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April 2026

  • Planted:

As April turns to May, I’m sending my seventh clipping from the garden: a collection of what I’ve been writing and reading since December.

And before that, if I could quickly break the fourth wall: reply to this email if you wouldn’t mind. I’m sending from a new address, and replies help build its reputation so that future email won’t be condemned to spam. (Or you can of course unsubscribe at the bottom—no hard feelings.)

Writing

Yesterday, April 30, the application window opened for the 2026 top-level domain round. That means from now until August 12 companies can apply to own and run new .words (the part of a domain to the right of the dot). If it’s anything like the first time this happened in 2012, we can expect hundreds of applicants competing for thousands of new words. In other words: domainia. The big, public “Reveal Day” will likely be on October 7. All that buzz makes this year a fun one to be researching and writing about domains.

Here’s a selection of writing from the book’s newsletter and a couple brief notes from the garden:

Reading

Last week was National Library Week, and I’m grateful to the Cincinnati Public Library for free access to so many books (and free printing, among much else). I’ve continued to check out print books instead of a want-to-read list, which means our house is decorated with books stacked and strewn about. For a handful of those books I wrote up notes in the garden, linked here:

For other books I didn’t get around to planting notes, so I’ve written a few words on each.

Mindstorms by Seymour Papert, a still-resonant book from the 1980s about computers and learning. I nearly doubled the thickness of the book’s top corner with dog-ears and took pages and pages of notes, which I hope to write up in the garden soon.

Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch. Another one with a litter of dog-ears in my copy. It’s a perfect intersection of two primary interests for me: words, and the internet. As the back cover blurb says, “Language is humanity’s most spectacular open source project.” In the vector space of my head this book neighbors Algospeak by Adam Aleksic and Word by Word by Kory Stamper.

Sourdough by Robin Sloan, whose fiction is great but whose nonfiction really reverberates in my head, like Manic technology. I also got a copy of Robin’s Aspire Zine: “Information technology should aspire to the speed & privacy of the printed page.” I’m excited to aspire to that model with my own book’s digital format(s). If you’d like to borrow my copy of the zine’s e-book, ask me—I’m eager to test out Robin’s e-book experiment. And if that last sentence was confusing yet intriguing to you, the zine will make things quite clear (it’s only a ten minute read)!

Networks of New York by Ingrid Burrington, who’s working on the second edition. If you live in New York and consider yourself to be even a little bit of an internet or infrastructure nerd, I’d recommend it.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. It was sad and beautiful (it made me cry) and captured the complexity of family and other relationships. Its premise and format—letters sent and received by the protagonist over multiple decades of her life—well illustrates that writing by mail (and email) is its own form of communication unlike any other. Sometimes the receiver isn’t ready or capable of listening, but the words will wait. When writing, unlike talking, you can rewrite, rearrange, reconsider, reorder. And the receiver can read, reread, reconsider.

The Oracle’s Daughter by Harrison Hill, about a woman growing up in and escaping a cult. The book is thoroughly researched and reported nonfiction that reads like fiction. Harrison interleaved America’s religious and cult history in chapters between the main narrative. My favorite sentence from the book:

Change so often happens on a gradient: Blue is still blue until somehow it is purple, the shift is hard to pinpoint but irrefutably there. (58)

Reading about writing

Over the past year I’ve been eating up meta books about books and writing, like Alia Hanna Habib’s book linked above, searching for insider takes as I continue to piece together how the traditional publishing world works. Speaking of, I’ve been listening to Planet Money’s podcast series on the making of their own book. It’s total catnip for me, and I think broadly interesting for anyone who likes walking around bookstores.

And on Monday, I’m leading the first of six discussions of Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer at the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati. That first session is sold out, but if you’re interested let me know and I bet we can make room!

-Pete