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My friend Gio tells me he liked the tone of the last newsletter. Sure, it’s a sample of one, but I like writing how I talk, so I guess I’ll keep going—until I get a request to be a little more “corporate”, in which case I’ll start using words like “engagement” and “take it offline”. I refuse to use “ask” as a noun, though. One has to draw the line somewhere.

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Anyway, the quote I can’t get out of my head this week is from Madeline Ashby’s No one cares about your jetpack — an article about the relative box office failure of the movie Tomorrowland. The whole thing is good, but this paragraph stands out:

In the end, the lacklustre performance of Tomorrowland at the box office has nothing to do with whether optimism is alive or dead. It has to do with changing demographics among moviegoers who know how to spot an Ayn Rand bedtime story when they see one. There are whole generations of moviegoers for whom jetpacks don’t mean shit, whose first memories of NASA are the Challenger disaster. And you know what? Those same generations believe in driverless cars, solar energy, smart cities, AR contacts, and vat-grown meat. They saw the election of America’s first black president, and they witnessed a wave of violence against young black men. They don’t want the depiction of an “optimistic” future. They want a future where their concerns are taken seriously and humanely, with compassion and intelligence and validation. And that’s way harder than optimism.

I’ve felt for a long time that what people (I agree with Rebecca Onion that we need to ditch generational labels) now crave the most is authenticity. We’ve learned how to see through most flavors of BS, and we are drawn to people situations that don’t try to dress things up to hide the truth. In short, we prefer “I made a mistake” to “Mistakes were made”.

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I love What exactly are our rules comprised of?, a story in The Economist about a guy who believes his grammatical mission in life is to remove every Wikipedia instance of the phrase “comprised of” that he can find. And then there’s the guy who doesn’t believe in the past perfect tense. We should all have this much conviction about something in our lives.

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In The Web of Alexandria (follow-up), Bret Victor continues a very interesting discussion about the role of the web to both preserve knowledge (the idea of a “common record”) and forget certain things (ephemeral discussions). He draws the following, well-argued conclusion:

[The web] currently has the property that it forgets what must be remembered, and remembers what must be forgotten. It manages to screw up both the sacredness of the common record and the sacredness of private interaction.

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Mike Errico looks at the economics of music streaming, and those who try to game the system, in Everything in the Music Industry Has Changed Except the Song Itself. There’s a fascinating story about a band who made $20,000 by releasing an album of silent tracks and convinced their fans to stream it while they slept. It’s a weird new world in this industry.

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Here’s an upside down thought. Clive Thompson asks us to consider that maybe when people text and drive, the most important of the two activities isn’t the driving, it’s the texting. So maybe we shouldn’t stop people from texting, but rather look for ways to get them to stop driving. Park the Car, Take the Bus is a very intriguing take on this topic.

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And finally, in honor of Google I/O this week, I’ll leave you with this:

Let us know everything about you. We promise it’ll be worth your while. http://t.co/vJv4ucoZmt

— Josh Clark (@bigmediumjosh) May 29, 2015

Happy weekend, everyone!

I’ve been thinking about the topic of my latest A List Apart column for a while, but I was just too scared to write it. I mean, what right do I have to talk about work and privilege? But I ran the idea by my amazing editor, and since she was really supportive and enthusiastic about it, I went for it.

So I wrote Why?:

Why we work—and what kind of work we do—is a function of our privilege and our history as much as it is a function of our choices and our dedication.

I hope you enjoy reading it, and take something from it. This one took a while to get right.

I’m a long-time Pinboard fan, and from the moment I became a paid user I couldn’t shake the feeling that it is one of the most underrated services out there. It’s basically the center of my personal internet. I have years of articles tagged and cached, and available immediately whenever I need to remember something. For me, it represents the best of what technology has to offer as an “external brain”1.

