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Happy Lunar New Year, friends. I have a new essay out this month for Every about taste. I kept seeing this word thrown around in online AI discourse, and it seemed to mean a different thing every time I saw it. So this was me trying to parse the different definitions.

In the essay, I only touch briefly on the role of status in cultural taste, and that’s because David Marx already wrote a whole book on the subject—that I read as part of my research. It was my first introduction to Marx’s writing and I highly, highly recommend it as a follow-up.

As I pitch ideas for future pieces, I’m noticing that my favorite ideas tend to start with a question I want to explore, for which I do not have a clear answer. I might have a hunch about the answer, or a hunch about where I might find it. But the actual answer? Always more complicated and surprising than I expect. Part of the fun.

Two: Some of you new Sunday readers found me through that same taste essay—welcome! Once a month, on the second Tuesday of that month, I host a Digital Mending Circle, in which we take on

the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

During last week’s mending circle, I installed OpenClaw (I fretted just now over what site to link to here, because I definitely do not recommend installing it without knowing the security risks).

What does a suspect AI agent that runs off a Mac Mini and a Claude Code account have to do with maintenance? Well, these AI tools are starting to automate a lot of those same exact activities we do at our mending circles. So what I want to understand is: What does maintenance look like when you have an AI assistant running 24/7?

… which may be the question for next month’s essay.

Our next mending circle is Tuesday, March 10 from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern. Reply to this email to get the Zoom link.

Third: I was finally able, this weekend, to push out a round of planned updates to my iOS quick notes app, Bebop. Updates that I simply wouldn’t have/didn’t have time for prior to the latest AI coding models.

My preferred development environment of choice these days is Conductor, which legitimately feels like it serves new different mode of making software. The sidebar, instead of holding a list of files and folders like its predecessors, holds a list of projects/repositories, because when you set coding agents to work on a problem and they run for minutes or longer, you can plug away at other projects while you wait.

I have never been more scattered and productive at the same time. I used to think those two words were antonyms. Now, not so much.

Jack

Current events have me thinking, oddly enough, about plant sociability.

Sociability describes how aggressively plants spread. Some stay where right they are, others creep a little, or stay in moderate but contained patches, while the most aggressive will, if left alone, dominate the landscape.

An example might be Canada Goldenrod, which spreads both by seed and rhizome (horizontal arms that shoot out from the main stem). I first saw three, four plants show up in the alley behind our garage a few years ago. This past fall, practically the whole alley was swathed in its eponymous color. Even though the plant’s native to our area, it crowds out less aggressive ones, both native and non.

You can try to remove these plants, or deadhead them before they seed. These strategies tend to work better when there are still relatively few plants in the area. What do you do if a highly social plant has already taken hold? You might introduce other highly social plants that can hold their own against solidago canadensis. You plant ironweed and bee balm, milkweed and Joe Pye.

You meet aggression with aggression. Because that’s what the situation demands.

Mark my words: Pluribus is going to be remembered as the series that best captures this mid-2020s moment. I’m talking not just our current flavor of sycophantic AI chatbots, but also the memory of pandemic alignment, of what we can do if we all work toward a common goal.

If you want to see a society’s subconscious, all you need do is look at their science fiction. What I see here is both a fear of and admiration for collectivism, a fear of and admiration for – intentional or not – an ascendant China. That tension is what makes the first season of this show so interesting. And so American.

Last month I mentioned I was playing the JRPG-inspired game Sea of Stars. I finished that (and enjoyed it!) and moved onto Final Fantasy X, which I finally played after reading Aidan Moher’s history of the genre, the brilliantly named Fight, Magic, Items.

From that book I went right into Matt Alt’s broader-scoped Pure Invention, which opens with a scene from Final Fantasy VII and makes a compelling case that a lot of what’s happening in American society right now happened in Japan decades ago.

Next up bookwise: W. David Marx’s Ametora. And gamewise, send me a JRPG rec, if you have one (preferably one that won’t take 40+ hours to finish).

