Water-seeking roots

Greetings and welcome to the new The Future Is Like Pie, now operating off of beehiiv (RIP tinyletter). I chose this platform because it offered a free tier for my subscriber level; that’s it, that’s the full extent of my decision-making. Fingers crossed now that a) beehiiv isn’t deliberately platforming fascists and b) the migration worked correctly. I’d ask you to email me if you notice anything not working correctly, but the only real snafu I can think of is you not actually seeing this, in which case, this sentence just ate itself. 

One of the changes (most of them, really) that come with this move is that I suddenly have a glut of bells and whistles in front of me. I liked tinyletter’s simplicity; basic formatting of text was really all I needed. But now I can even include images. I mean, heck. HECK

I can use nested headings. I can choose from multiple styles of block quotes. I need to build templates. I think there’s commenting functionality somewhere in here, and I just (on final edit) learned I can include emojis 🤯. I don’t think I could have kept the format of the tinyletter if I had tried; the beehiiv interface seems to demand selections about styling and information hierarchy that are, in fact, altering the way I use the words. It’s almost as if the content and the design have some kind of… some kind of relationship…? Sounds sus.

This platform shift has already prompted a few changes in my approach, but we’ll probably see more as I adjust to the new tools and take note of what’s working and what’s not. Perhaps I’ll end up paring the design back and recreating my tinyletter. Or perhaps content marketing is like the universe: ever-expanding, bound for entropy, inexorably drawn toward heat-death. So glad we’re on this journey together!

“A unified theory of fucks”

As far as I can tell, everyone I know is obsessed with the latest issue of Mandy Brown’s (always great) newsletter. As well they should be! It’s part meditation, part poetry, part pep talk, part ten-pound cuss. Run, don’t walk:

Venus’ moon

This is an incredibly charming and scientifically fascinating story from Radiolab host Latif Nasser. Read it the way I did through screenshots on tumblr (I’m not about to muck around on ex-Twitter in search of the original thread, but much luck to you if that’s your journey); there’s also a Radiolab episode all about it, though I haven’t listened myself. The story begins:

Lightning round

• I will accept no other canon for dwarf lore (tumblr)

• Tree-thinking and forest-thinking have to go together (Betsy Streeter)

• I have some philosophical questions about life, the universe, and PDFs now (Alex Chan)

• Another chef’s-kiss example of form design (tumblr)

• “4,000 of my closest friends and Willem de Kooning” (Cat and Girl)

February’s cause

The CDC’s Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) recently proposed new guidelines for controlling infections in hospital settings that, uh, didn’t really account for airborne transmission. A bold and creative choice in the Year of Our Pandemic Twenty and Twenty-Four! HICPAC has been asked to revise—help steer them right by signing this National Nurses United petition, which suggests they take, you know, basic germ theory into consideration, and the expertise of healthcare workers and public health advocates.

Buy my book

Please and thank you, many times over! It’s currently available as an ebook from the publisher—or check your local shops and libraries for the print version. Your purchases matter to me and other tech writers!