In my last letter on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I had finished re-reading the first third of this wonderful book. At that point, the story had not dug into the book’s major theme—Quality—and the sense of foreboding, of mounting menace, had not appeared.

This letter will finish the book.

For those who have not read ZAMM (which I encourage you do to), I’ll refrain from revealing too much of the plot. But suffice it to say that the narrator is not all he seems. And as the book proceeds, the reader becomes increasingly anxious about his relationship with his son.

Why is the narrator so brusque? So clipped and cold? Why does he refuse to answer questions with anything more than the barest detail?

(For the sake of convenience, I’ll refer to the narrator as “Pirsig,” since the story is modeled on aspects of the author’s life.)

The book, which begins as a road-trip adventure across the Great Plains, gradually becomes a tale of an estranged father and son quietly tormenting one another with unspoken grievances and memories lost or suppressed in the past.

A large chunk of the middle of the book is given over to Pirsig’s ideas on Quality. (Always capitalized — a tactic which I’ll return to in a moment.) This section of the book is absorbing and challenging; it is deep and worthwhile; it seems to be, from Pirsig’s notes, the stuff he really wished to convey to readers. The book came about because he wanted to write a philosophical essay, but he realized he needed a novel to carry it.

The funny thing is, the novel he built to carry the essay ends up being better than the essay itself.

Others may disagree with me. PhDs have been written on Pirsig’s ideas. Quality is Pirsig’s concept for the Tao, the Buddha, and God, and he builds a cathedral of reason out of this concept. While I enjoyed visiting the cathedral, I did not want to live there. At this point in life, I already have a metaphysical house (so to speak) where I dwell.

This is one difference reading the book a second time. As Heraclitus said of rivers, so it is with books: no man can step in the same river twice. The first time I followed Pirsig and son across the Midwest, I was swept away with the ideas. It was my first real exposure to philosophy. The second time, the philosophy left me cold, but the emotions of the book—above all the growing tension between father and son—moved me.

The Parable of the Left Hand Brick

In the latter 2/3 of this book, there are many lessons for creators—too many. The best of the ones I jotted down are below. But perhaps the most striking and important one I’ll call the Parable of the Left Hand Brick.

In the book, the narrator remembers teaching a struggling student how to write. When asked to produce an essay of 500 words, she proposes to write about America.

Taken aback by the breadth of her subject, and knowing it will fail to yield a good essay, the narrator encourages her to pick a slimmer topic.

“Focus on Bozeman, Montana.” 

When she fails to write a single word, he narrows it further. 

“Try the main street of Bozeman.” 

Still nothing.

“He was furious. ‘You’re not looking!’ he said. … The more you look the more you see. She really wasn’t looking and yet somehow didn’t understand this. 

He told her angrily, ‘Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.’” 

The next class, she turned in 5,000 words. 

The story captures a twofold truth about creating—and thinking. First, if you set your sights on too large a subject, you’ll never find a foothold. You need to take on something small. Second, it’s important to make sure you’re not just repeating what others have already said. That is, you must see for yourself.

The best way to do that is to choose a topic where you simply have nothing else to draw on. Only your senses. Then you’ll see it fresh.

How to Find Your Brick

In any story you tell, start with the small and specific. It should probably seem too trivial to be worth your attention.

For example, your brick could be the squeaky elevator in the building where you launched your company. It could be the odd nickname your uncle gave his dog. Or the trampled corsage on the ground outside your son’s high school on graduation day. 

Whatever it is, it should force your attention on something that you have directly experienced. The one memory, the one image, the one chart, the one anecdote. Break it down until you can hold it. Then build your story up again from there. 

This discovery is what enabled the student in ZAMM to “look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before.” 

Whether your goal is growing a newsletter or launching a fund, your communications need to start with that specific, single thing. 

The brick.

9 More Lessons for Creators

I filled the margins of ZAMM with notes. Moments where the craftsmanship was uncanny, or moving, or surprising.

Overall, I came away from my second reading convinced that ZAMM is a rare and special masterpiece. It has little patience for the conventions of standard fiction. There are few characters, little action (apart from riding a motorcycle, taking a hike, and eating hamburgers), and almost no interpersonal drama.

Instead, you have a father and son riding on a motorcycle, quietly thinking about the past; until at last the memories that have haunted them erupt into the open, causing one of the most dramatic reversals in fiction that I’ve ever seen. The ending doesn’t merely change your sense of the narrator; in an instant, it changes how you perceive the entire 400 pages of the book that have come before. It’s a huge release of tension, right at the end, giving the reader a great catharsis.

With all that, here are the techniques to consider borrowing in your next work:

1. To Ground Your Ideas, Go on a Journey Through Space and Time. When you’re dealing in abstract or subtle ideas, present them as waypoints on a journey. Take your audience on a hike, or a walk, and use this device to unfold a “huge structure of thought.” 

2. Make Language Weird. Pirsig is known for his ideas about Quality. One small but meaningful reason why he’s known for it is that capital “Q.” It takes the word out of ordinary usage, and forces you to stop and reconsider it. When you have an original idea, give it a weird look, and people will pay attention.

3. Follow Your Obsessions. If you ever feel like your interests are too dull to share, just remember that Pirsig made a bestseller out of extensive passages on motorcycle repair. Your enthusiasm is what matters. That’s what will carry the audience along.

4. Keep Secrets. Nothing teases an audience more—and pleases them—then being shown something mysterious that the author refuses to explain—yet.

5. Repeat Yourself. The reader loves a refrain. Introduce a theme, and then bring it back. Pirsig does this at the structural level, by returning regularly to different themes: the motorcycle, his son Chris, the ideas of Quality.

6. Show Empathy to Your Audience. If you have tough material to share, acknowledge it. Show that you understand your audience during the hard parts of a story. During the long sections on Quality, Pirsig occasionally has the narrator comment on how slow and arduous the journey is. But don’t deprive readers of the hard parts. Journeys that are worth going on must be hard. 

7. Strategically Change the Rules. Once your story is going, at a carefully chosen moment, break with the pattern you’ve set. Change what’s allowed. This is one of the most powerful ways to create a feeling of delight. ZAMM does this spectacularly at the end. (When the narrator suddenly changes into… well, you should read it.)

8. Reveal the Secret. A revelation at the climax, especially one that calls back to a theme in the beginning of the work, is incredibly powerful.

9. Bring About a Great Return. At a key moment, bring back a forgotten theme, person, or idea. The resolution of a long simmering tension gives a magnificent release.

What I’m Working On

As previewed in my last email, I’m moving mostly off of Substack, and this is the last email from this provider for now. You’ll hear from me next from ConvertKit. (Hopefully you won’t even notice the difference.)

And as a heads up, in addition to client work, I’m currently working on a course for people to build up their digital profile to attract investors and raise capital. It’s targeted at VCs, fund managers, and founders. Drop me a line if this interests you and I’ll share details once it’s complete.

Until the next time,

Ben

One summer, when I was a young teenager, my dad gave me two books: Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. 

“These two books are why I studied philosophy,” he told me. “You might like them.”

Or perhaps he said nothing like that at all. I’ve never had a memory that can hold conversations. Friends will relate back to me things I’ve said previously, advice I’ve given, jokes or stories I’ve shared. It’s as if it all came from a different person.

This condition of recurring amnesia, or identity loss, was, for much more brutal reasons—electroshock therapy—familiar to Pirsig, whose story parallels that of the narrator of ZAMM. Among other things, the novel is the story of a man in search of himself.

In any case, while I don’t recall the words my father used when he gave me the books, I came away understanding that these novels were not so much recommended as bestowed. They were imparted. And so I read them with attention. 

That summer, sometime around age 13 or 14, because of these two books, my mind changed. It is difficult to convey the substance of the change that took place; but I remember a feeling in my body like revelation. At a certain point in each book, I felt a wash of understanding, a tingly sensation all over my skin, and a quivering excitement. What was conveyed in that moment was, I suppose, the assurance that there was more to existence than what the senses revealed; and, more importantly, that I was not alone in having this belief: that others also felt a layer of reality above this one: a transcendent source of meaning that infuses our world. 

For over two decades, perhaps a quarter of a century, I never touched the books again. Given the fuzziness of my memory, I forgot their details, but remembered vividly the experience of going through them. Even though they gave me as much as any non-sacred book has ever done, I suspected that to read them again would be to spoil the magic. I didn’t want to see how the trick was done. 

Now, a father of three, I am revisiting these books. I know that as a man, I am unlikely to feel that revelatory rush I did the first time. I am content knowing that. But what I can do is to analyze the effects, to peel back the covering on the mechanisms that produced the wonders. The time in life has come where I do want to see how the trick was done. How can an author put together 161,000 words that, when read in order, with attention, transform not one mind, but more than 5 million of them?

I feel one of my tasks in life is to understand what makes a fantastically powerful piece of creativity—visual, verbal, musical—work. And so over the coming weeks, I’ll share my observations on ZAMM as I re-read the book that changed me.

To make it useful, I’ll structure these notes in the form of lessons.  

Lesson 1: The More Abstract Your Subject, the More Motor Oil You Need 

From the first moments of ZAMM, you are immersed in a sensory world. You feel the cool air drifting from the “duck sloughs” by the side of the highway in Northern Minnesota. You see the watch on the narrator’s wrist. You hear his voice straining to be heard over the roar of the engine. 