Jack

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I came home Christmas week after my second residency teaching at Antioch MFA and promptly got sick. I thought it was another stress cold (do you ever get those, when you somehow manage to hold it together just until a big project is finished?) but then the cold lingered, and worsened, and I spent many an afternoon doing what I would normally do except from bed.

No complaints, really. But that I’m sending this Sunday letter on an actual Sunday for a change (instead of Monday or Tuesday) is maybe a sign that I’ve shaken the cold, and hopefully also an auspicious start to the year.

When Julia and I were talking, over a card game last night, about our goals for the year, I offered this for my creative life: to finish a full draft of a big project, be it a novel or … something else. I’m just, at least for now, leaving the doors open for the something else.

Last month I dusted off my tech-essay writing breeches and penned this piece for Every about what becomes valuable when AI makes creative work “easy” (gift link). I pond-hop from Jack White to The Princess Bride to competitive gaming and Jorges Luis Borges and, of course, Chris Alexander.

This month my Antioch mentees and I are reading Karen Russell’s The Antidote, and of the many things I already love (I’m halfway through), I think I love most its atmosphere. The main storyline is set in 1930s dust bowl Nebraska, which I find to be a satisfying mirror image of the wet and feral Everglades setting of her last full-length novel Swamplandia. A real Tatooine/Hoth/Endor swing, a Lucasian move. Only made better by the fact that Russell’s two books aren’t of a series. The Antidote is sequel of spirit and setting.

Speaking of games, the card game mentioned at the top is Courtisans, to which my cousin Shaun introduced us over the holiday. Super-easy to set up and learn (a must for our feeble new-parent brains) and surprisingly dynamic even with two people. You play as attendees of a medieval royal banquet, casting cards, some in secret and others in the open, for or against six different families to try to put then in or out of favor with the Queen. Game of Thrones with far less gore.

I’m also finally playing the video game Sea of Stars, which was recommended to me by multiple people and is inspired by JRPG classics like Chrono Trigger. The last time I gamed was shortly after Rufus was born, and I needed a light-mental-load activity for when he was asleep in my arms. Sea of Stars is just about the coziest take on those Japanese originals.

Train Dreams is possibly the most ideal role for Joel Edgerton’s sad, frost-blue eyes. The film’s also beautiful, devastating, devastatingly beautiful. To come up with its look, the director and cinematographer took inspiration from colorized black-and-white photos of 19th century rail workers. Glimmers of Terrence Malick, too.

Tim Hartford’s year-end column in FT Weekend, which you can also read here (h/t Varsha), shouts out Stewart Brand’s new book, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One, which I now have on pre-order. Hartford:

[G]ood maintenance is often nothing like the chore of brushing teeth and washing dishes, but an intellectually demanding task requiring knowledge, intelligence and curiosity. To repair a complex object requires patient problem solving and the diligent discovery of hidden trouble. It is an act of mastery.

Brand’s How Buildings Learn is a personal touchstone (though I seem to have lost my copy in a move). This new book is published by Stripe Press, an obvious perfect fit. Brand also worked on the book out in the open, as a pilot of Books in Progress, a “public drafting tool” made in collaboration with the magazine Works in Progress.

You see this with “early-access” for indie video games but not nearly as much with books – at least not in such a formalized way. Though maybe there is a certain kind of generous, expansive, non-fictional book that’s best suited for the format. Exactly the kind of book that Stewart Brand would write.

Might this be a good time to mention that January’s Digital Mending Circle will be next Tuesday, January 13, from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern? Come join our small crew as we work on

the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

Reply for the Zoom link, if you don’t already have it.

Speaking of ideal niche publishers: For Christmas Julia gifted me Hey Kids, Watch This! after I repeatedly talked throughout the year how I cannot wait to watch childhood favorite movies with Rufus. The book’s organized by age range, with a great mix of shorts and features, animation and live-action, and indie/international and less-obvious big-studio titles.

