I think Anna hints at something here that I’ve struggled to describe, the way that blogs were somewhat hidden and when you discovered them it was like finding a treasure map; something intentionally obscured from view.

The grab-bag style is really interesting, where I just list out ideas and links to things that were interesting to me throughout the week. It’s essentially a forcing function for my attention. You have to to notice the things that you’re reading and thinking about, that are actually important, if you want to have any hope of pulling together enough interesting atoms for a functional structure.

A tiny bit of forethought, some cautionary design.

And so here we are: leaning on an open, beautifully staid, inert protocol. SMTP as our savior. ​ Mr. Chimero almost never writes but when he does makes the day a good day. ​ These newsletters are the most backed up pieces of writing in history, copies in millions of inboxes, on millions of hard drives and servers, far more than any blog post.

They’re there because they weirdly fell in love with what you’re doing, and they want to see you succeed. ​ But we never stopped to think about whether we repeated these behaviors because they were actually good for creators, or because that’s just how Kickstarter did it. ​ Creators sell intimacy to patrons. They sell “stuff” - perks - to customers.

and exercise and yoga and turning off devices and caffeine and pep talks—these can all help with our metaphorical recharge, but they’re not a perfect formula like a plug into a correctly-shaped hole. Sometimes are bodies and minds are stubborn mysteries. I have been thinking lately, as usual, our language about wellness is bending toward the language of machines. the one and only infallible, deep-in-the-bones, rejuvenating source of energy, has been the love of good people. the warmth of friends I haven’t seen in a year, and who have lit my face up with a grin so expansive that I find my cheeks sore at the end of the day.

I have to confess that Twitter has yielded some good relationships and opportunities over the past few years. And there’s a part of me that wants to keep that portal open. It’s just that on most days, I’m not sure it’s worth it. ​ going indie, as it were, works better (better, I grant, depends on your purposes) when you’ve already got a large audience that is going to follow you where ever you go ​ divided ​ What I do know is that the newsletter is increasingly where I want to write and what I want to keep developing

“Yancey Strickler, a co-founder of Kickstarter, on the internet retreating to safe spaces – well, safer spaces: Podcasts are another example. There, meaning isn’t just expressed through language, but also through intonation and interaction. Podcasts are where a bad joke can still be followed by a self-aware and self-deprecating save. It’s a more forgiving space for communication than the internet at large. Dark forests like newsletters and podcasts are growing areas of activity. As are other dark forests, like Slack channels, private Instagrams, invite-only message boards, text groups, Snapchat, WeChat, and on and on. This is where Facebook is pivoting with Groups (and trying to redefine what the word “privacy” means in the process). Obviously, the various spaces mentioned above are wildly different, but it is interesting to try to bucket them all together into this trend. And it is something that resonates with me about newsletters…”

my philosophy on blogging has shifted from “every essay must be a perfect, shimmering artifact” to “blog posts should be short, authentic, and flawed transportation devices”. they mark off from ten to noon and three to five as “engineering time”, and spend the intervening three hours doing anything but programming. I am growing more and more tempted to steal this for myself. those “correct” Sundays, where you flit from obligation to obligation and never grow tired enough to require pause.

That gaze is a monolithic one: it’s the mass of readers I am potentially failing by writing something pretentious, boring and not worth their time. Everyone is watching! It had better be good! It's is the gaze that says: You can't write unless you're describing everything in the cellar. ​ And most of all, letters make me feel like I am reading things that were written to me and for me alone. And that's my favorite feeling in the world. ​ So maybe the privacy I’m talking about really is just trust, and the ability to write to someone you know will still love you despite your writing. ​ —I’m talking about a friend who loves you enough to edit your writing.

i’ve been thinking about buttondown’s future a lot lately, trying to work out how to turn it from “growing and largely unmapped” into “sustainable and legible”. 1 i’ve been rereading seeing like a state, so legible might not be the best choice of words here, but i digress ↩

It can be more than just a creative endeavor: Newsletters can make a fine one-person business. ​ To be clear: I don’t intend to give up my low-grade Twitter addiction. I have built meaningful friendships on the platform, and it’s been a pathway for people to discover my work. ​ Instead, I’ll save it for my newsletter following — the one that belongs to me.

“(like it says in the thing, this is an in-progress piece of something much longer/bigger I'm working on and a lot of these ideas are still me spitballing/working through stuff, so if it feels incomplete, well, that's the fun of a newsletter I guess)”

worth the price of admission.

I was teaching writing all day but not writing myself, and on twitter so many people I knew were starting tinyletters, sending small paragraphs of heart-rending, un-pitch-able prose, family stories and recipes and album recommendations and lowkey erotica in little forward-marching scrolls of text that I’d read curled around my phone late at night while I couldn’t sleep. I was jealous of my students and I was jealous of everyone starting tinyletters and of everyone publishing essays, and of the world going on one bright achievement after another all around me. I wrote some paragraphs quickly, without looking, like muttering under my breath, told myself I didn’t have to edit it because no one would read it anyway, and hit send. The whole college application is a murderously hopeful document, and hope is the most mercenary emotion, the struck-match trick of salespeople and con artists and politicians, leaving the door unlocked at night, risking everything in a game to which no one told us the rules.

“The poems offer a version of the world in which we might reach toward others’ joy in the same gesture as reaching toward our own, rather than dissecting faults and hoarding happiness.” “I am aware that this is a way of being bad at social media, just like insisting on joy is a way of being bad at poetry. I am aware that documenting my love is basic in the same way that O’Hara being my favorite poet is basic. But, at least for me, this obsessive documentation of the stupid, boring, repetitive things that string a life together is the place where social media aspires to the level of poetry.” “Love celebrates another person’s existence rather than their achievements.” “Look at this pattern of days, this holiday that means nothing outside itself.”

“I don’t know, I think that this kind of email-based personal writing is like whispering when you’re the last two people left awake at a sleepover and you get to say the things you’d never say in a daylight conversation, one that actually counts.”

“Manhattan is quiet and cocoonish when it's cold. The entire city goes into hibernation mode, and communal solitude has to be one of the loveliest things I've experienced.”