These are the opening lines:

“I can see by my watch, without taking my hand from the left grip of the cycle, that it is eight-thirty in the morning. The wind, even at sixty miles an hour, is warm and humid. When it’s this hot and muggy at eight-thirty, I’m wondering what it’s going to be like in the afternoon.”

Where is he? Whither is he going?

And suddenly you’re along for the ride.

The first abstract reflection—the first philosophical moment—does not come for another two pages, when the narrator observes:

“I’ve wondered why it took us so long to catch on [to the charm of the backroads]. We saw it and yet we didn’t see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. … It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.”

This careful patterning of thought and matter, of reflection and sensation, of emotional tension and placid observation, is what allows the book to make philosophy not a topic of treatises but a lived reality. It reminds me of Dostoevsky, whose transcendent ideas come packaged in the messiest, dirtiest, bloodiest of human forms.

Ideas, like souls, need bodies.

You would not enjoy the ideas of the book without the metal and oil. The long passages of narration about repairing pistons hold your interest because they balance the paragraphs of reflection. 

And so in order to pursue the real object of ZAMM — how to live well — it must be tethered to a chugging, roaring, smelly motor. 

Lesson 2: Structure Gives Rhythm 

The sonata form in music is a way of structuring dramatic tension and release. The form introduces contrasting themes, wanders away from them, and then returns to them, often in some altered, triumphant version.

At a high level, a structure similar to this one underlies ZAMM.

Pirsig shows as much in the letters he wrote to his editor during the drafting of the novel. He describes a process of writing paragraphs on 3,000 four-by-six slips of paper, labeling them with thematic tags, and then weaving them together. Those labels were: “Events,” “People,” “Maintenance Broad Fabric,” “Zen Broad Fabric”, and “Heights.”

Once you hear that this is how he designed the book, you can see the way he subtly shifts between these themes from paragraph to paragraph. 

Long passages of closely observed detail about the topography and weather of the High Plains flow into introspective passages that raise questions about the narrator’s mysterious biography, which flow into minor scenes with secondary characters, and conclude with a meditation on the function of a gear assembly.

This alternation gives the book a rhythm and pace, carrying you along, preventing any one theme dominating. The contrasting paragraphs give an energy like the push and pull of an engine. All motion is a form of rhythm. Structural motion makes this intellectual book strangely hypnotic and highly readable.

It also creates opportunities for reversals and disruptions of the rhythm, which create drama, as we will now see.

Idea 3: Revelations Are Punchlines. Deliver Them Deadpan. 

The other driver of the action in ZAMM, as with a thriller (but much more subtle) is the subtle uncovering of details that add tension and drama to the story. 

In the first part of the book (the first seven chapters, roughly 90 pages), the narrator slowly uncovers, piece by piece, a series of mysteries, each of which raises questions. Every detail adds complexity, until a brief revelation, given suddenly without any fanfare, in plain prose, jolts our attention.

What’s remarkable is how Pirsig never overplays these small reveals. They often come near the end of paragraphs, as if in passing, and then the action turns away. This has the effect of seeding an unresolved desire to know that drives the action forward. 

In the first few pages he makes you ask: 

• Who is the narrator? Why does he not remember his past? 

• What is his relationship with his son, Chris? 

• What is his relationship with his friend John, and his wife Sylvia? Is there romantic and personal tension among them? 

• What is he seeking in this quest? 

Here’s an example of how he gives a revelation in answer that last question which only raises more questions. Prior to this sentence, he is reflecting on his friends’ hostile relationship to technology. Most of his observations are psychological. And then comes this bolt from the blue:

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself. That is what I want to talk about in this Chautauqua.” 

Then, back to the marshes again. 

One of Pirsig’s way of raising questions between his revelations is through dramatic irony. He shows you that the narrator has a strangely intimate understanding of his friend John’s wife, Sylvia, introducing a question about the nature of their relationship:

“John was worried Sylvia would not be up to the discomfort of this and planned to have her fly to Billings, Montana, but Sylvia and I both talked him out of it. … And when thinking about Sylvia’s moods and feelings, I couldn’t see her complaining.” 

Here you have to ask:

Why does he know more about Sylvia than her husband does? 

1/2 Lesson: Declare Your Intentions in the Highest Terms

Near the beginning of ZAMM, soon after we join Pirsig on his ride, meet his son, and see the flocks of ducks rising over the sloughs, he drops a passage on us that answers in an unexpected fashion a question we haven’t yet asked. Why are we here? His answer conveys that this is no ordinary ride in the countryside.

“Unless you’re fond of hollering you don’t make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them. On sight and sounds, on the mood of hte weather and things remembered, on the machine and the countryside you’re in, thinking about things at great leisure and length without being hurried and without feeling you’re losing time. 

What I would like to do is use the time that is coming now to talk about some things that have come to mind. We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much change to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. Now that we do have some time, and know it, I would like to use the time to talk in some depth about things that seem important.” 

He goes on to describe this journey, his purpose in this book, as a surprising thing: a Chautauqua, or traveling tent-show intended to edify, entertain, and improve the mind of the hearer. Like his other revelations, it raises a question. How can a ride on a motorcycle be a Chautauqua? We thereby understand that this mission is not simply to take a ride, but to improve the minds of his listeners. We see here that we are on an important journey. What felt like a motorcycle travelogue suddenly turns out to be a mission on a higher purpose. Motorcycle mechanics takes on a deeper meaning.

A Few Exercises to Put Into Practice

1. Think of your writing in modules of different tone. Alternate tones to create patterns of tension and release.

2. Structure a push and pull of revelation and mystery. 

3. Give revelations, but don’t overstress them.

4. Tell your readers the higher reason for the journey they are on. 

New Things Coming 

Some major housekeeping news: I’m planning to move my email off Substack. I may keep posting occasionally here, but there are things I’d like to do with email that I can’t do in Substack. This change will likely come in July.

Why am I moving? Flexibility. And a desire to focus on building a closer relationship with a smaller audience.

One client I’ve worked with saw his open rates climb significantly after shifting to a different email provider. He’s up to 60%+ open rates, and has developed new business as a result. 

I may lose a few people in the transition, but my goal is to be more frequent and more helpful to those who do read. Clients at Alembic have said how they value my analysis of their content and how to make it succeed, and I plan to give more of it here.

Hope you’ll stay on for the ride.

Until next time, 

Ben

Do you have a voice that you hear inside your head? 

How is it different from the voice you hear when you’re talking to your spouse? To a salesman at your door? To a neighbor’s child? 

It’s something so intimate to our experience, and yet so little discussed in daily life. 

Every few months a post goes viral bringing up the phenomenon of people who do not have a running internal monologue. (I am one of them.) 

While my headspace is typically quiet, when I concentrate on writing, an internal voice begins to speak. The voice is different from the one I use when I talk aloud. If I’m writing fiction, it is more animated than my external voice, more theatrical. If I’m writing an essay, it’s subdued and slow.

When I am speaking aloud, I am aware of having perhaps 5 different voices: different ones for when I speak to my wife, my older son, my younger sons, my neighbor, my staff. If I speak Chinese, that’s another voice.  

And when I am writing on behalf of a client for the new business, one of the great pleasures is learning to acquire—and sometimes to co-create—a voice that is authentic to each person. Sometimes that voice already exists. More often, it needs to be crafted to match the flavor of his personality, like an infusion of spice in gin. 

Altogether, each person has many different voices that change to suit the medium and the listener.

No single voice is the “real” one. If even God speaks with many “foreign lips and strange tongues” to his people, how could we be any different?

Read

In 1921, a young poet and bank clerk named Thomas shared a long poem he had been working on with a friend. The poem had the title: “He do the police in different voices.” 

The title was appropriate; the poem was a pastiche of many styles and voices.  

The title was also ugly. 

The friend, Ezra Pound, struck out the name and gave it a new one: “The Waste Land.” 

As an editor, and in a sense the ghostwriter or co-author of the work, Ezra Pound helped bring out the voice of the poet, T.S. Eliot. He did this by cutting dozens of lines, sharpening the voice like a blade. 

You can see the evolution in the manuscript here, in a fascinating post showing the creation of a modern classic in the interplay between two writers with very different styles, temperaments, and (yes) voices.

Watch 

Last week the world lost a great musician and producer, Steve Albini, at the age of 61. He was famous for his puritanical devotion to capturing what he believed to be the true, living voice of the band he was recording. 

In a famous four-page letter he sent to Nirvana before producing their record In Utero (for which he refused royalties), Albini wrote that his job was to serve as a mirror of the band’s personality. 

I’m only interested in working on records that legitimately reflect the band’s own perception of their music and existence. If you will commit yourselves to that as a tenet of the recording methodology, then I will bust my ass for you. I’ll work circles around you. I’ll rap your head with a ratchet…

I have worked on hundreds of records (some great, some good, some horrible, a lot in the courtyard), and I have seen a direct correlation between the quality of the end result and the mood of the band throughout the process. If the record takes a long time, and everyone gets bummed and scrutinizes every step, then the recordings bear little resemblance to the live band, and the end result is seldom flattering.

Albini sat down last year for an interview on a project I helped produce. He appears in the episode below at the 10:45 mark. The whole thing—featuring director Godfrey Reggio and comedian Fred Armisen—is one of my favorites from the series we made.

