Sunday

#458: A Fistful of Firsts

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 03:26:36 GMT

We took Rufus to our downtown YMCA for his first toddler swim class, which was perfectly scoped to half an hour. He made a valiant effort to blow bubbles in the water (ended up licking the surface), laughed when I flipped him from chest to back to chest again, and didn’t try to run off to the adult pool. The night prior we went bowling, also a first, and it was all we could do to keep him from dancing into the adjacent lanes. In the past month he’s had his first ice cream cone, rode his first choo-choo, and saw – and touched! – an in-service firetruck at our local fire station, where a firefighter nicknamed “Foxy” gave him his first cookie. He’s a happy, mischievous (we call him “Asian of chaos”), and deeply funny kid. I’m trying my best to savor these moments.

Work-wise I was out in Mountain View for a few days covering Google I/O (their annual developer conference) for Every. On the flight there I read Sebastian Mallaby’s thrilling The Infinity Machine, a profile of DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis (which I recommend to the much-puffier documentary The Thinking Game).

Being there gave me the impression that there’s a growing chasm between what researchers at the frontier labs see in their most advanced AI models’ impacts on scientific research and robotics, and the error-prone results that the most people see in the AI summaries tacked onto the tops of search pages. I believe that Hassabis believes, based on the progress he’s seen working on AlphaGo and AlphaFold, that – as he so casually said during the keynote at I/O – we’ll in our lifetimes “cure all disease.” I also believe that of the frontier labs, Google is maybe the one most cognizant that they need to prove that people’s lives aren’t going to get worse on the way there.

That said: I also had a hand in editing this essay by Dan arguing why the fears of AI automating away human jobs underestimate our own intelligence. It’s a pragmatic counterpoint to both the hype and doom on either extreme, and Dan’s advice in this weird – maybe weirdest – moment in time is to “surf the models.” The piece is a brisk 8,000 words, and took a huge effort across the company.

My last night in California, I stopped at Books Inc. in downtown Mountain View and, as one does in Silicon Valley, picked up a copy of Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas for the flight back—my first Culture novel.

But I’ll save my thoughts for when I finish.

p.s. June’s digital mending circle is next Tuesday the 9th at 7:30–9:00pm Eastern. I’ll be working on my website. Reply for the Zoom link if you want to join.

#457: Sweaty Poets

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 01:54:23 GMT

This month Rufus had his first overnight at my parents’ place without us (he did great!). In part, it was so Julia and I could go see poet and essayist Ross Gay, who was in town as part of Oakland University’s annual Maurice Brown Memorial Poetry Reading series.

The reading took place, of all places, on the basketball courts of OU’s campus athletics center, with a casual shootaround beforehand on the unbleachered half of the courts, the first time I’ve dribbled a basketball in years. The host later quipped about sweaty poets, Gay read his basketball-related work, of which there was more than I’d realized, including Be Holding’s appropriately drawn out opening ode to Dr. J’s legendary baseline layup in the 1980 NBA Finals. (Gay played basketball in school and has coached high school players, and is quiet tall.) A good way to spend an evening.

This On Being episode was my first introduction to Ross Gay’s unabashed gratitudes, and since the event I’ve been reading the poems in the so-titled book. A good way to start a morning.

Speaking of good ways to spend an evening: community theater. We saw, last night, a friend act in our local improv theatre’s musical parody of Jurassic Park, which was the first movie I ever saw as a kid in an American movie theater, and which struck me mid-show as a perfect parody target for this moment of nineties nostalgia. The props were perfectly DIY. The audience was mostly millennial. We hummed along, only half ironically, to the cast ironically humming the ending theme. An earlier musical number was sung by Samuel L. Jackson’s cigarette. It was excellent.

My latest piece for Every is on Living Software, and is in some ways a spiritual successor to The Slow Web. It starts:

Lately, I’ve been wishing that more software had a “freeze” button.

When pressed, the product would crystalize in its present state. The feature set would lock, and the interface would solidify, as if dipped in carbonite. There would be no more new updates. No changes whatsoever.

I want this button because companies are loading apps with more and more features, whether AI or the result of AI-accelerated development, making the tools unrecognizable. The additions are even more jarring for apps that I only use occasionally, like Figma. There, a chat box now beckons to describe my idea to make it come to life. A “Recents” toolbar above it has buttons for Figma Sites, Figma Buzz, and Figma Make—all launched last May. A sidebar module encourages me to try an AI image- and video-generation product called Figma Weave—and which I have to log into separately using my Figma account.

And here I am just trying to update the gradient on an app icon.

No shade on Figma (okay, maybe a little shade), but it’s more my gripes with The General State of Things and my distaste for the technical words “deterministic” and “non-deterministic” that the industry uses to talk about traditional software and AI software.

This makes the piece sound pessimistic—it’s not! I just think that better words (I propose, in the piece, the alternatives tool-like and living) can help makers make legible, for ourselves and others, what we’re trying to make.

To end: One of my new work colleagues also runs Flow State, which recommends two hours of ambient/instrumental music each weekday morning. A good way to start the workday.

#456: A Working Writer

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 02:32:21 GMT

I’m thinking about formats today. Though, it’s more accurate to say I’m often thinking about them for this newsletter. In the past, it’s been a book publishing dispatch, travelogue, link grab-bag, weekly pieces of first-draft poetry, and other, more shortly lived experiments. Since 2021, I’ve been pretty good about including a photo with every issue, though my cadence has slipped from weekly to monthly since Rufus was born (maybe not surprising to any of you parents reading).

All that’s to say that I’ve let go of the idea that this newsletter will ever have an entirely fixed format or rhythm. But I can feel, in this moment of time, a new one sorting itself out. I don’t know what the new format looks like quite yet, so I’ll do some thinking out loud here, in hopes that charting the ecosystem might help me better understand it.

If this doesn’t interest you, skip it! You’ll find more typical links in the next section. Here goes:

My new position at Every seems the ideal outlet for my tech essays. Sometimes, these are the same ideas I’ve floated here as first drafts, just with more time for elaboration, background research, and revision (did I already say this last month?)
My notetaking system has changed a bit recently, through the combination of new Bebop updates (coming soon!) and AI tools that help me review and resurface older notes and journal entries (which I’ve always struggled to do). I end up losing fewer ideas!
I’d like to develop many of the non-tech ideas too, in ways short and long, and post or publish more elsewhere about books, architecture, photography, or plants and gardening.
Including a photo in each newsletter has turned it into a bigger production than just sitting down Sunday nights and firing something off. I feel like I should take more photos during the week, and then want to take the extra step of editing them if I do. Another reason it’s become monthly instead of weekly.
The monthly cadence, though, makes me feel obligated to deliver something substantial than I sometimes have energy for.
For Dumpling Club members, I write a separate monthly letter that’s typically more personal or in-the-weeds, that I think might only interest the hardcorest of followers. But I haven’t clearly defined that for myself either (this email, for instance, is starting to feel more like something I’d send Dumplings).
I have newsletter fatigue as a reader. I’m subscribed to too many, and went to the extent of vibecoding a personal RSS/read-later tool that makes me feel a little less guilty about not reading everything.
I don’t love the term “vibecoding.” In practice it’s more like “painting with code.” But I digress.
I’d started doing longer write-ups of projects here, but again, these are bigger productions.
Maybe I should start blogging again? And just write shorter blog posts?
Or longer social media posts?
I’d rather not.
I like the idea of POSSE in theory, but I don’t love the fragmentation. I’ve started experimenting with cross-posts to Patreon, but it all ends feeling like another platform to manage and check (and get sidetracked by).
Then again, if I could more easily post and participate in those discussions without ever dealing with algorithmic feeds …
The above doesn’t even get into how/what else I could be writing about my novel-in-progress.

So that’s on my mind. Reading this over, I don’t know if I’m any clearer on formats. It just feels more than ever like being a working writer in 2026 means running one-person media company in your spare time.

My March piece at Every was all about maintenance, Digital Mending Circle, and OpenClaw. One thing that didn’t make it into the piece is that after some of the initial technical maintenance around my weird little AI assistant, the act of maintaining it turned more into like the act of maintaining a relationship with a person, or pet, or plant. I’m hoping to explore this angle for the next essay.

I also found, looking back over my notes, a link to this piece on mesolomania, the obsession with intermediate scales. I don’t remember exactly what I thought it had to do with maintenance (the mention of bridges? a connection to Stewart Brand’s “maintenance layers” idea?) but it’s a fun piece.

Speaking of Digital Mending Circle: Our next one is Tuesday, April 14th at 7:30–9:00pm Eastern! Hit reply if you don’t already have the Zoom link.

Rufus isn’t yet old enough to fully appreciate Bluey, but that didn’t stop Julia and me from watching the televised Bluey stage play or, more accurately, stage puppet show. It’s easy to imagine a version of this show with actors wearing full body character costumes, but it would be nowhere close to as magical as this one. Nor did they have to release an orchestral album, but they did. Despite being massively (and deservedly) successful, the show keeps its idiosyncratic charm. Which continues its success. I think of it as playing to the highest common denominator.

Speaking of highest common denominator: The entity I most associate with this phrase is Apple. You’ve likely seen all the coverage making the rounds for the company’s 50th anniversary, and this oral history on Apple’s early days (I love oral histories!) is one of the standouts.

Speaking of early computing: this Version History episode about the vocoder is 👌.

Before starting my new job, the architecture/urbanism account @wrathofgnon was one of the few reasons I would still check Twitter. Their thread on good urban boundaries as illustrated by the movie Zootopia is a classic in the form.

It is not hard to compare Zootopia (2106) with Thomas Moran's approach to Venice (1887). pic.twitter.com/sMiTLs3Cnv
— Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) July 24, 2017

Wrath of Gnon had, however, far more scathing words for Zootopia 2 (which Julia and I also watched without Rufus).

To end: I found myself driving, the other week, behind a van for a catering company called Edibles Rex. It reminded me of the year 2014, when, having just moved back to Detroit, I espied, next to me on the freeway, a service truck belonging to an HVAC company named Desert in Alaska.

Poetry is everywhere,

#455: Find Your Crew

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 01:52:35 GMT

This week I joined Every as a senior editor. I’ve been freelancing part-time there for over a year, editing essays (and in a couple of cases, fiction), and editing will continue to make up a majority of my work. I’ll also be writing my own occasional pieces like the two I shared in issues #454 and #452, and (and!) doing some light product work (which I’ll get to in a sec).

This all started a few years back when a mutual friend (👋 Linda) connected me with Dan Shipper, Every’s co-founder, to coach him on a manuscript. From there I picked up some freelance editing assignments, under the direction of editor-in-chief Kate Lee (formerly of Stripe Press and Medium), and from there, the energy of Every’s global 20+ person team charmed me even further.

One of Every’s big bets is that writers will thrive as AI becomes more enmeshed with our lives – that writing will be a foundational skill if not the foundational skill. Many engineers I know aren’t writing code anymore but they are writing prompts. And good writing gets harder when words are cheap.

These tools are radically changing software. It’s hard to understate this; I totally share Craig’s enthusiasm. If you don’t work in the field, you might’ve only had AI show up in your daily-use software in its sparkle-emoji forms: summaries, autocompletions, and the like, that it the biggest platforms and software makers are trying to shove down our throats.

But I suspect everyone will soon start to feel of the effects of how software is now being made. I’m most excited about what it means for the smaller projects that would otherwise get deprioritized. I’m excited about home-cooked apps and barefoot developers working in local communities, about the potential of long-abandoned projects rising from the dead.

I built Bebop on the first wave of AI copilot tools, and the latest models and coding agents make it feasible for me to maintain and actively develop it in my spare time. I finally, after almost a year of inactivity, pushed several new updates because the models are good enough that I can dip in between work on bigger, higher-priority projects (ie. manuscripts) and watching a one-and-a-half-year-old. Sometimes while watching a one-and-a-half-year-old.

As I said at the top, part of my role at Every will include light product work, mainly on tools to improve the editorial workflow. Again, this would otherwise would be its own full-time job if the latest Opus and GPT models weren’t so damn good at code. Simply being able to ask a model, “What does this code do?” and get a near-immediate answer in plain english ... it’s hard to go back.

While sometimes I find myself in rooms where I’m the most optimistic about AI, other times I’m in rooms where I’m the most skeptical. I’m worried about the second- and third-order effects on computer jobs. I’m appalled (but also not surprised) at the recklessness at which the big players are skirting regulation and gobbling up copyrighted material without just compensation (See You in the Cosmos is one of the books in Anthropic’s pirated training set). I’m unsure about whether or not the short-term environmental costs, the staggering amounts of energy and water usage, will really be made up by hypothetical, AI-enabled future advances in clean energy and medicine.

But I also see benefit in staying abreast of these tools and understanding how they work – and how the work on us. Like everyone (even those who claim to know where this is all headed), I’m figuring it out as I go.

What this means, more practically, is that I don’t expect much else to change here (gestures vaguely at desk and website). I’ll continue working on children’s novels in my spare time (as OG Sunday readers might recall, I wrote my first novel on nights and weekends, and my subsequent novels have taken just as long as that first one). I’ll continue to maintain and update Bebop, and host digital mending circles and books clubs. I’ll continue teaching, visiting schools and libraries to talk with students, gardening and working on house projects and starting new hobbies and trying to improve my daily routines and processes.

So why now? Why, after more than a dozen years ticking off the “self-employed” box on forms have I taken a full-time job? My rational justification is that I’ve come to appreciate stability and predictability much more since Rufus was born, and come to realize how much I depend on external structure, whether someone else has set up that structure or I’ve set it up for myself.

But the real answer is that it just felt right.

One last thought (and maybe small prediction): These tools make it newly possible for anyone to venture out on their own, it’s true. Or at least becoming true. You can have AI do all the parts of the job that you yourself don’t enjoy doing or don’t have time to do. It’s never been easier to go solo. Which means it’s also never been easier to feel alone.

So: find your crew. It doesn’t have to look like a company. It could look like an artist collective, a coworking group, an eclectic research lab, a telegram thread with fellow alumni of an unconventional architecture program, a monthly podcast recording meet that persists even after you and your co-hosts have put the podcast on hiatus, or any other configuration of multiple human beings who share ideas and tools and knowledge, cheer each other on, and help each other make sense of what’s going on in wider world.

#454: Scattered and Productive

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 03:35:53 GMT

Happy Lunar New Year, friends. I have a new essay out this month for Every about taste. I kept seeing this word thrown around in online AI discourse, and it seemed to mean a different thing every time I saw it. So this was me trying to parse the different definitions.

In the essay, I only touch briefly on the role of status in cultural taste, and that’s because David Marx already wrote a whole book on the subject—that I read as part of my research. It was my first introduction to Marx’s writing and I highly, highly recommend it as a follow-up.

As I pitch ideas for future pieces, I’m noticing that my favorite ideas tend to start with a question I want to explore, for which I do not have a clear answer. I might have a hunch about the answer, or a hunch about where I might find it. But the actual answer? Always more complicated and surprising than I expect. Part of the fun.

Two: Some of you new Sunday readers found me through that same taste essay—welcome! Once a month, on the second Tuesday of that month, I host a Digital Mending Circle, in which we take on

the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

During last week’s mending circle, I installed OpenClaw (I fretted just now over what site to link to here, because I definitely do not recommend installing it without knowing the security risks).

What does a suspect AI agent that runs off a Mac Mini and a Claude Code account have to do with maintenance? Well, these AI tools are starting to automate a lot of those same exact activities we do at our mending circles. So what I want to understand is: What does maintenance look like when you have an AI assistant running 24/7?

… which may be the question for next month’s essay.

Our next mending circle is Tuesday, March 10 from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern. Reply to this email to get the Zoom link.

Third: I was finally able, this weekend, to push out a round of planned updates to my iOS quick notes app, Bebop. Updates that I simply wouldn’t have/didn’t have time for prior to the latest AI coding models.

My preferred development environment of choice these days is Conductor, which legitimately feels like it serves new different mode of making software. The sidebar, instead of holding a list of files and folders like its predecessors, holds a list of projects/repositories, because when you set coding agents to work on a problem and they run for minutes or longer, you can plug away at other projects while you wait.

I have never been more scattered and productive at the same time. I used to think those two words were antonyms. Now, not so much.

#453: What the Situation Demands

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 02:35:40 GMT

Current events have me thinking, oddly enough, about plant sociability.

Sociability describes how aggressively plants spread. Some stay where right they are, others creep a little, or stay in moderate but contained patches, while the most aggressive will, if left alone, dominate the landscape.

An example might be Canada Goldenrod, which spreads both by seed and rhizome (horizontal arms that shoot out from the main stem). I first saw three, four plants show up in the alley behind our garage a few years ago. This past fall, practically the whole alley was swathed in its eponymous color. Even though the plant’s native to our area, it crowds out less aggressive ones, both native and non.

You can try to remove these plants, or deadhead them before they seed. These strategies tend to work better when there are still relatively few plants in the area. What do you do if a highly social plant has already taken hold? You might introduce other highly social plants that can hold their own against solidago canadensis. You plant ironweed and bee balm, milkweed and Joe Pye.

