To view this email as a webpage, click here Today is the most hope and optimism-filled day of the year. That’s great! Whatever goals or resolutions you’ve set for yourself, I’m excited for you! We’re all trying to better ourselves, and even though things haven’t worked out the way we wanted them to in the past, we hope this time will be different. Musician Nick Cave describes hope as “optimism with a broken heart,” and I think that’s beautifully accurate. We’re all trying to be different when...
14 days ago • 3 min read
To view this email as a webpage, click here Stephen Wilson Jr. was a scientist working for Mars, Inc. (Yeah, the Candy company). One day, his boss pulled him into an office and said something that changed his life: “Stephen, you’re about to get promoted.” Normally a cause for celebration, this was instead meant as a warning by his boss. In a past life, Stephen had been a guitarist in a small indie rock band. He also spent his evenings writing songs. His boss knew Stephen was a damn good...
21 days ago • 3 min read
To view this email as a webpage, click here 2024 is drawing to a close, so I wanted to hit you with one final newsletter before the chaos of 2025 kicks off. It’s that time of year where our brains will almost automatically look back on the past year. What went right, what went wrong. What we accomplished, what we failed to follow through on. If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to overindex on the “what went wrong” part, and feel all sorts of negative emotions around those things. We might...
28 days ago • 2 min read
To view this email as a webpage, click here On December 19th, 2001, The Fellowship of the Ring hit theaters and nerd culture was forever changed. If you’re like me, you associate these movies with the holidays and are about to rewatch all three films (extended editions obviously). I was rewatching the Fellowship recently, and I had a funny thought. While they’re in the Mines of Moria, Gandalf is reading the final entry in the Book of Mazarbul, the diary of Balin and his fellow dwarves and...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
To view this email as a webpage, click here A few years back, I attended my friend Nick’s blowout 40th birthday party. As part of the celebration, he hired an improv comic, and we all had to participate in learning improv comedy. (I just felt the collective shiver of all the introverts reading this newsletter). We started tossing out fun scenarios and scenes to participate in, and we learned about the most important rule of Improv:“Yes and.” Two simple words, and the foundation for all of...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
To view this email as a webpage, click here I’m a huge Stephen King fan. I’ve read the whole Dark Tower Series, It, The Shining, Doctor Sleep, and my favorite movie ever is based on his novella, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. So, at the behest of multiple friends who told me it’s their favorite book, I finally started reading 11/22/63. Here’s the head-exploding premise: On November 22, 1963, three shots rang out in Dallas, President Kennedy died, and the world changed. What if...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
To view this email as a webpage, click here Last December, I sheepishly admitted there was a huge hole in my Nerd cred. I grew up drawing cartoons, took AP art in high school, and was always fascinated by hand-drawn animation… But I had never seen a single second of any Studio Ghibli cartoon! Studio Ghibli is the Japanese equivalent of Disney, with Hayao Miyazaki as the Japanese Walt: the studio has won multiple Academy Awards for their beautifully hand-drawn animated films, and Miyazaki has...
2 months ago • 4 min read
To view this email as a webpage, click here In 1933, an overwhelmed and frustrated woman named Frau sent a letter to psychologist Carl Jung, asking “how to live.” (She didn’t have any Instagram influencers to yell motivational platitudes at her, I guess) Jung replied: “Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. …if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by...
2 months ago • 3 min read
To view this email as a webpage, click here I’m currently reading The Tainted Cup, a fantasy detective novel. Think “Sherlock Holmes set in Westeros.” The main character has this augmentation that allows him to absorb every single detail of every interaction, crime scene, and then recite back these exact details at a later date. I remember a horrifying Black Mirror episode about this very thing: being able to recall every fact of every interaction in the past. Here’s the thing: in all of...
3 months ago • 2 min read