Archive (Page 6) • text

The new dialectic

October 7, 2022

In the on-off saga of a bad person buying Twitter, a noted fascist mouthpiece, as of this writing it appears to be back on. If it actually happens, which it...

One to the next

October 5, 2022

In 2013, I launched Draft Revise as something a great deal smaller & more structured. I would run a few A/B tests for your SaaS business for $650 a month,...

A different feeling (Take 11)

October 3, 2022

To love the Avalanches is apparently to never see them live. It would be one thing if they were the sort of band that never toured, that barely left their...

September 28, 2022

The trajectory of brands is hard to reckon with. Nothing stays fixed. Goods that have been around for 500 years are now being munged through the fustigations...

The great deferral, or: I am spoiled

September 26, 2022

I’ve been to Japan three times.

Talking to people

September 23, 2022

One of the things interviewing teaches you is that everyone is secretly interesting. Boring-seeming people have weird hobbies. You catch a centimeter of a...

September 21, 2022

A few months ago, I wrote some text about natural processed coffee. In short, coffee is a tropical fruit. You’re drinking some ground-up, roasted seeds that...

No scotch & iPhone

September 19, 2022

I bought an iPhone and feel nothing. I bought an iPhone and don’t know why I did. It had been 3 years? I first wrote about the iPhone when I bought a 3G,...

Have everything

September 16, 2022

When I started shifting from contractor design work to consulting, one of the key things I kept reading, in book after book, was the idea of an abundance...

Shitpost Jubilee

September 14, 2022

I have started & stopped Midjourney text 5 times now, because the contours of the stupid thing keep changing. There is Midjourney, yes, but they keep...

September 12, 2022

City is a two-mile strip of land art in the middle of absolute nowhere in central Nevada, a state in the middle of absolute nowhere, that an artist named...

September 9, 2022

One of my friend group chats was dunking on Funko Pops, a thing that I aggressively have no opinion on, when we got to discussing the drain we circle so...

The walls of the room

September 7, 2022

First, I wanted to say thanks to everyone who wrote in about our latest text, and to everyone who subscribed in response to it. I never plan which text will...

September 5, 2022

I’m writing this shortly after the end of my workday on August 31, 2022. 45 minutes ago, I deactivated a client’s Slack login and left their Trello board....

September 2, 2022

Of all the things that I do to account for my calm & permanent disengagement from the horrifying vagaries of social media, the one thing everyone is most...

Not the sling text we need, the sling text we deserve

August 31, 2022

A sling is a carry object with 1 shoulder strap that exists somewhere between a wallet and a messenger bag. You can put it on a shoulder, carry it like a...

Three uses for Malört

August 29, 2022

Malört is a digestif, derived from Swedish båska, that contains a lot of wormwood & emotional baggage. Its top notes are grapefruit rind and pine. It is...

August 26, 2022

I own an Instant Pot for one reason: beans. It is too large for the amount of beans any rational being makes at once, but that doesn’t stop me. You throw...

A quiet soba abomination

August 24, 2022

You don’t really know soba, and neither does the rest of America, but we’ll make it work anyway. Soba is a buckwheat noodle that is usually made fresh in...

You will now experience Starbucks text

August 22, 2022

There are few sacred spaces in the city, few areas that draw everybody, few spots that have literal oral histories written about them, but the corner of...

August 19, 2022

The rule is this: if I use it once a day, I need to optimize for pleasure, and there is effectively no maximum budget. This becomes complicated when...

Notes on the practice

August 17, 2022

Upon request, someone asked me how I write. I write a lot, and like most writers I have a really specific and picky routine. Writers tend to work themselves...

The banal wonder of Hasami

August 15, 2022

Hasami Porcelain is a Japanese brand that makes stackable mugs, plates, bowls, planters, and pourover drippers. You have absolutely seen it before. It speaks...

August 12, 2022

I got six tomato plants at the beginning of the season, and did what I normally do, which is plant three of them in the raised bed and three of them in...

