It doesn’t take much

10 things worth sharing this week

Hey y’all,

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

1. “Evil fortune does have some use: it is a good thing to be born in a century which is deeply depraved, for by comparison with others you are reckoned virtuous on the cheap.” That’s our old friend Michel de Montaigne. I’ve read a few pages of his Essays every morning of 2026, and every morning I find some wonderful 400-year-old line that speaks directly to my present moment. (Old books are time machines.) If you don’t know Montaigne’s work, check out Stefan Zweig’s short biography, written in exile during World War II. My friend Ryan Holiday loves the book so much he bought a thousand copies to stock at The Painted Porch before it went out of print. (Montaigne was an influence on my book Keep Going, and I wrote more about his famous tower in my letter, “Room To Think.”)
   
   

2. “Writers, we’re magpies, you know? We steal all the bits and pieces that everybody says as best we can.” Director Paul Thomas Anderson on stealing like an artist.
   
   

3. “Please put me in the company of first-class artists with good hearts and good minds doing meaningful work.” This profile of Noah Wyle and season two of The Pitt is excellent, even by Sam Anderson standards. (I was not expecting the appearance of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, which has been in our home library for years, but I still haven’t read.) The show is so intense I hadn’t really thought of it as comfort viewing! (As “competency p*rn,” sure.) “The real world is, yes, broken and foaming at the mouth and desperately in need of healing. But, at least while we’re watching ‘The Pitt,’ we begin to believe that there might be someone out there who can fix it.”
   
   

4. “Humor is… reasonableness. Reasonableness in the face of the ghastly serious people who have dominated the twentieth century.” The humor in writer Robert Stone’s work. (I just started his novel Dog Soldiers and it’s great so far.)
   
   

5. “If they passed a law saying I needed to draw with Procreate, I would quit art, convinced I could not draw.” Cartoonist Vanessa Davis on why pencils are everything. (Our tools matter! I switched from my Lamy Safari fountain pen back to my beloved Pilot Brush Pen earlier this week, and I immediately started drawing more in my diary.)
   
   

6. If you’d like to be drawing more, too, there’s still time to be part of my friend Wendy MacNaughton’s 30 Days of Drawing. Check out her Saul Steinberg-inspired exercise for a taste. (Steinberg is who I stole my “writer who draws” tagline from — see my letter, “Steinberg at play.”)
   
   

7. Miyazaki’s Sherlock.
   
   

8. Pizza night: Meg and I re-watched Billy Wilder’s The Apartment a few weeks ago, and we loved it so much we decided to give Some Like It Hot a go with the boys. It was delightful. I need more Jack Lemmon on my TV. And more Billy Wilder. And maybe more Marilyn! (“Where’s the bourbon?”)
   
   

9. “The chances are I spent more time standing onstage playing guitar and singing than any human who ever lived.” RIP Grateful Dead co-founder Bob Weir, who also loved to ride a bike. (I enjoyed Walter Martin’s tribute show.)
   
   

10. A typewriter interview with artist Tucker Nichols.

Thanks for reading. This hand-rolled, ad-free, AI-free, anti-algorithm publication is made possible thanks to the kind support of readers like you. To keep Friday free for everyone, buy me time to make you fun stuff like mixtapes and typewriter interviews, and get an extra exclusive email from me every Tuesday, become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin

PS. I was stoked to see this whole rack of my books at the World Book Fair in New Delhi. (My books are always hanging out in cooler places than I am!)

photo:@booksmandala