A couple things: 1) Book product pages showing interior print spreads should be standard practice, regardless of book or genre. I especially want it for pulpy trade paperbacks so it’s clear when I’m getting into a sardine typography situation.

And 2) I didn’t realize A24’s publishing arm was so extensive, that in addition to their beautifully formatted screenplays they published titles on directors’ sartorial tastes, compendiums on cool movie merch, picture books and The Daniels’ A Vast Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur, and quarterly zines mailed to you via their membership program.

Someone on a panel I was on once called this, quite aptly, “The A24 Industrial Complex.”

I love Jasper Nighthawk’s practice of reading a Big Winter Book:

A big winter book should be full of mood and perhaps some textual difficulty. Reading this particular book might feel a bit ambitious. Maybe you usually don’t read books this long or this demanding. But it’s winter, you don’t have so many other demands on your time and attention. You can tackle a big winter book, promise yourself to it, give yourself over to it.

The hope is that reading your big winter book will be enough of an experience that it will mark out a minor era in your life. You might even later look back and remember, “Oh yeah, that was the year I read that book.”

It’s just the kind of thing to pass the time while holed up with comrades in your own winter keep.

To close – I am, as of January 1st, officially a Michigan State University Extension Master Gardener, which is a fancy title that means I continue to learn a lot about plants.

And that, apparently, is my “speaking of” link to Joel Edgerton.

Buon anno,
Jack

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Our new internet plan included a free year of a mobile line so I picked up an old Pixel 3a, installed a minimal launcher (the truly excellent Before launcher, which I also have on my e-reader), and am trying it out as a dumbphone.

The usual challenges aside of having devices on separate ecosystems (photo syncing, headphone pairing – and not being able to use Bebop), it’s worked decent. I went today to get a haircut and flu/covid boosters and even forgot to bring the iPhone as backup. I got along fine.

I have noticed, since the start of this experiment, that I’ve been overly tired and am eating voraciously. Maybe from some combination of dopamine withdrawal and getting our first snow. I turned 42 last month and wrote, in my journal, “Don’t fight the winter blues, Seasonal Affective Disorder is just your body responding to your environment, telling you to rest and do less.”

I don’t know if I’ve gotten wiser or just gotten older.

This week I’m headed to glorious, sunny LA for ten days, to kick off another semester of teaching at Antioch’s low-residency MFA. Have I already told you this? It’s hard to remember.

Tomorrow is the second Tuesday of the month, so that means we’re having our monthly Digital Mending Circle at 7:30–9:00PM Eastern, whereupon we partake in

the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

Hit reply if you don’t already have the link. I’ll be getting all my devices sorted for the trip.

I saw, at the Detroit Film Theater, one of the few midwest screenings of Peter Hujar’s Day, based on a book that’s a transcript of a lost recording of an interview between the photographer and his friend Linda Rosenkrantz, for a project she was doing in the 1970s on the fractal nature of seemingly ordinary days.

Even if you’re not familiar with Hujar (I wasn’t going in), you’ve likely seen his portraiture (or the works from other photographers his portraits inspired). One of his best-known is this one of Susan Sontag, which appears in the back of my copy of On Photography:

Back to the movie. It’s a marvel of creative constraint. Given the fixed (and sometimes, by itself mundane, dialogue), director Ira Sachs’ choices in staging the characters and handling the passage of time are truly surprising. Scenes, often delineated in the dialogue by changes of tape, are also cut with beautiful shots that feel magazine-esque and, as confirmed by the friend I saw the film with, very much in the style of Hujar’s work. The whole seventy-some minutes were mesmerizing.

The movie I saw right before the Hujar one happened to be Come See Me in the Good Light, a documentary about spoken word poet Andrea Gibson’s cancer battle and final live show. Some of the interviews with Gibson happen while they’re lying on their back, which I imagine has to do with how much pain they were in from the cancer and treatments. The last of these shots is quite Hujaresque:

But also colored with its own meaning. Intentional or unintentional homage? I don’t know if it matters. Poignant? Most definitely.