Listen 

It’s a rite of passage for composers to channel the voice of Bach

In the centuries since his death, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Brahms, Schumann, Reger, and Arvo Pärt all wrote compositions paying tribute to the master. 

One of my favorite homages to Bach is by Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich. His 24 Preludes and Fugues are a revisiting of the concept Bach explored in the two books of his Well-Tempered Clavier. 

Listen to this gem of a fugue in A major: 

What I’m Working On

After wrapping one large project at Alembic Partners, we are starting on another big one on a subject I care about. (Wish I could share more specifics, but that will have to wait.)  

But I can share that my partner Geoff Cain had a nice rundown on how to land a publisher for a non-fiction book proposal. I added a few thoughts on how to get Elon Musk (or someone like him) to share your writing, if you’re ready for an avalanche of attention. (It’s intense, but worth it.)

Hope you’re enjoying this strangely cool Spring.

Until the next time, 

Ben

READ 

If you haven’t yet, read the startling account by NPR reporter Uri Berliner in The Free Press. 

It tells the story of a cultural shift within the organization. Away from even-handedness and toward advocacy. 

Berliner’s story is powerful and provocative. He’s now suspended from NPR. (I would observe that he did not appear to ask his sources for comment on his story in advance of publishing it, for reasons I do not know.)

NPR’s media reporter David Folkenflik did an excellent follow-up piece with Berliner after his suspension that is worth reading for what it reveals behind the scenes. 

My own story is very different from Berliner’s, but it has some parallels. 

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The main one was this: the growing feeling that being a reporter put me at odds with my values—and, ultimately, myself.

I spent more than a decade in journalism. From the time I graduated until I was well into my thirties, it was the only industry I knew. I worked as an editor, a reporter, an analyst, and that least glamorous of things, a blogger. I did business features, travel stories, economic breaking news, missile launches, diplomatic readouts, book reviews, Gawker-style satires, straight interviews, and occasional opinion pieces. 

After a decade, I had seen reporters rise and fall. I had seen plagiarism scandals, mental breakdowns, the collapse of multiple publications, firings aplenty, and a newsroom rebellion. Through all that, I had built a solid career. I could freelance for major magazines. I knew people at the top. 

And yet… I increasingly felt sick to my stomach doing it. 

Why? 

By 2018, I hated what media was doing to me as a person.

While many journalists get an ego boost out of telling people what they do — it’s one of the main perks, since the compensation is mediocre—I increasingly felt moral shame. 

I had come to journalism because I loved to write. I wanted to present ideas to the public in a beautiful form. 

The reason I left was that the habits I learned there made me lose self-respect. 

One of these habits was superficiality. I had entered journalism in the 2000s, when blogs were just beginning to make print media nervous by commanding large readerships. That’s when I learned the art of clickbait. Writing edgy, misleading headlines was my first real job. If The Atlantic is a place full of clickbait headlines today, I can tell you that process began over 15 years ago. 

The other habits took longer to form. And to be clear, the responsibility for them is mine.

What I can say is that now, over five years out of the profession, I was right in thinking that leaving the media would free me of this guilty feeling.  

Here are the bad habits — or peccadilloes, or perhaps even sins — that I perceived in the industry and feared were growing in me as a byproduct of being a journalist:

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1. Cynicism

2. Disingenuousness

3. Thirst for glory over truth

4. Indifference to the consequences of a story

5. Rejection of anything not “new” or “relevant” 

6. Desire to control what others think and know 

7. Contempt for anyone outside media

8. Herdthink 

9. Intentional twisting of words

10. Proudly biased

11. Shamelessly inexpert yet swaggeringly confident

12. Certainty that only you know what really matters 

In addition to feeling the growth of these habits, I went through a few incidents that made me aware that my job as a reporter was not to write what I found, but to State The Narrative.

The worst of these was in 2017, when a story I was writing about China’s president’s speech to the World Economic Forum was changed in order to conform to The Narrative. (Which at the time, was that China was the Good Guy in global trade.)

You can read that story here.

WATCH

The challenge of Narrative Control is nothing new.

In 1959, a television writer by the name of Rod Serling told Mike Wallace (an excellent interviewer of the old guard) about the censorship he experienced, and the insidious practice of “pre-censorship” that became ingrained among writers who learned how to tailor what they wrote to the needs of their commercial sponsors.

Such experiences led Serling to start his own program on themes of manipulation and deception. Its name: The Twilight Zone.

Enjoy the eloquence. Try to imagine this on TV today.

LISTEN

Give a listen to this podcast on Infinite Loops, part of the O’Shaughnessy Ventures growing empire of content. It features host Jim O’Shaughnessy in conversation with Liberty RPF and author Jimmy Soni.

It’s a rich discussion of the future of publishing. One of the challenges they touch upon—one of many—is the risk-aversion (and ideological narrowness) of contemporary publishing. Call it another form of Narrative Control.

This timidity leaves a door open to disruption, something you will see more of with a proliferation of hybrid publishers.

What I’m Working On

The next session of Create, Publish, Profit opens its doors this Wednesday. I’ll be teaching two courses on authority and networking online. If you’re interested, check it out and register before the doors close later this week.

And speaking of books and the future of publishing—thanks to many who have reached out about exploring projects with Alembic Partners. There are exciting things in the works, and if you’re curious to learn more I’d love to hear from you.

The rest of the “work” this week is preparing for our identical twins’ second birthday. It was their birth two years ago that set off so many new things in my life. I’d say it’s “hard to believe” it’s only been this long, but the truth is it’s felt like much longer.

…In a good way.

Until the next time,

Ben

There are some new friends on this list since you last heard from me.

Hello and welcome to the several hundred who subscribed after reading my essay for The Free Press on Marshall McLuhan. I’m glad you’re here.

Another three hundred of you joined after encountering a thread I wrote about Yuri Bezmenov that got shared by Elon Musk. (Bizarrely, this was not the first time he’s engaged with my writing, but it was by far the biggest: 23 million impressions and counting.) If that’s what brought you here, thanks for signing up. I appreciate it.

My goal is to give you all more of what brought you here… and the unifying theme across them is the effect our media (and cultural) environments have on our individual minds.

To start, I’d like go a little deeper into Marshall McLuhan, the great Canadian theorist of technology and media. (Two words that in his thinking represented much the same thing: a medium is any tool that extends our innate human capabilities, thereby changing us.)

McLuhan believed that different uses of our senses affected our thinking and being. Accordingly, I’ll give three slightly different ways of experiencing him: in print, in video, and in audio.

Finally, I’ll finish with 13 takeaways from his writing derived from my background research on all of this material.

Read

In the course of my research for the article on McLuhan for The Free Press, I read three or four of his books, listened to all of the recordings of him put out by the McLuhan Institute podcast, and watched pretty much every video of him available on YouTube. (A clip from one of these will appear below.)

I also contacted his grandson, Andrew McLuhan. He advised me to start with this article: an essay in Playboy magazine from 1969. (You’ll be amazed how long and erudite the article is; at its peak, Hefner’s magazine was more intellectually high-minded than any popular magazine today. The same issue features a Senator on gun control and sci-fi genius Arthur C. Clarke on space colonization.) 

The piece offers perhaps the most useful and succinct encapsulation of McLuhan’s ideas.

You’ll find his playfulness, his seriousness, his verbosity, all on display for the bewildered and intrigued interviewer. 

McLuhan: In the past, the effects of media were experienced more gradually, allowing the individual and society to absorb and cushion their impact to some degree. Today, in the electronic age of instantaneous communication, I believe that our survival, and at the very least our comfort and happiness, is predicated on understanding the nature of our new environment, because unlike previous environmental changes, the electric media constitute a total and near-instantaneous transformation of culture, values and attitudes. This upheaval generates great pain and identity loss, which can be ameliorated only through a conscious awareness of its dynamics. If we understand the revolutionary transformations caused by new media, we can anticipate and control them; but if we continue in our self-induced subliminal trance, we will be their slaves.

Watch

A year after this interview, when McLuhan was near the peak of his cultural influence, he sat with a friend and admirer, the bombastic stylist and urbane intellectual novelist, Thomas Wolfe.

Seated in aluminum lawn chairs, they have a wide-ranging conversation. One moment in particular grabs me: here, where Marshall proposes that all media — all of them — be “turned off” for a week as a grand experiment. This is the kind of policy idea I can get behind.

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Listen to this recording of a 1968 Canadian show, which titled the episode “The End of Polite Society.”

In it, McLuhan describes the electric age as “much the greatest of all the human ages, there’s nothing even remotely to resemble the scope of human awareness” in it. 

This appalls one of the other guests, the plummy British talk-show host Malcolm Muggeridge, who takes a much grimmer view of TV culture. The episode also features the pugnacious American writer, Norman Mailer.

13 Takeaways

Drawing from all this material and more, I’ve pulled the following observations (in no particular order) from my notes on McLuhan. A few may be paraphrases, most are my own riffs on his ideas. It would be difficult to chase down any precise genealogy. (So please don’t quote one of them elsewhere as “Marshall McLuhan says…” unless you find your own attribution.)

1. You cannot understand culture today without understanding technology. In turn, you cannot understand technology without understanding culture.

2. Most of our relationships with our people are now invisible. Instead of family reunions, we have family text groups.

3. Slang is a leading indicator of social change. Watch what words come and go—"Karen,” “based,” “black-pilled”—and you will see how perceptions are shifting.

