PicoBlog

There is a lot of bad news out there and no shortage of awful people doing bad things. On Molly Jong-Fast’s great podcast The New Abnormalthey have the “Fuck that guy” segment to highlight the awful people and on Joy Reid’s The Reid Out she offers the “Absolute Worst.” For balance I’d like, once a week, to focus instead on people who are fighting the good fight. I’ll let you know who my Good Guy of the Week* is get get us started and then you all have 24 hours to let me know who yours is.

Oh friends. I’m so excited (and completely tearful) to announce that my debut collection, Instructions for Traveling West, is finally available for preorder. The book will be released in April 2024, but you can preorder right now. If you’ve ever dangled in the dark, felt homesick for your unlived lives, or ached to fling yourself into the jaws of Whatever Comes Next, I wrote this book for you. Preorder now

About five months ago, I shared the news that I was collaborating with Google on a new AI-based tool for thought, then code-named Project Tailwind. If you happened to have missed that post, or are a new subscriber to Adjacent Possible, the quick backstory is that I have had a career-long obsession with using software to augment the research and ideation phase of my work as a writer, some of which I have explored in the “creative workflows” series in this newsletter.

As of April 11, 2023, Notes is available to all writers and readers on Substack. Visit Notes. We started Substack in 2017 because we wanted the internet to be better for writers and readers. We were dismayed with the clickbait and content farms, the listicles and liars, the cheap outrage and culture wars. We thought there could be something better if writers and readers were given more control and treated as a higher priority than advertisers, and if culture makers could find financial dignity without needing to sublimate themselves to attention games and corporate marketing budgets.

Just a few days ago, I sent my editor the second draft of my next book, The Infernal Machine, coming out sometime in the spring of 2024. We don’t have a subtitle or a design yet, but we do have a first version of what will probably become the jacket copy, and so I figured you all should be among the very first to read it. The Infernal Machine is a project that I’ve been working on for about four years now, dating back to when I was putting the finishing touches on Enemy Of All Mankind, my account of the pirate Henry Every and the clash between the nascent East India Company and the Grand Mughal Aurangzeb, a conflict triggered by Every’s brutal crimes in the Indian Ocean.

Welcome to The Rebis, a new publication exploring the connection between tarot and creative expression. It feels surreal to be writing these words. A few months ago, this was just an idea. As it so often happens, I was driving late at night when an image of this magazine jumped into my brain. It was early February 2022. My mind had been wandering. I was looking for an escape — from the world, from myself.

Today we’re excited to share the Substack Android app with you and your subscribers.  Android readers can now read, watch, and listen to their favorite writers in one dedicated space. Get the app now:  Download the Android app Our Android app offers a quiet space to read, where the work itself is given the spotlight and you’re not pulled into status games or trivial diversions. And it amplifies the network effects that already exist on Substack, making it easier for writers to get new subscribers, and for readers to explore and sample Substacks they might otherwise not have found.

Greetings from Barcelona! Even though it was only a week, it feels like the last edition of Message from the Underworld came out a million years ago. I don’t know if that’s because I’ve been so busy or because I’m so jetlagged that I never really know what time it is, much less the day of the week. I’m currently in a laundromat waiting to dry my clothes so I’m going to jump around a bit, but let me start with the big news first…

Have you ever been told you’re ‘a bit intense’, ‘very sensitive’, or even - perhaps - ‘too much’? If so, then this is the place for you. You see, I am the self-appointed queen of intensity, sensitivity, and basically being far too much. It’s something I have fought for most of my life, but I’ve come to accept my too-muchness not as an annoying trait I need to overcome, but as a major source of strength.