October 2026
- Planted:
I’ve been finding my footing with this newsletter. It’s an incomplete mix of what I’ve written and read since June. I’ll start, sheepishly, with a personal milestone: the first time seeing my own name in a print magazine, or as they say in the biz, my first byline—
WIRED
This summer, WIRED magazine sent me to ICANN86 in Spain to learn about top-level domains and the people who make them. The story was published online earlier this month. At 4,000 words, it’s the best approximation yet of what my book will be like—interviews with primary sources, thoroughly researched and fact checked, real narrative nonfiction with characters and scenes. The work of reporting and writing the story was stimulating and challenging. I met many kind, fascinating people in the domain world, and the WIRED folks (editors, fact checkers, etc.) were terrific to work with. I hope you enjoy reading, and if you do, consider forwarding to a friend. (Oh, and I promise it has nothing to do with cat-camgirls, despite the cover art.)
I also wrote a column for WIRED lauding CSS, the styling language of the World Wide Web. It came out online and in print last month. The premise of my article: CSS gets short shrift, which maybe has to do with sexism, but it’s a really cool programming language, and people care how things look! Lots more good stuff in the WIRED Women Issue, btw, like Maia Hibbett’s The Price of Eggs.
Writing
A few weeks ago I visited and wrote about my 40th and 41st US states: Wisconsin and Minnesota. Both decidedly something to write home about. +2 Midwest. Which, I’ll say—I think I’ve absorbed Midwesterner as a facet of my identity. (Although I think Midwest is a misnomer and that Ohio should be Mideast and Minnesota/Wisconsin Midnorth.)
Aside: Why is it that I like writing on airplanes so much? It almost makes me want to book a round trip to nowhere every so often just to write. Almost.
I gave a talk, er, mini workshop I guess, at Startup Cincy Week on October 5. The talk was titled “Your corner of the internet,” and it was about making personal websites. (Thanks to all who came!) To collect my thoughts ahead of the talk, I wrote an essay re: why personal websites.
I have a new silly life goal: to get a word in the dictionary. Not just any word—abottom. The elevator pitch is that it’s useful—shorter than “at the bottom”—and easily understood—because of its analogue, atop. More information on the infosite I created, abottom.org.
Spread the word!
The possibility of inbox zero ensnares me.
My career goal is enjoying Mondays as much as Fridays.
I often forget: Run, write.
From the book newsletter, for domain nerds and the domain-curious: Reveal Day brought us .taylorswift, .agent, .good & .bad, .fart, .beijing, .ihop, .etc, etc. (not a typo). Also: The Public Suffix List is “just a list”. And: Domains by the numbers.
From the Val Town blog: Ethical cold outreach.
A couple weeks ago, my coworker Charlie got a cold email from a startup with a link to their “personalised” video pitch. I put scare quotes around “personalised” both because that’s literally how they described the video over email and because it turned out to be thoroughly impersonal trickery: the guy in the video was not a person at all. He was synthetic, either fabricated entirely or maybe a clone of the human who created him.
Essay partly inspired/informed by Evan Ratliff’s podcast Shell Game.
Reading
James Somers’s Word of the Day email newsletter is among my very favorite writing on writing. I find myself sending certain words to certain word-nerd friends almost weekly. You can tell that James is not just thumbing through a dictionary for a random word and transcribing its definition. The definitions and examples come from what he’s heard and read and written (in the wild, as they say). Each day’s writeup is short, usually one to four paragraphs. I like the medium: a new word just shows up in my inbox, and if it doesn’t catch my eye, I skip it, but most mornings I read it (you can guess where). He’s been going since January 2025, so by now the archive serves as its own little dictionary.
If you like James’s Word of the Day, you might also like Ingrid Burrington’s weekly Perfect Sentences newsletter. Is there a monthly Outstanding Paragraphs (or somesuch) newsletter I don’t know of?
Maia Hibbett’s feature on egg-freezing company Cofertility is really good. Women can freeze their eggs for free, but there’s a catch: half the eggs are donated and sold.
It’s balancing the interests of, essentially, four different parties at once. There are the intended parents, made vulnerable by the financial risk they assume; there are the people who will one day be born from these eggs and may have untold numbers of half-siblings swimming through the world; and there are the donor-freezers, who are essentially two different clients in one, with different interests on each side of the hyphen. It’s a money-making model bound to test human psychology.
Adam Aleksic’s reporting on everything essay (~700 words) is worth a read for readers and writers of “cool, smart” longform journalism (guilty as charged, and scare quotes because it’s a self-conscious hamster wheel trying to keep up with what’s culturally cool and smart). Per Aleksic (who wrote the terrific book Algospeak), Gonzo journalism—i.e. ~participatory journalism—is back in:
I went to that pro-data-center party, just like I went to the anti-data-center parties in New York City. It’s the same incestuous swarm of substackers and journalists accidentally interviewing other substackers and journalists.
The article is short, so I’ll resist the urge to continue quoting and instead let you read it, if you’re interested.
I liked David Owen’s piece on The American Religion of Self-Storage Facilities.
There are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined.