You meet aggression with aggression. Because that’s what the situation demands.

Mark my words: Pluribus is going to be remembered as the series that best captures this mid-2020s moment. I’m talking not just our current flavor of sycophantic AI chatbots, but also the memory of pandemic alignment, of what we can do if we all work toward a common goal.

If you want to see a society’s subconscious, all you need do is look at their science fiction. What I see here is both a fear of and admiration for collectivism, a fear of and admiration for – intentional or not – an ascendant China. That tension is what makes the first season of this show so interesting. And so American.

Last month I mentioned I was playing the JRPG-inspired game Sea of Stars. I finished that (and enjoyed it!) and moved onto Final Fantasy X, which I finally played after reading Aidan Moher’s history of the genre, the brilliantly named Fight, Magic, Items.

From that book I went right into Matt Alt’s broader-scoped Pure Invention, which opens with a scene from Final Fantasy VII and makes a compelling case that a lot of what’s happening in American society right now happened in Japan decades ago.

Next up bookwise: W. David Marx’s Ametora. And gamewise, send me a JRPG rec, if you have one (preferably one that won’t take 40+ hours to finish).

#452: New Year Notes

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 01:00:16 GMT

I came home Christmas week after my second residency teaching at Antioch MFA and promptly got sick. I thought it was another stress cold (do you ever get those, when you somehow manage to hold it together just until a big project is finished?) but then the cold lingered, and worsened, and I spent many an afternoon doing what I would normally do except from bed.

No complaints, really. But that I’m sending this Sunday letter on an actual Sunday for a change (instead of Monday or Tuesday) is maybe a sign that I’ve shaken the cold, and hopefully also an auspicious start to the year.

When Julia and I were talking, over a card game last night, about our goals for the year, I offered this for my creative life: to finish a full draft of a big project, be it a novel or … something else. I’m just, at least for now, leaving the doors open for the something else.

Last month I dusted off my tech-essay writing breeches and penned this piece for Every about what becomes valuable when AI makes creative work “easy” (gift link). I pond-hop from Jack White to The Princess Bride to competitive gaming and Jorges Luis Borges and, of course, Chris Alexander.

This month my Antioch mentees and I are reading Karen Russell’s The Antidote, and of the many things I already love (I’m halfway through), I think I love most its atmosphere. The main storyline is set in 1930s dust bowl Nebraska, which I find to be a satisfying mirror image of the wet and feral Everglades setting of her last full-length novel Swamplandia. A real Tatooine/Hoth/Endor swing, a Lucasian move. Only made better by the fact that Russell’s two books aren’t of a series. The Antidote is sequel of spirit and setting.

Speaking of games, the card game mentioned at the top is Courtisans, to which my cousin Shaun introduced us over the holiday. Super-easy to set up and learn (a must for our feeble new-parent brains) and surprisingly dynamic even with two people. You play as attendees of a medieval royal banquet, casting cards, some in secret and others in the open, for or against six different families to try to put then in or out of favor with the Queen. Game of Thrones with far less gore.

I’m also finally playing the video game Sea of Stars, which was recommended to me by multiple people and is inspired by JRPG classics like Chrono Trigger. The last time I gamed was shortly after Rufus was born, and I needed a light-mental-load activity for when he was asleep in my arms. Sea of Stars is just about the coziest take on those Japanese originals.

Train Dreams is possibly the most ideal role for Joel Edgerton’s sad, frost-blue eyes. The film’s also beautiful, devastating, devastatingly beautiful. To come up with its look, the director and cinematographer took inspiration from colorized black-and-white photos of 19th century rail workers. Glimmers of Terrence Malick, too.

Tim Hartford’s year-end column in FT Weekend, which you can also read here (h/t Varsha), shouts out Stewart Brand’s new book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, which I now have on pre-order. Hartford:

[G]ood maintenance is often nothing like the chore of brushing teeth and washing dishes, but an intellectually demanding task requiring knowledge, intelligence and curiosity. To repair a complex object requires patient problem solving and the diligent discovery of hidden trouble. It is an act of mastery.

Brand’s How Buildings Learn is a personal touchstone (though I seem to have lost my copy in a move). This new book is published by Stripe Press, an obvious perfect fit. Brand also worked on the book out in the open, as a pilot of Books in Progress, a “public drafting tool” made in collaboration with the magazine Works in Progress.

You see this with “early-access” for indie video games but not nearly as much with books – at least not in such a formalized way. Though maybe there is a certain kind of generous, expansive, non-fictional book that’s best suited for the format. Exactly the kind of book that Stewart Brand would write.

Might this be a good time to mention that January’s Digital Mending Circle will be next Tuesday, January 13, from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern? Come join our small crew as we work on

the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

Reply for the Zoom link, if you don’t already have it.

Speaking of ideal niche publishers: For Christmas Julia gifted me Hey Kids, Watch This! after I repeatedly talked throughout the year how I cannot wait to watch childhood favorite movies with Rufus. The book’s organized by age range, with a great mix of shorts and features, animation and live-action, and indie/international and less-obvious big-studio titles.

A24 shop

A couple things: 1) Book product pages showing interior print spreads should be standard practice, regardless of book or genre. I especially want it for pulpy trade paperbacks so it’s clear when I’m getting into a sardine typography situation.

And 2) I didn’t realize A24’s publishing arm was so extensive, that in addition to their beautifully formatted screenplays they published titles on directors’ sartorial tastes, compendiums on cool movie merch, picture books and The Daniels’ A Vast Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur, and quarterly zines mailed to you via their membership program.

Someone on a panel I was on once called this, quite aptly, “The A24 Industrial Complex.”

I love Jasper Nighthawk’s practice of reading a Big Winter Book:

A big winter book should be full of mood and perhaps some textual difficulty. Reading this particular book might feel a bit ambitious. Maybe you usually don’t read books this long or this demanding. But it’s winter, you don’t have so many other demands on your time and attention. You can tackle a big winter book, promise yourself to it, give yourself over to it.

The hope is that reading your big winter book will be enough of an experience that it will mark out a minor era in your life. You might even later look back and remember, “Oh yeah, that was the year I read that book.”

It’s just the kind of thing to pass the time while holed up with comrades in your own winter keep.

To close – I am, as of January 1st, officially a Michigan State University Extension Master Gardener, which is a fancy title that means I continue to learn a lot about plants.

And that, apparently, is my “speaking of” link to Joel Edgerton.

Buon anno,

#451: Fractal Nature of Days

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 02:51:08 GMT

Our new internet plan included a free year of a mobile line so I picked up an old Pixel 3a, installed a minimal launcher (the truly excellent Before launcher, which I also have on my e-reader), and am trying it out as a dumbphone.

The usual challenges aside of having devices on separate ecosystems (photo syncing, headphone pairing – and not being able to use Bebop), it’s worked decent. I went today to get a haircut and flu/covid boosters and even forgot to bring the iPhone as backup. I got along fine.

I have noticed, since the start of this experiment, that I’ve been overly tired and am eating voraciously. Maybe from some combination of dopamine withdrawal and getting our first snow. I turned 42 last month and wrote, in my journal, “Don’t fight the winter blues, Seasonal Affective Disorder is just your body responding to your environment, telling you to rest and do less.”

I don’t know if I’ve gotten wiser or just gotten older.

This week I’m headed to glorious, sunny LA for ten days, to kick off another semester of teaching at Antioch’s low-residency MFA. Have I already told you this? It’s hard to remember.

Tomorrow is the second Tuesday of the month, so that means we’re having our monthly Digital Mending Circle at 7:30–9:00PM Eastern, whereupon we partake in

the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

Hit reply if you don’t already have the link. I’ll be getting all my devices sorted for the trip.

I saw, at the Detroit Film Theater, one of the few midwest screenings of Peter Hujar’s Day, based on a book that’s a transcript of a lost recording of an interview between the photographer and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz, for a project she was doing in the 1970s on the fractal nature of seemingly ordinary days.

Even if you’re not familiar with Hujar (I wasn’t going in), you’ve likely seen his portraiture (or the works from other photographers his portraits inspired). One of his best-known is this one of Susan Sontag, which appears in the back of my copy of On Photography:

Back to the movie. It’s a marvel of creative constraint. Given the fixed (and sometimes, by itself mundane, dialogue), director Ira Sachs’ choices in staging the characters and handling the passage of time are truly surprising. Scenes, often delineated in the dialogue by changes of tape, are also cut with beautiful shots that feel magazine-esque and, as confirmed by the friend I saw the film with, very much in the style of Hujar’s work. The whole seventy-some minutes were mesmerizing.

The movie I saw right before the Hujar one happened to be Come See Me in the Good Light, a documentary about spoken word poet Andrea Gibson’s cancer battle and final live show. Some of the interviews with Gibson happen while they’re lying on their back, which I imagine has to do with how much pain they were in from the cancer and treatments. The last of these shots is quite Hujaresque:

But also colored with its own meaning. Intentional or unintentional homage? I don’t know if it matters. Poignant? Most definitely.

The new Apple TV intro was made, by TBWA’s Media Arts Lab, using practical effects. Craft in the time of generative AI.

Speaking of practical effects, Light and Magic goes deep into the Lucasfilm archives. I’ve only seen the first episode so far, about John Dykstra’s pulling-together of the crew of generalist weirdos to work on the first movie, but man! Selective environmenting at its best.

To close: This, from Baptism of Fire, the fifth Witcher book, is maybe the best description I’ve read in fiction of a treasured tool:

The bow came from the Far North. It measured just over five feet, was made of mahogany, had a perfectly balanced riser and flat, laminated limbs, glued together from alternating layers of fine wood, boiled sinew and whalebone. It differed from the other composite bows in its construction and also in its price; which is what had initially caught Milva’s attention. When, however, she picked up the bow and flexed it, she paid the price the trader was asking without hesitation or haggling. Four hundred Novigrad crowns. Naturally, she didn’t have such a titanic sum on her; instead she had given up her Zerrikanian zefhar, a bunch of sable pelts, a small, exquisite elven-made medallion, and a coral cameo pendant on a string of river pearls. But she didn’t regret it. Not ever. The bow was incredibly light and, quite simply, perfectly accurate. Although it wasn’t long it had an impressive kick to its laminated wood and sinew limbs. Equipped with a silk and hemp bowstring stretched between its precisely curved limbs, it generated fifty-five pounds of force from a twenty-four-inch draw. True enough, there were bows that could generate eighty, but Milva considered that excessive. An arrow shot from her whalebone fifty-fiver covered a distance of two hundred feet in two heartbeats, and at a hundred paces still had enough force to impale a stag, while it would pass right through an unarmoured human. Milva rarely hunted animals larger than red deer or heavily armoured men.

#450: Rest or Rot

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 02:11:54 GMT

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced here, in Michigan, an autumn as stunning as this one. Some combination of geography, weather-induced leaf sugars, and Rufus being almost sixteen months old (yes, already). I’m out more during blue hours and golden hours – pack walks in the mornings, afternoon pickups on daycare days when the low angle light catches the tops of trees, afternoon outings when the sunset hits the downtown skyscrapers near the newly opened park on the river.

I have no good pictures. At least not any that do the moments justice.

Julia and I were talking, the other day, about things that either fill our well or drain it. That are, in her words, Rest or Rot. The same activity can be both depending on the context. TV is a good example: When we take a break after a long workday to rewatch an episode of The Witcher (as we are currently doing) it gives our introverted selves a moment to recover before having any sort of more meaningful conversation. Even the occasional series binge can be energizing when it strengthens our bond. But when it becomes too much of a routine and takes lieu of other types connection, it’s rot.

Alcohol is another example: A drink for the taste of it, with a good meal, or in a celebratory way, can fill the well. But taken too often in a stress-drink kind of way, ROT.

As I type this I wonder how much rot is just rest hardened into habit.

Here’s a thing that happens somewhat regularly: I’ll write about something here, like a book I’ve been reading or an app I’ve been using successfully, and after I send out the newsletter, I immediately abandon the book or stop using the app. Most recently, the novelty of Opal, mentioned in issue #447, has shriveled away. I turned off my scheduled blocks for a couple of weeks because I was too often ignoring them.

Maybe it’s my inner rebelliousness and not wanting to get pinned down, or just how quickly my excitement about anything tends to wane. But distraction is also a Whac-A-Mole game. In this analogy, various apps, minimalist launchers, visual timers, bullet journals, and other productivity tools and systems, are each swings at a different hole from which it can rear its grinning, taunting heads.

Which seems to suggest that playing the game with any amount of success is more about reacting quickly than repeatedly bashing the same empty hole.

November’s Digital Mending Circle is tomorrow (Tuesday), the 11th, from 7:30–9:00pm Eastern. For new readers, this is our monthly

virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

Hit reply if you want to join and don’t already have the Zoom link. I’ll be tagging and organizing videos of Rufus.

#449: for marty

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 03:35:35 GMT

My former creative director Marty passed away. When I think about jobs I’ve held that were more like true apprenticeships, working under a master, a mentor, Marty’s name is the first to come to mind. From a brief tribute I wrote on Instagram:

It was working under Marty Cooke that I first saw myself as a professional writer. Because he saw me as one. He taught me it was okay, sometimes necessary, to spend a month writing and rewriting a single paragraph till you found a new way to say something familiar, or an honest way to say something new, until you got clear on whatever the hell it was you were even trying to say. He’d tell you when an idea wasn’t good enough. When it was great, he’d be more excited about it than you were. He was the anti Language Model. He was the coolest dude.

Marty got his start in the Mad Men era. He’d come to work still dressed the part, relaxed suits matched perfectly to his silverwhite hair and clear-frame glasses. He was generous in a way that I appreciate even more now, being a new father. If I could relive those days I’d have asked him more questions. I’d have taken more pictures and printed them out. I was texting back and forth with friends and former co-workers and none of us had any photos of him from that time (late aughts). There are surprisingly few of him online. So much for digital permanence.

When I started Glenn Adamson’s Fewer, Better Things, I was expecting a paean to minimalism. I was surprised, pleasantly, to find that the first half of the book was mostly about craft. Craft and material intelligence (this in 2018, before it was fashionable to stick any old word in front of intelligence).

Hindsight makes it obvious: Quality is the necessary ground. Instead of railing against consumerism and the same tired touting of the benefits of having less stuff (as much as I do enjoy a good tout), Adamson, who’s a museum curator, tries to nurture a reference for the well-made. A more hopeful, abundant approach.

Speaking of abundance: Adamson’s twin brother, Peter Adamson, is a philosophy professor who hosts a long-running podcast called History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The “Without Any Gaps” here refers to all the figures who get skipped over in undergrad Intro to Philosophy classes – basically everyone in the two thousand years between the Big Three (Socrates/Plato/Aristotle) and the enlightenment.

You can almost picture this as a breezy, encyclopedic book or series of books (in fact, Adamson has been simultaneously writing just such a series), but to me, it’s a perfect podcast format. Each episode is about 20 minutes long and, as of this writing, there are 477 of them (and they’ve only gotten as far as Descartes). A feat of endurance.

These two questions about AI share a duplex in my head: 1) Will it be more of the same convenience-peddling, democracy-eroding, power-concentrating, environmentally catastrophic ill effect of the tech that came before it? Or 2) does it represent a genuinely divergent (and more humane) trajectory from the first road?

Dan Shipper makes a case for the latter. Full disclosure: I edited this essay, and Sunday letter readers will notice some common themes. In it Dan argues that language models are the first time we’ve been able to embed human intuition into a tool. And since our tools shape us as much as we shape them, language models can help bring about a new worldview that breaks the more tyrannical aspects of the old, mechanistic worldview – the one that we in the West have inherited from those three ancient Greek dudes.

The false binary I led off with here (can’t it be some of both?) is exactly the kind of paradox Dan argues that we can better hold, and work with, when we learn to see like a language model.

#448: Twice Attested

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 02:29:35 GMT

A short documentary project I’ve been working on for Building Beauty is finally live: A tour of a house Christopher Alexander designed for two writers, Ann Medlock and John Graham, in Washington State.

This has been in the works since late last year! I did all of the editing/post-production, and what stands out to me now, ten months later, is just how much film editing experience I’d gained between the first and final cuts.

The biggest lesson was concision. That first cut was over 18 minutes; the last sits at 12 1/2. I also learned, pretty quickly, that duration of edit isn’t a linear multiple of final runtime. A twelve-minute video takes far more than three times as long as a four-minute one. Partly because it just takes longer to watch the whole thing from start to finish, which I must’ve done dozens of times.

I imagine that working on a film of this length (vs a TV commercial or a social media story) is much more microcosmic of working on a full-length feature. There were quite a many semiconscious, in-the-moment decisions that turned out to be good ones – and plenty others that didn’t. There were minor shots missing that I had to stage and match from here in Detroit. There were titles to be designed!

Back in issue #418, I wrote about Walter Murch and Michael Ondaatje saying that editing was the closest, of the different disciplines in film, to writing fiction. I can attest. The sequence of the actual house tour was a natural spine, but the story itself had to be found.

Speaking of microcosms, for a friend’s birthday this weekend I went go-karting for the first time since ... I was a teenager? And while I could do without the lawnmower-engine exhaust, I think it really captures the maneuvering and position jockeying of something like Formula One driving.

Again: I say this having had no experience as a Formula One driver.

It does makes me wonder, though, for what else is there a smaller version that gives you a proximate experience of the whole?

Speaking of short films, PBS News Weekend aired a nice piece on Belle Isle’s Oudolf Garden. I volunteered there for the second time this past Friday and am happy to count myself among their “army of 300” – very Spartan!

But seriously, maintaining a naturalistic, mostly native garden like this, contrary to common belief, is loads of work. And as a volunteer I have never felt like I was merely there as “free labor”. My second attestation of this Sunday letter is that Richard and Meredith and crew are models in educating and empowering volunteers. Especially horticultural neophytes like yours truly.

Reading this letter over, I like the set-of-three! So I’ll leave you here.

#447: Thermal Delight

Tue, 02 Sep 2025 16:19:07 GMT

I tried to sit down and do another of my intermittent daily routine check-ins, but everything I wrote was more or less about Rufus’s schedule. We’ve heard from friends that for the first year you have a new-parental brain fog – from lack of sleep, stress, hormonal changes, etc. It takes that long, they said, to feel like yourself again.

Other parents have said two years. Or longer. But I have been noticing expansions, lately, in my attentional bandwidth. One way I can describe it is self-awareness, in the awareness of your own thinking. You notice what you’re doing as you’re doing it – without sidetracking the doing. On lower bandwidths, I can still focus on the task at hand, but only that. On higher bandwidths I make more outside connections. It’s the difference between reading something and reading something to try to understand how its written. That’s what I feel, in my most optimistic moments, coming back.

Or maybe it’s just the summer heat breaking.

September’s Digital Mending Circle is next Tuesday, September 9th, from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern. As usual, we’ll spend this co-working session on

the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

We use the same Zoom link every month. If you don’t already have it, just hit reply.

Speaking of heat breaking – I loved Lisa Heschong’s Thermal Delight in Architecture. A slim book on an overlooked sense that, while often lumped in with touch, is very much separate. Echoes of In Praise of Shadows (mentioned in issue #442); one of my favorite arguments in the book is against thermal neutrality – an environment in which temperature is perfectly stable and changes go unnoticed. Here, Heschong compares it to food:

A few tubes of an astronaut’s nutritious goop are no substitute for a gourmet meal. They lack sensuality—taste, aroma, texture, temperature, color. They are disconnected from all the customs that have developed around eating—the specific types of food and social setting associated with breakfast, with a family dinner, with a sweet treat. And they have none of the potential for significance of those special foods used for ceremonial occasions such as a birthday cake, the Thanksgiving turkey, the symbolic foods of a Seder.

The thermal environment also has the potential for such sensuality, cultural roles, and symbolism that need not, indeed should not, be designed out of existence in the name of a thermally neutral world.

I found myself thinking about this as Julia built a fire in our backyard fire pit and the first pizzas of the season came out of our portable outdoor oven. The best crusts have plenty of char.

Speaking of thermal delight – My favorite subreddit at the moment is /r/TheNightFeeling, self described as “the thoughtful nostalgic emotion you feel when you drive alone at night, or see a city skyline at dusk with the wind in your face. It's the feeling you get when you're lonely but at peace, thoughtful but melancholy, and homesick for something you can't quite remember.”

The coinage comes from John Green, answering a reader question in an episode of Dear John and Hank. For me, this redditor photo probably captures it best: Empty streets with warm windows, and solitary streetlights, under snow-refracted sky. Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is rife with the night feeling. As are Wong Kar-Wai films.

Speaking of films – I really enjoyed American Animals, a docudrama about a group college freshman who in 2004 attempted to steal several rare books – including a first edition of Audubon’s The Birds of America – from Transylvania University’s special collection.

But “docudrama” isn’t the best description for what this movie is. Genre-wise it’s much closer to a based-on-a-true-story narrative feature. There are some incredibly clever shots where the actors who play the students interact with their real-life counterparts, and a White Lotusesque title sequence – that predates White Lotus (Animals came out in 2018).

I watched it on Kanopy which, if I haven’t gushed about it before in these letters, is a sort of public-library-access version of Mubi. Or a Libby App for movies.

My agent Jessica recommended the Move 37 newsletter (named after the turning point in the AlphaGo/Lee Sedol match). It’s written by two literary agents, Lauren Hamlin and Aaron Shulman, grappling with the effects AI might have on their roles and publishing at large. The two have differing levels of enthusiasm and skepticism – which I appreciate!

Lastly – Opal is as good the the top app charts suggest. I’ve used Freedom off and on over the years to block distractions but it’s never worked that well for me. After Opal, I’ve realized that it’s because the way I’d set up Freedom was too restrictive; throughout the day I’d often need to quickly look up something work-related on, say, YouTube and Reddit, and the obstacles to temporarily stop and start Freedom made me less likely to use it in the first place.

I needed my distraction filters to be more porous, not less. And Opal’s thoughtfully designed experience around breaks is working much better for me.

#446: Financial Safe Word

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:45:40 GMT

Every Friday at noon, Julia and I have a household meeting. Like these newsletters, it doesn’t always happen on the week, but we try nonetheless. Topics include our shared calendar, Rufus’s developmental milestones, house and garden projects, dates, social plans, etc. House Meeting is when we check in on existing tasks, delegate new tasks, and, when one or both of us is stuck, help each other get unstuck. How did we even manage before we had House Meeting? I don’t remember.

One big house meeting topic is always our budget. Sometimes it’s so big that we have to schedule a separate meeting to go over it. We’ve been using YNAB for years now (long enough that I’m comfortable sharing this referral link), and while it’s a useful planning tool in these meetings, we still struggle with sticking to those plans. We’ve tried to ask, in the moment, “Is it in the budget?” and more often than not still end up finding some way to justify the purchase.

We generally want to spend less. And when we do spend, spend more mindfully. In issue #429 I linked Sarah Lazarovic’s “Buyerarchy of Needs”, but even that simple chart, in the thrall of a potential delivery order or gadget or gizmo that promises to make our parenting life easier, isn’t always top of mind.

So at a recent House Meeting, we realized that we needed a financial “safe word.” A quick incantation to pull us out of the weeds. At first we considered, as a safe word, Rufus – a reminder of who and what we’re trying to be frugal for. But we say his name so often that it’d lose its desired effect. The safe word had to be rare. It had memorable. And provocative enough to make us pause.

The one we landed on – and I don’t remember how exactly we got there – was pineapple.

August Digital Mending Circle

is this coming Tuesday, from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern. I’ve had Bebop on the back burner, in part because I have to update the dev environments on multiple machines, so I might spend the time updating those.

We use the same Zoom link every month. If you don’t have it yet, just hit reply.

Reader Andrew F sent me this egregious example of Daylight Computer, once again, engaged in calmwashing. To promote their summer outdoor co-working meetups, they have (seemingly) ripped off a classic Alan Kay sketch:

Does moving Kay’s signature to the back of the dude’s shirt make it “homage”? I’m leaning no. To be clear: I’m not against these kinds of meetups, nor am I against techno-optimism – the Digital Mending Circle is very much in the same spirit! – I just cringe at the hyperbole.

Speaking of techno-optimism: I’ve been doing some freelance editing over at Every. A few essays I’ve worked on recently include this one by Vivian Meng – describing an experience on a trip to China that will be familiar to Sunday Letter readers – and Alex Komoroske’s piece on how a little-known browser patch from the Netscape browser days is at the root of our biggest gripes with modern apps.

(Alex is also a part of The Flux Collective, whose newsletter is one of the few I read in-inbox and don’t kick over to a read-later pile.)

I love this bookbinding case project from Gerald Schulze at Small Works, where I RISO-printed my neighborhood pattern zine:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Small Works (@smallworksdetroit)

Small Works’ newsletter for shop updates, Printing in Detroit, while unfortunately intermittent (I get it!), is exemplary for a local business. I especially dig the equipment notifications section.

File under Great Names for Podcasts: Everything is Somewhere, the official podcast of the American Surveyor (as in, land surveying) magazine. Here’s the host, Angus Stocking, talking to Maggie Moore Alexander and Yodan Rofe about Christopher Alexander and Building Beauty.

Which makes this my annual reminder to you that Building Beauty is open for enrollment for the upcoming fall semester. Here, again, is the program intro I helped record and edit earlier in the year.

Lastly – While looking at rugs for Rufus’s nursery I came across Nestig’s happily small array of washable rugs in in collaboration with Eric Carle and Richard Scarry. The Brown Bear one would go well in any room, but my favorite is the Scarry 2-Seater Crayon Car:

Pineapple.

#445: Expansion through Compression

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 03:04:31 GMT

Rufus turned a year old this month. He can stand on his own now and is piecing together the motions of walking unsupported. He can be wild at times, especially right before bed, but can also play quietly by himself. He’s adventurous – and cautious too. In other words, he’s becoming a full little human, contradictions and all.

This past week we went Up North (that’s Michigander for the northern tip of the lower peninsula) to spend time with Julia’s family. I’d intended to use the time to read, reflect, and plan out the rest of the summer but I didn’t set good boundaries going in around phone use (or physical diet) so I ended up consuming too much snack media (and fried foods).

It’s taken me a year to even start to recalibrate my expectations around my own free time as a parent. Specifically the amount of time I need to dedicate to maintenance and admin, to cleaning up toys, answering emails, unclogging drains, sending invoices, sweeping and dusting. Also keeping in shape and stretching more.

Feels like a cliche to say I wish I’d started sooner but: I wish I’d started sooner.

The one book I managed to finish while up north was Paul M. Sammon’s comprehensive, multi-editioned history on the making of Blade Runner, Future Noir. It’s the first time I’ve come across Ridley Scott’s concept of layering, of “building up a dense, kaleidoscopic accretion of detail within every frame and set of a film”. The book cites examples like made-up magazines on the newsstands, or fine print on domed parking meters that read, “WARNING—DANGER! You Can Be Killed By Internal Electrical System If This Meter Is Tampered With”.

To me, the combination of density of detail and also what those details evoke – and is not already explained by the film’s premise. Not just elaboration but expansion. Expansion through compression. It’s possible in a serial medium like the written word, but there’s a different magnitude of expansive density than in a more-parallel medium like film.

There’s quite a bit of layering in the first episodes of Man in the High Castle (another adapted Philip K. Dick story with Ridley Scott’s involvement). And one movie I’ve seen this year that layers decently is Gareth Edwards’ The Creator, maybe because it’s – increasingly rare for our current century – original IP.

#444: Induced Demand

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 02:27:11 GMT

What started out as video editing for a couple of part-time gigs has turned more into video production, shooting, and—new for me—directing. In my day-to-day I’m pretty conflict-avoidant. I tend to people-please and keep my real opinions to myself, especially in new social situations.

But that doesn’t work in a shoot. I have to be clear about what I want. I can’t hesitate to stop in the middle of a take and ask to run it again because of a wrong (but important) line, because it only wastes my and clients’ time.

When we were in Georgia last weekend I met someone who’d opened their own bar. They said their personality had changed as a result of it, that became much more direct. You aren’t an asshole, but you also don’t let yourself get run over. I’ve noticed my directing work seeping into my off hours, in good ways. I notice more and more when I don’t speak up – and should.

I tell this to students all the time when I talk about my books, that your vocations are like masks. They’re like getting to try on new identities, different ways of being, of moving through the world. It’s through that trying on, that play acting, that you come to understand who you are – and who you want to be.

Last month we had a more directed Digital Mending Circle: the focus was photo organization. Despite trying out a few different tools to eliminate duplicates and clean up my archive, what ended up working the best for me was just going through everything manually. I did land on using Lightroom Classic as more of an inbox to process photos and videos, then offloading the processed media either to Apple Photos or an external drive. I’m still getting comfortable with the new system.

This month’s mending circle (Tuesday, July 8 at 7:30–9:00PM Eastern) will once again be open-ended. But I’m scheming to do more directed ones in the future. Come one come all to

a virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

Hit reply if you don’t already have the Zoom link.

One of the precepts of modern urban planning is around something called induced demand, which says that if you build or widen roads to ease car traffic, the traffic only gets worse. There’s a fun discussion of it in the context of Robert Moses in this 99PI episode.

I think about induced demand whenever I hear someone talk about how AI will grant us more leisure time. Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation, calls it the plenty paradox:

In the richest countries in the world, we have more leisure time, more disposable income, more access to leisure goods than ever before. And as a result, we are all struggling to know what to do with all that extra time and money. And one would hope and think that we would be engaging in deep philosophical discussions, helping each other … But instead what we’re doing is spending a whole lot of time masturbating, shopping and watching other people do things online.

The solution to induced demand, at least when it comes to planning, is a balanced transport system. You don’t stop building roads, but you have mass transit too. So I wonder: What’s the balanced transport system for our digital lives? What alternative networks can we bolster that also make use of the same new lanes?

I’ve been off social media lately (save for Instagram), but I do find myself increasingly on YouTube and, once on YouTube, increasingly bombarded by recommendations for camera equipment. A video might be unsponsored, a creator might say, “I was sent X by Y company but it doesn’t affect my review of it, they’re seeing this when you’re seeing it,” etc. But don’t be fooled into thinking there’s that there isn’t an unspoken contract: the wish to keep the free goods flowing.

Or as Nilay Patel says in this Vergecast episode, access is poison.

I don’t want to put it all on individual creators, though. The real worms in this apple are affiliate links and influence marketing. My advice (and reminder to myself): Don’t let access dictate what you make in the first place.

Last month Julia and I rewatched the first six Mission Impossible movies (we need to line up a babysitter so we can catch Final Reckoning while it’s still theaters). Seeing the series in quick succession I was struck by a couple more technical bits: the jump from celluloid to digital in the JJ Abrams-directed third film, and the clearly-computerized camera movements in action sequences in later sequels. It might be the series that best demonstrates the changes in modern camera technology.

Speaking of Mission Impossible: Here’s David Cole with 20,000 words on Tom Cruise, Buster Keaton, and trains. (h/t Diana Kimball)

For one of the video gigs mentioned at the top of this issue, I came across Cueprompter and had a teleprompter rolling in a few seconds. They advertise app downloads but the website works just fine.

I wrote about Kelli Anderson’s pop up alphabet book in issue #432. Here’s a new(ish) preview video to get you excited, along with some examples of student work from Anderson’s paper engineering class at The Arm in Brookyn.

That’s right, paper engineering. Ten-year-old Jack’s dream job – if he’d known there was such a thing!

#443: Befittingly Mysterious

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 02:11:57 GMT

This weekend we went to a plant expo to pick up some native perennials for our garden, and spent all weekend planting said perennials and tidying up the beds along our fence. Since my last letter I’ve also done my year’s first pair of volunteer toward my Extension Master Gardener certification. My legs are sore but my soul is content.

I tend to overcommit to things (if you haven’t learned that about me already). I’d put an embargo on new projects during the first two weeks of June and have already taken on two (albeit small ones). Do you have any strategies that help with this?

I’ve been trying to ask myself lately, “What would make today a win?” I like that question because it still leaves room the variety my brain craves. Some days, simply spending a half hour on the new novel qualifies. Other days it’s not enough, and must happen in combination with delivering something for a side gig, or tidying and bagging the branches of trees trimmed the day before.

But it’s the feeling I’m after, of having done the thing or things you most needed to do (ideally by lunchtime) and the knowing the rest of the day is open to you, open for whatever. I need the compression before I feel the release. Maybe it’s really just the feeling of having accomplished something new, and newly challenging.

June Digital Mending Circle

I’m trying something different this Tuesday for our monthly virtual mending circle. Instead of everyone bringing their own personal maintenance tasks, I want to suggest a shared activity. Something we all work on during this month’s meeting: Photo organization.

I have files spread across different drives and apps (and versions of Lightroom). Old Flickr images backed up somewhere (probably more than once) and ballooning cloud storage I’d rather not have to pay for in triplicate. Maybe you do too? And maybe if this is something we do together, we can tackle it more thoughtfully than alone. By our powers combined.

So we’ll meet this Tuesday, June 10, from 7:30-9:00PM Eastern to organize our photos (though I won’t stop you if you want to bring a different type of work to the session). Just reply to this email if you need the Zoom link.

Commencement speech season upon us, and Hank Green’s to the graduating class at MIT was a fun one (and the only one I’ve watched). It prompted me to start his novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, which is so far reads like a quirky YA version of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition? I’m here for it.

The other book I’m (re)reading right now is Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In Matthew Crawford’s foreword to the newer edition I have on digital loan from my library, one paragraph opens with this – almost throwaway – definition of technology:

Today, we often use “technology” to refer to systems whose inner workings are assiduously kept out of view

Which seems right.

The trailer for Architecton has major echoes of Koyaanisqatsi, a movie I haven’t the former in an actual theater here in Detroit, but I’m also not holding my breath. We have a few neat indie film pop-ups, but one of the things I miss most about living in New York, is being able to pop into places like Film Forum or IFC Center on any given weekday. If I were there today, I’d for sure try to catch IFC’s re-showing of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise.

