I finally watched Everything Everywhere All At Once last night and I have never cry/laughed as much as that before. But there was a line in the movie that struck me: When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary. That reminded me of a question that Rutger Bregman...

I really like what Chris says here about email: I do think it’s OK to kinda poke through your inbox sometimes just to remind your brain about things in there you might need to get to. But just marking your messages as read is essentially fake work. Be wary of fake work. Be wary of fake work! Heck yes. There’s two...

Somewhere in this sea of mustaches is my great grandfather on my mom’s side, William French. He could be any one of these faces; there’s no blondish hair, big-ish noses, or any other genetic quirk of chance that’s familiar to me. All these men look the same, and I could be related to each and every one of them. My...

106,820 people visited my website last week. Two posts had been upvoted to the top of the orange website and a hellish amount of attention was suddenly thrown my way. This has happened before and I’ve always felt conflicted about it. The first time I got onto the front page of the orange website I was like finally...

After long bouts of work—months and months uninterrupted—I become a slug person; small hurdles spike my anxiety, my anger flares at the slightest confrontation, I notice fewer jokes, fewer attempts on my part to make people laugh. My memory goes to all hell too and I can’t seem to concentrate on prolonged amounts of...

Jim Nielsen: Prototyping is moving. It’s the meeting, the considering, and the conceptualizing, but with iterative progress in a concrete artifact. When you’re done, you’re left with something tangible — as well as experiential knowledge — rather than just a bunch of meeting notes and perceived agreement. As an...

In this fantastic video, Dan Olson looks at the grossest parts of the publishing industry; the exploitation, the predatory behavior, the high tolerance of spam by publishing companies, and how grifters push freelance writers and voice actors into a gig economy nightmare. Dan breaks down how these scams work—how they...

Type specimens are getting buck wild these days. Here’s The Food Issue, a website by Commercial Type, that’s a tiny magazine and type specimen. But, also: Helena Fitzgerald! Helen Rosner! Robin Sloan! What a great idea for a thing. Editor of The Food Issue, Caren Litherland, wrote about the origins and where this...

Someone asked me for advice about their career a while ago and even though I absolutely do not feel qualified enough to give advice to anyone about this, here goes nothin’: Blog! Blog your heart out! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in. Blog about cameras or HTML or that...

I am burrowed in a small cafe with soft music in the background and a warm coffee in hand. The heatwave in the bay area has broken and today I have nothing to do but read and write and read some more. I ought to to update the /newsletter page today since now I’m working on multiple newsletters at once. Also it would...

I made a lil micro-site for the newsletter I’m kicking off tomorrow morning called How Not To Make A Book. Here is me quoting me: There’s almost too much to care for; the design, paper stock, binding, proofreading, logistics, then—not to forget and most important of all—the words you need to write inside. But what...

Back in 2009, Cory Doctorow described how to write like the wind: Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun....