Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. It’s been just a few days since OpenAI revealed its latest flagship generative model, o1, to the world. Marketed as a “reasoning” model, o1 essentially takes longer to “think” about questions before answering them, breaking down […]

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Today is the release of Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s monograph Citizen Printer. 

In the foreword to the book, I write:

Kennedy’s work is evidence of the head, the heart, and the hands together at play. His is a physical process, done by a human body in time and space with the real materials of ink and chipboard and wood and machinery, pressing them all together into something new. In this digital age, it’s inspiring to see someone using their digits. Among the many images in this book that bring me joy, my favorite might be the photograph of his ink-stained hands… To hold a thing in my hands that he’s made with his hands makes me want to make things with my hands.

You can read the whole foreword in today’s newsletter, “A Man of Letters.”

One of the diary-like joys of the Friday newsletter is getting to sit down after a week and figure out if the things in my life have been speaking to each other in any particular way.

Usually, the week is a miscellany — if not cacophony — but often a theme appears.

That theme this week is “collective creativity,” brought about by reading about Prince, jazz, and the work of being in a band. It’s a dense one, and good, I think.

Read it here.

Hiya, folks, welcome to TechCrunch’s regular AI newsletter. If you want this in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. This week in AI, OpenAI’s next major product announcement is imminent, if a piece in The Information is to be believed. The Information reported on Tuesday that OpenAI plans to release Strawberry, an AI model that […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Friday’s newsletter, “Wondrous Variety,” started out with something I read in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia: 

Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it.

I was having trouble coming up with an image for the newsletter and then I remembered this photo I took in a Costco on Oahu.

Read the whole newsletter here.

Today’s newsletter begins:

It’s back to school season here in Austin. We dropped our youngest off at fourth grade this week and walked our firstborn to middle school. How is this possible? I’ve been keeping my mind off the inexorable passage of time by putting the finishing touches on a book proposal and carving stamps from Pink Pearl erasers. (I have always loved shopping for school supplies. If you need a little retail therapy, here’s a list of the gear I use in the studio.)

I named it after an old eastern saying that I can’t quite pin on anybody specific: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

In today’s newsletter, I write about spending half of a flight to Honolulu drawing a comic while freeze-framing Tim Burton’s Batman:

Planes are excellent places to work, but they’re also excellent places to zone out and to play or do “comfort work” — what I’m calling the creative work we return to when we don’t know what else to do.

Drawing Batman, it turns out, is a great comfort to me!

A reader commented that they’d love to sit across from me on a plane, and it suddenly occurred to me that I left out a huge inspiration from the newsletter: I was sitting on the plane diagonally from a kid drawing, which is what made me get out my diary in the first place!

Here are a few blind contour drawings I made of the kid:

And what I wrote in my diary underneath:

there’s a little kid across the aisle from me who has the most chaotic little marker box and I love it. just scribbling little drawings w/ what looks like EXPO markers and crayons and all kinds of random stuff…

Since the letter takes a turn into kids and the aliveness in the lines that they draw, I can’t believe I left out this detail. But that’s what’s so great about putting work in front of people — the minute you do, you remember everything you left out.

Read the whole letter here: “The comfort of drawing Batman”

Today’s newsletter was really an excuse to tell you about my vacation (and mess around with recall):

I’m adding the Windward Coast and North Shore of Oahu to my list of magical happy-making drives along the Pacific Ocean. Green mountains, palm trees, sunny beaches, swimming with sea turtles and dolphins, poke bowls, plate lunches, cold coconuts, shaved ice, McDonald’s drive-thrus that still do fried pies, lizards, mongooses, peacocks, horses, feral chickens, Banyan trees, ukulele shops, and watching every sunrise and every sunset. It was the best vacation we’ve ever been on.

I feel about Hawaii the way Mark Twain did:

No alien land in all the world has any deep, strong charm for me but that one; no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun, the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloudrack; I can feel the spirit of its woodland solitudes; I can hear the plash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

Read all about “The North Shore.”

We’re going to start a book club back up in the newsletter and I’m taking suggestions for what we should read.

Now, of course, is an excellent time to join the club and become a paid subscriber.

Here’s John Gregory Dunne, in his introduction to The Studio:

Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions.

Read more in last Friday’s newsletter, all about writing and how to make it less like Donkey Work. 

Today’s newsletter began with this photo of Tacos Yo Soy on North Loop here in Austin, Texas. (Taken while riding my bike around.) It’s a dense Friday edition, full of good stuff. Read it here.

I will often map out a Tuesday newsletter in my notebook, forget I made a map, and write it without my notes. Then when I go back flipping through my notebook, I discover everything I left out!

Today’s newsletter is about messing around with anticipation and recall to stretch out pleasant events and minimize unpleasant ones. 

On the unpleasant side, I left out one of my favorite parts of the section of Katherine Morgan Schafler’s The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control that inspired the letter:

We justify agreeing to get coffee with someone whom we don’t really want to see by saying something like, “It’ll just be half an hour and then I’ll leave.” No. It’ll be the anticipatory anxiety for the week leading up to that half hour, the half hour itself, and then the negative recall of how you felt annoyed and immediately resentful upon sitting down, didn’t want to be there, and couldn’t believe she said that, even though she always says stuff like that, and that’s why you don’t like hanging out with her in the first place….When it comes to agreeing to engage in events we don’t want to engage in, there’s nothing quick about quick catch-up drinks or quick calls or quick meetings.