4. We now have the means to keep everyone under surveillance at all times. As a result, one of the main objects of effort and expense in our civilization is simply watching what other people are up to in their “private” lives.

5. What matters is not what you say with your iPhone. It’s that whenever you have a question, your mind drifts toward your pocket, as if it’s a phantom limb (or phantom brain) connected to your body. This reflects how it’s changed you.

6. Constant change leads to a crisis in identity for individuals and societies. Mental disorders on the personal scale, and on the national scale, become more common because of the void this creates.

7. In the past, people had one lifetime. Later, it could be supplemented by books, which gave experiences of other lives in condensed form. Now, young people experience several lifetimes’ worth of sensation, experience, and thought by the time they hit puberty. Our educational systems poorly recognize and serve this reality.

8. If you look at human behavior, you will see that computers don’t serve us. We serve the computers.

9. The rate of history is now compressed. Because actions take place at the speed of light (mediated by our communications systems), the reaction is global and instantaneous. This means we again live in an age of myth: when demi-gods ruled the Earth.

10. “Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s problems.”

11. Social issues are not contained to their native societies. We have a sense of universal responsibility and universal involvement in each others’ lives.

12. The AI revolution represents the return of servants, with all the convenience, decadence, and danger this entails.

13. You are, in a real sense, living the lifestyle of an electron.

What I’ve Been Working On

For the last several months, I’ve been developing a new business with my partner, the bestselling author and journalist Geoffrey Cain. Previously, we’d both been working separately to help executives craft and write thought leadership.

With the creation of Alembic Partners, we’ve joined forces to maximize what we can do for clients.

We produce essays, thought leadership campaigns, and books, building up clients’ brands and platforms.

We’ve worked with CEOs, tech entrepreneurs, finance professionals, and ex-government officials, among others.

We’re still in soft launch (though already busy with client work). If you’re interested in learning more, drop me a line.

Hope you’re doing well in 2024,

Ben

This week, a graphic by the wonderful music critic Ted Gioia made vivid the ways in which our culture has, across every domain, accelerated toward manic gratification. (Or what he calls “dopamine culture.”). You’ve probably seen it already; it went viral for the right reason. Not because it’s provocative, but because it captures something true we all feel.

READ

His State of the Culture 2024 is worth reading in its whole

What it made me ask was this: what is the antithesis of dopamine culture? 

Art that makes you pause; that halts time. 

Have you ever had the experience (especially in recent years) of reading a print book, falling into a state of concentration, then looking up after what feels like a long, deep journey, to discover that only 10 minutes have passed? 

This is the sign of true absorption. It doesn’t speed time; it slows it down.

The theory of relativity holds that the faster you go in space, the slower time passes for you, relative to others.

You could say there’s a theory of artistic relativity: the deeper you go, the slower the seconds pass. 

And conversely, the quicker the hit, the faster they run. 

For example, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony takes a little more than an hour from beginning to end. But when you come out of it, it feels like you’ve traversed years—eons. 

Yet on your phone, an hour is nothing.

If you go through the day scrolling through the delights of dopamine culture—as we all do—you will feel as if no time has passed at all. Hours become slippery and evanescent; time runs through your fingers. People routinely spend 3 or 4 hours per day on their pocket screens and wonder where their life went.

I know this because it’s true of me. I can hardly make time for a movie that would allow me to experience years in one sitting, but I somehow spend the equivalent of a Wagnerian opera on my phone without noticing it. 

Another example: I wrote the first draft of this email by hand. It took 12 minutes by the clock, but felt like twice or three times that. On a computer, 12 minutes passes in a blink. 

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WATCH

One of the most popular videos I’ve ever shared is this one featuring Aldous Huxley. 

It struck such a chord with people that even Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey commented on it.

Why did it hit people so hard? What does that tell us, that the creator and owner of that dopamine engine, Twitter, felt this spoke to them?  

LISTEN

Now counteract the experience of the dopamine culture. 

Slow down. 

This Icelandic pianist, Vikingur Olaffson, is one of the most magical performers working today.

Listen for five minutes and tell me how long it feels.

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No writer has written more deliciously of the pleasures of drinking than Kingsley Amis.

In his collected columns on the subject, Everyday Drinking (alcohol was the novelist’s great hobby and subject) he describes the culture of alcohol as one of great spirits, in every sense of the word.

“With alcoholic ritual, the whole point is generosity,” he wrote. “If you open a bottle of wine, for heaven's sake have the grace to throw away the damn cork.”

With Amis, drink appears as a friendly companion, one who enlarges us, grants us courage and humor, and who makes magic out of mere matter.

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I loved this book, and the lighthearted touch Amis brought to his great pastime. It reflected (and encouraged, modestly) my own tendencies. Whisky or wine was a daily companion for many years.

But for reasons familiar, I’m sure, to many of you, I’ve decided for the last two years to find that quality of drunkenness—the beautiful, loose, dangerous Bacchic spirit—somewhere else.

It happened after my wife was found to be carrying twins, an unexpected (and intimidating) blessing after our first son.

I wanted to tell her that, much as she was being asked to do something that seemed impossible, I would do the same.

To my surprise, I did it.

What’s even more surprising is I that I haven’t missed the taste.

What I especially do not miss is what Amis describes as “that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future” that follows a loose night.

I suspect a time will again come when, Amis-like, I will keep a bar stocked with liquor.

But for now, I can enjoy the drunkenness that comes not from a decanter of rum (as with Hemingway below), but from the exhaustion, strain, and ecstatic relief that mark the ends of most days as a father of three young boys.

WATCH

Kingsley’s son, Martin Amis, died last year.

A novelist like his father, he also shared the elder’s sense of humor, and his fine savor for language.

See how he describes his formula for perfecting a sentence in this video from the later years of his life.

Listen

Even outside of fatigue, I believe there is such a thing as sober drunkenness. Anytime there’s a loosening of control, a staggering, jolly, broadness of mood, a goofy happiness—you may be called drunk. (My children get this way around 6PM every day.)

This dry inebriation is well captured in music.

Behold Chopin’s “Wrong Key” étude, played here in all its sloppy exactitude by Sviatoslav Richter.

Tell me: What did you enjoy reading, writing, or watching this week?

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Welcome to a new type of email, where I’ll share the best of what I read, see, and listen to every week.

What would you do with eternity?

That’s the question that lies at the heart of a very silly movie that means a lot to me (and to many people out there): Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day of 1993.

A masterpiece of wry existentialism, the movie puts its egotistical hero through endless repetitions of the same day, asking him over and over: what will you do with endless time?

His form of eternity is fundamentally lonely. Only he knows that time has halted. The progression of days, the hope we feel looking forward to tomorrow, the connection we feel as heirs of yesterday’s choices, all that is broken for him.

As Bill Murray’s character discovers, as he moves through the phases of elation (I can do anything!”), despair (Life beyond time is not worth living), and hope (I’ll never be perfect, but I can spend forever trying to get better) we were not made for eternity. At least not in this life.

Here is my favorite scene in the movie, a cry for help in which he demonstrates supernatural ability (omniscience, foresight) but only in order to be seen and understood, to spend at least one day communicating about his awful form of eternity with a mortal—or to be more specific, the woman he has grown to love.

IMAGES

WORDS

The question of time—how eternity interacts with history; how the infinite can be grasped by the finite—also lies at the heart of Marilynne Robinson’s recent essay in Harper’s. It explores the important differences between the Creation account in Genesis, and the earlier myths of the Near East. In contrasting the tale of the Flood recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh with the deluge of Noah, she highlights ways in which the Bible narrative rejects the Bablyonian ideas of the divine and the human, and presents a radically different understanding.

The two Creation narratives of Genesis place the universe in history, and offer no suggestion of what “preceded” it, she writes. Time had a beginning, and it will have an end.

The Creation story ex nihilo presents but does not pretend to explain “the complexity and mystery of time,” she writes, as if time “were made indeterminate to accommodate simultaneities—our entangled and consequential lives, our deeper participation in Being itself, the eternal God.”

Robinson has long been one of my favorite essayists. I love following the pattern of her thought, which, while clear, does not make many accommodations. When reading her writing, I often have the feeling that I am encountering handwritten prose: it has the leanness, the linearity, the insularity and sinuousness of a pen on a page. (I have no idea if she does, in fact, draft by hand, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she did.)

I love this way she characterizes the Bible, which as anyone who has read it knows contains paradoxes, explicit and implicit, on every page.

“The Bible does not exist to explain away mysteries and complexities but to reveal and explore them with a respect and restraint that resists conclusion.”

“This irresolvable question regarding the origin and meaning of human actions persists in crucial contexts throughout both Testaments. … It is the centrality of humankind, exceptional among the myths of neighboring cultures, that draws down this order of attention to the great mystery of the origins and meaning of individual actions, and the meaning of individual lives.”

MUSIC

Let’s finish this theme of eternity/finitude with two pieces of music I love that, from their very first notes, seem to freeze time.

The first, by Kid A, has been running through my head all week. The opening notes of “Everything In Its Right Place” are one of the most powerful statements I know of in popular music. I am instantly hypnotized. It sounds like something celestial, and perhaps sinister, coming into our world.

The second, composed by Schubert and interpreted in its most majestic form by Sviatoslav Richter, is a late sonata by the dying master. In its first movement (a full 24 minutes of the recording below) you experience the infinite meeting the finite. If at all possible, try to listen to this piece at least once in your life without any distractions, any texting or reading, and see how you feel.

