This mix began as a Halloween party mix (complete with “Monster Mash”) and then morphed into something weirder and scarier, I think: a mix of songs (mostly) about being crazy — maybe even psychotically! —  in love. (The more you listen to love songs the more you realize, “Man, this person is not well!”)

These mixes usually begin with what I call “seed songs” — a song that you kind of want to build a whole mix around. In this case it was the Sonics’ “Psycho” and Girls’ “Lust for Life,” which I couldn’t get out of my head for weeks. I also found that picture of Frankenstein’s monster with the little girl by the lake and these lyrics became more relevant: “I wish I had a father / And maybe then I would’ve turned out right / But now I’m just crazy / I’m totally mad…”

Another thing I learned from this mix: I really build theses mixes based on vibe, so if I have a band that captures the vibe I’m going for, I can use their influences to build up variety in the mix. For example, The Cramps’ “psychobilly” thing is what I wanted for the first side, so I simply searched “cramps influences” and got this Apple playlist that had more of the sort of stuff I was going for. Having the original versions of songs the Cramps covered (like Charlie Feathers’ “Can’t Hardly Stand It”) just thickens the stew, so to speak. (Same for searching for “Creedence covers” — this playlist popped up.)

I filled the tiny gaps on each side with Uncle Monty’s “I mean to have you, even if it must be burglary!” monologue from Withnail & I and a snippet of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Love is Not All.”

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

I used this poem at the top of my letter, “Everything you can see.”

See also: “Do you have a nemesis?”

The latest typewriter interview is with artist Lisa Hanawalt.

I love to (mostly) ignore baseball all year and then follow the playoffs religiously. A few weeks ago I wrote a whole newsletter about the game called  “Baseball on the brain.” It begins:

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” That’s the opening of “The Green Fields of the Mind,” collected in the slim, wonderful volume A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti. Highly recommended if you like thinking about America, baseball, and The Odyssey.

Read the rest here.

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.