Some of you are getting this 〰️ in 〰️ out 〰️ newsletter for the first time and might be like "what is this exactly?" If that's you, it's because you were subscribed to my personal newsletter (Bucket of Eels). I realized it was silly to have two personal newsletters, and figured that probably if you signed up for that one you'd be okay with me adding you to this one. If that's not the case, there's an unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email! You probably know where to find it. I don't get notifications about unsubscribes because I'm not a sicko so you don't even need to feel bad about it! I'll never know!

〰️〰️ IN 〰️

These are things I read, saw, ingested, ate, listened to, or just generally thought about in the last month that I want to share with you. It's an incomplete list (obviously) but it's the stuff I'm still thinking about.

letterpress

I took a letterpress class at my art studio this month! I was a little nervous. I'm not really a 2D design person. I didn't come in with a sign in mind, unlike my classmates who came prepared. I'm not a graphic designer, or anything of the sort. I mostly make big abstract sculptural work, not nicely kerned text.

But it wound up being really fun, and I'm actually pretty pleased with my first ever letterpressed poster! Here it is:

I now have a billion ideas for future posters. And maybe I'll send some to paying subscribers in the future, if I get really into it. Maybe I'll even do a little shop? Shipping paper is way easier and less stressful than shipping pottery, so it feels less daunting than trying to sell my sculptural work which I've resisted for years.

Stay tuned for more letterpress from me. And in the meantime, you can find letterpress from actual legit letterpress artists at the shop associated with my studio. And if you're in the Bay Area, I definitely recommend the letterpress workshop at The Compound, which you can sign up for here.

glass brain correction

Last time I sent one of these, I told you about a brain that had been turned into glass by the eruption of Vesuvius. It turns out that not all scientists buy this idea. Nora Bradford wrote about the case at National Geographic:

Experts doubt multiple aspects of the recent finding, including how brain microstructures would survive this process and whether the material was brain in the first place.

“Personally, I find their claims to be rather questionable,” says John Mauro, materials scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “How can biological soft tissue be heated above [950 °F] without undergoing irreversible damage? The claim of attaining a perfect state of preservation is clearly wrong because of this irreversible damage, which necessarily leads to major changes in microstructure.”

The researchers with the (potentially) glass brain haven't released their data for further analysis, and so skeptics say that nobody can really verify their claims properly.

My one question about this, that I haven't seen answered anywhere, is what the scientists who are skeptical of the glass brain think that this shiny black thing actually is. Is it just some dirt or lava that wound up falling into the head? Is it something else? Clearly there is something physical that exists — what is it? What are we looking at?

It turns out this is basically the researchers behind the original paper's defense as well: “The material is compositionally and unequivocally organic in origin,” one of them told Bradford. “What organic tissue fills the skull of a man if not a brain?”

I'm not sure that's a great defense. This body is very old. All sorts of things could have happened since 79 A.D. I'm not an expert here, nor have I spent a lot of time with this paper, but it feels like "what else would be in a head" is not the world's most scientific argument. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Either way, Kelsey McKinney wrote a funny blog about the brain, so please do enjoy that.

a few new (to me) artists

I encountered some work I loved this month that I want to share with you, starting with this painting by Bill Hammond called "Six Placemakers." Something about this piece really speaks to me — the color pallet, the forms, the textures, I love it.

I also came across the sculptural work of Hannah Levy this month, and it's probably not a surprise that I'm really into it. I mean look at this!

And last but not least, my friend Suzanne Fischer introduced me to the work of Amaranth Ehrenhalt (what a name, eh?) who makes these lively color pieces.

One interesting thing about all three of these artists, is that some of their work really hits for me, and some of it really doesn't. There are Ehrenhalt paintings that I very much don't like. There are Levy sculptural pieces that don't work for me. "Six Placemakers" is, by far, my favorite Hammond piece of all the ones I could find online. And I can't exactly explain why — what makes this painting work for me, but that one, using the same color palette, the same ideas, the same kinds of strokes, doesn't? I don't know!

stop the bleed

As part of Fix It Fridays (something I wrote about in the last in/out newsletter) some friends and I did an informal Stop the Bleed training where we learned about how to respond to a situation in which there are big injuries — whether that's an active shooter situation, a car accident, a bomb, or something else like that.

