Many of the newsletters I read are publishing “best of 2025” wrap-ups where they rattle off the posts that either got the most attention or made their authors most proud. Which is nice and all, but I saw that content already. I guess the digital cadence means it’s better to do the newsletter version of a clip show...

I took a microeconomics class my first semester of college as an undergraduate. It was part of the core curriculum requirements. I found it incredibly boring. My distaste for it was part of the motivation for me to declare a major in English instead of something pre-business. More than a decade later, I took a...

I have owned netwert.com since 1997. That’s a long time! I have a few dozen email aliases that route through this domain, for everything from work to shopping to family management. I have had Gmail since shortly after it went public in 2004. That’s also a long time! Gmail is my default mail interface. I am...

I recently pulled out my old Helly Hansen all-weather coat. My wife bought it for me on a trip to Norway back in 2007. It developed a small tear in the nylon on the chest, so I moved onto other jackets, including two more Helly Hansens. But I never let go of the first one, […]

The news that Typepad is shutting down raised some eyebrows in my corner of the internet. Typepad was a bit of a niche service, but it was an interesting attempt at both democratizing and monetizing blogging. While it’s sad that it’s going away—I am anti-linkrot, and “your account will be permanently deactivated” is...

The end of summer brings reflection, so here are a few of my thoughts as we head back into the workaday. ➸ Sunday marked 100 days since I hit my target weight, and I checked in two pounds lower than I was in May. The embarrassing pile of sweets my family brought home from Martha’s […]

There’s an interesting conversation occurring around conversational AI, and the thought that humans, as a species, aren’t properly equipped to handle their existence. Consider these perspectives when next reading about blind trust in Gemini search results, or people using ChatGPT as a therapist. Rusty Foster:...

“If you could go back and listen to one song for the first time again, which song would it be?” I came across this prompt in another blog post, and it got me thinking about what song I’d like to experience that with. The answer for me came instantly, actually: “Moby Octopad,” by Yo La […]

I was delighted to be contacted by Manuel Moreale for his long-running People and Blogs interview series, which went live today. If you didn’t come here from there, here’s our conversation. The archives are full of interesting people and worth poking through. Thanks, Manuel!

Noah Smith wrote about his weight loss journey, and came to an interesting conclusion: that for him, the issue was noticing whether or not he was full: I started paying attention to how much I ate. If it was “time to eat”, but I wasn’t hungry, I wouldn’t eat anything. And when I did eat, […]

I haven’t really been a paying member of anything since my college fraternity. (The gym does not count.) My wife and I find it mildly amusing that we live in Manhattan with children who play golf and tennis; if we were in the suburbs, it’s likely that we’d have joined a country club a long […]

Because it’s really all I think about in my spare time lately, and I need to get it out of my system. I’m still losing weight. I am way below the target I mentioned in this space last month. I did some homework, and realized that broader measurements of “ideal weight” and “healthy BMI” were […]