So America’s religions are, one, religion itself, and two, self-storage. The above fact about the number of self-storage facilities is staggering, and if you drive across the country I can attest there are churches freaking everywhere.
Some other good longform I read this month: Casey Cep’s Barbara Kingsolver profile in The New Yorker; Ian Urbina’s The Secret Life of Passwords; Nathan Heller’s The New Age of Reading in The New Yorker (titled in print as “Books Everlasting”).
Books
Searches by Vauhini Vara is one of my favorite books I’ve read this year, and Vauhini Vara is now one of my favorite writers. I planted quotes & notes in the garden.
I also read Vara’s excellent Bloomberg piece on Pangram, a company of the moment squarely in that Venn diagram middle I occupy between the worlds of writing and technology (see additional longform Pangram write-ups in WIRED, etc.).
The Design of Books by Debbie Berne, which I read with the writers’ book club at the wonderful Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, is another favorite of the year for me. I planted a few garden notes in February, but I have so much more to say, which I hope to write down sometime. In short: I absolutely love the book—not only its subject matter but also Berne’s writing. I learned last month that she passed away tragically in December from brain cancer. Amazingly, she wrote and designed her second book, Cookbooking, in the two years between receiving her terminal diagnosis and passing. Oliva Peluso wrote a nice article about Berne’s work and life for the The San Francisco Gazetteer.
I re-read The Correspondent by Virginia Evans for a Zillennial book club discussion, also at the Merc. In April I wrote a few sentences praising the book. I’ll add now, after a second read and two book club chats, that it’s a highly-readable and -recommendable book, crossing generations and reader types. It’s also a good nudge for all of us to lean into letter and email correspondence, which doesn’t have to be serious or heavy. It can be a slower, pleasant way to keep in touch. This newsletter is one way for me to do that. To those of you who have replied over the years, thank you, I enjoy those conversations! And for those who haven’t, consider replying if anything comes to mind (now, or later), and we can strike up a correspondence!
After that I read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, prompted by Evans’s references to it in The Correspondent. Hats off to the cover designer for the easter egg in the title letters: a subtle blue hue drawing out four dispersed letters, together spelling out J O H N (the name of Didion’s late husband).
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm is a fascinating case study of journalistic ethics. This book has it all—a true, dramatic story with a meta story surrounding it that involves the author herself. Notably, the book has no chapters, not even Parts. And it doesn’t need them—it flows just fine. It’s like reading a 150 page longform magazine article.
I, like many people, am way into You Can See Everything. If you liked the Fielder-Holmes meta game, I highly recommend Malcolm’s book. It’s pretty short—there are no chapters, and it reads like a longform magazine article (which is indeed how it started).
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott is another catnip writer-writing-about-writing book I liked. (See also: Stephen King’s On Writing, John McPhee’s Draft No. 4, etc. My excuse lately for reading all these is to vet books for the next writers’ book club at the Mercantile.) Quotes and observations in the garden.
I picked up Little Blue Dot by Katherine Dunn from the library, and I am almost positive no one checked it out before me because the new book smell was so rich (and more to the point, it had just come out). I was quite excited because the premise—how GPS changed the world—sounds similar to my book: something that we use every day; a technical topic that seems narrow but has a surprisingly fascinating underbelly (probably, hopefully). And I love the title. So I’m curious how she shapes the book: does she avoid the topic-not-a-story trap; does she build the narrative with a cohesive spine rather than discrete parts; how much of it is history, how much is technology explainer, how much is pure stories that happen to involve GPS; etc. I’ll admit so far I haven’t been hooked, maybe because it starts with old war stories (that don’t even involve GPS yet), which isn’t really my thing. I’m hoping to crack this one open again soon, though! Oh, and I didn’t know GPS stood for Global Positioning System.
I also read The Address Book by Deirdre Mask. It’s not related to Dunn’s book except that it also struck me as a close comp to my own book. Even closer actually, subject matter wise (physical addresses instead of web addresses).
I read The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz. It is solid, page turning fiction. The main character is a writer, so it has a lot of self-aware reference to writerly clichés and culture. Which I welcome, still being pretty green to calling myself a writer and having missed most of the traditional channels (MFA, working for a publication, etc.). The plot of The Plot—without spoiling much—is that the once-promising-now-struggling novelist has a story (a plot) so good and so unique that his book is inevitable, impossible to screw up. So I ended up wondering the whole time whether this author herself had an inevitable plot. And I don’t know, I mean, I haven’t read enough novels to know all the plots, but I guess my flight—I read this instead of sleeping on a red-eye—flew by.
Strangers by Belle Burden is a readable book. She might have been financially dishonest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she was emotionally dishonest. It had bright spots for me, and I’m mostly bummed that the drama around her credibility gets in the way of productive conversation to be had about financial literacy, gender roles, and divorce. It made for good discussion in our Zillennial book club at the Mercantile. One member summed it up by saying, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I hated everything about this book, but I couldn’t put it down. 5 out of 5 stars.”
Books by the Banks
Looking ahead to November...Cincinnatians—I’ll be at Books by the Banks on the 14th. Hope to see you there!
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From the Midwest,
Pete