What were the best things you read, saw, or heard this week?

Does writing that is never read have any value at all?

Think of the vast mass of literature produced in the last century. Hundreds of thousands of books published every year, many of them read by a few people at most; within a year or two, the vast majority of them are ignored and very soon forgotten.

Was all that effort, that pulp and paper, worth it? Were those ideas, those stories, those experiences, captured for nothing?

As a lover of books, you might feel sorrow to contemplate all those pages that now meet no eye; ideas that fizzled and died like flares sent up in the night; emotions felt and recorded that no longer reach another heart.

Isn’t that a waste? Isn’t it sad?

And of course, this mountain of paper isn’t simply a product of modern life. In 1500, less than 50 years after the first printed copies of the Bible came off of Gutenberg’s presses, more than 10 million copies of 40,000 individual works had been printed in Europe.

Most of them, if they were ever read, have since disappeared from the collective memory of humanity.

If you put together all those forgotten works—including ones whose existence we recall only in form: the scrolls of the incinerated library of Alexandria, the lost plays of Aeschylus and Euripedes, the classics burned by China’s first emperor in 213 BC—you would have a library far bigger than the library of any living works.

That library of the forgotten, larger than the Library of Congress, buried deeper than any ruins, is a monument to our deepest desires: to be remembered, to live on beyond our lifetime, to save something beautiful from our brief encounter with reality.

And it’s this impulse that makes these forgotten works not sad, I think, but a source of wonder.

Anyone who writes knows that the act of putting down your thoughts is itself transformative. The process of writing an unread book (I have written one of them, several version of it, in fact) makes you a different person from the one who started it.

Jorge Luis Borges, who loved to imagine impossible libraries, once said (as you can see in the video below) that “the task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music.”

All those forgotten books are an index of how important the act of writing down our lives is, and always has been, to mankind, Homo Scriberus. They attest to many lives transformed.

While fewer people seem to read intensely these days, many more people write. And I view that as a positive development.

The impact of a book is felt most deeply on the person who produces it. It gives puts what happens to you into a matrix of meaning; of thoughts and ideas that persist outside of your own experience.

A book is a form of thought into which we have evolved. 

Without a book the thought does not exist. 

Better a world of writers than a world of readers.

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What I’m Reading

I’ve been going through some long works I never read before. Just this morning I finally finished The Count of Monte Cristo. (Fifty hours in audiobook form.) It had been recommended to me several times. I can now see why.

The book is gripping, endless, and deliciously melodramatic. What particularly struck me was how the plot created the template for so many works to follow it. 

Take Batman:

The mysterious, icy, sophisticated, dangerous, and cunning billionaire who has a cave lair, multiple identities, and who exacts revenge outside the judicial system for brutal injustice suffered when he was innocent. He develops himself under the tutorship of an unfathomably wise and mysterious religious master, and relies upon a reserved, skilled, and trustworthy servant almost as competent as his master.

Yes, that’s all in the Count.

Few people seem to read it today, but the story has steeped itself into the culture.

What I’m Working On

We’re finishing up another session of Create, Publish, Profit. I gave two lessons, the first of which was on Building Your Authority to a community. I’ll be happy to share that when it’s available.

My other side projects are keeping me busy as well. I thought I’d have more to share on that now, but it will have to wait.

Until the next time,

Ben

Share Carlson Letter

He contacted me to set up a letter exchange. I’d never done one before—at least not in public—but was intrigued, as I have enjoyed his writing. We agreed upon a general topic, and I set out to write the first letter, which you see below. 

Dear David, 

In this season of Advent, I have been thinking about belief. 

I grew up in a religious (Lutheran) household, and am religious to this day. 

(I used to hide this fact when I was a reporter. On one occasion, I was asked directly by my editor if I was religious. When I said yes, he smirked. “Really?”)

Part of the process of becoming an adult is wrestling with the beliefs you have been given. 

My process of wrestling has led me to a philosophy of givenness. 

A wanderer, geographically and intellectually, for much of my life, I now prize precisely what is fixed. 

(I left home outside Philadelphia at 16, and spent years abroad, until I moved home 18 years later.)

Learning to love the physical and mental stuff that’s been given to me without my conscious choice—this body; this birthplace; this family; these perceptions; these ideas; these beliefs; this world—has brought me a stabler happiness than trying futilely to construct reality from scratch. 

(Though nothing, not even an atom, is made from scratch.) 

For a long time, I used to search among ideologies and ideas for something suitable, like rummaging for an outfit at a shop. 

Friends of mine have gone through various forms of conversion: religious, cultural, ideological.

There’s the poor rancher boy who grew up in a conservative, Christian household, moved west, and built his life around a secular, globalist ideology. 

The Irish Catholic who left the Church and converted to mystical Judaism. 

The cynical, liberal pothead who converted to conservative Orthodoxy and moved to the desert.

The military orphan who embraced Asian cultures so thoroughly he became almost unrecognizable at home.

(Many of these changes have been to their good.) 

In my life, I’ve had brief flirtations with conversion. Phases of atheism, nihilism, pacifism, idealism, literary aestheticism. But none stuck.

These conversions represent alternative lives; selves that might have been, that could live on elsewhere.

I'm fascinated by this idea of different versions of us, as belief systems are one of the few ways we have for changing ourselves.

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Tell me something, David: You study ideology. What belief system did you come closest to converting to? What belief systems have had the strongest pull on you, for good or ill?

Mine—or one of mine; the strangest one—is Scientology. 

Yes, Scientology. 

Back in 2008-2010, there was an upsurge in interest in Scientology. High-ranking defectors began to speak out. A few books came out quoting them on the strange and abusive practices alleged under the president, a native of the Philadelphia countryside named David Miscavige. 

I was a young reporter, and I made Scientology my beat for a time. 

I reported on a secretive, non-accredited boarding school where the children of Scientology’s elite (Will Smith, et al.) were educated. I reported on a Scientology business school. I covered the church's expansion into Taiwan—its foothold in the Chinese-speaking world, which heavily regulates spiritual movements, especially ones from abroad. 

One of the barriers to reporting on Scientology well is that there is a vast literature that almost nobody outside of Scientology reads. 

L. Ron Hubbard was a logomaniac, and his published and unpublished writings—not to mention his audio recordings—span thousands of volumes. 

But I dug in. I read and listened to as much as I could take, and then went back for more. It took immense patience to pierce the obscure jargon Hubbard insisted everyone use.

Eventually, it almost made sense.

What I came to understand was that Scientology, in its basic form, gave people a method to be trained, slowly and systematically, to suppress emotional reactions to traumatic moments. 

This gave them a kind of emotional power.

And over time, this form of quasi-therapy was extended in the direction of giving positive mental powers. 

How much can you control with your mind? 

The goal was an attainment of physical, mental, and (in a sense) transcendent or spiritual perfection in this life and this body. 

Of course, the means by which this was achieved was expensive and abusive. 

But for a time, I felt I could understand the attraction to Scientology. It was, in a sense, a kind of mental and emotional bootcamp, a self-improvement exercise with different levels of attainment. It gamified reality and promised huge—cosmic—rewards with advancement. 

I also had a personal reason for wanting to understand it.

A brilliant and troubled relative of mine, after graduating early from college, came to be friends with L. Ron Hubbard’s son, “Nibs,” in California. 

The two were so close that my relative, an early Scientologist, made out a life insurance policy to be paid to Nibs on occasion of his death. 

As it happened, sometime later my relative was found dead in Hubbard’s backyard. He had suffered a fatal rifle wound to the head. The police ruled it a suicide. 

My extended family didn’t accept this, understandably. After years of investigation—and a great deal of uncertainty —the best theory I heard was that this relative, who was bright and intuitive, came to believe in a form of reincarnation. 

While there’s no way of knowing, it seemed Nibs may have played a part in encouraging my relative to believe that if he died, his soul could pass to a child in my relative's wife’s womb. The funds collected from insurance would give him a fortune on which to raise himself.

Crazy as it sounds, this conclusion seems plausible.

If Scientology were powerful enough to make my relative believe this, there must have been something to it—an ability to persuade, to coerce, to make you betray yourself. 

This understanding, and my exploration of its beliefs, ultimately made me more empathetic to Scientologists, and to cultists. 

Even as a critic—especially as a critic—if you can’t understand the attraction of what you study, you'll never see the full truth of it.

This is the problem with many reporters on religion. And, for that matter, partisan commentators.

That's why the best critics of Communism and Marxism were those who understood it from the inside: Leszek Kolakowski, Czeslaw Milosz, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. 

You can’t effectively enter a systemic edifice of thought unless you are willing to step through the door. You must give something of yourself to be admitted. 

What do you think? 

Ben

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What makes you trust someone?

What instantly arouses your distrust?

Here’s a story.

Last week, I got a call from the boiler technician I sent out to one of my rental properties.

“I got bad news,” he said in a tone that suggested he didn’t feel it was bad news for him. “You know how old your boilers are?”

I told him I did; they were from the 1980s.

“When was the last time you had someone look at them?”

It had been a while, I said. That’s why I had sent him out there.

“Well, they’re busted. One of them has to be red-tagged. I already shut it off. The other one needs a new valve, but for what it’ll cost you, if I were you, I would just replace that one too.”

I took a deep breath.

My other rental needs a new roof.

I put that thought somewhere else.

