Back in March, I was one of the speakers at a Founding Failures event, in which entrepreneurs share a major mistake of theirs and what they learned.
Read a version of the story here, and listen below
Year: 2019
The difference between reporting about policy and politics
In spring 2008 during my final interview for a prestigious post-graduate statehouse reporting internship, I got tripped up.
The impatient and inimitable Pennsylvania state government correspondent Pete Decoursey, a quirky Yale alumnus who passed in 2014, asked me to explain how I would approach my reporting on policy differently than my reporting on politics. I started. He corrected. I restarted. He interrupted. I faltered.
The truth was I didn’t yet grasp his point. He very carefully compartmentalized two kinds of government reporting: the legislating to solve problems and the campaigning to get elected power.
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To be great, you must know how to change speed
A version of this essay was published as part of my monthly newsletter a couple weeks back. Find other archives and join here to get updates like this first.
In high school, my varsity soccer coach would preach: Masters change speed.
The best players aren’t always the fastest. They are the ones who can go fast and then slow. Dribble the ball at a sprint. Stop. Pause. Redirect. Sprint again. Pace. Pace. Pace.
It’s among the lessons from my youth I reflect on most often. It carries through so much of my life. I love speed. It takes mastery to manage on deadline, something I surely learned from newsrooms. Yet, as I age, I’m most proud of how I can find moments of calm to slow down amid my frenetic pace.
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How we speak signals education. But it is not the same thing as education: Robert Lane Greene
Language and the stories we tell about its origins are highly political. To understand one, you need to be mindful of the other.
That’s the main thesis of the 2011 book You Are What You Speak by Robert Lane Greene, who also writes a twice-monthly column on language in The Economist that I adore as a subscriber. I finished the book earlier this year as part of my continued assault on better understanding language’s history — read other reading notes of mine on language here.
This book helped cement my understanding that my favorite part of linguistics is philology, or the historical and comparative elements that seem quite cultural.
Below I share pieces of the book that stood out to me. But as always I encourage you to buy your own copy and read it; I only write nerdy posts like this when a book has really added to my worldview. So I strongly recommend it.
How to fund small projects as a CEO
One unexpected result of becoming CEO of my own company is that I found myself without a traditional budget line I could pull from.
As we grew our company, we created a budget aligned with core functions. I stepped into a role in which I was overseeing them all, but I didn’t set aside budget for me in last year’s budget for myself. That sparked me to wonder how other CEOs approached giving themselves budgetary space to experiment, explore and trial.
Nobody wants to follow someone who made General in Peacetime: notes from Tribes by Seth Godin
I had read other books by popular marketer Seth Godin (I was a regular reader back in 2009). But not one of his best known, one most aligned with work I do, his 2008 Tribes.
A friend (thanks Kristin!) handed me a copy last year and told me to get it done already. Godin is so ubiquitous in web circles that I stopped pursuing his work. I do respect his perspective and approach; I just expect to come across it from his passionate follower base. I supposed a friend handing me the book was just that.
I read it in a weekend last fall, and I just came across the notes I wrote down for myself. Below find them.
Buy local; support independent artists
In December 2012, My good friend and musician Mike Herzenberg hosted in his beautiful home the very talented John Elliott for a very special, intimate 10-person concert.
I hosted a handful of concerts for John in Philadelphia over the next several years. I recorded a podcast episode with him. He became a friend, and he helped me understand how to better support independent artists.
Buy local campaigns can come across as needless protectionism. At their best though, when we talk about buying local or supporting independent artists or otherwise diverting our dollars to small, we are voting with our wallets about what we want in the world. That is something I support.
I’ve picked up a few habits to support independent artists that I wanted to share in the hopes they might suit you.
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Apparently I have a lot of opinions about what cup you should use for your drink
The words we have for drinking vessels are old ones. Glass, mug and cup are all very old ideas.
Hence, there’s quite a bit of culture tied to them. So, though, I’m not an overly particular person in many household respects, I have a lot of opinions about them.
I remember being a teenager and finding a common bond among friends because we all agreed (and struggled to explain why), we thought it was strangely discomforting to have milk served in a plastic cup. Understand, we weren’t richly cultured.
We were middle -class teenagers who for the first time were confronting together an opinion developed independently based on culture and lived experience. This was new.
This is going to be a strange little post about feelings and memories about tiny, meaningless things. If you’re paying attention, you might draw conclusions to feelings about language and fashion and so many other cultural elements.
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Our ‘tranquilizing drug of gradualism’
A version of this essay was published as part of my monthly newsletter a couple weeks back. In its own way, it commemorates African American History Month. Find other archives and join here to get updates like this first.
Dr. King is likely the American thinker who comes to my mind more than any other. Not the populist who was culturally moderated over time into a convenient character for classroom posters. But the difficult and complicated and tortured man, the leader who was flawed and inspiring and masterful in so many ways.
When a MLK quote rattles in my head, it isn’t his iconic, if tired, classic: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Pulled from its context, that’s always seemed to me to be too universal to stir. Instead, it comforts, and I’ve found always found MLK misunderstood when he’s seen as a comforting.
Punctuation today: notes from the 2006 bestseller “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”
Modern linguistics is based largely on a descriptivist view of language, describing common usage. Many grammarians follow a more prescriptivist view: if we don’t prescribe, language will falter.
I read a host of pop linguistics books this year, challenging my prescriptivist publishing origins with a small library of descriptivist perspective. I also consumed podcasts, articles and other interviews with experts on the matter. (Most recently this conversation.)
Along this exploration, I was familiar with several of the most-cited grammar classics (King’s English and Elements of Style among them). But I hadn’t read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, published by Lynne Truss in 2006. So I changed that late last year.
I wanted to share a few notes below.
Continue reading Punctuation today: notes from the 2006 bestseller “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”