It’s been a few months. Life happened in our home this spring, to the tune of a child who became very sick in February and is still slowly coming back into his own. A season of ongoing adjustment—see how much badness one can smuggle into that little word?—with abiding comfort in asinine clichés (“taking things one day at a time”), and big changes in how I’ve used the time. We are fine, and will be fine. I’m grateful for all the people who have given support or slack in one way or another.
All that said, it’s time to get back to words, a whole bunch of ’em, in deliberate sequence. Let’s go. ↓
Online reading
From Tom Wolfe’s absurdly fun 1983 profile of Robert Noyce:
“Some twenty-four-year-old just out of graduate school would find himself in charge of a major project with no one looking over his shoulder. A problem would come up, and he couldn’t stand it, and he would go to Noyce and hyperventilate and ask him what to do. And Noyce would lower his head, turn on his 100-ampere eyes, listen, and say: ‘Look, here are your guidelines. You’ve got to consider A, you’ve got to consider B, and you’ve got to consider C.’ Then he would turn on the Gary Cooper smile: ‘But if you think I’m going to make your decision for you, you’re mistaken. Hey … it’s your ass.’”
Tom Wolfe
From Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon’s essay on rewilding the internet:
“When a failure by cloud provider Fastly took high-profile websites offline in 2021, its share price surged. Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service. To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit. The result of infrastructural narrowness is baked-in fragility that we only notice after a breakdown. But monoculture is also highly visible in our search and browser tools. Search, browsing and social media are how we find and share knowledge, and how we communicate. They’re a critical, global epistemic and democratic infrastructure, controlled by just a few U.S. companies.”
Maria Farrell
Books
It is the English major’s way of scrabbling through a difficult time—I’ve been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson. From his “Circles” essay:
“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”
During the past few months I’ve collected a few older kaizen books, but haven’t cracked these yet. They’re next, and coming up soon.
Recommended courses & workshops
The second cohort of Fenwick’s “Think Like a Writer” course begins next week, on June 3. (Still time to join up, or you can take it on your own time, anytime.) I was part of the first cohort. I encountered a breezy course loaded with rubrics, questions, and checklists that led to immediate improvements in my own business writing. I appreciate the respect this course extends to participants’ time and attention—I was able to complete it during a busy month of client work and in the midst of the aforementioned family health crisis. Use code PENPAL25 at checkout to knock $25 off the asking price:
I also recently enjoyed Ryan and Greg’s half-day “Restart” workshop, the premise of which is to guide you through existential and scary stuff related to independent work. You’ll spend the morning designing a business, uncovering ways to talk about your services, and mapping out specific positioning and marketing opportunities. I’ve worked for myself before, would like to again someday, and have many nervous questions about the prospect right now. This workshop and the subsequent bi-weekly calls and take-home activities was perfect for me. When I think about some of the readers of this site & mailing list—well, it might be perfect for you, too. Next one planned for June 17:
Ryan Rumsey