I asked him the price.

“Oh, for doing two of them, I think we can get you a discount. Let me confirm with the boss. But it should be,” he paused as if solving a trigonometry problem, “$22,000.”

At my stage in life, I have already had more boilers installed than I ever thought possible.

This number, I knew, was high.

I asked if the price would change with a different make of product.

“Yeah, but that one would be more expensive. This one’s more reliable, and it’s made here in Philadelphia.”

His voice had risen. He was now speaking quickly, excitedly.

“I’ll send it over right after this call. If you sign, we can get there Monday, maybe even tomorrow.” Then he added, as if remembering. “It’s getting cold. I know you don’t want your tenants freezing in there.”

No, I agreed, I didn’t.

I asked him to send over the quote.

As soon as we hung up, I called an HVAC guy who lives down the street.

Tom has no website, no digital invoices, no search-engine-optimization. Just word of mouth.

When I told Tom what the other guy quoted, he swore.

“How can they sleep at night? I’ll do it for $12,000. I’m still making money on this job, but what they’re doing is disgusting.”

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What Makes Us Trust

Trust is an intangible thing.

It is woven from your experiences and impressions of a person over time.

To understand trust, you can examine at its opposite: why you distrust.

You may distrust someone who seems to be:

• Withholding

• Manipulative

• Slick

• Pushy

• Exaggerating

So, in turn, you may tend to trust someone who is forthcoming, neutral, casual, unassuming, understated.

While natural, these instincts don’t always serve you well.

Sam Bankman-Fried understood the dynamics of trust.

He used a rumpled appearance and sloppy manners to disarm otherwise intelligent people.

Prince Harry’s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, described how to cultivate belief in writing. When being interviewed by tennis legend Andre Agassi, he put it this way:

[Agassi] hated tennis, he said. He wanted to talk about memoir. He had a list of questions. He asked why my memoir was so confessional. I told him that’s how you know you can trust an author—if he’s willing to get raw.

Writers who share their emotions more easily earn our trust because they seem too transparent to deceive.

‘That’s Impossible’

Personality, of course, has a large impact on how willing we are to trust.

By nature, I am credulous. I tend (or used to tend) to assume the best about people. The cost is that I have, in the past, occasionally stumbled out of an interaction to discover I’ve been fooled.

By necessity, first as a journalist and, now, a small-time landlord, I’ve had to become more skeptical.

In the case of the boiler salesman, he didn’t give off any clear tells. He was warm and affable. A guy who was trying to help.

If I hadn’t been skeptical, I might have gone with his bid.

When it comes to reality itself, we apply the same framework.

When we hear something that sounds implausible , we get skeptical. We assume whoever is telling us this fact must be lying, or a fool.

But what happens when the truth itself is implausible?

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What I’m Working On

A few big projects are in the works.

I want to keep the pressure high—no letting steam out of the kettle—so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Let me know what you’re working on. Have you had any run-ins with people abusing your trust?

Until the next time,

Ben

When and where do you do your best thinking?

Many swear by the shower.

Or long walks.

Beethoven composed during long perambulations through Vienna. Coleridge and Wordsworth turned their conversations into poetry.

For me, the best thinking occurs when I’m wielding a pen.

(A physical pen with a good flow. Among fountain pens, I like the Kaweco Sport.)

What’s true of all of these methods is that the thinking is somehow physical, embodied.

Our minds respond to the movements of our limbs.

As any musician or artist can tell you, your hands are organs of cognition.

The figures your fingers trace make impressions on your mind.

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I share this with you because, well, I need it right now.

I’ll be candid: I’ve been struggling recently with writing.

I have big themes I’m developing which excite me. But the more excited I am, the harder it is to put my focus on them.

What’s that passage from St. Paul?

“For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

I have my excuses. (We all do.) My three kids are all young and need lots of love. Giving them that love is the most important thing I can do. There’s no evil in that.

But there’s a peculiar plight that comes from writing on a computer. I feel it every day.

For some reason, it is frightening to face up to your highest aspiration, because the moment you (and here I mean I) look at it, you are crushed.

All this is to say, writing by hand is a means of soothing that metaphysical terror.

One word at a time, on a page.

Ink flows through the nib, leaves a durable mark, and instead of writing with my eyes I begin to write with my body, my ears, my inner voice. The writing feels fertile. If nothing else, it is fun.

I was struck recently that Sam Parr, an entrepreneur, shared that he learned how to write from copying works of writing he admired by hand.

This is an old method—he learned it from Benjamin Franklin—and long ago I remember doing it with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose.

I can’t say it had a transformation effect on my style, but what handwriting has done is to acquaint me with the internal music of my own mind.

One of the happiest writing memories I have of being in my own company is when, shortly after moving to Beijing, I set up in the un-air-conditioned workroom of the hotel where we were staying until we found an apartment.

The air smelled like pollution—a new odor to me then, which I came to know as well as the flavor of nutmeg or cinnamon—and I was happy.

For hours, I sat in that bare room, writing a book by hand.

Those were some of the most blissful days I’ve ever spent in my imagination.

While the majority of what I’ve written sits in bound notebooks, and has never been read by anyone, in many cases including me, the joy came from the act of creating it.

It was a function of life, like eating or walking.

After all, as much as our brains, our dextrous hands are what make us as human.

What About You?

Have you noticed that technology affects your writing?

What feels most natural, inspired, flowing?

Whatever medium you use, your thinking adheres to the technology.

I find that because I have to invest more physical effort in writing, I compose more in my mind.

Whereas when I type, because I can do it quickly, I edit with my eyes. I become a reader and a critic as much as a writer.

This makes the prose more polished, but the thinking less exploratory.

While the perennial problem with handwriting is transcription (especially when your script looks like mine, see below), the rise of reliable dictation software has been revolutionary.

Drafting for me has now often become a process of writing by hand, dictating, and then rewriting on a screen.

What’s surprising to me is that the snapshot of a notebook I just shared above — a random page from 2013, I believe, which I hadn’t read since writing it—touches on some of the same obsessions I have today for a short story that never got off the ground.

Extremism. Radicalism. Interrogation

Evidently, 10 years ago I was imagining “the conversion of a quietist to a radical.” A snatch of imagined dialogue for an interrogator in this sketch of a never realized piece of fiction:

“There are no innocents in a time of extremism,” he said. “Naivete is no saving grace.”

As it happened, this week, I shared some observations from the novel I’ve read most often in my life (perhaps four times), Demons (also called The Possessed or The Devils) by Dostoevsky.

What I’m Enjoying and Working On

I have an idea for a longer work alluded to above… about which the less said now the better.

I’m carrying out the advice of Gretchen Rubin in renewing old friendships, celebrating minor holidays, and taking an inventory of the self.

Reading (I always read too many things at once):

• Eric Hoffer, True Believer

• Dostoyevsky, The Devils. (Just finished; see above.)

• Gretchen Rubin, Life in Five Senses

• Proust, Guermantes’ Way

• Jacques Ellul, Propaganda

What’s inspiring you? What are you struggling with?

If you find yourself blocked for some reason—try getting out a pen. Let me know how it goes.

Until the next time,

Ben

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Three people stand before a window. 

They look out over the same landscape.

 One turns to the other, “I see a storm coming.” 

The other one looking into the near distance declares, “I see a boat bringing goods to shore. I wonder if it will have what I’ve been waiting for.” 

And the third speaks: “This window is dirty. Don’t you have any self-respect to clean it?”

When you write, it often feel something like this. You create a window onto yourself, your views, your world, and invite people to look through it. 

You hope to educate, please, delight, inform, or perhaps galvanize to action. 

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But perception is an active process. Your readers do not simply ingest your words and acquire your ideas, like the Pill of Murti-Bing described in Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz’s masterpiece on ideological conversion, Captive Mind.

Your audience brings their own assumptions and experiences to the act of reading. 

When they look through the window of your writing, half of what they see is their own reflection in the glass.

Take a sentence that looks clear and simple. People interpret it countless ways.

In Matthew 5:44, Jesus says: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” 

Does this endorse pacifism? Stoic detachment? Enlightened otherworldliness? Muscular self-confidence? Just war?

Even your family texts and work emails run into this. It’s not simply what you say. It’s how you say it; and just as often how you didn’t say it.

Did you use emojis? Exclamation marks? Was the response too short? Too long? Do you use too many gifs? Not enough?

Every detail is fodder for interpretation.

This has been on my mind this week because a thread I wrote on China got widely read, and as often happens, the interpretations ranged as widely as the readers.

While I was grateful for many positive responses, I was surprised by those who seemed to miss what was (in my mind) the real point: it isn’t really “about China.” (A place I love in many ways, above all for the people.) It’s about human nature. How do people anywhere respond to tightening limitations in what they can say and do? What goes for China, goes for America, too.

(I’m aware that a number of you have joined this newsletter because of it, and I thank you for signing up. Welcome to the community.)

A certain amount of misunderstanding is inevitable with any work of writing.

You are, after all, a mirror.

Your job as a writer is to polish the glass.

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What I’m Working On 

One of the best ways to improve as a writer is to do it in a supportive community.

For those looking to make writing a public part of your life, I encourage you to explore the program Write of Passage. I know several people who say it’s one of the most transformative things they’ve done. 

Several of you have signed up, and I’m excited for you. If it interests you, the window closes on Tuesday. You can sign up here to join the cohort.