The new Apple TV intro was made, by TBWA’s Media Arts Lab, using practical effects. Craft in the time of generative AI.

Speaking of practical effects, Light and Magic goes deep into the Lucasfilm archives. I’ve only seen the first episode so far, about John Dykstra’s pulling-together of the crew of generalist weirdos to work on the first movie, but man! Selective environmenting at its best.

To close: This, from Baptism of Fire, the fifth Witcher book, is maybe the best description I’ve read in fiction of a treasured tool:

The bow came from the Far North. It measured just over five feet, was made of mahogany, had a perfectly balanced riser and flat, laminated limbs, glued together from alternating layers of fine wood, boiled sinew and whalebone. It differed from the other composite bows in its construction and also in its price; which is what had initially caught Milva’s attention. When, however, she picked up the bow and flexed it, she paid the price the trader was asking without hesitation or haggling. Four hundred Novigrad crowns. Naturally, she didn’t have such a titanic sum on her; instead she had given up her Zerrikanian zefhar, a bunch of sable pelts, a small, exquisite elven-made medallion, and a coral cameo pendant on a string of river pearls. But she didn’t regret it. Not ever. The bow was incredibly light and, quite simply, perfectly accurate. Although it wasn’t long it had an impressive kick to its laminated wood and sinew limbs. Equipped with a silk and hemp bowstring stretched between its precisely curved limbs, it generated fifty-five pounds of force from a twenty-four-inch draw. True enough, there were bows that could generate eighty, but Milva considered that excessive. An arrow shot from her whalebone fifty-fiver covered a distance of two hundred feet in two heartbeats, and at a hundred paces still had enough force to impale a stag, while it would pass right through an unarmoured human. Milva rarely hunted animals larger than red deer or heavily armoured men.

Jack

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I don’t think I’ve ever experienced here, in Michigan, an autumn as stunning as this one. Some combination of geography, weather-induced leaf sugars, and Rufus being almost sixteen months old (yes, already). I’m out more during blue hours and golden hours – pack walks in the mornings, afternoon pickups on daycare days when the low angle light catches the tops of trees, afternoon outings when the sunset hits the downtown skyscrapers near the newly opened park on the river.

I have no good pictures. At least not any that do the moments justice.

Julia and I were talking, the other day, about things that either fill our well or drain it. That are, in her words, Rest or Rot. The same activity can be both depending on the context. TV is a good example: When we take a break after a long workday to rewatch an episode of The Witcher (as we are currently doing) it gives our introverted selves a moment to recover before having any sort of more meaningful conversation. Even the occasional series binge can be energizing when it strengthens our bond. But when it becomes too much of a routine and takes lieu of other types connection, it’s rot.

Alcohol is another example: A drink for the taste of it, with a good meal, or in a celebratory way, can fill the well. But taken too often in a stress-drink kind of way, ROT.

As I type this I wonder how much rot is just rest hardened into habit.

Here’s a thing that happens somewhat regularly: I’ll write about something here, like a book I’ve been reading or an app I’ve been using successfully, and after I send out the newsletter, I immediately abandon the book or stop using the app. Most recently, the novelty of Opal, mentioned in issue #447, has shriveled away. I turned off my scheduled blocks for a couple of weeks because I was too often ignoring them.

Maybe it’s my inner rebelliousness and not wanting to get pinned down, or just how quickly my excitement about anything tends to wane. But distraction is also a Whac-A-Mole game. In this analogy, various apps, minimalist launchers, visual timers, bullet journals, and other productivity tools and systems, are each swings at a different hole from which it can rear its grinning, taunting heads.

Which seems to suggest that playing the game with any amount of success is more about reacting quickly than repeatedly bashing the same empty hole.

November’s Digital Mending Circle is tomorrow (Tuesday), the 11th, from 7:30–9:00pm Eastern. For new readers, this is our monthly

virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.

Hit reply if you want to join and don’t already have the Zoom link. I’ll be tagging and organizing videos of Rufus.

Jack

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