A root vegetable for every season

August 10, 2022

I live in Chicago, land of too many root vegetables. A turnip the size of a softball landed on my doorstep the other day, thanks to my farm. It joined,...

The most off-brand thing about me is that I am extremely into baseball. I promise to not talk about baseball a whole lot here, unless the Cubs win the World...

We’ve talked about flashlight people, and now we will talk about the flashlight. There is truly a flashlight for every season, but in another, more accurate...

The trial & grim error of our zero waste rumspringa

There is a genre of objects that falls under the genre of zero waste. It is made without plastic, reusable, reused, compostable. There are bamboo...

“I really have no idea what it is I sell,” a Chartreuse Diffusion president told The New Yorker in 1984. “I am very scared always. Only three of the brothers...

Want to not want

One of the nicer lessons of the Bad Times® is that I don’t really need anything. I lived in Portugal for a month with two bags; I lived in Mexico & Costa...

Notes on the third worst date that I have ever had in my life

In 2012, I threw my 30th birthday party, and over 250 people showed up. I say over, of course, because I lost count sometime around when the police first...

I went to a fancy college where, between bits of studying, integenerational wealth likes to show off its materialism and reify structures of power. If you...

Second city chance

I like second cities. I grew up in one. I live in one. Second cities try to punch above their weight. Second cities have something to prove. There is a...

Fewer, better hoodies

Here are the fashion rules:

The zine as trial balloon

The slow roll is important. There is risk. Printers don’t have undo buttons. You can’t take years of your life back. This is why zines exist. The premise At...

Earth's only remaining holiday

There is your perception of Basil Day, there is my perception of Basil Day, and then there is Basil’s perception of Basil Day, which is the only holiday...

The first thing you have to do is go to a lot of museums. If you go to a lot of museums, you learn how to skip stuff, and skipping stuff is how to museum....

$ · July 11, 2022

I was chatting with a friend the other day, and she told me that I do the best job with creative work when I oscillate between periods of public exposure and...

In 2008, on the fourth of July at sundown, I posted up with a few friends on the seawall facing Lake Michigan, and watched some fireworks. The city would...

Community work is repair work

$ · July 6, 2022

In my recent text about community matters, a couple of people remarked on our code of conduct, asking: how do you deal with bad actors? This is not a short...

Community-supported marathon

For the past 11 years, I have participated in one form or another of community-supported agriculture, where every week I either go to a farm and pick up a...

$ · July 1, 2022

In order to see more text you like, you need to reply to it. And a lot of you replied to the text I wrote a few weeks back about the barbeque. I think people...

New pour, old practice

The pour is a habit; the pour is a practice. For about a decade, the pour went like this: Grind to the consistency of sand, approximately. Boil your water to...

$ · June 27, 2022

I almost have compassion for Rey Colón. He picked a fight, as aldermen do; it was, very profoundly, the wrong fight. A political rival campaigned against him...

How to pick a serviceberry tree

You’ve heard of other berries, but not serviceberries. In June, they speak to abundance. They are small, sugary, in season for only a few weeks, and kind of...

The sandwich we deserve

$ · June 22, 2022

Time changes a place. We never want to admit this. Our favorite stores should stay open forever. Our favorite restaurants must serve the exact same food...

We have reached this point with respect to the soap bag, and there is no turning back

Travel toiletries are one of the weirdest things to me. They are a ritual that could only exist based on the essential tension between international law,...

$ · June 17, 2022

Your city can tell me a lot based on its relationship to gin. London kind of tucks gin under the rug, not wanting to admit its colonialist history,...

The barbeque is not medicinal, despite appearances

I threw a barbeque over Memorial Day weekend. It was the usual sort of thing: a garage sale, a grill, lots of seltzer and beer. People rolled through on...

$ · June 13, 2022

All stitching, on everything you own, is drawn, manually, with two hands. On every t-shirt you own, the cuffs are drawn with two hands, the seams are drawn...