If you were a person of modest means in the mid-19th century, your clothes were probably homemade or sewn by someone you knew. Ready-to-wear clothing was limited, and tailors were expensive. Most home sewers used patterns, likely from the Demorest Company. Ellen Demorest had a front-row seat to two major developments in home sewing: the invention and spread of the sewing machine, and the ingenuity of her Black maid (whose name, regrettably, is unrecorded), who fashioned a cardboard pattern to make a dress.

Demorest realized that, with sewing machines entering homes in large numbers, there would be a booming market for mail-order patterns. Cardboard was too bulky to ship easily, but tissue paper was cheap, light, and foldable. Her company started mailing instructions and patterns to households across the country. Even that was a relatively new possibility: the U.S. had printed its first postage stamp just a few years earlier, and steamships and expanding railroads were rapidly making mail delivery faster and more reliable.

Demorest’s business did well—well enough that she eventually turned her attention to philanthropy. But she left the door open for someone else to build something even bigger.

Enter the Buttericks.

Augusta Butterick’s insight was deceptively simple: people, even skilled home sewers, struggle with math. Specifically, the kind of proportional thinking required to resize a pattern. If you wanted to make a double-breasted morning coat but sized for a 12-year-old, where would you start? How do you scale down armholes, collars, waistlines? How do you preserve shape and proportion while subtracting six inches of height?

The Buttericks solved this by doing the math for you. They offered patterns in multiple standard sizes—ready to mail and ready to sew. That innovation helped turn the Butterick Publishing Company into the second-largest printer in the United States, behind only the federal government. By the time Ebenezer died in 1903, the company had more than 1,000 stores around the world.

And in 1907, their name lit up the Manhattan skyline. It is unknown if any teenagers walked by, giggling “it says ‘butt,” to each other. I would have.

The Main Event: Toni Morrison and The “Take a Dozen” Theory

When I was 19, I went to see Toni Morrison speak at a non-descript lecture hall somewhere in Kansas City. A local Barnes & Noble had won some sort of company display competition for which the prize was that the great one herself would come and give a lecture in the the winner’s city. (I can find no documentation anywhere of this, so please apply the appropriate level of uncertainty to the specifics).

I remember quite a bit of her talk, including how she brooked no guff from facile Q & A questions that were actually comments. The most jaw-dropping moment for me though was when she said she rewrote every sentence in Paradise seven times. To me, who at the time resisted deleting a single word from an essay draft because that was a backward step from the word-count finish-line, this was as wild a statement as saying she wrote her first drafts in binary. In the intervening decades, it was the amount of revisions and reconsideration this represents that I have wrestled with, but I never thought much about the specific number—seven.

As impossible a standard as Morrison’s Seven remains for me, she might actually have been a little short of optimal. In Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiousity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life, Shigehiro Oishi surveys some research about how much exploration (which I am here using as a fuzzy stand in for creative options), writes about the “Take a Dozen” theory formulated by psychologists Samantha Cohen and Peter Todd. In their work in the area of mate-selection (yes, that is what it sounds like), they found that exploring twelve prospective partners yielded a very good probability of finding a top 10% outcome.

For example, say you were naming a new newsletter you wanted to write about creativity and were trying to think of names, you should aim for at least 12 candidates. Then, you pit them against each other, starting with the first two, and then the “winner” of that pairing squares off against the next one. Then the survivor of that round takes on the next. And so on.

Some choices are more amenable to this structure than others, but the underlying insights are widely applicable. Generate a bunch of choices but you do not need to go completely nuts and consider every possibility. After about 12, you will have a sense of the range and, crucially, what a top 10% (ie really good!) option looks like. I tried it out for the subject line of this email and am pretty happy with the result. It was certainly better than my first crack, not as good as Beloved. I am ok with that.

Picks and Links

• MOVIE: Sinners , written and directed by Ryan Coogler. You do not need me to tell you about this movie, which in very rare company might in its second weekend of release make more money than its first. But I might be able to point you to this shockingly entertaining and informative bit of marketing from Kodak that has Coogler walk through various film formats, break down their attributes, and explain why and how a filmmaker might use each of them.

• GAME: Baltaro has eaten the last 10 days of my life. Baltaro is what happens Bruce Banner had pointed the gamma ray emitter at a deck of cards rather than at his chest. With gameplay elements of a rogue-like (where you start over from scratch each game) and the scoring structure of poker, Baltaro’s combination of intermittent rewards and deck-building deceptive complexity apparently interfaced precisely with the reward-chemical pathways of my brain. And I am not the only one so ensorcelled: the acclaim for this game, developed entirely by a single, anonymous individual, has been widespread. Highly recommended but be warned—if this hits for you, a lot of your time is about to disappear into it.

• RHETORICAL MOVE THAT SOCRATES JUST RATED FIVE STARS FROM A CRYPT SOMEWHERE IN GREECE: I’ve had this one in the chamber since December, but Julia Steinberg of Stanford’s student newspaper absolutely suplexed Stanford University President Johnathan Levin in this Q&A:

  Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?

  President Levin: There's no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.

  Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.

  So yes, if those admission essays seem impossible—it is because they are. Straight from the Head Cardinal himself.

• ESSAY: I am a proponent of using “they” as a singular personal pronoun. Have been for a couple of decades now. It does introduce the problem of number, even as it tames the gender and grammatical awkwardness of using gender in pronouns. John McWhorter blew my mind in this essay—just capitalize They to indicate the singular. We already capitalize “I,” so the association of the capital with “one” is baked in. Brilliant. I am spreading McWhorter’s good word here and wanted to give Them credit. Ok, it will take some getting used to.

• ALMOST GOOD IDEA FROM ME: On the Book Riot podcast, we do an occasional episode of half-baked ideas, which itself is an idea stolen from Kevin Wildes’ appearances on The Bill Simmons Podcast. These are ideas that rise to the level of “you know what that kind of makes sense” but top out there for one reason or another. I keep a log of these as they occur to me, but I thought this might be a good place to initiate what will surely be a swift and comprehensive uptake of them by the wider world.
  
  Here is my latest:

  
  Add color to salt. How much salt did I put on those eggs? Wait is that sugar or salt? This is why we should add color to salt. We did it with natural gas AND SAVED LIVES. This is the same, except with color and saving amateur cooks an embarrassed apology. I propose pink be the color. There is already the Himalayan sea salt thing out there, and while if you are in that line of work hey I am sorry but I have under/overseasoned too many dishes to care. Pink salt. There you go.

