pamphleteering in public spaces has been made illegal. Nearly $8 million in fines were issued to cleanse São Paulo of the blight on its landscape. Seven years on, the world's fourth-largest metropolis and South America’s most important city remains free of visual clutter and eye sore that plagues the majority of cities around the world.

Your parents are getting old, here's what to do

This piece deeply touched me and has been a constant reminder that I should be cherishing the moments I have with my parents. I may be busy, stressed, or have other obligations, but once they’re gone, no amount of money, free time, or mental acuity will allow me to enjoy more time with them.

What I truly appreciated about Shaan’s post is that it’s not just saying “spend more time with your parents”. The post provides 10 ways to make your parents happy, so if you’re feeling stuck and unsure how to make your parents feel seen, simply adopt one or two of these ideas. I did exactly that a few months ago, and it’s made a meaningful impact.

I’ve decided that it’s time for some family philanthropy.

How do I give back to my parents? What are the simple, low cost, low effort things for me, that would make a big impact for them? Those are the best life trades: “Easy for me, valuable for you”

Here’s my list of 10 things any kid can do for their parents as they get older. Starting with the lowest cost/effort…going up to high cost/high effort.

How Actors Remember Their Lines

It would be fair to say that I have a poor memory for tasks like remembering to pick up something from the pharmacy or packing an extra sweater when I visit San Francisco. My workaround for this is a never-ending list of to-dos. Heck, it’s why I built Plinky as a place to save links that I didn’t want to forget to show Colleen.

However, I am very good at remembering people, places, and personal stories. That’s because those things have meaning to me, and it turns out it's quite similar to the way actors remember their lines. For them, lines aren't just words learned through rote repetition; they learn the words by finding the meaning in them.

Actors imagine the character in each scene, adopt the character’s perspective, relate new material to the character’s background, and try to match the character’s mood. Script lines are carefully analyzed to understand the character’s motivation. This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?” Later, during a performance, this deep understanding provides the context for the lines to be recalled naturally, rather than recited from a memorized text.