Beyond that, there’s a new project in the works that I’m looking forward to sharing with you soon. A collaboration.

What’s your experience with being understood or misunderstood as a writer?

Until the next time,

Ben

PS - The story of the ex-McDonald’s shift worker, Sheehan, who has since gained a massive following as the Twitter writer “Cultural Tutor,” is worth checking out. Scroll down to the bottom. Below, an image from a great thread of his recently on the Japanese painter of atmospherics, Hasui Kawase.

My friend Mitch is the kind of person who is so unusual that anyone else you meet who knows him becomes an instant friend.

It’s like sharing the experience of having grown up on the side of a beautiful, remote, and little-known mountain.

You both have been shaped by the experience, which is difficult to describe to anyone else.

Mitch (not his real name) was one of my closest friends in high school.

At the time, he was intense, earnest, studious, health-conscious and fastidious to an extreme.

It was clear he was gifted. At the time, I would not have called him the smartest person I knew. That’s because I was too young to recognize the nature of his gifts.

For a long time, I equated ease with intelligence.

How easily did someone master calculus? French? Piano?

When we were young, certain things came easier to me than Mitch.

What set Mitch apart was the passionate focus he brought to everything he did.

Outdoorsmanship. Economics. Poetry.

Over time he became exceptional in all of them.

These were byproducts of what I now recognize as his master-gift: he had learned how to learn.

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Mitch’s capacity for learning, his hunger to absorb, went beyond anyone I knew.

Belatedly, from him and those like him, I came to understand that intelligence is not what you’re born with. It’s what you build.

Don’t look at prodigies. Look at those who apply their focus for 15 years. That’s when you begin to see intelligence.

Where is Mitch now?

After college, he went abroad. He is now a specialist in ancient Chinese literature. He speaks, reads, writes, and lectures in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. He hikes. Decades of care for his body have preserved his youth.

He has become, or perhaps always was, the smartest person I know.

What he understood early on was the art of humbling himself and learning from those who were ahead of him.

He’s never had an ego about anything he does; and this has allowed him to go further than anyone I know.

What I’m Working On

Speaking of learning from those who are ahead: if you’re a writer, there are some great opportunities to learn coming up.

As I mentioned before, for the first time, one of the great breakout cultural Twitter accounts of the last 18 months, The Cultural Tutor, is finally revealing who he is and sharing what he’s learned in building up a following of 1.5 million in a year.

The webinar with him is tomorrow, 9/6 at 12PM Eastern. Sign up here - Grow Your Audience with the Cultural Tutor

I highly encourage you to come, and I’ll see you there.

If you’re serious about wanting to write, these are free ways to learn from those who have seen success. David Perrell (the interviewer above, and founder of an excellent program called Write of Passage) has put together a few others coming up soon.

Tuesday, September 12th at 7pm ET - How to Start Writing Online

Thursday, September 21st at 2pm ET - Test Drive Write of Passage

Recommended Reading

My friend Chris Boettcher, a 10-time Iron Man athlete and doctorate-trained physical trainer, has woken me up to nutrition and health in a way that is far overdue. I love his content on Twitter, and his newsletter. Give him a follow and subscribe—you won’t regret it.

Who is the smartest person you know, and what has he or she taught you?

Until the next time,

Ben

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If you want to get good at anything, you need another’s eyes.

This is so obvious when we’re children, but when we’re adults, we often assume we can teach ourselves anything. (“There’s YouTube!”)

And it’s true, up to a point.

But if you want to take your hobby into the public eye—golfing, dancing, guitar playing, singing, carpentry—you need a guide to bring you up to the highest standard.

This holds for writing, too.

As more and more people write digitally as a necessary part of life (consider how much emotional and economic business is transacted by text messages), few of them will have the chance to work with an editor.

This is a shame because the mere experience of working with an editor can change how you write.

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When I began as a journalist, I was fortunate to be surrounded by great editors at The Atlantic.

I saw how carefully they read each piece. They asked questions, suggested rewordings, identified weaknesses, proposed additional evidence, and offered alternative lines of thinking.

In their hands, meandering anecdotes turned into enveloping stories. Sloppy arguments became subtle theses. Weak ideas were sharpened.

When I became an editor, I learned from their example.

The editor is a rare breed, but far from extinct.

This is why I encourage everyone who writes to get published in a place where editors still exercise their craft.

The experience of getting edited by a good editor is an education in itself.

Many people write well enough to get published.

More importantly, you may have experiences in the “real world” (which many journalists lack) that would make you desirable to publish, if you found the right venue and angle of approach.

The process is simple.

(In case you’re wondering how I know: I worked as an editor at The Atlantic and freelanced for years at Rolling Stone, Esquire, WSJ, The Atlantic, and other publications.)

Here is how you get published in The Atlantic:

1. You have a good idea. (A good idea is one relevant to readers of The Atlantic.)  

2. You send that idea (“the pitch”) in an email to an editor at The Atlantic. This includes some background on you.

3. The editor accepts your pitch. He or she will give a word count, deadline, and rate. “Submit 1200 words at $1.50 a word, due end of September.”

4. You write the story. 

5. The editors edit the story.

6. You revise.

7. The story is published.

The hard part is the execution.

I’ve helped several people go through this process, and the sticking point is usually Number 1: how to identify an idea that an editor would find appealing to publish.

I’ll dig into that in a coming email.

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What I’m Working On

I had a call last week with David Perrell, creator of the Write of Passage program. (Quoted above.) I’ve been an admirer of his for some time, and I’m impressed with what he’s built.

One thing that impresses me about his program is how it requires students to produce, give feedback, and receive it.

In effect, it’s doing what I just described.

You learn to edit yourself by editing others. You learn to write differently by being edited.

Everyone I know who has gone through Write of Passage credits it with transforming their writing.

I was pleased to be as impressed with David on the call as I was from his work.

I’ll be attending an upcoming free workshop he will be holding with the popular Twitter account, The Cultural Tutor.

If you’re interested, I encourage you to register and I’ll see you there.

Until the next time,

Ben

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I was lying next to my son in his bed, where I often spend half an hour in the evening to get him to sleep.

He turned to me.

“Is God real?”

I answered that I believed he was.

He thought for a moment, sucking his thumb and cuddling his doll.

“Why is there a God?”

This stumped me.

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While I’m familiar with some theology, I was not prepared to rehash the Argument from Necessity in terms accessible to a four-year-old.

Which is perhaps another way of saying the Argument of Necessity doesn’t do justice to the question.

The question is beautifully impossible. And beautifully human.

Why is there a God?

My son is at the age where ultimate questions about origins and destinies occupy his thoughts.

And increasingly often, his feelings.

It is an age most of us—all of us—pass through and forget.

We might think about death, life, and God.

But in the middle of life we mostly grow numb to existential dread.

Death? We worry about the death of our children, our spouse, our parents.

Ourselves? We take out a life insurance policy and consider the matter settled.

We have learned to play the game with our stakes on the table, aware that no matter how well you appear to do, you will eventually fold, the house will collect your chips, and new hands will be dealt.

The idea of death (if not the threat of it) returned to my household this week.

The whole family came down with Covid; and while it was a mild version, it brought back memories of the pandemic.

Two years in which the culture, society, and government were consumed with fears of sudden mortality.

The isolation. The strange shame of contagion. The measures we took to shield elderly family members.

It was a week of raw feelings. Exhausted, I lost my temper over tiny things — a dropped cup of orange juice, a child refusing to sit in the tub.

When asked to attend on death and God, your mind loses its grip over the mundane.

This is why mountain climbers don’t think of the peak. They think of the step in front of them.

The moment you look down is the moment you begin to lose balance.

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I had intended to write the email this week about why you might want to get published in media. I will have to come back to that next week.

Instead, I asked myself what feelings I could share with you.

One thing I’ve slowly learned as a writer (and a reader) is that words with emotion in them—real, human feeling—are the only ones we care about. They’re also the ones most uncomfortable to share.

What have you been feeling lately?

What I’m Working On

Next week, I’ll share my thoughts with you on the why and how of getting published. I made my career as a freelancer for a number of years, and it’s one given me more basic entrepreneurial skills than I realized at the time.

In the meantime, on Thursday, the price for the course I released on attracting the attention of influential people will go up. Get it before then if you’re interested.

Finally, an article I wrote on media theorist Marshall McLuhan for The Free Press should be coming out later this month. I read three of his books, watched and listened to dozens of lectures, and came out more impressed than ever. He was a prophet.

Until next time,

Ben

If you go to your childhood home, does another part of you emerge?

Are there places where a calmer self, a better self, comes out?

I’m writing you from one of mine.

This is the deck in the wood where I like to sit.

It’s one of the best features of a house that belongs to my family. We’ve been coming here, to Northeastern Pennsylvania, for more than 30 years.

Before its sale, I came as a boy for a tour on behalf of my grandparents. I remember walking down the driveway one January when I was five. The house was dark and cold. Nervousness and a vague desire to impress the agent made me comment that a piece of furniture in the corner was an “armoire.” This puzzled him.

Today, it is home both to dear memories, and moreso (as memories blur with age) to a state of being.

Here is where I did my deepest reading.

In my early teens, I spent one transformative summer reading books my father gave me: Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha and Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance.

I still recall the sensation of a stunning inner reality being peeled back and shown to me while reading each book.

