Going to a spa or a hair appointment has an added layer of stress when you’ve got skin allergies.
I don’t need clean or organic beauty (though I do prefer it). It’s not about being fancy so much as I need it to be free of synthetic fragrances like Limonene.
Limonene is a naturally occurring, colorless liquid terpene hydrocarbon (C10H16) found in citrus fruits and other plants, known for its citrus scent and used as a flavoring agent, solvent, and in various products like cleaning products, cosmetics, and supplements
Somehow I became allergic over the years to a number of fragrances both natural and synthetic. A clean beauty list of “no no”ingredients has become common as everyone from Sephora’s to BeautyPie agreed on things like keeping products free of paraben, sulphate and Methylisothiazol.
It’s a little harder to justify not including citrus or lavender unless you are trying to cater to the most sensitive skin. Both are quite popular for all kinds of personal care. I have to be careful of almost all soaps.
Some of my interest in preparedness (and in travel size cosmetics) surely comes from having to carry around basics from shampoo to shea butter. It’s a pain to have to consider but also a pleasure to always be prepared for any scenario.
A friend of mine has managed a career as a tastemaker of the sort that hardly exists any longer. It’s hard to find a term that’s even appropriate without both identifying them and understating the power of their influence.
Influencing the direction of culture isn’t so much a job as a point of view with a paycheck. It used to be a bit simpler. We had a hierarchy of influence caped by physical realities.
Maybe your pastor or your employer influenced your daily culture. Even when I was younger it wasn’t much broader than your local news and what you could get at the library. Now we live in a mass market of influence.
Influencer, creator, journalist, editor, blogger, hell we even have Twitter accounts that move culture now. So it’s not surprising that it can be hard to keep track of who is truly influential and who is just popular.
Being heard out and being really listened to and considered are very different things. It’s a weird moment for taste. Especially culturally. We keep having vibe shifts. The people who are paid to make sense of it all are as clueless as the rest of us.
The only thing anyone can seem to agree on is that it’s all very chaotic. Which is a point of view with which I’m quite familiar. And naturally that unsettles me. Once everyone agrees on a cultural moment is exactly when the tastemakers look for something new and when the masses really come with the big bucks.
Much of our winter has revolved around various maladies that require the help of professional from doctors to industrial hygienists.
Alex and I (let’s be honest mostly Alex) have been scheduling a lot of consultations and procedures. While I’ll certainly caveat that selling a service does generally mean being friendly to the customer. But it really feels like like we’ve got friendlier people in Montana.
Even our government is friendly. We’ve has cause to call the county and it’s just so pleasant to engage with a kind, present and helpful fellow human.
We’ve really run the gamut. Our trash needed replacing after a hard winter and the company who does our pickup sent us a new one the next day. A recycling service for mattresses excitedly told us about community programs. The eye clinic got us in the day we called. And on the follow up let us add in an eye exam since we were already there.
We are all accustomed to the frustrations that come from indifferent corporations with private equity minders. Healthcare is by far the worst offender here.
So it’s nice to be reminded in a vulnerable world that American towns are filled with everyday people like you and me. And that genuinely makes me happier. We are all in this together and being friendly makes everything for everyone.
You can quibble a bit on the start (right there in the name alluding to its discovery in 2019) but this second of March the week where America finally started changing behaviors. Within two weeks we’d have the infamous “flatten the curve” discussion. What a shitshow those early days were.
My life changed in a lot of ways that are probably recognizable to other Americans. My already digital life became how business was done. I moved back home. I rethought my relationship with institutional trust.
We lived in New York when we were locked down. Alex and I didn’t leave our one bedroom apartment for three months except to go to the CVS.
Coincidentally we’d been in the middle of our landlord trying to evict us for filing a complaint with the department of buildings over broken elevators. That got stopped. As soon as it seemed safe to leave city we rented an Airbnb in the Hudson Valley. The next week protests broke out. We had lived above City Hall so we got very lucky.
Figuring out where to land and the shape of our lives was a process. The Airbnb phase felt stressful as the summer ended and the urge for permanency felt overwhelming. We signed a lease site unseen for a townhouse in my hometown of Boulder Colorado.
Much of the rest of these past five years have been subsequently documented here on this blog. We found our way to Montana. A lot happened in those intervening years. None of it felt like it happened very fast. And yet here we are.
Given the amount of illness that seems to be plaguing folks this winter I’m surprised we’ve not all decided to hide until Spring thaw.
Every event seems to be a super spreader. Our physical immune systems are shot and I doubt our emotional defenses are much better. Everyone is predicting informational dangers myself included.
It is hard out there and we all experience it in different ways. My medical improvement sprint is plagued with logistical issues, the mold situation in our basement is overwhelming, and yet I have hope that I’ll make it.
o many people are dedicated to building solutions to problems, big and small, that I can’t selfishly let my any of my problems stand in my way. We have to all pull forward together.
