Thank you

A weekly tradition

Hello everyone.

Another week comes to a conclusion. Stack the Week is in the world and now it is available as a podcast, which means you can listen to it through your podcast apparatus as well as on Substack. I’m still doing all the writing and recording so it will sound like that is what I’m doing even though it may post right next to NPR.¹

The Stack the Week has become what the Face the Nation Diary was for me back in 2017, a way to work through the events of the week for the purpose of figuring out what I think. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” E.M. Forster didn’t say. (See who did say that in the footnote²) Its length is attributable variously to lack of skill, verbosity, genius hidden even from its author and the complexity of things like the role of rhetoric in violence, untangling incorrect first reports.

I wrote a piece about a NYT focus group this week because I thought its findings merited the effort but also as an act of discipline as I work to wean myself from the constant interruption of the algorithms. More on that later.

Thank you to all of you out there who have subscribed and who write in with your thoughts. It is very sustaining. I am grateful for your support.

We all have our struggles but to give you a window into my process, this picture illustrates the distance my office chair roams when I stand up to stretch. The floor is not level:

Off to the kitchen where we are going to take a chance on cooking duck and where I intend to get on the outside of something clear and bracing faster than it will take for the ink to dry on this message.

1. I discovered this week that last week I recorded Stack the Week on an entirely different microphone. I spoke diligently into the rig in front of me, but what was doing the actual recording was my laptop microphone, which gave the whole business the auditory quality of talking through a string connected to a Progresso soup can.

2. According to Quote Investigator, the phrase first appeared in the 1926 book “The Art of Thought” by Graham Wallas, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of London. Wallas suggested that the processes of thinking and expressing were entangled for the poet because the precise selection of words was crucial to success.