  ---

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I turned to books for a quasi self-directed MBA, covering finance, management, product development, marketing, and the attendant activities of a corporation. In the course of learning how to make a business, I discovered that my fundamental equation was hilariously wrong. There are so many other variables, and variables within variables, about success that not only is talent + effort x time unhelpful, it is actively misleading.

Instead, I have found it more productive to imagine a toolbox of strategies, tactics, examples, and attitudes to be deployed with some degree of intention, experience, and play. And most of these I learned about by reading. Here are 11 of the books that have helped me the most—and that I turn to regularly when the going gets tough.

Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

Forte walks through building a system for capturing, organizing, and using the never-ending flow of important and/or useful things you come across. Capture has always been my Achilles heel. If I can just take a damn second to log or calendar or bookmark that permission slip or blog post or really cool idea, I am 80% of the way there. But unless I am good about using my system (Bear + Omnifocus + Google Calendar), I can be very, very bad. Shouts to Getting Things Done (see below) which introduced me far too late to the need to have a system, but Forte built on that foundation in a way that I actually use day in and day out.

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Guwande

This is a specific implementation of David Allen’s “do not try to remember things” from Getting Things Done, and it’s the book that has improved my working/doing life the most. Not only should you not try to remember things, you should not trust yourself to remember how to do the things you know how to do. I know you have made chili con carne 50 times. But your human brain gets lazy and overconfident because it also knows you have made it 50 times. And there is going to come a time when you are tired or distracted or just plain old over confident and you don’t put the chili powder in. And then you just have a sloppy ground beef soup.

Guwande, a doctor by trade, shows how using checklists prevents worse outcomes than bland meat paste in fields considerably more complex than anything I deal with: aerospace, surgery, engineering, and construction among others. There is no good reason not to have a checklist for most things you think you are going to do fairly often. Try this one on: the next time you screw something up, ask yourself: is there a checklist that would have prevented this? At Book Riot, whenever there is a moderate+ mistake made, the first thing I ask is “is there a checklist for this? And if not, would a checklist have prevented this?” I am not exaggerating when I say that 90% of the time a checklist would have done the trick.

Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace

This is where most of my creativity and business reading flows these days: specific stories and examples about people making things—and generally the further afield from what I do and know the better. And Creativity, Inc is at the top of the pile of books like this.

The journey of computer animation from stick-figures rendering on mainframes through the release of Toy Story in 1995 is as compelling a story of creativity as I know of. This isn’t just the story of a particular technology or paradigm: Catmull also talks about the very human sensibility that Pixar brings to story-telling, with familiar echoes of Peak (see below) in the form of feedback and iteration. A terrific read about one of the great creative revolutions of our times that is as inspiring as it is compelling.

Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu

Are the things you think you should do the things you want to do? Sure you have to pay the electricity bill, but do you need to tidy up the foyer before your friends come over? Or spend all day cooking for them? What if you could let the stuff that you more feel like you should care about than ACTUALLY care go? Even just typing that sentence made my shoulders tighten up. On an emotional level this can be liberating, but it opens up time as well, which in my experience is the lifeblood of creativity.

Note: I haven’t read it, but from what I understand Let Them by Mel Robbins swims in similar waters, at least when it comes to letting go of the stuff that you do or say or feel that are principally derived from what others will do or say or feel about you).

Getting Things Done by David Allen

Do not try to remember things. That’s it really. There are too many inputs and your human brain is better used for processing and thinking than for storage. Paper kicks your ass in that department, so why are you fighting it? This is the book that made me realize that I could actually like for real get better at being organized and productive and in general more sane. Forever and ever grateful.

Grit by Angela Duckworth

Keep going. Or rather, those who can keep going tend to go further. Expect it to be hard. Expect to want to give up. Then, figure out a way not to. Or rather, figure out a way to figure out if giving up is smart because the project is bad or the product stinks or something else is broken. But don’t give up because it is hard or not fun or not magically successful according to your internal, completely unfounded expectation of success. There’s more to it than that, but that’s more than enough for this book to be always within a mental arm’s reach when I feel myself reaching for the eject button on something.

Mediations for Mortals & Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

I am cheating and counting this as one book. You can read either or both and get the idea: your time is limited and you are never going to get ahead of it. Your to-do list is like cold fusion—a self-perpetuating, inexhaustible fount of busy-ness. Realizing and accepting that there is no productivity hack or to-do app that will solve this is both liberating and terrifying. And if you don’t get in your own way and start realizing that you have to solve for the to-NOT-do list so that you can spend your scarce directable time how you want, you will end up getting so much done that you don’t care about.

Nuts & Bolts: Seven Small Invention That Changed the World (In a Big Way) by Roma Agrawal

Someone (and in this case most of the time a bunch of someones) made everything you interact with (this includes most parks and beaches and trails and other “natural” things. Don’t at me). The simplest tools, from the lever to the screw, represent centuries of use and iteration and application. A lens is a vessel of massive amounts of accrued human ingenuity: the wheel a mind-bogglingly elegant solution to a host of human problems. Innovation and creativity is our inheritance, and I find that inspirational.

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike, Jr.

I think creativity in business is underrated. I also think financial mega-success in business is overrated. This book profiles executives who thought differently about business by creating unusual models, unconventional products, and even strange new financial terms (including EBITDA for the real-ones out there). Perhaps ingenious capital allocation doesn’t stir your soul, but “how else can we figure this out?” is fascinating in any context, perhaps especially those that seem boring. It was a real look in the mirror moment when I was fascinated by accounting innovations in the world of cable-television.

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericcson and Robert Pool

Sticking with it is necessary—but not sufficient. Just because you have written 1000 blog posts or drafted dozens of screenplays doesn’t mean post 999 or screenplay 32 is better than number 1. How do you know you are getting better? You need feedback from someone or something that knows what mastery of that thing looks like. Grit without guidance or other form of feedback is quicksand that feels like progress. (This is the major pitfall of talent + time x effort.)

