I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon watching the fog roll over the hills in Vermont, thinking about how much electricity it takes just to keep our modern anxieties running. It is a strange thing to consider that while we argue over pixels and policy, the literal physical substrate of our world is shifting … Read more
I was sitting in a drafty coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, watching the rain smear the window into a gray blur, when I realized that the way we price books is essentially a relic of the nineteenth century. We pick a number, usually something ending in ninety nine, and we let it sit there until … Read more
The floor lamp in my corner is a ghost. If you walked into my apartment right now, you would see a dusty patch of hardwood where a stack of unread magazines usually sits. But through the lens of my glasses, there is a mid-century modern piece in brushed walnut casting a warm, amber glow across … Read more
I remember sitting in a cluttered office in Chicago about five years ago, watching a friend get rejected for a small business loan because of a medical bill he forgot to pay in 2017. The system back then was a blunt instrument, a three-digit number that summed up a human life with the nuance of … Read more
There was a time, not so long ago, when the act of writing was a lonely, almost monastic pursuit. You’d sit in a room, perhaps a cramped studio in Chicago or a quiet corner of a library, and wrestle with shadows until a story emerged. You held all the keys. You were the sole arbiter … Read more
Static pages are starting to feel like a quiet room where nobody is allowed to talk. I spent the last week walking around a damp, grey Seattle morning thinking about why I haven’t finished a non-fiction book in months. It isn’t a lack of discipline. It is the friction of the medium. We are living … Read more
There was a time, not so long ago, when the only way a reader could touch a piece of the world I built was to wait for a publisher to decide a plastic keychain was worth the shipping costs from a warehouse in Ohio. It felt hollow. We spend months, sometimes years, obsessed with the … Read more
Staring at a bank balance in 2026 feels a bit like watching a slow-motion heist. You know the money is there, but you also know it’s losing its edge. Inflation isn’t the monster it was a few years ago, yet the traditional savings accounts offered by the big legacy banks still feel like they’re stuck … Read more
I was sitting in a small, slightly drafty coffee shop in Seattle last Tuesday, watching a woman struggle with a self-service kiosk that kept insisting her name was “User 402.” She eventually gave up, walked over to the tired barista, and they shared a genuine, weary laugh about how stupid the machine was. That moment … Read more
The coffee shop I frequent in Seattle has this one table with a wobbly leg that everyone ignores because the light from the window is just too perfect to pass up. I was sitting there last Tuesday, staring at a half-finished manuscript and wondering if the traditional path of begging for an advance was finally, … Read more