PicoBlog

Sorry for the break last week! One of us (Colin) had to take some time away from computer screens due to a poorly timed migraine – as if there are well-timed ones! In our last issue, we wrote all about how the skill of reading interacts with your developing mental representation of your target language, and outlined two strategies you might consider taking in different scenarios: reading early and reading late.

TLDR: WATCH THE VIDEO (click above) There’s a simple way to make people love (and actually use) your product: give them the ability to edit it.  In behavioral science, this is traditionally called the Ikea effect. What is the IKEA effect? If you’ve ever cobbled together an IKEA bookcase and convinced yourself that it’s the bee’s knees, you know it. Basically, it’s the disproportionately high value we place on products we’ve partially created.

Welcome to an occasional interview series in which I chat with interesting creative people about how and why they get good work done while staying alive. I like talking to (some) people. My friend Parker Molloy of is one of those people. We got to know each other years ago thanks to The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, and then became text friends, and now we are REAL-LIFE FRIENDS.

This interview took place backstage at the Bijou Café right before Carl Perkins was to do his first show in Philadelphia in years with a band that included two of his sons. It was a rare occasion and I don’t believe he ever returned. At the time he had a new album out that pretty much ended up going nowhere and I’m not sure if the album he talks about at the end of the interview ever was released.

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control environments. Today I am so excited to bring back an audio interview/podcast format. Carolyn Baker is the author of Confronting Christofascism: Healing the Evangelical Wound which was released in 2021. I’m so grateful to have this conversation, and for elders like Carolyn who help us name and situate where we are in American political and religious history in a compassionate way.

One of the nice things about doing John’s Music Blog is that I am not beholden to album cycles or touring cycles or any of the other promotional focal points that exist within the music business. I’m fine with all of that stuff, but sometimes it can be fun to chat with an artist for no damn reason… Just for the love of the game. Which brings me to Machine Girl.

Laura asked if her playlist could be 17 songs long and I couldn’t think of a good reason why not. Catch Sun June on tour with Wild Pink. Earlier this year, I took Laura Colwell, the lead singer of Sun June, to see some bison. If it sounds like a bit of a wild goose chase, that’s because it was; I had planned to walk us through a tame section of the Conservatory of Flowers, but it was mysteriously closed.

This newsletter has been quiet for some time, and while I have every excuse in the world — I have three toddlers, a new house, two cats, and suffered a bout of viral pinkeye which is, quite frankly, the type of disease they should use to torture information out of people — it’s mostly because I, for a while, lost the ability to write. Not the desire, mind you. The ability.

In 2004 I published a book title, ‘Post-Soul Nation,’ with the very Tom Wolf inspired subtitle - The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes.) The book was time line of key ‘80s events: Rev. Jesse Jackson’s two runs for President, the introduction of crack cocaine, the ravages of AIDS, Eddie Murphy, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, General Colin Powell, Oprah Winfrey, MTV etc etc.