We learned about triage in these scenarios (very different from how I was taught to triage in wilderness first aid classes), how to use a tourniquet (both a purpose made one, and how to make one out of gauze or a shirt or a belt), how to hold pressure on a wound, and how to pack wounds that might need it. It wasn't fun. The training involved asking a lot of questions about intense, terrible situations. I'm glad I did it, and I hope that I never have to apply the knowledge.

this tree

On our way to a hockey game (go Sharks) I saw this tree and I made us late so that I could stop and take pictures of it. Look! Look at it! Absolutely beautiful.

I showed this to a friend and they said it "looks like it's in the middle of telling every passing neighbor the JUCIEST secrets."

Abelard and Heloise

You know the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon? That thing where you encounter something, and then it's everywhere? I had that recently with a set of letters from 1128, written by two star crossed lovers Peter Abelard and Heloise (who is never given a last name). I came across the letters while I was assembling a huge corpus of religious text for an experiment I'm doing as part of PROJECT TEONANACTL (a riff on an old Flash Forward episode). The letters are listed on the Sacred Texts website as a sacred text. And I thought to myself, huh, I wonder what these letters are and why they're considered "sacred."

I'm no expert on what makes something a sacred text or not, but I can tell you that the letters are incredibly intense and arresting. You can read an early translation of them here.

I'm going to write more about these letters for paying subscribers soon, but as soon as I read them I started seeing references pop up everywhere. Lamorna Ash wrote about them in the inaugural issue of Amulet Magazine. When doing research for something else, I came across a Salvador Dali painting of them.

These letters, which I had never heard of, are apparently referenced and riffed on constantly. From the Wikipedia page for Heloise I learned that they've been referenced not once, but twice in The Sopranos. Their story is featured in the movie Being John Malkovich, and has been made into multiple broadway plays. Cole Porter referenced them in a song. Lauren Groff wrote a short story inspired by them.

And I get it. I'm obsessed with these letters now (and the academic debate that has surrounded them), and I have been talking to all my friends about the story of these two people and how these extremely old letters still feels shockingly modern. It turns out, heartbreak hasn't changed much.

additional links and such

• Outside of Story by Sheila Heti 〰️ "Thinking something logically through does not lead, in any way, to doing it. Thinking and doing are in some ways opposites."
• She’s One of Florida’s Most Lethal Python Hunters but the Invasive Creatures Still Have a Hold on Her 〰️ "Donna Kalil has plunged into canals in the dead of night, straddled two-hundred-pound serpents, and been bitten more times than she can count—all in the name of killing a thing she loves and playing a game she can’t win."
• Trust is consistency built over time 〰️ "Trust is earned, not something that is gamed out."
• Proof of human movement 〰️ I find these images so beautiful!!!!
• As I've been trying to diversify my news feed amidst everything, I've found Global Voices to be a truly incredible resource.

notes on PROJECT CUBENSIS

I got notes on my novel draft back from my agent! Absolutely terrifying, to be honest. I was half convinced she would pat me on the head and say "very cute, now let's get back to non-fiction," or "I can see the ideas here, but this draft simply doesn't work and you need to start over." The last time I sent my (former) agent fiction work he gave me some writing 101 handouts which really stung, and I think I was still a little bit wounded from that whole thing.

But Caroline did not say any of those things! In fact she liked it! There are things that need to be addressed — but none of them were a big surprise to me. In fact, when I sent her the draft I included at the end a list of questions for her about things I was thinking the draft might need, or places that I felt the story was weak or confusing. And she basically agreed with all my notes, and gave me some good things to think about.

Of course... now I have to... actually fix those things. Which is terrifying. I've never edited anything remotely this long before. And while I think I understand the problems fairly well, I'm not actually sure how to solve them.

〰️ OUT 〰️〰️

This is stuff I wrote, created, or published.

PROJECT TEONANACTL

I got through the first draft of a novella about faith, technology, and loneliness that I wrote about last in/out newsletter. In that one I said that I was pretty sure it was novella length, and I was right. The first draft sits at 29,666 words. This first draft has a bunch of holes in it that I know I need to go back and fill in, so it will likely be more like 35,000 words in the end.

Novellas are hard to sell, especially if you're not a published fiction author already. So who knows what will come of this. But I'm pretty pleased with it so far. The story takes place over seven days, and features two characters who develop an intense, deeply fucked up relationship with one another. I had originally dreamed of writing this as a screenplay, because it's a project that I see the scenes so clearly on, but I don't know how to write a screenplay and I certainly don't know how to sell one.