But it’s even more powerful than that. I recently started wondering if Pinboard could become more central in my blogging workflow as well. My flow when I find an article I want to write about used to be two steps: (1) save to Pinboard, and then (2) start a new text file (with an excerpt from the article) and start writing.

Since I don’t always have time to write immediately after I read something, the disjointedness of these two steps means that I forget to post articles sometimes — or that I can’t remember which part I want to write about. So I needed a way to save Pinboard links for later, in a way that lets me pick up writing whenever I have time.

The solution I came up with isn’t rocket science, but it has made such a big difference to the way I write that I wanted to share it here. The key is a simple IFTTT recipe that takes any new link I save to Pinboard and creates a Markdown-formatted text file that I can use to start writing whenever I want to.

Here is a link to the IFTTT recipe: Post any new Pinboard link to a new text file in Dropbox.

And this is what it does:

I always put a pull quote in the “Description” field when I save a Pinboard link, so the recipe creates a text note with a Markdown-formatted URL, the pull quote, and space for me to add a title, slug, and excerpt once I’m ready to post to the site. Putting the note in a Dropbox folder means I can continue typing and editing on any device — I use Editorial on iOS and nvALT on Mac.

As for posting… I still haven’t found a mobile blogging platform that works for me, so even though I write many posts on my iPhone or iPad, I still post exclusively from MarsEdit. So I also went one step further and made a Keyboard Maestro macro (download here) that transfers the text from nvALT to MarsEdit as soon as I’m ready to post.

You know, the internet is pretty cool sometimes.

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1. Clive Thompson discusses the idea of external memory in detail in his excellent book Smarter Than You Think. ↩

Robinson Meyer reflects on Medium and What Blogging Has Become:

And I too, a lowly twentysomething, pine for days of less centralization. As I wrote a few days ago, in a New Medium-style short post, “I still find the idea of a diverse blogosphere — arrayed across tens of thousands of URLs, with sites organized by author and shaped by distinctive interests — really, distinctively, unavoidably cool.”

But is there a place in the web ecosystem for this kind of writing anymore? And is the cost of using Medium, which will centralize writing and create a kind of publisher/publishee power inequality, worth the ease? What will happen when widespread abuse comes to Medium, the way it’s come to Twitter? And social media companies have proven tremendously malleable, product-wise, to the desires of other companies — will Medium be the same? What does a piece of advertising look like on Medium anyway, when the line between journalism and PR on it is already so thin?

I’ve been around long enough for Blogger to rise (and fall), for MySpace to be the best (and then the worst) place to write your thoughts, and for Posterous and Windows Live Spaces to disappear (along with all my posts there). So I will stubbornly hold on to writing on this here, my very own URL.

In Don’t Say ‘Cyclists,’ Say ‘People on Bikes’ Sarah Goodyear explains how some deliberate language changes turned a serious conflict in Seattle into a civil debate. Here’s what they did:

“Though the group made no secret of their biking advocacy, they didn’t brand themselves as biking advocates,” writes [PeopleForBikes blogger Michael Andersen]. “They branded themselves as neighborhood advocates.”

[Seattle Neighborhood Greenways] also developed a list of new ways to talk about their concerns and promoted it in handy chart form. Instead of “cyclists,” they suggest, use “people on bikes.” Instead of “drivers,” “people driving.” Instead of technical traffic-engineering terms such as “pedestrian/hybrid beacon,” say “safer ways to cross busy streets.” Replace “pedestrians” with “people walking.”

The result?

[Tom Fucoloro of Seattle Bike Blog] says that talking about streets in a way that emphasizes the common humanity of all users, rather than dividing them into tribes with warring interests, has made a real difference in the way Seattle’s planners discuss possible changes to streets with the community. As a result, he says, the discussion has become much more civil. And Seattle has been installing protected bike lanes (don’t say cycletracks!) at a steadily increasing pace.

I wonder if we need something similar in our industry. Instead of “users,” perhaps we should talk about “people who use websites.” After all, we’re supposed to be all about emphasizing humanity in our products.

