Still summer

A new mixtape, 20% off sale, and 8 other 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. I’m having a 20% off sale on paid subscriptions! Becoming a paid subscriber gets you an exclusive email from me every Tuesday and keeps this Friday newsletter free for everybody. I haven’t raised my prices for paid subscriptions since I started, so for a measly $4, you can immediately get access to the entire archive, with stuff like a look inside of my notebooks, a tour of my studio, my guide to block printing, how I make color brush pens, motivational posters for your studio, and the 7 questions I ask myself when I don’t know what to do next. Get it!
   
   

   
   

2. “Still Summer” is a mixtape full of jazz/electronic/ambient music that evokes the kind of cool, spooky wind and crunchy leaves vibe that I pine for here in Texas when the fall equinox hits and it’s still 99 degrees outside. (It’s a cousin of another mixtape of mine, “Autumn Leaves.”) Here’s the tracklist:

   

   About the title: Not only does it still feel like summer here, a lot of this music is very still. It has a pulse, but maybe not a beat. The mix is a message to myself: It’s still summer — be still. No sudden movements yet. Estivate. Play dead if you need to. Like a lizard.
   
   You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
   
   

3. There’s a lot of Pharaoh Sanders on the mixtape, which is kind of funny to me now, because the whole vibe I was going for is probably captured even better on his last record, Promises, which was made with Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra. (Or maybe him playing “Kazuko” in an abandoned tunnel in San Francisco!) This week was also, perhaps not coincidentally, the centennial birthday of John Coltrane. (Sanders was a member of his final band — you can hear them go nuts together on Ascension and A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle.)
   
   

4. Every once in a while, I pick up a physics book I can barely understand. My current read is Lee Smolin’s Life of the Cosmos, which proposes that the universe evolved much like life on Earth evolved through natural selection. I learned about Smolin from Julian Gough’s The Egg and The Rock (see item #2 in my letter, “A Day Too Long”) and I was reminded of him while reading Eli Stark-Elster’s piece about childhood, black holes, and meeting your heroes. (Smolin is friends with another favorite physicist/writer of mine, Carlo Rovelli, who has a new book out called On The Equality of All Things.)
   
   

5. Much easier to understand: I got a bunch of Paul Johnson’s short biographies because my 8th grader needed to read a biography for English class. (He ignored them all and decided to take on Walter Isaacson’s 600+ page Steve Jobs biography instead.) I already read Johnson’s Mozart: A Life years ago, so I started Darwin: Portrait of a Genius, which goes perfectly with my recent devouring of the Aubrey-Maturin books. (Darwin on the HMS Beagle was obviously an inspiration for Maturin. Speaking of: Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is streaming in 4K on Apple TV!)
   
   Johnson also wrote Napoleon: A Life as part of the Penguin Lives series. I’m always frustrated that there aren’t more short biographies like this, but you can get a clue why the project was short-lived from this 1999 Los Angeles Times article, ”Penguin Lives: Here’s the Real Skinny”:  “Lipper put several million dollars of his own money into the project and owns half the business. Atlas, a writer for the New Yorker perhaps best known for his essays about how little money he makes, is the general editor for the series.”
   
   

6. I’ve been inspired lately by how many people I admire have moved to an analog notebook-based method of teaching. I really believe that in 2026 plain ol’ paper and pencil is the killer app. For example, my 6th grader needed to memorize the countries in the Middle East for a quiz and his dad got, erm, rather involved:

   

   A reader on Instagram suggested we should try out MapTap, a daily geography game, but I think there’s something about copying things out by hand that makes you learn them really well. (Remember when Al Franken got up and drew the entire United States from memory? I’d like to see a current senator do that.)
   
   Your kids are a great excuse to fill in all the holes in your education, which was partly the inspiration for my last book:

   

   
   

7. “Why you, personally, love a work of art is a fascinating question. Why you hate a work of art is even more fascinating, and often easier to articulate for some reason…. Conversely, ’what is art?’ is an incredibly boring question.” Dana Jeri Maier on the 11 things she learned in art school. (Her book Skip To The Fun Parts inspired my letter on the creative benefits of having a nemesis.)
   
   

8. Nature is healing: Athena’s owlet was released back into the wild, it’s Fat Bear Week, and I actually caught the night-blooming cereus in our backyard doing its thing:

   

9. Short pep talks you might need to hear: artist Tracey Emin and filmmaker Ava DuVernay on focusing on what’s inside of you that you have to give, not what’s outside of you that you’re trying to get.
   
   

10. The latest typewriter interview — our 30th (!!!) —  is with artist Esther Pearl Watson:

    

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to support this human-made, hand-rolled publication, take advantage of the 20% off sale and become a paid subscriber!

xoxo,

Austin