The climates of Messina, Sicily and Stockton, California are shockingly similar. Stockton gets a few degrees warmer in the summer and stays a few degrees warmer in the winter, while Messina gets a few more inches of rain a year, but we can forgive Stefano A’rrigo from not really noticing. When he first visited the Central Valley of California soon after World War II, all he could see was just how much it felt like the coastal town that he and his brother emigrated from more than a decade prior.

Warm days, cool nights, dry summers, with wetter winters: this meant that you could grow the stuff you used to grow in Italy year-round (and it has turned out, pretty much anything else). The A’rrigo Brothers’ first thought was grapes: returning soldiers from Europe had developed a taste for wine, and there was not yet much American supply to serve it. So, they made a deal with some of their cousins back east in Boston to supply fresh grapes.

The company they formed would come to be known as Andy Boy, and chances are you have eaten some of their broccoli. More specifically, their fresh broccoli. In 1925, Stefano arranged for a train-load of refrigerated broccoli to be shipped from California to New York, the first such shipment of its kind. To distinguish the higher-quality California broccoli from the lesser locally-grown New England variety, Stefano put a pink label on his broccoli with a cute drawing of his grandson, Andrew. And so Andy Boy was born, marking the first time that fresh produce became a brand.

Over the next four decades, the Andy Boy company branched into a wide variety of vegetables, including a previous wild-grown Italian plant known in English as mustard greens, but also referred to as rapini. You know it as broccoli rabe.

There are two parts of that last sentence to break down. First, the time period. The late 90s and early 2000s ushered in a tremendous change in how Americans thought about food. Food TV, celebrity chefs, the founding of Whole Foods are just a few markers of this transformation (I myself use the publication of Kitchen Confidential in 2000 as a line of demarcation, though the water was warming before it).

New ingredients with a wider flavor and taste profile were in demand. Broccoli rabe was ready and waiting. This bitter, abundant vegetable was a terrific candidate for adoption as it tasted different than broccoli but hey also it was a kind of broccoli right so how weird could it be? (I am guessing many of you probably had a similar experience as I did in 2003 or so, ordering a sausage and pasta dish with this “broccoli rabe” stuff on the side that neither looked very much nor tasted at all like broccoli. Probably also with a brown butter sauce of some kind). Google Trends confirms it: search interest in broccoli rabe roughly quadrupled between 2004 and 2015.

Forty years before, Andy A’rrigo (yes the same one on the label), now in charge of Andy Boy’s west coast operations after his father passed away in 1951, was looking to ship mustard greens from San Jose to the East Coast. At that time, the Interstate Commerce Commission controlled shipping rates for food products and broccoli got a special discounted rate. But when Andy Boy wanted to ship mustard greens the Transcontinental Rate Bureau said that it would be charged regular rates. Since shipping costs for fresh produce can account for up to 15% of costs in a notoriously low-margin industry, this was very bad news indeed.

In a fit of inspired and exasperate pique, Andy told them that the stuff was actually called “broccoli rabe”, and the TRB knowing about as much about broccoli rabe as I did as at 22-years old, said “oh, ok it’s broccoli I guess” and extended the discount rate to “broccoli rabe” and laying the groundwork to confuse all of us for years to come.

There is vivid-orange yew, ancient, supple and immensely strong. Before the introduction of composites, the bowmaker’s timber of choice. In the right hands, a wood that was capable of propelling an armor-piercing arrow the length of three football pitches, making it the stuff of battlefield nightmares and tipping the scales of fate for England’s armies for two hundred years. There is hard maple, sweet chestnut, black walnut, and great wide immovable slabs of flesh-colored beech. There is tense, fretful, crimson cherry. Beautiful, but so shot through with splits and flaws that it’s next to useless. And then there is elm, the tenacious swaggering dandy of the forest. Decimated by disease, with some sixty million trees gone in the UK alone since the 1960s. But resilient. Surviving, like a forty-a-day whiskey-sipping octogenarian Highlander, for reasons that science still cannot entirely explain.

The book is worth reading for the sentences and sensibility alone, but it is sprinkled with a few “Briefly Noted” sub-sections (Healthy & Safety, Inspiration, and others) that are more directly instructive. Two of them stood out as not just resonating with my own experience, but also are often massively overlooked by those (myself included often) interested in getting into something new.

From the “Finding Your Voice” section:

Right now, today, this minute, there has never been a better time to explore the world of design…Work that, just a generation ago, would have been almost impossible to find. Use it. Pour over books and magazines, get online, read interviews with designers in different fields and discover, if you can to move them to do what they do….Unearth the things you love, the things that speak to you, and ask yourself why they work—not just how….Seek out the seeds of inspiration, hybridize, and nurture your own unique creative voice. Then grab yourself a pencil, and a sketchbook….because you are going to need them.

In the “Making a Start” section, Robinson advises would-be craftspeople to reach out to local workshops, state plainly their untrained passion and willingness to do whatever, and then do whatever they will let you do. Quietly, observantly, patiently, and then competently. And then in time, they will be given more complicated tasks, and the ladder of expertise will be assembled one rung at a time. But it his advice for those that for whatever reason cannot access this apprentice-like experience that is more generally applicable to any pursuit:

…if you don’t have any transport of free time during business hours to dedicate to sweeping floors and absorbing advice…and you know in your bones that you do want to pursue furniture making professionally, but lack the means to enter full-time education, training, or apprenticeship, you might what to try the route my father took. To get your hands on some books and some second-hand tools, to find a space where you can make a lot of mess without getting into too much trouble, and to throw yourself in.'

There are three, let’s call them inclinations in these two paragraphs that are simple, but difficult for a beginner to take to heart.

First, you have to want to do the thing. Not just have the results of having done the thing, but want to do the things that lead to being able to do the thing. That is not to say you have to like them, but you have to muster enough energy, time, and focus to put yourself in a position to get good. For creative work, this will not be straightforward, exploration never is. There might be specific skills that can be learned from a YouTube tutorial or rule-expression available in a textbook, but the deployment of those skills into your own specific project has no template.

Second, make a mess. In a workshop that might be more literal and less figurative, but it holds for a Word doc as well. Do not expect that you will create beautiful or true or sellable things any time soon. Getting the reps in, in the form of bad drafts, sunken souffles, buggy code, or whatever tossable widget you produce is an unskippable track that you must play. Probably a couple of full albums, honestly.