My next step is to go back through and fix/fill in all the stuff I know is missing from this draft. Then I'll probably send that official v1 to a couple of friends, and perhaps even my agents, and see what they think.

My big goal is to have two full drafts of fiction projects (both Project Cubensis, and Project Tonanactl) and my non-fiction book proposal finished by the end of the year, and so far I'm on track for that.

audiobooks!

I recorded my first ever audiobook this month! It came about by chance — a friend was complaining that he didn't love the voice samples they had sent over for his book, and I said "I'll do it!" I was sort of joking. But then I realized... why not?

The day of recording I was really nervous. I've spent hours and hours in front of the mic, but I'm also well aware that audiobooks and podcasts are in fact not the same thing. And in general, it's hubris to think that just because you're good at one thing, you'll definitely be good at a similar but different thing. Often, the differences are quite important actually! (There's a Mitch Hedberg joke about this: "When you're in Hollywood and you're a comedian, everybody wants you to do other things. All right, you're a stand-up comedian, can you write us a script? That's not fair. That's like if I worked hard to become a cook, and I'm a really good cook, they'd say, "OK, you're a cook. Can you farm?")

There were some little but big differences. For example, when I'm recording a script for something, if I rearrange the words a little to sound more natural for me, that's okay. I can turn "but it's not really a problem" into "but it's really not a problem" and that's fine. But for an audiobook, it's not. You have to read the words, exactly as they are on the page. (This seems obvious! And it is! But it's also different from a podcast script.)

So I flubbed a bit, and had to do pickups, and my very kind director had to stop me here and there to point out a word I had swapped, or skipped, or said wrong. I learned that I had been saying words like antennae and synesthesia wrong my whole life, which was surprising and fun. But overall I had a great time!

I'd love to do more audiobooks, and the director I had encouraged me to put together and submit samples in a few places. Maybe I'll get to do more!

(I don't think I'm allowed to say yet what the book was, by the way, but when I can I'll tell you all.)

I also:

• Filed a draft of an update for the Wirecutter menstrual cup guide.
• Wrote a blog for paying subscribers about resistance, art, and conflict. And the latest public in/out post.
• Wrote a post for the Tested newsletter about the new IOC president, some recent races that Beatrice and Christine went to, and why we should be careful with statistics around trans athletes.
• Went to some protests (I even made a sign).

• Learned how to fire a gas kiln in my ceramics class.
• Sold a pitch to Defector about volleyball.
• Saw Alexis Madrigal and Jenny Odell talk about Alexis's new book The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City
• Helped my union write a letter of support for a California bill that would require companies developing LLM's to actually disclose what went into their training data.
• Competed in my first ever powerlifting meet! It was very informal (no weight classes, no singlets) but even still I was super nervous. But PR'd my squat (250 lbs) and deadlift (300 lbs)! We will not speak about bench. If you're in the Bay Area and curious about lifting I cannot recommend my gym Bay Strength enough and my coach Haley Shevener who I would die for.

• Attended The Ambies, my first ever in person awards show! And Tested won for Best Documentary! Tested is a huge group project, and I always want to make sure that's clear. Please go check out the credits on the Tested page, every one of those people made the show better. I was very flustered so I flubbed my speech but here's what I wrote and meant to say:

Thank you to CBC, NPR's Embedded, and my team at Bucket of Eels for their tireless work on this series.

Last month, World Athletics announced new proposed policies that would ban all so-called "DSD athletes" from competition and bring back mandatory sex testing for ALL female athletes.

If we allow a government or organization to ban people from entire realms of public life like sports, simply because of the way they were born, that is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set. Today is Trans Day of Visibility. Trans rights are human rights. Intersex rights are human rights.

Thank you again, and may Tested one day be truly a historical podcast.

Here's a funny story about the awards ceremony: they only had one trophy. So as soon as you got off stage, you had to immediately give it back so they could give it to the next person. Apparently after the event you could take photos with the one trophy in front of a backdrop but I had no idea that was happening so I have no photos of the event really. Thanks to Eleanor for taking a video of my little speech and some photos! (Check out her latest show World Gone Wrong it's really fun.)

Okay, that's it for this one. Again, it's long, and I'm sorry, and it will absolutely happen again.