Table of Contents
On Writing
- The Case for Blogging in the Ruins by Joan Westenberg
“The blog, at its best (a best I aspire one day to reach) is Montaigne’s direct descendant. It’s a form that allows for intellectual exploration without demanding premature certainty. You can write a post working through an idea, acknowledge in the post itself that you’re not sure where you’ll end up, and invite readers to think alongside you. You can return to the topic weeks later with updated thoughts. The format accommodates the actual texture of thinking, which is messy and recursive and full of wrong turns.
Social media flattens all of this into statements: Everything you post is implicitly a declaration. Even if you add caveats, the format strips them away. What travels is the hot take, the dunked-on screenshot, the increasingly-shitty meme, the version of your argument that fits in a shareable image with the source cropped out.
I keep thinking about how many interesting folks have essentially stopped writing anything substantial because they’ve moved their entire intellectual presence to Twitter or Substack Notes. These are people who used to produce ten-thousand-word explorations of complex topics, and now they produce dozens of disconnected fragments per day, each one optimized for immediate engagement and none of them building toward anything coherent.
It’s like watching someone who used to compose symphonies decide to only produce ringtones.” This excerpt says it all. And she wraps it up with platform suggestions to begin creating your digital space. Thanks @joanwestenberg for weaving ideas that I have felt in my bones but hadn’t strung together into a coherent message until now.
On building sustainable data teams well
- How to Build Indespesible Data Teams by Amalia Child