Speaking of Architecture YouTube: Aesthetic City’s new video on Christopher Alexander is a nice overview of the man and his work. There are some neat shots in the first few minutes too of the Fresno Farmer’s Market, one of Alexander’s lesser known projects.

Lisa Locascio Nighthawk lifted out some gems from the David Lynch auction. It’s also fun to pore over through the listings yourself as there’s really something in there for everyone. Camera collector? How about this Montana Luxus Snakeskin viewfinder? Into woodworking? Here’s a four-unit Festool extractor. Even with the descriptions, some of the auction lot groupings are befittingly mysterious, ie. nine neckties and a pair of reading glasses.

To end: I’m slowly collecting examples of artists, architects, who use their home studios as testbeds for their projects. Here’s the Times on the SoHo building where Christo and Jeanne-Claude lived and worked.

#442: Ugly Sugar Daddy

Mon, 12 May 2025 04:04:29 GMT

Last letter I forgot to include what was maybe the biggest thing on my mind when I was in China: the stark difference in cost of living, even compared to a smaller American city like Detroit. In places like Shanghai there are luxury malls abound, sure, but you can also live comfortably on much, much less. One teacher I talked to said that they didn’t realize how much financial stress they carried until they started teaching in China and the burden was suddenly lifted. Another teacher called their smaller suburban city an “ugly sugar daddy” – there wasn’t as much to do there, but it was a quick hop to larger cities in China (and the rest of Asia); it afforded them a lifestyle they otherwise wouldn’t have. These are foreign teachers at prestigious international schools, sure, but for the general population the government also subsidizes food, housing, and healthcare – you know, the things you need to survive. Through these state actions and a heavy hand in expanding the country’s manufacturing, China has, over the last four decades, lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty.

Here in the US there’s often an illusion of choice, of freedom. How much freedom do you really have if you’ve been priced out of your basic needs? This has been very much on my mind as Julia and I decide if we want to (and can afford to) try for a second child.

My friend Sarah’s written about this topic to varying degrees on her newsletter 16 Hour Direct Flight, which I recommend! Last time a Sunday letter reader also shared this Ezra Klein podcast with Thomas Friedman about China (thanks Marc). I have a library hold on Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance, but this pod about the book’s origins previews the argument they make in the book for a new kind of liberalism in American, one that reminds me a lot of modern China.

Pudong, Shanghai

In other news, I think I’m still decompressing from travel – and from not having so much daily caffeine in my system. I went to a friend’s birthday party on Friday and came home more energized than when I left. Is this … extraversion? Anyway, I thought it’d be fun this time to catalog my media consumption this trip, and share some more photos too.

Before I jump in, I want to remind you that this coming Tuesday, the 13th is the second Tuesday of the month, which means it’s time for our monthly Digital Mending Circle,

a virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

7:30–9:00PM Eastern. I’ll be working on my taxes. Reply to this email if you don’t already have the Zoom link and want to join.

Temple in Wuxi

I packed several books for the trip and, as usual, I didn’t get to reading half of them. One I did (re)read was Jun'ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. My edition had an afterword criticizing Tanizaki’s transitions which, this time around, were the thing I most noticed and quite appreciated – the fluidity in which he moves from topic to topic. In one instance he groes from puppets to musing about the different kind of whiteness East Asian skin takes on compared to people of European descent. One of my favorite bits, still, is on the use of gold:

Lacquerware decorated in gold is not something to be seen in a brilliant light, to be taken in at a single glance; it should be left in the dark, a part here and a part there picked up by a faint light. Its florid patterns recede into the darkness, conjuring in their stead an inexpressible aura of depth and mystery, or overtones but partly suggested.

Guangzhou (I think)

Speaking of re-reads, 9th Year students (eight grade here in the US) at multiple schools had an upcoming unit on dystopian science fiction (of course?). Naturally I found myself recommending MT Anderson’s Feed over and over. I mentioned it so much that I decided it was time once again to re-read it. A few things: 1) It’s still the funniest YA novel I’ve read, full stop. 2) The main characters aren’t “chosen” ones; there’s no overthrowing the regime. They’re teenagers being teenagers, trying to live in a system that gives them few options for rebellion. Yet, 3) In spite of all this, the dystopia is palatable; there’s a surface hopelessness but there’s life teeming, writhing, in the dark underlayer. Good aftervibes.

Pudong, Shanghai

Speaking of palatable dystopias, Kevin Nguyen’s Mỹ Documents follows four half-siblings and imagines a near-future scenario where Vietnamese Americans are sent to internment camps. The novel’s humor and irony is more subtle than Feed (there’s a reference to Babe: Pig in the City, the congressional act that starts detentions is acronymed “AAPI”) and does a lot to present what would otherwise be a horrific thought experiment in a non-traumatic way. But what the book is really about is about 2010–20s journalism.

Kevin (who’s the features editor at The Verge) wrote about the numerous apps he used in writing the book, and it’s probably the once tools-in-use piece that comes closest to capturing the messiness of my own process.

Birding to Change the World is a memoir I picked up at the airport bookstore. Journalist Trish O’Kane moved to New Orleans to start her new teaching position at Tulane … weeks before Katrina hit. She takes up birding as a way to reconnect with her ailing father, and ends eventually ends up in Madison, Wisconsin for an environmental studies PhD. O’Kane gets involved protecting wildlife habitats at Warner Parker, and discovers that those little birds are inseparable from the land and its environmental issues, which are inseparable from social justice.

Didi to somewhere

Tracy Chapman mentions, in this rare interview, Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. I started it excitedly and then found myself skimming, skipping chapters, and finally gave up. Maybe you’ll have better luck? (hey, Chapman loved it!) I chalk it up to the challenge inherent in writing and researching such a book: When your potential source material is every single notebook in history, how do you choose which ones to include?

I lost momentum, for different reasons, reading A Clearing in the Distance, Witold Rybczynski’s biography of Frederick Law Olmsted. A sales-y subtitle (at least for the first third of the book) could be: “How a generalist travel writer became the world’s preeminent landscape architect.” I’ve enjoyed Rybczynski’s other titles on architecture, so I’ll come back to this when I’m in a different headspace.

Temple in Wuxi

Speaking of architecture: I downloaded a few different videos for the intercontinental flight, and one of them was this newly surfaced Christopher Alexander talk on the process — particularly the use of mockups — for a community of homes he and his team built in Texas.

If you saw the latest season of White Lotus, you might’ve noticed the extreme shallow depth of field in many of the shots. Mark Bone’s breakdown of the show’s cinematography gets into lenses and lighting – but also the story reasons for deploying the technique.

Paradise Walk, Shanghai

Movies on the Delta inflight: Good One did such a fantastic job capturing a kind of low-key Gen-Z teen vibe. First Man is, I think, a good film to study in contrast with Apollo 13 (though more forgettable than some of Damien Chazelle’s others). Speaking of Ryan Gosling, I rewatched Blade Runner 2049 without sound, which didn’t take that much away from the film. And What Remains, a documentary about the life and work of photographer Sally Mann.

High Speed Rail, Haikou to Sanya

A pair of books of ethnography, both put out by China Intercontinental Press:

One Billion Journeys draws from forty years of work by Wang Fuchun, a photographer and former railway worker whose subjects are the passengers of China’s trains, from the days of overcrowding to the introduction of high speed rail. My favorite photos were the ones of people sleeping.

Liuba Draws Beijing was gifted to me by a school I visited and has often-hilarious illustrations of Beijing through the eyes of a Siberian/Buryat artist who moved to the city after University. The humor reminded me some of my friend Shawn’s work.

Xujiahui Park, Shanghai

Lastly, I didn’t want to bother with having another device to charge, so I left my smartwatch at home and picked up a Casio World Time for twenty-some bucks. I didn’t really need the time zone features (Beijing Standard is 12 hours from EST), but I enjoyed wearing it and used the stopwatch quite a bit in my workshops. I’m still wearing it now.

I’m also not sure if the Casio Sauna Watch is a genius idea or a terrible idea. Do I want any kind of device in the sauna? Probably not.

#441: China Core Sample, 2025

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 10:45:44 GMT

I’m in Hainan, China, having just last week crested the hill of a slate of author visits. Wednesday was my busiest day; I did three events at two schools – and all three of those events different kinds of talks and workshops. I had this weekend off with my dad in sunny, humid Hainan, and took full advantage.