And third, throw yourself in. The abandoned and unsuccessful projects and ideas of my own that haunt me are the ones where I know I didn’t throw myself in. I quit when it got hard (and it always will get hard), or I got tired or impatient that it wasn’t good yet or that people weren’t paying enough attention yet or look here is another pure and unblemished idea that seems a whole heck of a lot more interesting than this tricky and time-consuming thing that I am doing now. And so I stop. Make an excuse. Take the books back to the library and let the URL expire or forget the log-in to whatever it was being hosted on.

I want to stop doing that. If something fails, I don’t ever want it to be that I could have tried a little harder or longer. Not that something can’t fail or that I can’t quit something of course, no one bats 1000%. But no more called third strikes: I want to go down with a huge swing that twists me into the dirt.

It is his distillation of what we are talking about that stuck: the model has everything in it.

“…language models are not merely trained on human writing. They are the writing: all those reasons, granted the ability to speak for themselves. […]

To make this work — you already know this, but I want to underscore it — only a truly rich trove of writing suffices. Train a language model on all of Shakespeare’s works and you won’t get anything useful, just a brittle Shakespeare imitator.

In fact, the only trove known to produce noteworthy capabilities is: the entire internet, or close enough. The whole extant commons of human writing. From here on out, for brevity, we’ll call it Everything.

This is what makes these language models new: there has never, in human history, been a way to operationalize Everything. There’s never been anything close.

And therein lies the whole freakin’ ballgame. You know why your head hurts and you feel like you’ve eaten a bag of Skittles on an empty stomach when you think about AI? This is why. The operationalization of Everything is a rollercoaster on a Ferris Wheel on the Nurburgring of existential vertigo. Even that business suit verb is an MC Escher drawing in sheep’s clothing, because what it means is to be able to turn Everything into Anything.

The math of creativity as we have sort of known it goes something like this. [Individual experience] x [individual personality] = [stuff only that individual can make]. Put extremely crudely, you could not infant swap me with F Scott Fitzgerald and still get so much stuff about gin.

Only the key of me can unlock whatever is behind door number me. Same for you. Imitation, then, is suicide, as Emerson wrote, because it chucks in the rubbish that singular junk drawer of preferences and potentialities that is you.

The Everything Machine is different. It starts with more stuff than you can ever have taken in and can twiddle with it faster and with a wider range of techniques than you can ever hope to master. The sum total of all you have watched or read or heard is but the first word on the first page of the first book in the library of libraries that is in the Everything. And it’s ready to party—all the time, forever.

For someone like me, and for a newsletter like this, the all-singing, all-dancing, Everything Machine’s potential to do humanity’s best act at the speed of electrons is, it must be said, a 10.0 on the Richter Scale of bummers.

Perhaps counter-intuitively though, I don’t fear an Everything Machine cultural supremacy because I’ve already seen what it looks like. Extant math-derived cultures (aka the algorithms that play act as “social media”) are so encouragingly terrible. Entertaining for sure. Finely honed attention cigarettes? To our very peril! But masterpieces of art and learning to topple singular artistic vision? You all know the answer, say it with me now: “hell no.” Gimmicks, memes, clips, “trending sounds” abound, but I’m going to go out on a Banyan tree-sized limb here and predict none of it is going in anybody’s eulogy for Grandma. The algorithms aren’t trying to make anything great: they are trying to serve up just enough to keep you on the phones.

There is one last bulwark against the Everything Machine supplanting human creativity, though what a bitter one it is. Implicit in the “if the Everything Machine can suck up everything we have ever made, then it can reverse engineer what makes us tick” is that “everything ever made” is approximately congruent with what it’s like to be every kind of human, everywhere, forever. But as anyone who has tried to write, paint, build, say or otherwise communicate something, that just isn’t the case:

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

The yawning abyss between what we think and feel and what we then manage to squeeze out for someone to take a swing at understanding might not be the happiest obstacle to being existentially annexed by math, of course, but it a sturdy one. The Everything Machine might soon know what is already knowable. But it can only sift through what we have made so far. It doesn’t know that everything at its disposable is but the leavings, fertile, various, and remarkable though they be, of what it means just to walk around on a regular Tuesday as a person. So it cannot make what it is we really want to make—some arrow that will fly across the great whatever from me to you, and stick there, if only for a moment.

The training program wasn’t a drawn-out affair: I think a night a week over the course of a couple of months. I remember being completely terrified.

They walked us through emergency procedures, how to look up local social services, and otherwise point certain situations in the most-useful directions. But mostly, it was a crash-course in how to listen to people.

Ours was not to council. It was not to give advice. It wasn’t to say things are going to get better. It was, mostly, to affirm. “That sounds really hard.” “It sounds like that makes you really scared.” “I can definitely understand why you are feeling sad.”

It was (and perhaps still called) reflective listening. And it was my single most-powerful tool in getting through a Friday overnight shift or a Tuesday sunrise stint. I’ve never really known what to call it: “technique” seems too clinical, and “skill” doesn’t capture its wonderful simplicity. It served me extremely well in my future teaching career, and I still have it at the ready at home and at work.

I was thinking of reflective listening while watching The Pitt a few weeks ago. The Pitt is a lightly-camouflaged setting and spiritual successor to ER, to the point that Noah Wyle is again a central figure (I have been recommended the series to friends as “ER, perfected”).

A key difference between them is that The Pitt takes place, all fifteen episodes, over the course of a single shift in the emergency room. The most potent consequence of this is that you spend more time with the patients. Very few real-life trips to the emergency room take less than a few hours, and in The Pitt, you follow a person, couple, or family through their whole experience.

A couple of cases anchor the early episodes, and the climax of one family’s story happens in episode four. An adult brother and sister have come in with their elderly and ailing father, who has reached the end of his life. After struggling through the previous episodes with the wrenching decision/realization that keeping him on a breathing tube is neither helpful nor humane, they decide to let him go. They then find themselves in the terrestrial purgatory of knowing he is going to die, but not when.

With little time to process, let alone reconcile with, what is happening, they are in crisis of their own. At this point, Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle, in a truly remarkable performance) asks if they are religious, knowing that this would be the moment to call upon whatever faith or ritual they might have. When the daughter responds, “Oh god no. No god,” Robby offers them something:

ROBBY: I had a teacher, mentor, who told me about a Hawaiian ritual called Ho'oponopono. Or, the four things that matter most. It’s just basically a few key things we can say when we’re saying goodbye to a loved one that can really help, at the early stages of loss.

