Nathanael Yellis

When I worked in advertising, our design brief had three initial options for the overall style. They were traditional, modern, or other. 95% of the project briefs ticked the modern box. This was surprising: our firm did creative work for southern small business owners and southern politicians. They were, almost to a person, the old boys club members you'd expect. They were so conservative that I'm not sure they believed Pepsi to be an acceptable soft drink. It was only Coca-Cola and our clients were Coke classic incarnate. Yet, they asked for their designs to be modern.

Eventually, everyone buries their parents. Some of us have already had to bear that burden; it's coming for the rest of us. Whether your parents die tragically before their time or at a ripe old age, it's a lonely, sobering journey.

I spend a lot of time reading articles online. In 2016, I decided to do something productive with all of that reading. Inspired by my brother’s Sunday Evening Post, I began a weekly roundup of things worth the time to read.

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Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not WWW.NYTIMES.COM

This morning, I reviewed the last year's worth of posts on my site. Most of the posts were these weekly emails; I also published a few longer form articles. A year ago yesterday I published a retrospective: a requiem for Revue.

In John Updike's autobiography, he describes winters in Ipswich as dark and lonely unless you made your own fun. His set of middle class bohemians had their cocktail parties and poetry readings and volunteer choruses, all of which make excellent appearances in his short stories. But the biographic detail from his autobiography that struck me is the weekday trips to New Hampshire to go skiing.

Twice a week, I ride the train to Boston. My commute starts with a quick walk to the suburban station near my house, after forty minutes on the commuter rail, I either walk a mile or jump on the trolley to East Cambridge. The people watching is varied: sometimes it's townies heading to the big city for a day, there are some high school kids heading to school, and you get quite a few tourists. On the train, though, it's mostly commuters. We're a quiet bunch. Unless you sit with your friends, you're usually reading, sleeping, or staring off into space.

This year, HubSpot, like seemingly all tech companies, has incorporated AI into its product line.

A few weeks ago, a friend replied to my email about monoculture wondering why that essay (and the person who selected it) focuses so much on perceived shortcomings, flatness, and sameness, when there's so much diversity, creativity, and newness all around us? For ever example of few people wanting interesting degrees from their college, you can find experiments in higher education providing exactly that. For every corporate-inspired global aesthetic, you can find someone doing it entirely differently. My friend was right: Brink Lindsey sees a glass half-full, or perhaps sees things through his own funhouse mirror.