Every time I’m in China I play the game of What’s different than before? In my last core sample from March of 2019, I wrote:

If this is the future, then it’s a deeply complicated – and in ways frightening – version of the future, where things are cheap, plentiful, delivered fast, yet intensely monitored and tracked. Then again, the question of how much China is ahead or behind is a clumsy question. The subway system there, for instance, has long surpassed the public transit here in the States in nearly every factor: design, cleanliness, timeliness, and reach; my parents moved to their current apartment knowing there’d be a new Metro line completed within two years, and now it’s been completed. These core samples have as much to do with where my attention is and what’s happening here in the US (particularly with housing, transit, and tech companies) as they do with what’s happening in Shanghai. They’re as much about how I’ve changed as how the city’s changed.

The first part strikes me as even more true today. Delivery people scooting around town, delivery people racing up mall escalators; yellow vests, blue vests, everywhere I go. Speaking of malls, that metro stop by my parents’ apartment now has a shiny new one on top of it – and an elevated freeway adjacent (whereas last time they were just starting to erect the concrete piers). I fretted about finding a Didi (China’s version of Uber/Lyft) willing take me the 100km/1.5 hours from Shenzhen to Guangzhou, but a driver accepted my ride near-instantly and was two minutes away, and just asked that I also cover his bridge toll for the return trip.

Shenzhen, China

A majority of the cars on the road now are Chinese car brands – so many different Chinese car brands; I stopped counting after fifteen – and about one out of six had a green license plate designating an EV (which is nice, subtle social pressure to electrify). I saw plenty of charging stations in underground parking structures, and some structures also had a light above every parking spot that turned red/green depending on if it was occupied/vacant – easily seen when hunting for a spot.

Other things I’ve noticed so far this trip:

The streets in every city I’ve visited feel human-scaled, with wide sidewalks and tightly planted street trees. One thing I loathe about Detroit is that even in denser neighborhoods you can’t always find shade to walk in. In Shanghai, vines are also being trained to go up the concrete piers of many elevated freeways, which gives off mild – though not entirely unpleasant – Last of Us vibes.
Payments were notably easier this time around. WeChat and Alipay now let you to link foreign bank cards for mobile payments. The latter also has in-app support for transit passes. (Though I did run into a couple instances of Visa rejecting larger payments to small vendors). Pair that with an eSIM and the new 10-day visa-less tourist entry policy and it’s never been easier to visit. Though, if you’re coming from the Western Hemisphere I’d tack on another week elsewhere in Asia to allow for jetlag.
Along with the auto manufacturers there’s been an explosion, too, of smaller coffee shops. Full-sized espresso machines are everywhere. So. Many. Espresso machines. I also quickly learned how to say, in Mandarin, 抹茶拿铁 – matcha latte.
Multiple hotels I stayed in had these (~~cleaning?~~ room service) robots:

They bumbled around charmingly in the way of the original Star Wars droids.

This isn’t an observation of differences per se, but Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei Electronics Market is the stuff sci-fi dreams are made of. The bottom floor of the SEG Plaza building, especially, with its meter-wide stalls with bundles of cable piled like produce, computer chips under grungy glass display cases, portable translators and knockoff Dyson hair dryers. Another floor was devoted to security cameras. I saw fiber optic fusion splicers, men crammed into soldering cubicles, three kids sitting on the floor sifting a box of thousands of orange thumb drives as if they were Legos.

Huaqiangbei Electronics Market, Shenzhen

Down the street was a building with mostly used consumer camera equipment, and the busiest stalls by far were the ones with spreads of “vintage” compact digital cameras, trending here as much as they are back home, rightful pushback against our too-processed, too-“perfect” phone photos.

Lastly, I’ve been asking folks in different cities about their impression of the tariff news. Some teachers and librarians said it was affecting their ability to order American books for their classrooms, but that also, for most Chinese people, it’s a non-event. A vast majority of what they buy comes from within the country, and whatever second- or third-order effects are so far removed that (I suspect) there won’t be a feeling of cause-and-effect. Not like back back home. The general sense I got was: Ehh, we’ve been through worse.

#440: Packed and Packing

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 03:00:35 GMT

A couple of quick notes this time, as I’m headed to China for a few weeks in April and my days have been as full as they can be.

The first is that due to said travel, April’s Digital Mending Circle will happen on the first Tuesday of the month instead of the second. That’s this coming Tuesday, April 1, from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern. Join me and a small group of Sunday readers for

a virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

If you don’t already have the Zoom link, just reply and I’ll send it. I’ll likely spend the time organizing an external drive I’ll need for the trip.

Second: I put together this ~7 minute video for Building Beauty, in which a few of us former students (and current tutors/instructor) talk about the program and its different courses, particularly the Studio (You’ll see some familiar photos if you’ve read the project write-ups from my own experiences.).

Enrollment is open both for the 2025–26 Building Beauty academic year, and for an 8-day intensive this summer in Sicily. I’m also in the process of editing a second, very exciting video of entirely new footage of one of Chris Alexander’s projects. More on that in the months to come.

#439: Avoidance

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 01:12:04 GMT

There are few forces in my life stronger than manuscript avoidance. Whenever I go down an online research vortex – researching cameras, researching woodworking tools, researching different types of attic insulation – it’s usually because I’m avoiding the manuscript. Sometimes the only way I make tedious phone calls is if I’m making them instead of working on the novel.

The avoidance is most intense at a certain stage of writing: I’ve already written some words, but they’re not in any shape to revise. What I mean by that is that they’re more a messy brainstorm, an extended outline (or multiple possible outlines). I generate a ton of words so I can find the beats to the scene or chapter, so I can figure out what the story is about. Or try to, at least.

The main reason the avoidance is so intense, I think, is because I’ve done it before. Done this writing thing. When I take on new hobbies, learn new skills, I’m ~~totally fine~~ much more okay with failure. But with writing, I tell myself, You’ve published several books. You should be better at this by now.

How far do I have to get into a book before I remember this lesson – that I have to re-learn how to write each book?

But when I really accept it, accept with my whole being that to write a new book is to learn an entirely new skill, a entirely new process, the task becomes exciting again. I get to play. I get to try out new ways of going about my writing! If they don’t work, then that’s a good lesson. And maybe they will work, someday, for a different book.

Right now, for this specific novel, I’ve started rewriting my typed vomit draft longhand. In hopes of forcing slowness, of attuning myself more closely to the aftervibe. If, as I wrote in that last issue, it’s too easy for me as a reader or viewer to lose myself in the moment-to-moment experience, then it’s even easier to get lost as the first reader – as the author.

Speaking of aftervibes, a reader, Varsha, sent me this, from an essay by Virginia Woolf (emphasis mine):

The book upon which we have spent so much time and thought fades entirely out of sight. But suddenly, as one is picking a snail from a rose, tying a shoe, perhaps, doing something distant and different, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete. Some process seems to have been finished without one’s being aware of it. The different details which have accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape; it becomes a castle, a cowshed, a gothic ruin, as the case may be. Now one can think of the book as a whole, and the book as a whole is different, and gives one a different emotion, from the book received currently in several different parts. Its symmetry and proportion, its confusion and distortion can cause great delight or great disgust apart from the pleasure given by each detail as it is separately realized. Holding this complete shape in mind it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book’s merits, for though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure and excitement from the first process, the actual reading, though this is of the utmost importance, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure we get when the second process—the after reading—is finished, and we hold the book clear, secure, and (to the best of our powers) complete in our minds.

March Mending Circle

The second Tuesday of the month is upon us. Join me this Tuesday (March 11) from 7:30PM–9:00PM Eastern for another Digital Mending Circle, which is

a virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

If you attended February’s DMC, you already have the Zoom link. If you’re new, just reply to this email to get it. I plan to use the time to update my site and Sunday letter template to include the new Patreon option for Dumpling Club memberships.

Speaking of writing longhand, I finished The Power Broker, and then promptly read Working, Robert Caro’s book about writing his books. Caro does his first drafts longhand on white legal pads:

[My problem in school] was it was too easy for me to write. I could write very fast without thinking it through […] I realized that if I wanted to write a book I had to think things through.

Then he types those longhand drafts into his Smith Corona Electra 210 typewriter:

Computers are fast, typewriters are slower. It’s not always a virtue to be fast.

That’s not at all to fetishize the romance of typewriters:

Everybody has to figure out things for themselves in writing, that’s what I believe.

All of the above nuggets are from this three minute interview.

If you want more than three minutes, try the documentary Turn Every Page, which overlaps some with Working. I, for one, am quite enamored by this yellow pinboard wall in Caro’s office.

Turn Every Page is about Robert Caro, yes, but it’s more about the relationship between Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb – a titan in his own field. It’s a special relationship, the one between an author and their editor (hi Jess!).

That’s all for this issue. I haven’t worked on the novel yet today (see what I mean?) so now I’ll going to go fail my way into a new draft.