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Now a newsletterer?

After twenty years of blogging, I have followed my fellow netizens to Substack, where I am publishing a weekly newsletter. You can subscribe via the form to the left and please drop me a note with a link to your newsletter.

Taking Notes

Thinking out loud in my corner of the internets.

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Best Of

I’ve been writing here for over a decade now. In hindsight, only a handful of those posts are still worth reading.

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Latest Essays

Life is Hard

We’re not getting any better at dealing with these problems; we may be getting worse. At their root, we fail to recognize our fragility and vulnerability. Technology makes our lives easier, but it won’t make us happier until we develop our emotional intelligence, including kindness.

A Modest Proposal to Un-Divide Our Country

How we use the Internet — and for what — has changed dramatically over the past ten years. The same forces that are empowering groups that feel repressed — #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and, yes, #WhiteLivesMatter too — are challenging our ability to relate to one another across identity-based and ideological divides. Here’s what I’d do to change that if you were to give me $50 million.

The Joys and Sorrows of a Small Identity

This past week I've been riding my bicycle down from Seattle, along the Oregon Coast, and inland to Klamath Falls where I'll catch the overnight train to Jack London Square in Oakland, named after one of my favorite fellow wanderers.On day one, I took a ferry from...

Paper has more patience than people

Surely, there will be wonderfully creative applications of textless technologies. But then some things will be lost.

An unnecessarily long and self revealing description of a Modest Mouse playlist

I still don’t expect Modest Mouse to mean as much to anyone else as it does to me. But here’s my best attempt at explaining why, to me, they mean so much.

Walk Around the World

The book that captured my imagination most as a teenager was Peter Jenkins' A Walk Across America. In the 1970s, disappointed with the state of the world, Jenkins set off walking with his dog Cooper from upstate New York down to New Orleans and across to the...