1. WHY NOT replace grades in college? (Or why I can’t speak French.)📝🔄🇫🇷
Grades should come with a warning label.
They’re meant to help — but the side effects? Superficial learning. Outright cheating. Rampant grade inflation.
It’s time to end the madness. In my latest Washington Post’s Why Not column, I argue for ditching grades and replacing them with something more rigorous.
You can read the column here (gift article) or by clicking the image below.
2. PINK RECOMMENDS. Travel tips 🌍 . . . the art of sports 🏀🎨 . . . a compelling docudrama . . . and lots of weed🌿
READ ✈️: The wise and peripatetic Kevin Kelly has distilled 50 years of travel wisdom into a single list. (One gem: If you hire a driver, pay them to take you to visit their mother!) A brilliant compilation. Don’t leave home without it.
LOOK 👀 : Even people who aren’t sports fans should pay attention to sports. Sports has everything, folks! Organizational behavior (people working in teams, evaluated by clear metrics). Drama (characters confronting obstacles, often against a ticking clock.) Politics (labor disputes, antitrust issues, protests.) That’s why I love Art But Make It Sports — a newsletter and Instagram feed where LJ Rader pairs sports photos with fine art lookalikes.
COUNT 📈: More Americans now smoke marijuana daily than drink alcohol — even though the substance has been legal in some states for only a decade and remains illegal under federal law. Wild. Here’s the study.
WATCH 📺: Mrs. Pink Report and I have been riveted by Say Nothing, the nine-episode Hulu series that unpacks The Troubles in Northern Ireland through one woman’s story. (The show is based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s widely praised book.)
3. FINAL THOUGHTS. Good leaders have fans. Great leaders have haters.🔥
Our most popular video in February — nearing a million views across social media — explains why effective leaders always have a few haters.
The 31-second (!) piece is inspired by Jessica Stillman’s Inc. story, which itself was inspired by a conversation between Bob Sutton and Adam Grant (the Batman and Robin of organizational psychology!)
Not on Instagram or TikTok? No worries—we just posted it on YouTube. You can watch it for free by clicking the image below.