Hi friends,

Greetings from Austin!

I think I've spent more time writing in the past week than at any point in my life. I've been working on an updated Ultimate Guide to Writing Online. To my surprise, the project became so expansive that I think I'm ready to turn these ideas into a book. As of now, I plan to publish this beast of a guide in early August and then spend the next few years fleshing them out into a book!

Here's what I want to share this week:

1. The Paradox of Abundance: The average quality of information is getting worse and worse. But the best stuff is getting better and better. My favorite analogy for this is health, where obesity rates and the number of people in incredible shape are both rising. The takeaway is that markets of abundance are simultaneously bad for the median consumer, but good for intelligent ones. Here's my short piece on it.
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2. ​We're Hiring a Student Success Lead: Hundreds of students take a Write of Passage course every year. Soon, it'll be thousands. This hire will be our student's go-to liaison whenever they have an issue. They'll ensure every student feels heard and ready to take on the journey of learning to write online.
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   ​Want to work with us, but don't think this role is a fit? Here are all our Write of Passage job openings. ​
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3. How Morgan Housel Writes: Morgan’s book, The Psychology of Money, has sold more than two million copies. This video distills a conversation between him and I, on the process he used to write his book and become one of the most popular financial blogs in the world.

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Today's Finds

​The Geography of Nowhere: Why are American cities so ugly and indistinguishable from each other? Why is the vast majority of what's been built in America over the past 80 years so depressing, and soul-sucking? This book answers these questions, walking through the history of American architecture. It begins with the first pilgrim settlements and eventually explores the car's impact on cities and suburbia. My biggest issue with car-centrism is the inequality and atomization it produces. Cars destroy community. Long distances between work and home lead to long commute times for the poor. When people are always in their cars, they stop valuing the kinds of public spaces that make Western European cities so delightful. The book can be summarized in one lyric from the Counting Crows: "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." If you're looking for a YouTube video on the same subject, I recommend this one from Wendover Productions.

​The Story of Oprah Winfrey: Oprah might be the most successful media personality in American history. This two-hour podcast episode is the best explanation of her story I’ve seen, from the adversity she faced as a teenager to becoming one of the wealthiest women in the world.

​How Airplanes Fly: The physics of flight has interested me ever since I was a kid. I took flying lessons during high school, in part because of a program for Bay Area teenagers called Young Eagles, which allowed kids like myself to fly airplanes for free. Yes, it was as cool as it sounds. To this day, I still turn my head whenever a plane flies above me. This article explains the science of aerodynamics as well as anything I’ve ever seen.

​Quentin Tarantino’s Writing Process: In writing, there’s a precious liminal state that occurs between the time you stop writing and start transitioning into the normal world. It’s like waking up. Though you’re technically awake in the first 30 minutes after your eyes open, you aren’t fully aware of what’s going on. That’s why Tarantino gives himself time to wander during his workday. Here’s a clip about his “write, wander, plan” methodology and a longer video on how he wrote Inglourious Basterds.

Richard Wagner: I’ve long been familiar with Richard Wagner’s music, but only recently did I begin to understand its tense history. At once, Wagner’s work set the stage for the kinds of dramatic movie scores you see in movies like Interstellar. His music wasn’t just sound. It was theater. But at the same time, his work has always been associated with antisemitism, in part because he was Hitler’s favorite composer. But that’s what makes him such a fascinating person to study. As the music critic Alex Ross said: “With Wagner, you never leave reality, and everything sublime and magnificent and moving in Wagner is inseparable from this corruption, this darkness, this evil. And I think that makes him a very human, unfortunately, exemplary human phenomenon, where the greatness and the darkness are all mixed together because that’s who we are as a species. And Wagner really exemplifies our species, in some ways, in terms of this mixing together of creative and destructive energies all at once, and you can never separate them — if that’s not too drastic.” Damn, that’s good. To learn about Wagner, I recommend Alex Ross’ interview with Tyler Cowen and this one on Open Source.