Hey y’all,

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

1. Love is not mind-reading. (Related: We love because we care.)
   
   

2. Your comments on my letter about when our expectations and reality don’t match up gave me so many things to think about, I wrote a followup post about how images can blind us.
   
   

3. “Find your voice”: I keep thinking about something writer John Hendrickson said during our great conversation last month: “We all have three voices: the one we think with, the one we speak with, and the one we write with.” (Another great conversation: City Lights uploaded my interview with Peter Turchi.)
   
   

4. Gear: I finally ponied up the ungodly sum for an Apple Studio Display and it is gorgeous and already making my digital work easier and more pleasant. Meanwhile, at the time of writing this, the brush pens I love are $7.70, the cheapest I’ve ever seen them. (I bought another dozen.) If you want to know more about the stuff I use in the studio, I made a page of all my gear.
   
   

5. TV: We are rewatching The Sopranos and it’s even better — and funnier! — than I remembered. I re-read this piece about why the show feels so right right now and I’m dipping into The Sopranos Sessions after each episode we watch.
   
   

6. Some good stuff on Kottke.org this week: sky collages, a memoir by a museum guard, an archive of In Our Time inspired by the Dewey Decimal System, and Prince’s legendary 1983 show at First Avenue.

   
   

7. Music: I’m listening to a lot of SZA after reading Danyel Smith’s NYTimes profile. (I also ordered Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop, just out in paperback.)
   
   

8. We had a Superb Owl Sunday and I’m so excited that Flaco The Owl has learned to hunt.
   
   

9. RIP Trugoy the Dove of De La Soul. RIP set designer Eugene Lee. (I love that photo of his studio.)
   
   

10. Can’t find the good idea? Perhaps you need the less good idea.
    

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a completely reader-supported publication. The best way to support it is to buy my books, hire me to speak, or become a paid subscriber:

xoxo,

Austin