I spent a few hours with a portfolio founder working on their fundraise today and I felt my optimism. I enjoyed the flow of work even as the enormous task of raising capital is filled with risk.
I’d taken a risk on directional play earlier in the year. I believe in the founder. They are making their way through YC. I can see their path emerging with every step forward. And I see hope.
I’ve not in one thousand five hundred and thirteen days of writing in a row set forth a m standard for how I might quit. Four years (or 216 weeks) is plenty of time to come up with a criteria for making a decision.
I have in that time embraced the haziness inherent in self trust. I’ll just know when it’s time. That’s obviously a rationalization. I assumed that circumstances would decide for me which meant I’d never need firm criteria for stopping. It would just happen.
Given my health and the general state of the world surely in this long timeframe some calamity, crisis or mishap would keep me from writing one day and that would simply be that. The chain would be broken.
It has not yet happened. No forcing function has stopped me from my writing practice. And I’ve not yet set worth anything firm about how I’ll know.
So far 2025 has tested me. There are many short posts. I have been hampered by health and home issues which sorely make me want to give up some days.
I’ve tried to included more sporadic “linking and thinking” to make my writing space more blog-like and less essay oriented. Backing away from narrative forms is a fine way of introducing flexibility into one’s writing.
I can’t help wondering if I should introduce a forcing function and create a set of criteria for when I’ll stop. But the truth is I’m scared to give myself a clear way out when I’m struggling. Perhaps it’s better to keep that trust that I’ll know.
I am in a challenging spot at the moment with our household mold issue and my attempts to accelerate changes in my care protocol for my autoimmune condition.
When things are challenging physically I find myself in tension. I want to share and be open in my experiment to write every single day. I am afraid that I’m doing nothing but share weakness by doing so.
I don’t want to telegraph only strain, illness, and struggle. Sure things are hard at the moment, but I am more than my current local minima conditions. Things are quite good.
Just because I feel too weak to articulate all the areas of strength doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I just can’t put them front and center right now.
This frustrates and even angers me. Large long term projects and investments are thriving and rather than focus on those I am curling into the fetal position and wishing I could disappear until I’m able to advocate loudly and proudly for my wins.
For as exciting as the last few weeks have been it’s hard to feel like as it’s the dead of winter. I’ve not gone outside in several days as we are in -20 land which probably contributes to fatigue. Thankfully it’s bright and sunny.
I don’t have anything useful to say as being in the middle of multiple health projects is a time suck. Any excess energy goes to work as there really is no way of stopping progress. I wish I could keep up as it’s exciting.
Partially because things are so “out of bounds” I can feel more comfortable prioritizing long term gains and changes. I think I can achieve a health level up and fixing it now prepares me for strain later.
I take this approach on everything now. The short term has been set by decisions in the past and the medium term is highly uncertain. Steer correctly now so future you is set up to succeed.
What I think is most useful to remember about media narratives is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Coined by Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame it helps remind experts to not expect expertise from normal people.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Most of the commentary you will see on any given topic of media interest will be a fog of war mismash of competing narratives and ambitions.
Just remember that it’s wise to be wary of any certainty when it comes to what’s going on. What we know changes on what we know and it’s odd how easily we forget that.
The paper of record just doesn’t know what to make of a political constituency that it has been determined to view as a billionaire bad boys club. And so after almost a decade of hostility between media and Silicon Valley, it is clear the vibe shift has come in the house style at the New York Times as it is dedicating a lot of ink to “Tech Right” and how it views the world.
The editors appear to sense the shift of power. And with new beats come new talent. The Grey Lady has hired an opinion columnist James Pogue who actually does reporting with these elusive new right and tech right figures.
Old timer readers might appreciate that this new talent shares a name with a past technology columnist. Pogue. David Pogue reviewed gadgetsfrom 2000 to 2013.
Despite being millennial, James Pogue is an old school reporter. His popularity derives from his deep reporting. He picks up the phone and talks to people. He shows up to events and reports on what he sees. He does it with verve and style but lets his subjects speak for themselves.
If you enjoy learning how the media sausage gets made Isaac Simpson has an interview with James Pogue on his newfound status, his reporting style and how he ended up at the center of the political and cultural moment.
It is here I do full disclosure myself and say I’ve been interviewed by himtwice and we have social relationship that includes being on a very similar professional and social circuit. Because he actually goes to report on things in person we’ve seen a lot of each other over the years. A reporter grows with their beat.
If you are interested in what establishment media has to say about this new power base of new right, tech right and a rising counter cultural elite and prefer your news to be deeply reported then make yourself familiar with James Pogue and his work.
He has a nuanced understanding of the personalities, always his homework, and incredible access to his sources. I guess this is what happens when you ask questions and then let your subjects speak for themselves. If anyone has the secret to the media rebuilding its trust with readers my money is on James Pogue.