ADULT SON: What are they?

ROBBY: They’re gonna sound really simple, but I swear I’ve seen them work.

ADULT SON: Okay.

ROBBY: I love you. Thank you. I forgive you. Please forgive me.

ADULT SON: That’s…that’s it?

ROBBY: Yea. I told you it was simple.

I won’t recount precisely how things unfold from here, but I will say that their use of Ho'oponopono allows them to access something they needed to.

I admit I am always more than a little suspect of neat, decontextualized deployments of cultural and religious practice, especially in popular entertainment. In this case, though, that it is a Hawaiian ritual is less important than that it works. From the moment Robby recited the four things, I knew I would be thinking about them for a long time—and most likely using them.

Reading a little more about Ho'oponopono added rather than detracted from my appreciation of its deep, human elegance. Ho'oponopono roughly translates as “to make right”: “pono” itself means “right or balanced,” so the repetition of “pono” after “ho’o” (to make), emphasizes that this is the deepest kind of right that can be made. Ho'oponopono as practice can sometimes be a part of mourning, but more often it’s a structure for conflict-resolution and reconciliation. The four things are said by both parties, usually under the supervision of an elder, as a path towards figuring whatever it is out. It precedes resolution by making mutual accountability, appreciation, and forgiveness openly stated preconditions.

The other piece of this scene that I have been thinking about is how Robby came to know about Ho'oponopono. He doesn’t learn about it through the formal, highly regimented process of medical education. Instead it comes in sort of sideways from his teacher, who in this moment he is quick to also call a mentor, presumably in a moment much like this one.

And what is the moment? It is immediate, acute, and a matter not of medical treatment but human feeling. It is not presented as a cure for grief. Instead, it is something to do right at this moment, “in the early stage of loss.” This anticipates future stages of grief for which Ho'oponopono perhaps is less effective, but right now, it fills the need at hand. It is a suture for the soul, providing just enough structure to allow longer-term, more fundamental, healing to take place. And it is not hypothetical—this is something that Robby says he has seen help people. It might be largely unexplained and unfamiliar, but the results makes that immaterial. This thing works.

It seems to me things like Ho'oponopono and reflective listening should be as well-known and practiced as splints or Advil or scissors or internal combustion engines. But they aren’t. The reasons why are as simple as they are frustrating. You cannot mass produce, package, and sell reflective listening. Ho'oponopono is not patentable, and it’s effectiveness isn’t something that will show up in a blood test or EKG. These practices do not possess the material qualities we have come to associate with the word technology, but they are products of human understanding, developed over time to address human needs. That the needs they serve are that of the psyche and soul, rather than the atom or electron, mask their power and and potential.

These emotional technologies are all around us. In AA meetings and after-school programs, in coaching and counseling, in negotiations and networking. We have a patchwork taxonomy for people who somehow have learned to use emotional technology in the form of “personality hires,” doctors who have great “bedside manner,” friends and co-workers with high “emotional intelligence” or excellent “interpersonal skills.” People who are, in the strangely useful formulation, a “people person.” These labels are describing the same thing: people using emotional technologies consistently and effectively.

What, then, would a high-school course in emotional technology look like? How extremely useful, and I am not kidding about this, would an employee with a doctorate in emotional technology be? What discovery might warrant a Nobel Prize in Emotional Technology? After all, what higher science can there be than the mastery of the condition of being humans together?

New Book-Sorting Algorithm Almost Reaches Perfection by Stephen Nadis at Quanta Magazine

It doesn’t take long for the math here to escape me, but the central innovation is communicable in prose: by accounting for randomness and discounting history, an algorithm for sorting books can actually be more inefficient. If I understand this correctly, it means that, at least in the domain of book collections, the past is not only not predictive of the future, but actually a hindrance to planning for it.

Norman Foster Empire of Image Control by Ian Parker in The New Yorker

I live with an architect, so have a hazy-lidded awareness of the brightest names in the field. And Norman Foster is among the first rank, both in profile and prolificacy. I also know that for architects of this stature, there is considerable, let’s call it creative infrastructure that makes the work possible. But I had no idea of the scale:

Foster was the first in the profession to dismantle the distinction between two kinds of architectural success: that of the architect-auteur (giving furrowed attention to a few exceptional projects—cathedrals and concert halls) and that of the big, anonymous corporate practice (designing the malls, towers, hospitals, and rail stations that fill up much of the space that remains). Foster’s production line spits out dozens of structures every year. These will include hospitals and rail stations but also, say, a luxury yacht, or an open-air chapel, for the Vatican, on the Venetian island of San Giorgio Maggiore.

Humanity’s Last Exam

This is a project from a non-profit called The Center for AI Safety and an AI startup called Scale. The goal is to develop very hard, deep-expert level questions to test the reasoning abilities of advanced AI models. One example:

Hummingbirds within Apodiformes uniquely have a bilaterally paired oval bone, a sesamoid embedded in the caudolateral portion of the expanded, cruciate aponeurosis of insertion of m. depressor caudae. How many paired tendons are supported by this sesamoid bone? Answer with a number.

This is not an answer I can do readily, but presumably a research-caliber ornithologist could. The most powerful AI models currently score between a 3 and 9% correct rate (interestingly, the bombshell DeepSeek model had the highest score), so there is plenty of room for improvement.

But the most interesting piece here to me is the kind of questions the group is looking for: “HLE tests structured academic problems rather than open-ended research or creative problem-solving abilities, making it a focused measure of technical knowledge and reasoning.” This is useful shorthand for understanding both what AI is and will be blazingly good at—and where its weaknesses will remain. Knowledge retrieval and reasoning within closed logical systems will be (and already are) near miracle-level fast. Open-ended, creative, and research-focused pursuits will be ours for a while. I think.

