About time

10 things worth sharing this week

Listen to my new mixtape on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube

Hey y’all,

Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week:

1. “There’s only one season lately. There used to be an agreement between the seasons, that they would all stay for three months, and then go wherever seasons go when they’re not where we are. Lately there has been no spring, no summer, and no fall. Politically, and philosophically, and psychologically. There has only been the season of ice. It is the season of frozen dreams and frozen nightmares. A scene of frozen progress and frozen ideas. Frozen aspirations and inspirations. They call the season ‘winter.’ We call the song ‘Winter in America.’”
   
   

2. “So far, it’s been a bleak streak over here in America! You know what? It’s a famine of beauty. It’s a famine of beauty, honey! My eyes are starving for beauty.”
   —André Leon Talley, The September Issue
   
   

3. “The old is dead, and I don’t know what the new is. The only way to find the new is to start different things and see if there’s something that can come out of experimentation.” That was the filmmaker David Lynch, who we lost one year ago. (You can look out the window and tell what season it is outside, but it can be hard, sometimes, to look inside and tell what creative season you’re in.)

   

4. “So much that is best in America is a state of mind that you can’t export.” I spent a lot of time with the novelist Robert Stone this week, reading his Vietnam-era novel Dog Soldiers, his excellent Paris Review interview, and some of his nonfiction. (Stone tried to tell stories of who Americans are. Our prophet, he said, was not Orwell, but Herman Melville: “Moby-Dick is the most uncanny act of incantatory prophecy known to fiction. Unlike Nineteen Eighty-Four, it’s nearly unreadable, talking in tongues and uttering visions.”) Stone began his literary career as “The Least Merry Prankster,” so I’ve decided it’s time to read Tom Wolfe’s book about them, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
   
   

5. “I had a girlfriend, and she was from Washington, and her father worked in the government, and she shocked me by saying — I must have been 19, 20 — she said, ‘Oh my god, my father thinks that Eisenhower is such an asshole.’ [Gasp!] ‘Somebody talked about a president that way? Your father said that to you and he’s working in the government?’ She said, ‘Yeah, he’s really a a dumb asshole.’ I said, ‘Presidents can be dumb assholes?’ I didn’t understand the world.” That’s journalist Seymour Hersch in the Netflix documentary about his life and work, Cover-Up. (A little uneven, but I was really taken by the first half, about how he broke the Mai Lai story, Vietnam, Nixon, etc.)
   
   

6. I had a little bit of trouble figuring out the right vibe for my January mixtape, About Time. I went with: “the sound of having a smoke on the front porch in the dead of winter.” You can listen to it on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.

   

   Every time I try to make these mixes more conceptual or abstract, I freeze up. But if I just start with a good leadoff track and ask myself, What do I want to hear after this? the mix just sort of makes itself. I think this is also true of writing and drawing, too: if you start with big, conceptual, abstract ideas about what you want the thing to be, it’s easy to freeze. But if you just start with one good line and ask yourself, What comes next? the thing builds itself.
   
   

7. “It’s amazing what cutting a bad sentence will do. Or taking out a bad paragraph. Cutting is essentially a kind of sculpture. It reveals the face inside the piece of rock.” RIP Austin novelist James Magnuson, who directed the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas for more than 20 years.
   
   

8. JetPens picks the 47 best pens for 2026. (My personal favorites: Pentel Portable Pocket Brush pens, Lamy Safari fountain pens, Pilot G-2 Bolds, and Pentel Sign Pens.)
   
   

9. Yahoo! adapted a bit from the “Demons Hate Fresh Air” chapter of my book Keep Going for their piece, “52 fascinating people reveal the tiny habits that changed their lives”:

   

   Illustration: Andrea Chronopoulos

   Years ago, we adopted the unofficial United States Postal Service motto as our own: “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom … stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
   
   

10. The best way to read the internet.

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xoxo,

Austin