This adds a layer to the question to ask yourself to avoid accepting invitations you’ll later regret: “Would I do it tomorrow?”

The time travel involved in this calculation is already tricky — who knows how I’ll feel about doing something five minutes from now, let alone five months from now? But if you think about the time leading up to the event and the time coming down from it, suddenly such obligations reveal their bloated shape. 

(“The job never kills anybody,” says John Taylor of Duran Duran. “It’s the fucking stuff you do in between.”)

On the pleasant side, I was reminded of how important it is to have something to look forward to, no matter how silly.

All of this, by the way, is a form of playing with your experience of time: by exploiting anticipation and recall, you’re trying to effectively slow down and speed up certain events, and using your memory to shape the story you want to tell about your experience. 

You can read the whole newsletter here. 

I don’t know how these Friday newsletters come together. Or maybe I do. They usually start with an image I want to put at the top, or a subject line. Today’s began with the subject line: “Listening is the whole deal.”

I came across that line when I was reading The Work of Art, and I knew I had 3 things I wanted to put in there — the Eno doc, Perfect Days, and the Four Tet interview — which were all somewhat related to listening. So once I had almost half the letter, I figured might as well make it a theme.

My favorite bit in the letter is item #9:

“The act of writing is to me to listen,” said Jon Fosse in his Nobel lecture. “When I write I never prepare, I don’t plan anything, I proceed by listening… At a certain point I always get a feeling that the text has already been written, is out there somewhere, not inside me, and that I just need to write it down before the text disappears.”

I don’t consider my newsletters fine literature or anything like that, but there’s something that happens when I’m out here in the studio at my desk, and I’m writing and just pushing things around, seeing how they bump up to each other — the arrangement presents itself, and the thing just comes into being.

At least, that is, when it’s going good.

Anyways: Happy Friday.

Friday’s newsletter was inspired by our recent trip to New Mexico.

It ended on this note about travel:

I am a big believer that travel doesn’t relieve your problems, it throws them into relief. You see your life in a new light and new shadows. The desert light can be good for this. At its peak, it is harsh and unforgiving, but at dusk and dawn it softens, becomes more mysterious. Every trip has its challenges, but I returned home, as I often do, with a sense of perspective and a clarity about what I want to do next. What more could one ask for? (“Go away so you can come back.”)

What I liked most about New Mexico was being in the forests and the deserts outside of town.

In Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac, a fictional Richard Feynman says:

Los Alamos was high up on a mesa with tall cliffs carved in dark red earth, lots of trees and shrubs all around. The landscape was breathtaking, the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. Coming from New York, I’d never traveled out to the West before, so I really felt like I was in another world. In Mars or something. It had the strange energy of a sacred space, a haven far away from the civilized world, away from prying eyes, farther than God could see. The perfect spot to do the unimaginable.

Read more in “The Land of Enchantment.”

Today’s newsletter begins:

Like many book nerds, I got sucked into the NYTimes list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. I am with Paul Ford that “Why Wasn’t I Consulted?” is the fundamental question of the internet, and so a list like this one is bound to get big clicks…

One thing that struck me is that only two (great) comics made the list — Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis(2004).

I thought it might be fun for me to list a few more books from this century that have pictures and words that have made a big impact on me in the past 24 years…

No paywall today so you can read the whole thing here.

I was embarrassingly pleased with myself when I came up with the subject line of last Friday’s newsletter, “Midyear in a mid year,” which began:

My kids love to use the slang word “mid” to describe things that are “mediocre or of low quality” or “bad, boring, or inferior in some way.” I thought about the word a lot this week, and what it means to be in the middle of things — mid-year, middle age, etc. My slogan: “mid-life need not be mid.” (Know Your Meme is still a great website for “the olds.”)

Today’s newsletter is a midyear roundup of things I liked in the first half of 2024, including books, music, TV, movies, podcasts, gadgets, and more.

Have I mentioned the newsletter now goes out to over two hundred thousand people? That number blows my mind.

Today’s newsletter is about how hard (and how easy?) it can be to come up with titles.

It begins:

In My Life in France, Julia Child wrote about what a pain it was to come up with the title for Mastering The Art of French Cooking. She and her husband Paul debated “the merits of poetic titles versus descriptive titles.” They made lists and lists of titles, trying to come up with the right “combination of words and associations” that would work…

You can read the rest here.

(Reminder: I’m having a summer 20% off sale on paid subscriptions.)

Friday’s newsletter was inspired by this vintage stamp carousel that Meghan got me for my birthday: 

I didn’t even know such a thing existed, but I’m told they used to be pretty common in offices. I’ve been spinning it here on my desk, thinking about circular time, nostalgia, volvelles, and Fortuna’s wheel. All the things that go round and round. (Just this morning I was reading The Idler and learned about prayer wheels.)

Read the rest here.

Today’s newsletter is about “solar returns” and revisiting old work.

Here’s Richard Linklater in the documentary Dream is Destiny, talking about the non-linear nature of time:

You don’t want to come back to this exact same spot, but you can’t help it through life. It’s a spiral. You know? You kind of come back to a new spot. You’re farther down the line, but you’re in a similar position.

You can read the rest here.