The Making of Nickel Boys by David Canfield in Vanity Fair

Still no place close by for me to catch The Nickel Boys, but I don’t mind waiting. The novel the film is based on was on my ballot for The New York Times’ 100 Best Books of the Century list, and from the moment the film was announced, I was excited. A pretty straight-forward adaptation would have been notable, but this film is up to something even more daring, which is in the spirit of Whitehead’s larger literary project:

“We only see what Elwood and Turner see, with the whole ensemble (also including Hamish Linklater and Fred Hechinger as employees of the school) typically tasked with looking direct to camera. Produced by Plan B’s Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner (The Tree of Life, Moonlight), along with co-writer Joslyn Barnes, the film’s avant-garde approach is cannily balanced by its moral urgency and aesthetic rigor. Like last year’s The Zone of Interest, it all but reinvents the language for movies about a particular, dark historical chapter, and seems primed to spark conversations about both its content and its form.”

Libraries of Matter by Virginia Postrel in Works in Progress

I have no particular need to visit a library of…stuff. But I have never seen natural rubber. Or an Aerogel. Or probably most of the 10,000 materials collected in the Material Connexion in New York City (and elsewhere). Damn if it doesn’t sound fascinating:

Visiting the library gives students a chance to experience materials they’ve only read about in books. Art and art history majors explore samples of pigments and paper. Engineering students fondle ultra-lightweight aerogels. One student squeezed so hard that the aerogel exploded. (The library preserved the broken sample so that students could see the aerogel’s internal structure.) When the Penn Museum of anthropology and archaeology mounted an exhibit of artifacts and garments made from fish leather, the library supplied contemporary samples that visitors could safely feel for themselves. ‘I’m trying to make sure it’s as interdisciplinary as possible’, says Carroll.

NBA greats think this D-II coach is a basketball genius. So why don’t you know who he is? by CJ Moore in The Athletic

Jim Crutchfield, head men’s basketball coach at Division II Nova Southeastern, exudes strong early Bill James energy. Someone obsessed with the game, but not really of it. Someone possessed of a clarity of vision that seems mad to others, but painfully obvious to him. The central insight of Crutchfield’s trapping, sprinting, rebounding-focused style is so simple it hurts: if you get more chances to shoot than the other guy, you usually win. And he does.

Threads of Resistance by Gemma McKenzie in Aeon

This survey of “craftivism” is a little on the academic side, but I am here for the stories of women using crafting in unexpected, clever, and downright subversive ways. I keep thinking of Lorina Bulwer, held as a “lunatic” at the Great Yarmouth Workhouse, who channeled her anger, confusion, and desperation by sewing dense, rambling, and disarming accounts of her life:

While some sentences are vitriolic and difficult to decipher, others are statements about her life and experiences. Included are declarations of her rage:

I HAVE WASTED TEN YEARS IN THIS DAMNATION HELL FIRE TRAMP DEN OF OLD WOMEN OLD HAGS

In addition are statements that allude to abuse and raise questions about the behaviour of medical professionals:

I MISS LORINA BULWER WAS EXAMINED BY DR PINCHING OF WALTHAMSTOW ESSEX AND FOUND TO BE A PROPERLY SHAPED FEMALE

I am always interested in what other people find fascinating. Links of your own are more than welcome in the comments.

Apparently, the studio had seen a bunch of actors for Wonkad and found all of them not just wrong, but actively bad. And then they saw Wilder.

Wanting him for the role desperately, they agreed to a strange rider in his contract. In it, Wilder made a demand related to the performance—that when Wonka first comes out of the factory to meet the kids, he walks gingerly at first, seeming either infirm or injured, before slowing falling forward into this:

His vision for Wonka depended on the children, and by extension the audience, never being able to pin Wonka down. Wilder said, “because from that point on, no one will be able to tell whether I am telling the truth or I am lying. That’s the part I liked. You never knew whether I was telling the truth to the kids or I was lying.” Director Mel Stuart was puzzled and asked if Wilder was serious when he said if he couldn’t be allowed this choice. Wilder said he was.

And for this then-seven-year-old, Wilder was bang on. I wanted to believe the jovial clown-uncle Wonka was the real one, but I could never be sure. Was Augustus Gloop in trouble in the tube or not? Was the shoe going into the cauldron a joke or not? Were the kids, and by extension myself, in safe, if mischievous hands? Or were they in danger? Wilder wanted the answer to be “Yes.”

It’s an inspired insight but also a limiting one. Wilder took agency from the director and editor and fixed them with his vision. Perhaps if in the moment or afterwards Wilder saw dailies or a cut and believed his take wasn’t working, he would have relented.

If you are of the “there is a lesson here” persuasion, let me interrupt you with a different anecdote. A couple of weeks ago, my partner Michelle sent me this Instagram reel (don’t worry if you don’t want to click out to it, I will sum it up on the other side):

Walken giving Spielberg a bunch of different options for this critical monologue in Catch Me If You Can is just downright mesmerizing. For someone who is relentlessly caricatured as “Christopher Walken,” there is delightful, even moving, variety in these takes. Spielberg eventually has to convince him at the end that he has given him enough, way more than enough even.

This stands in considerable contrast to Wilder’s determination. The reasons for each strategy matter less to me than the fact that they both worked. A strong, early (legally-binding!) conviction worked. A “take of these the one you best think fits” approach worked. The art of it is figuring out which to use—and when.

I struggle with this in most new projects. Which parts shouldn’t move because they are indeed crucial to success? What can go into the “we’ll figure it out later” pile? A creative intransigence can sink something that has potential, just as a lack of clarity can lead to a rudderless muddle.

I am not going to pretend to have an answer or even to venture a provisional heuristic. I find it a perpetual conundrum and often a source of real paralysis.

I forced my son to watch Master & Commander as our dad/kid movie night pick the other night, both because I thought he would like it (he did) and because I wanted to watch it again. Turns out, this about early 19th Century maritime warfare hinges on deciding when to drop anchor and when to raise the mainsail (the remainder is about how slippery the French are). Sail maintenance—lower this, raise that—is more dynamic in chasing enemy ships or weathering storms, but deciding when to stop to repair, refit, and replenish is equally important and fraught. If Master & Commander were scored like The Knight’s Tale with a modern soundtrack, there would have been a strong case for The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go.”

The emotional climax of the movie is when Captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) decides to drop anchor and pause his pursuit of his quarry, the privateer vessel Archeron, to give his best friend and ship’s doctor, Dr. Stephen Maturin, a sporting chance at surviving a bullet wound. The soldier and sailor in him knows he is giving up a rare chance, but the friend and fellow in him cannot proceed. Maturin, who had previously been roundly dressed-down for questioning Aubrey’s dedication to the pursuit at any cost, cannot quite believe that his friend/captain shirked his duty on his behalf.

