Issue № 78
Branded
The word “brand” carries two definitions sitting in horrible proximity to each other — a company’s product identity, and a mark burned into livestock, criminals, or slaves. From there: Godin on skipping the clown car, Feynman on leaving the door to the unknown ajar, and a useful exit ramp from the over-thinking spiral — asking whether, if you could answer all these questions, it would actually enable you to do something.
Issue № 77
Obliged to respond
The pen is a physical reminder that you’re not reading passively — you have an obligation to respond. The Muse, meanwhile, rewards those it finds working, and scoffs at the ones who think they’ll just remember. The issue also reveals that the nose is actually two noses working in alternating cycles somehow connected to the armpits, which turns out to be exactly the kind of rabbit hole Gray’s Anatomy was made for.
Issue № 76
Try steeper
You can see your own white blood cells moving through your own eye by staring at a blue sky — which is either the takeaway, or evidence that wonders never cease, or something else entirely. The issue also features Aldous Huxley’s defense of Latin grammar as excellent preparation for life not as it ought to be but as it actually is, and a personal observation from 1989 that the Internet was social and interesting long before anyone thought to wonder whether it might remake society.
Issue № 75
I am a creative
Addicted to the adrenaline rush of postponement — and then, these days, to abandoning the thing entirely — opens an issue that finds an unexpected parallel in gerrymandering: one side draws the map, the other side chooses how to assemble it into districts, and like the fairest way to split a piece of cake, the two-stage process holds both parties’ ambitions somewhat in check. Somewhere between Jeffrey Zeldman and voting districts, Cal Newport makes the case for a diverse, distributed, interesting internet built on contribution rather than engagement.
Issue № 74
Do not hoard ideas
Annie Dillard’s instruction to spend it all, every time — give it now, something better will arise for later, like well water filling from beneath — arrives in an issue that also notes, with some honesty, that building clever systems is just another way to hide. Trees carry their entire temporal and geographic history in their bodies. And the Ents, of course, never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.