While my body was in a dusty loft over the garage, my mind had stretched so far I felt forever enlarged by it.

At least, that is, when I’m here.

The geography of personality also has its negative side.

There are certain rooms in houses that may make you feel petulant and childish.

There are great cities that may make you feel instantly small. (I know some people are energized by New York. I feel crushed by it.)

There may be beautiful vistas that alienate you rather than embrace you.

As I get older, I try to resist letting the patterns and preferences of others dictate where I go.

So much of travel is spent trying to find a better version of yourself.

If you made a map of the world that reflected your feelings, it would look quite different from the “Best Places” list by Condé Nast traveler.

What I’m Working On

I’ve been on hiatus with the newsletter while I finished two courses for a cohort I’m helping to teach.

The first is on how to source and cut video clips for Twitter.

The second is on how to get your ideas featured in media.

I’ll be releasing both of them in the coming weeks. If these subjects interest you, please stay tuned.

Hope you’re having a wonderful summer wherever you are.

I’d love to hear what places bring out your best self if you’d like to hit “reply.”

Until the next time,

Ben

I’ve been going through Robert Greenberg’s lectures on the Beethoven string quartets for the Great Courses series.

(By the way: if have not yet explored the Great Courses available at your local library, I highly recommend checking them out. These are under-celebrated treasures of 21st century American life.)

Greenberg explains Beethoven went through two wholesale self-reinventions in his life.

The first came after his early years.

A brilliant piano prodigy as a boy, he was driven by his alcoholic father to make money and tour in the manner of Mozart.

His early career as a composer he achieved renown as a composer and virtuoso.

After moving to Vienna, he dashed off dazzling improvisations and won favor among the aristocracy.

By 1802, however, he was in crisis. His hearing was in decline. The depression this caused was so severe that Beethoven retreated to a town outside Vienna and composed a confession and will addressed to his two brothers.

It is called The Heiligenstadt Testament.

…what a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life - only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce, and so I endured this wretched existence

…

it was virtue that upheld me in misery, to it next to my art I owe the fact that I did not end my life with suicide

Instead of submitting to despair, Greenberg says, Beethoven decided to recreate himself as a hero.

He brought about this transformation not through warfare, but through his art.

To express this idea of himself as an undaunted soul, one who strives and ultimately overcomes torments in triumph, he had to craft an entirely new musical style.

From the 3rd Symphony (the Eroica) onward, Beethoven left behind the restraints of classical form in favor of a personal expressiveness that embodied this image.

He believed himself a hero, and through art he willed his heroism into existence.

Listening to the Eroica and the Razumovsky quartets gives you a feeling of this transformation.

The second transformation in Beethoven’s life is one I’ll revisit later. It’s what makes Beethoven still, to my ears, the most powerful and spiritually transcendental composer ever to live.

What I’m Reading

I once heard the researcher, author, and psychiatrist Ethan Kross asked what was the biggest misconception that he wished, as a scientist, to dispel.

His response was the pernicious idea that “venting” was good for you.

This writeup of his ideas from Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center is worth a read.

It turns out, however, that this type of emotional venting likely doesn’t soothe anger as much as augment it. That’s because encouraging people to act out their anger makes them relive it in their bodies, strengthening the neural pathways for anger and making it easier to get angry the next time around. Studies on venting anger (without effective feedback), whether online or verbally, have also found it to be generally unhelpful.

Over the weekend, I’d been thinking about how, as a father, it’s so critical to keep my temper in check.

The moment I relax my guard and let out a sharp tone, I find myself tumbling down a slope of increasing anger.

Like a flame, expressing the anger merely allows it to ignite.

When I posted about it on Twitter, I was surprised by the responses it generated.

What I’m Working On

The two lessons I’m preparing for the summer session of the Create, Publish, Profit program are coming along well.

I’m particularly eager to share my thoughts on how to get published in major media. It’s easier than you think, but like so many things, it just takes some insider knowledge to break through.

If you’re curious about that, the program is available here.

Hope your summer is going well.

Until the next time,

Ben

The author was a Canadian English professor named Marshall McLuhan.

The reader was Howard Luck Gossage, an ad man known as the “Socrates of San Francisco” for his ability to bring together intellectual salons.

He also had a knack for translating highbrow concepts into language that could be grasped.

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As the story goes (attributed to a 2012 biography of Gossage by Steve Harrison), Gossage was in bed reading McLuhan’s dense, and dizzyingly brilliant 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

He looked up from the book, turned to his wife, and said of McLuhan’s sometimes cryptic writing, “I get it!” and then added, “It needs to be filled in. I’m going to fix it.”

Shortly thereafter he had the Canadian professor on the phone and asked, “Dr. McLuhan, do you want to be famous?”

With the 53-year-old professor’s consent, Gossage and his friend Dr. Gerald Feigen, a proctologist and ventriloquist, spent $6,000 to fly McLuhan to New York and introduce him to the city’s tastemakers (including, and most importantly, novelist and influential journalist Tom Wolfe).

Without these relationships, he may have remained a well-regarded but obscure academic.

With them, he became a pop-cultural icon.

Throughout the second half of the 1960s, McLuhan had bookings on major TV programs, consulting contracts with Fortune 500 firms, and lengthy profiles in newspapers and magazines.

His ideas, albeit somewhat mangled forms of them, have become part of our common lexicon.

The medium is the message.

The global village.

And while McLuhan earned his fame — a captivating, hypnotic speaker, he dazzled even the brightest hosts with a ceaseless stream of ideas — the opportunity to earn it came from Gossage.

There’s nothing odd about this.

Beethoven would not have become Beethoven without the early support of generous patrons who connected him to resources, audiences, and future patrons.

Influential people beget influential people.

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It’s an uncomfortable truth that proximity to platforms — those who have an audience, a voice, a following — is the only way to be heard.

Not in 1795, not in 1965, and not today, is the economy of attention egalitarian.

That the greatest media theorist of the last 50 years needed to hack the systems of media to be heard would not have surprised him.

That’s one thing I’ve learned in my 15 years in media and PR: the difference between the renowned and the unknown is less a matter of talent than of who you know.

When I can, I try to help friends to leverage what I know. (That’s what I ended up putting in the course I released.)

I’ve seen mediocre people become famous, and worthy people go ignored.

How well are you being heard?

What’s Coming Next

On Monday, the program where I’ll be teaching two lessons opens up. The other teachers are great—honored to be among them.

I’ll be teaching one module on how to source and cut video clips for Twitter.

The other will be a guide on how to get yourself published in (or featured by) the media.

There are a lot of misconceptions, and not a lot of practical resources.

If you’re interested, you’ll be the first to know when it opens.

Until the next time,

Ben

PS - The first video I share that was liked by Elon Musk was this clip of Marshall McLuhan from 1977. If you haven’t seen it already: enjoy.

Father’s Day put me in a reflective mood.

I recently found a two-page childhood memoir by my grandfather, written at the end of his long life.

In it he tells how he learned his father died.

The week it happened, in 1930, his father had stayed up with him, teaching him pronunciation.

The next day, at his two-room school (with an outhouse), the teacher said, "You read as well as the A readers," and promoted him.

The night his father died, my grandfather, then 6 years old, heard a phone ring in the dark. There was "scurrying." He went back to sleep.

The next morning his aunt greeted him. (His mother was off dealing with the remains.) Tearful, she fed him porridge and sent him to school.

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She didn't tell him what had happened. He was the eldest of three.

As he was walking the two blocks to school, a little girl ran up.

"Your father died in a car accident last night," she said. "My mother heard it in the morning news."

Here the memoir says only this of his pain: "I remember it was a sunny fall day."

His mother was 26, now a widow with three small children.

She lived a hard life, he wrote. He said he prayed for her every night, into his 80s.

Behind every good father—which he was—is a good wife or mother.

The rest of his brief memoir is full of accidents and troubles that are remembered without pain.

There's the little neighbor girl who liked to be driven "fast" (20mph) in her father's 1924 Chevrolet. She died soon after in a house fire.

There's his brother, who suffered scarlet fever and had his leg crushed at age 2.

His father had lost two siblings. His grandmother was also widowed young.

In his era, death and sickness were companions of life. Family and friends came together to salve the pain.

Recognition of the fragility of life did not diminish the sweetness of it.

The last line of his memoir:

”Since I lost my dear father, it was compensated many times over by having my sweet little wife."

A few weeks ago, I took my boys to their grandfather's gravesite to meet him.

Rest in peace.

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Worth a Watch

On the subject of pain, memory, and survival—in recent weeks I came across this interview with Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and Auschwitz survivor. His reflection on writing, sympathy, and history as a sacred trust is moving.

"I would like the faces that I have seen, the fires that I have watched from a very near distance, should not be extinguished,” he says. “Neither the faces, nor the fires."

Wiesel watched his father die in Auschwitz, and lost his whole family in the Holocaust.

That he could summon the resources to write, to keep his memories of them alive without sinking into despair, is a testament to his strength.

What I’m Working On

In the coming days, I’ll be announcing something exciting and new. I’ll be a partner and teacher in a program that will run in July. Stay tuned for more on that front. My new course is a portion of what I’ll be covering there. But there’s more to come. Looking forward to sharing more details soon.

Until the next time,

Ben

PS - Thanks to the new paid subscribers. There are getting to be a number of you, and though I have said all along I intend to keep all regular content free, I am looking into whether there’s something I can do just for you, soon.