Hello friends! It's been a while! You likely signed up for this after reading one of my essays on Medium, my personal website, or seeing something on Twitter. I send this thing every few months, mostly a wrap-up of stuff I'm working on and thinking about — all ending with a sweet flag. See past issues here. Now, to the newsletter:
The Italian Market Festival in South Philadelphia. Memorable moments include a greased pole climb and lots of tacos.
It's a newsletter of big life/work updates!
We announced a brand new season of Pilcrow House events!
Pilcrow House is an event series in Philadelphia founded by my wife Allison and I. The premise is simple: we rent a private room at Philadelphia's best restaurants and invite an expert to discuss an issue important to our country and culture with a small group of ~10 people. Previous guests include Scott Belsky, Taylor Lorenz, and Tim Carmody.
We just announced the Fall 2019 season:
- 9/18 - Dan Runcie @ Zahav on the economics of hip-hop (🚨there’s only one spot left!🚨)
- 11/4 - Sarah Tabor @ Osteria on the future of agriculture in America
- 11/20 - Matt Stoller @ The Fitler Club on monopolies and the future of the Democratic party
- 12/10 - Jillian Richardson @ Giuseppe and Sons on America's loneliness epidemic
Read more about each event on the Pilcrow House website. And you can purchase a season pass to all four here!
Pilcrow House was founded to be an antidote of sorts to the national, very-online discourse. If you find yourself missing candid, informed conversation I’d love to see you there.
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I have a new gig!
This month, I start my role as Director of Content at Crossbeam, a local startup here in Philadelphia building tools to create better partnerships. I'm excited for this next step because...
- I greatly respect the work of the founding team who have built and exited multiple Philadelphia startups.
- I greatly respect the investors in the company including First Round Capital, FirstMark, Hubspot, Slack, and Salesforce.
- Those working the partnerships space are underserved.
- It's a chance to build a content operation from scratch.
- After 2.5 years of remote work, I was ready for an office. Very ready.
I’ll write more about this later, but a good summary of the opportunity and excitement around Crossbeam can be found in FirstMark’s blog post about funding the company.
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The final issue of “The Discourse”
In my 2018 year-end update, I wrote about the importance of focusing.
So in order to focus more on the two projects above, I published the final issue of “The Discourse” my newsletter with 2,000 subscribers about the way we talk to each other. You can read the final issue here, which goes into more detail about why I think the project ran its course. And, if you’re interested, you can still purchase the poster “14 Rules for Staying Sane Online” for your home office or workplace.
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Other recommendations:
- The burn of “liking [x] is not a personality.” Gets me every time.
- I used some of my time between gigs to summarize my recent career learnings in this piece: What I wish I knew five years ago about building a career in content
- My final article for InVision was this interview with Nir Eyal, who has some unexpected takes on tech addition. In short, we should learn to manage our tools, not abandon them.
- David Brook’s book The Second Mountain has had a profound impact on the way I look at careers, relationships, and life planning. If you find yourself growing tired of the whole “finding your passion/purpose” discourse, I highly recommend it.
- I read The Dark Forest and regularly return to its lessons on humanity. It’s a haunting sci-fi read, and one that expands beyond normal sci-fi tropes.
- My friend and former business partner Christopher Wink’s treatise on the hard questions the journalism world needs to ask itself: ‘Journalism Thinking’ doesn’t need a business model. It needs a call to arms.
- Not a Newsletter, an ever-updating Google Doc by my friend Dan Oshinsky, former director of newsletters at The New York and Buzzfeed.
- You should subscribe to Little Futures, the consultancy launched by Tom Critchlow and Brian Dell, two of my favorite media and internet thinkers.
Official newsletter flag (for now):
A recent trip to Chicago reminded me of the city's incredible flag—which is a bit of a guide to the city's unique geography and history. The four 6-pointed stars represent defining moments in the city's history, each its own fascinating Wikipedia deep dive.
From Chicago Magazine they are: "Fort Dearborn, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 [aka the world's fair], and the Century of Progress Exposition of 1933–34." The blue stripes represent the North and South branches of the Chicago River.
America's third-largest city is true to its midwest values: it humbly builds and rebuilds, forever improving on the work of those that have come before. Its architecture, waterways, and history are incomparable to any other city in the U.S. Its scars and shortcomings are not hidden. And yet, Chicago doesn't need your recognition. I rarely see conversations comparing and contrasting Chicago to any other place. It is comfortable in its own skin.
I wish you the same, dear reader.
--Sean