I have been writing a special Tuesday newsletter for paid subscribers for five years now, which means there’s a bunch of really good stuff just kind of hiding in the archives over there. I’ve tagged a lot of of it on the newsletter homepage in categories like “notebooks,” “mixtapes,” “tutorials,” “zines,” “typewriter interviews,” etc.

But it’s hard to know how to point people back at stuff.

A few weeks ago I had a sale on paid subscriptions, so I used it as an excuse to gather some of the more popular letters, like:

a look inside of my notebooks, a tour of my studio, my guide to block printing, how I make color brush pens, motivational posters for your studio, and the 7 questions I ask myself when I don’t know what to do next. Get it!

The week after that, I gathered up the letters regarding what I know about writing books:

All good things must begin, there’s an abyss between researching and writing and a gulp between when you finish and publish, coming up with a good title matters, there are many tricks for self-editing and the best is “just cut stuff,” you have to love your work long enough to see it through, and it often helps to think of your book (and everything else you write) as a letter to a friend.

I need to spend more time in the newsletter archives doing this kind of work: figuring out what I have and how I can bundle it together. Because honestly, that’s how most of the books were written!

But then again, I’d rather, you know, actually be writing.

Last week’s newsletter began:

An out-of-town developer tore a house down at the end of my street and cut down every single tree on the lot. As I watched the big T-Rex excavator claw down the walls, a thought ran through my head: If it can be built, it can be torn down. True of houses, relationships, and civilizations. What got me the most was the smell of the big pile of demolished house. A smell of rot and death. And then the oxblood and rain lilies came up.

Related: “Normal is what you can successfully ignore”

This was not entirely pre-planned, but: it turns out I’m publishing a typewriter interview with a cartoonist every week of October, and I just now realized they’re all contributors to The New Yorker. The first two are Roz Chast and Paul Noth! (Can you guess the other two?)

Curators Jenny Robb and Caitlin McGurk took me on a 45-minute guided tour of one of my favorite places: the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum on the OSU campus in Columbus, Ohio. Really fun. Watch the video.

In last Friday’s newsletter, I wrote about helping my sixth grader with homework:

I’ve been inspired lately by how many people I admire have moved to an analog notebook-based method of teaching. I really believe that in 2026 plain ol’ paper and pencil is the killer app. For example, my 6th grader needed to memorize the countries in the Middle East for a quiz and his dad got, erm, rather involved…

A reader on Instagram suggested we should try out MapTap, a daily geography game, but I think there’s something about copying things out by hand that makes you learn them really well. (Remember when Al Franken got up and drew the entire United States from memory? I’d like to see a current senator do that.)

I barely knew Iraq from Iran on a map, honestly, and what’s crazy to me is that a week later, I can still name — and draw, roughly — every country in the Middle East from memory.

From an old post of mine, “Learning how to learn again,” which was inspired by my eighth grader, when he was four:

I continue to be fascinated by how slow, seemingly inefficient methods make my self-education more helpful and more meaningful.

That was 9 years ago, and it’s even more true today.

The latest typewriter interview is with artist Roman Muradov.

(It’s made me want to re-read my notes from C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, show creator Michael Schur’s book, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, and maybe Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost.)

[Spoiler alert] The other thing the show is about is the unique Hell of thinking you’re in The Good Place when you’re really in The Bad Place.

I see this a lot in life, but I see it all the time on social media.

Pretty much all social media is The Bad Place, but some social media thinks it’s The Good Place, and that somehow makes it even worse.

For example: Bluesky (literally blue sky, a.k.a. the heavens) thinks of itself as The Good Place, an alternative to The Bad Place (a.k.a Twitter/X). But it’s still a place where people torture each other — mostly by preaching to the choir and/or boring each other into submission. It’s not, IMO, what I’d call fun. (At least in the microdoses I’ve experienced. As with all social media, the dosage is the poison.)

Meanwhile, whenever I pop into The Bad Place, it’s like everybody has accepted it’s The Bad Place and has carried on. Despite its toxic chaos, it’s still sort of… well, I won’t say fun, but it’s not boring.

You can think of each social media site like a neighborhood in The Bad Place. Every Bad Place neighborhood has its own form of torture. For me, Threads is the worst: absolutely algorithmically tuned to your worst anxieties and fears. A complete hellscape that I only get sucked into via the other Meta hellscape known as Instagram. (The pretty pictures and bite-sized reels slowly torture you with the thoughts that everyone else is more attractive, more creative, and generally having a better time than you are.)

Facebook has been Bad from the beginning, and it remains the number one Bad Place neighborhood to find out that the people you know and/or love have terrible, terrible ideas. (I only visit the neighborhood when I want to see new owl photos uploaded to my Central Texas Screech Owls group.)

NextDoor is the Bad Place neighborhood designed to make you feel shittier about your actual neighborhood on Earth.

Etc.

It’s all The Bad Place!

“Still Summer” is a mixtape full of jazz/electronic/ambient music that evokes the kind of cool, spooky wind and crunchy leaves that I pine for here in Texas when the fall equinox hits and it’s still 99 degrees outside:

I started the tape with the working title “See you in the fall,” which is a phrase I used as a sign-off in my last Friday letter. (Reader Pamela B. responded, “Paraphrased from IG: When people say, ‘See you in the fall’ it takes me a minute to realize they mean Autumn—not the end of civilization.” Indeed!)

But then this morning I was writing in my diary and the words “STILL SUMMER” came out of my brush and I thought, Yeah, that’s more like it.

Not only does it still feel like summer here, a lot of this music is very still. It has a pulse, but maybe not a beat. It’s a message to myself: It’s still summer — be still. No sudden movements yet. Estivate. Play dead if you need to. Like a lizard.

You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

Filed under: mixtapes

The latest typewriter interview is with artist Esther Pearl Watson.

(I can’t believe I’ve published 30 of these things!)

My last two Friday newsletters have referenced the late summer misery of September. (See: “The cruelest month.”)

From “The Birds are in misery”:

It is so miserable in Texas right now that I’ve taken to reciting Werner Herzog’smonologue from Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams: “The trees here are in misery and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain…. It’s an unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever goes too deep into this has his share of that curse. So we are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land that God, if he exists, has created in anger…. Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some kind of harmony, but it is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity… we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences…” (Summer here will end one day… in November, probably.)

I need to take this note to myself from September 2020 and auto-email it to myself every June:

Summer is a season for doing as little as possible. If I get any more of them, I plan to get through them by swimming and reading and generally practicing as much extreme idleness as I can get away with.

From my letter, “Summer is cooking my heart”:

One thing I know for sure that my notebooks have taught me is that life is not linear. Life is more like a spiral. We travel around the sun and we live in meteorological, spiritual, and creative seasons.

“Live in each season as it passes,” Thoreau wrote in his own notebook in late summer of 1853, “and resign yourself to the influences of each.” (I would add: the more you deny the season you’re in, the more you suffer.)

When I visit myself in the pages of my notebooks — flipping through an old summer diary, for example — I see that my patterns are well-established and that I’ve been here before and I’ll be here again. (If I’m lucky, that is.) Keep going!

On that note: It’s the first day of fall and Halloween is 39 days away…