Maturin has a chance to return the favor later in the movie, in a quite elegant inversion. The naturalist-doctor is enjoying his promised reprieve of specimen-hunting among the heretofore undocumented strange species of the Galapagos Islands, when over the crest of the hill he spies the Archeron, sailing in a nearby channel, oblivious to the presence of Captain Jack and his HMS Surprise nearby. Lowering his head resignedly, he knows it’s time to scurry to the ship, unfurl, and move—and give up his chance at scientific renown.

I so want to synthesize these two moves, but the farthest I can get is to metaphorize them, and even that suggests a tidiness I do not feel.

I do find, however, my mind unexpectedly drifting back to the Hollywood executives who cast Wilder as Wonka. Even though no one reading a newsletter about creativity is inclined to credit the suits, if there is a co-existence to be found for The Anchor and The Sail, they might have found it. Their anchor was their belief that Wilder was the right actor—and their sail was then to let go of total control of what that choice meant.

For Walken, I would guess that his anchor was a desire to do whatever he could to help Spielberg make the best movie possible. If that meant in this scene he was a rakish story-teller, great. If it meant he was a blubbering mess, also fine. And so when Spielberg finally said “enough,” he could stop. The number and variety of takes weren’t showmanship or indecision. They represented the natural outcome of his creative anchor.

Can this help in the process of making something? Maybe.

Here is what I am going to think about the next time I am trying to figure out whether to dig in or to keep noodling:

• What is the heart of this?

• What about this do I feel the strongest about? How can I protect that?

• What parts can be in service to that but also be figured out later? Or altered? Or surrendered entirely?

• What brainstorming or experimentation or indecision is spurred by feeling that I haven’t cracked it yet and I do actually need to keep the sail up and what is the product of fear or ignorance or lack of belief in the project?

• When I am reluctant to retreat, start over, or abandon, is it because I think the idea is still good or is it because I don’t want to lose the work and admit the time I have already spent was wasted?

Progress. Perhaps.

A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his.

I used to teach this essay to 18-year-olds for a couple of reasons. First, Emerson rules. Second, I wanted them to try to trust that they could have good ideas. That’s what I take from this passage: we tend to devalue our own ideas because they are ours and not in a textbook or syllabus or book already (Today I show how hip I am by including meme, political platform, ideological camp, and influencer. I am pretty sure Emerson would not be the world’s biggest defender of social media).

What idea do you remember having that was yours? Not parroting something else. Not something you learned or read or were told. Not applying some theory or philosophy or stance that was available to you. Usually when I asked this question, I didn’t get much response. Granted, they were freshmen and didn’t know a whole lot about anything, but I am 46-years old now, and I cannot say I had a ready list. Even the idea for this newsletter took me a couple of years to muster the courage to start. And I think it’s a really good idea, and if someone else had had it (maybe they have!) and made it first, I would have had two thoughts: damn, that’s a good idea and damn I wish I was writing it.

Emerson writes something akin to this:

I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter which were original and not conventional. The soul always hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it may. The sentiment they instill is of more value than any thought they may contain. To believe our own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius.

Translation: I read this amazing poem the other day by a painter (how is that fair!?) and it pissed me off. How come this brush-monkey had the gumption to write what he believed, whereas I am a tremulous coward. This is pretty tricky of Emerson and not a little disingenuous, as no one in the history of English 101 courses liked to believe what he thought was true was true for everyone (“Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” Gee, Ralph, which one would you say you are?).

Still, I don’t think he’s wrong. Or at least, the experience he describes is a familiar one to me, and I think a familiar one to others. We might have more modern terms for it now like “imposter syndrome” or “fake it til you make it” or “the Lacanian mirror stage,” but the core feeling remains the same: I don’t think my ideas can possibly be as useful as the ideas that are already out there, especially the ideas of people whose names are carved on libraries or on bylines or in prominent publicly funding podcasts.

And notice too that Emerson does not ascribe genius to the quality of the ideas. The bar is actually much lower and harder than that. It is the belief that your idea might be good enough or true enough to be worth expressing that is genius.

I take comfort in the fact that even canonized blowhards like Emerson got the intellectual yips every now and then. And so when I am procrastinating or questioning myself or just out-and-out worried that what I want to say or make or think might be garbage, I remember that I can call it genius to just send or post. And Emerson would agree with me.

I don’t remember actually renting videos for several more years, around 1986 or so, but I do remember two movies in our VHS collection, and they might have comprised the entirety of it. The first was The Empire Strikes Back, which was a bootleg copy that our neighbors gave us. I have no idea where they got it, but I do remember that someone had written the title of the movie in delicate calligraphy on a sticker on the edge of the tape. I watched the movie hundreds of times, usually skipping Luke screaming and his hand getting lopped off.

The other movie we had was Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971). My uncle taped it off HBO for us for reasons I also don’t know, though perhaps he just knew it was a kids’ movie, and it was something he could do for us.

He started recording a little before the movie came and so he captured two stray bits of video. The first was the music video for “Man-Eater” by Hall & Oates, in which a woman transforms into a panther—and whose central metaphor was lost in me. It seemed like some sort of PSA for adults: there are shape-shifters out there who might well devour you while recording yacht rock. Useful!

The other thing was a movie trailer (I think) whose principal attraction was a woman taking her top off. No metaphorical close-reading required there. I was careful to fast-forward to the opening credits of Wonka while my parents were in the room. This was material that needed preservation.

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory itself is a ton of fun. A tour of a quasi-magical candy factory led by an enthralling inventor-genius-circus ringleader as played by Gene Wilder still is enough to get through 90 minutes.

Roald Dahl wrote the source material, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, with inspiration from the chocolate wars of his youth, in which rival candy companies would indeed try to infiltrate each other's factories to learn their trade secrets. What was behind those doors after all? What would be the most exciting version of that? That’s more than enough enticement for the kinds of short books Dahl wrote. And paired with Dahl’s willingness to seed his stories with the creepy and macabre, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory is a sort of Se7en for the under 7 set, with the sins of each kid taking them out of the tour one by one, until only Charlie remains.

