Day May 19, 2025

Here is an old blackout poem I stuck in Tuesday’s letter, “Your next best friend,” which is about making good friends — with people and books. We spend a lot of our lives as readers on the search for new books. But…

This poem was inspired by listening to The Cure’s Disintegration at top volume in my studio. I put it at the top of last Friday’s newsletter, “A New Appreciation.”

Tuesday’s newsletter was all about the wild and wonderful questions that kids ask: I really think that the best artists and scientists are grown-ups who somehow manage to retain their ability to ask child-like questions. In Harold Gardner’s Creating Minds, he writes:…

Today’s letter is titled “We’ll see!” “We’ll see” is the refrain in the Charlie Wilson’s War version of the 2000-year-old Chinese parable about the old man who lost his horse. (Bluey used the same refrain, while Alan Watts used “Maybe.”) It’s a favorite parable of mine and one I…

In Tuesday’s letter, I tried to weave together some ideas about yard work, Larry McMurtry, and giving yourself time to feel things, and I managed to articulate something I hadn’t articulated before: The computer used to mean the world to me.…