Melissa Dahl talked to some people to find out Why You Keep Mishearing That Taylor Swift Lyric:

“There’s a piece of what we understand that comes from the sound that comes in our ear,” but another piece of our understanding comes from our minds — from our expectations, in other words. It’s easy to see how this explanation applies to many misheard lyrics, specifically the most-often cited one from Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” which contains the lyrics “Excuse me while I kiss the sky”; people often mishear that line as “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.” It makes sense: People are more accustomed to hearing someone talking about kissing some guy, less so the entire sky.

I recently realized that the web services I love and use the most are all run by indie developers or small companies. While I ponder what that means, I thought I’d do my little part to tell you about them in case you’re in the market for one of these things.

These are all services I’ve used for a while and have no intention of leaving. Unless they shut down. PLEASE SUPPORT THEM SO THEY DON’T SHUT DOWN.

• I use Feedbin as my back-end for RSS reading. It’s solid. It always updates fast, it never goes down, and it works with a pretty much any RSS reader you can think of. I tried Feedly, but it’s not for me. Too many gimmicks I don’t need.
• Speaking of which, I use Reeder as my front end for RSS reading. Beautiful UI, great integration with services.
• Anyone who’s paying attention knows that Feedburner is on its way out. So a while ago I moved my site’s RSS feed hosting to Feedblitz. It’s not worth linking to them — it was a terrible mistake. Shady “growth hacking” marketing techniques, impossible to work with on support issues, etc. Don’t do it. I have since switched to FeedPress and I’m really happy with it. I do think there’s still a gap in the market for a really good Feedburner replacement, but Feedpress does an admirable job for now.
• Pinboard is still the backbone of everything I do online. It’s basically my external memory. I don’t know how I would internet without it.
• Instapaper is not a one-person band any more, but it’s still my “read later” service of choice. I dabbled in Pocket for a while, but I keep coming back to Instapaper for the no-nonsense UI and focus on typography.
• When it comes to writing, my favorite tools remain MarsEdit (blog writing and editing), nvALT (text editor), and Marked 2 (Markdown viewer).

I really hope these developers continue to make enough money to focus on these fantastic projects. I also hope they know how many people they’re helping every day with the things they dream up. Thank you, to all of you.

Oh man, Some 2015 Predictions on The Awl is so good. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but if I have to:

No human, for the entirety of 2015, will be convinced of anything but his own rightness by any “explainer” site. They will become extremely popular, fully stocked with “Perfect Response” and “Reasons Why” posts that are first and foremost affirming to the reader, and secondarily intended to demonstrate the rightness and virtue of the sharer. One high-growth post-type in 2015: “You’re Right, But For Even Better Reasons Than You Think.”

Last year I accidentally became an expert on interviewing. I didn’t want to, but hey, we do what we need to do. I just published some things I learned in the process on A List Apart, in an article called How to Interview. Here’s one piece of advice on how to get companies to email you back…

Send separate, personal emails to each of the likely hiring managers you found. Make it really, really short. Don’t go on about how awesome you are—you’ll get a chance to do that later. Tell them you like their company, you like the role, you’re interested in talking. Link to stuff you’ve done: your LinkedIn profile, your portfolio, articles/books you’ve written, etc. Then ask them if they’d be willing to have a call, or forward your information on to the right person. The point is to not burden people. If they see a long email, the chances are high that they will delete it. But if they see a short email that’s respectful of their time and gives them the information they need to make a quick decision—that’s a different story.

I wrote a story about jazz, coffee, and liner notes, and hopefully managed to turn it into something with a logical conclusion. But feel free to judge for yourself by reading Taking back the music:

We like things fast and disposable — I get that. I mean, no one even knew what the word “ephemeral” meant until Snapchat came along. But moving quickly from one thing to the next will just never be as satisfying as really spending time with something or someone, with no escape from the person or the artist’s intentions and successes and failures. We can all do with a little bit more of that.