In the book, Charlie inherits the chocolate factory as the only child without a deal-breaking character flaw, for the whole ruse of the golden tickets and the tour is to find a kid to whom Wonka can pass on the factory. That is that. Charlie didn’t break the rules, so he wins.

This is not exactly what happens in the movie. The other kids still exit the stage because of their various appetites, but in the movie Charlie can’t help but try one of the delights, even if he and his Grandpa Joe know it is forbidden. They sneak a spoonful of fizzy-lifting juice, but manage to belch their way back to Wonka before being discovered. Or so they think.

As the tour comes to an end, Grandpa Joe asks about the lifetime supply of chocolate that was part of finding a Golden Ticket. Wonka berates him and says that the chocolate is forfeit because they broke the rules: you get nothing!

And it is here we come to the reason this scene is my first post for Kinda Genius. This scene, and the set-up for it earlier in the movie, were the additions of screenwriter David Seltzer. (This was his first screenwriting credit, and he would somewhat incongruously become best known for creating The Omen series.) Seltzer adds a test within a test, making the story, Charlie, and Wonka each richer than their book counterparts.

You see, Charlie has a gobstopper up his sleeve. He has been offered, prior to the tour, a vast sum of money if he will provide one of Wonka’s rivals, Mr. Slugworth, with an Everlasting Gobstopper, Wonka’s rumored killer-sweet that can be enjoyed forever. Faced with Wonka’s rebuke, Charlie has a choice to make: hand over the Gobstopper to Slugworth to stick it to Wonka and get his family out of some very gray poverty or return it to Wonka. This is the real test, for Slugworth’s itself offer is another of Wonka’s inventions—a final hurdle for Charlie to clear.

When Charlie quietly sets the candy on Wonka’s desk before leaving, Wonka is genuinely moved and exhilarated (Wilder is particularly electric here) and gives Charlie the good news: you’ve won.

What I find so inspired here is the subtle shift from Charlie merely following the rules and not doing anything wrong in the book to him choosing to do something right. Wonka doesn’t care that he broke the rules, in fact the whole tour is set up to make it nigh impossible for the kids to resist breaking the rules.

What Wonka wants to know is this: do they get it? Do they have some inner sense of right and wrong? Might they believe in something other than their own desires to eat and own and consume? In short, do they think making something special is more important than having something special? And would they sacrifice something to protect that?

In my imagination, each of the other kids were given an opportunity, after they were juiced or stretched or otherwise restored, to return their gobstoppers before leaving, and none of them did. Roald Dahl hated how the movie turned out, with his main beef being that the movie focused too much on Wonka and not enough on Charlie (Dahl had other bad opinions too).

But even at age 6 I knew he was wrong. The Charlie of the movie gets something to do, not just a series of things not to do. This matters when you are a kid. Following the rules might not be easy, but it is straight-forward. What is not straight-forward is what to do when there are no rules. Or the rules are unfair. Or you are the one making the rules. What will you do then? If, in addition to being creative, you are kind and fair and generous, maybe, just maybe, you can make something magic.

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Origin Story

I have never consistently kept a journal. I am a bad returner of phone calls and an even worse writer of letters. I wrote a reading blog for a while, but then that was abandoned to make way for Book Riot. I even struggle to text people back reliably.

I am quick, though, to save something I find interesting, a digital raccoon who bookmarks a shiny bauble. Sometimes I share them via text or personal anecdote over dinner. For a long time, I didn’t think the anecdotes, facts, definitions, and stories that caught my attention had any unifying theme or overarching concern. I thought, and even said over many years, that I can get interested in almost anything. It has even become a (non) joke: there is no subject so boring that I won’t at least consider it as a subject of leisurely inquiry.

Over the last couple of years, though, I realized this is mostly untrue. Not the collecting part, but the taxonomic shruggie-shoulders part. Because I have favorites. These are not the undifferentiated background flotsam in Ariel’s cave, but rather kept on a special shelf in my mind.

Broadly speaking, these are stories of people having a great idea and then doing something with it. Of seeing a problem and solving it. Of asking a question, and then answering it. Of being told “not so fast,” and responding “hold my beer.”

I don’t remember figuring this out, but I do know the date I did something with it: Dec 21st, 2022. I know this because on that date I created a new Google doc and immediately dumped 79 items (I am still struggling to find the right noun for these things) into it just off the top of my head. Bookmarks and saved links provided another few dozen. And over the last two years, new entries have trickled in, both remembered items and new discoveries.

In each case, I find myself eager both to file a new finding away and to tell someone about it. And I do, usually in the form of a dinner time did-you-know to my family or workplace today-I-learned Slack message.

So What is Kinda Genius?

The idea for this newsletter is simple: share these stories with more people, more consistently. I considered an Instagram account or other social media presence, but I am by nature a writer and reader, and so text will always be my media franca. And everyone has email, but no one owns it.

My very loose plan is to send something at least once a week. Possibly Sunday mornings. Length will vary: sometimes they will be longer, involving more explanation and research. Sometimes these might only be a few sentences long; I am not interested in belaboring a wonderful anecdote that can speak for itself. So expect a range, both in length and in levels of seriousness.

I am not trying to develop a grand unified theory of creativity that I can trademark. I am not trying to sell anyone on the 7 Ways To Be More Creative. I find these stories inspiring, entertaining, and instructive on their own, without the need for some framework to explain them.

So What Kinds of Things Would I Be Getting?

Glancing over my idea sheet, I have entries for architecture and archeology. Business and ballet. Chess and cosmology. I won’t do all twenty-six letters, but you get the idea. I am an expert in precisely none of these fields, so my selections will be necessarily limited by my ability to understand them.

As of this writing, I have my first three dispatches planned:

• On the Ending of Willy Wonka and Chocolate Factory

• Selling The West Wing

• A Magic Trick That Took 27 Years

I reserve the right, though, to do none of these should other topics elbow their way to the front of the line.

Here is the bit where you can subscribe

If that sounds like the kind of thing you might be interested in, this is where you can sign-up. I am turning on paid subscriptions, as I have learned that putting out your hat when you are playing guitar, even just for fun, doesn’t hurt anybody. (If there are enough coins in my cap, I hope to commission other people to contribute.)

If I do this like I hope, Kinda Genius will be something you look forward to and pass along. Thanks for considering it.

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