A quick update

And a return.

I’m back in the Bay Area after two weeks of travel (SFO —> Toronto —> New York —> Philadelphia —> Oakland), much of it by slow, glorious rail (Maple Leaf, Keystone, Pennsylvanian, Floridian) and some of it by agonizing air (Air Canada/United, Southwest). I expect to publish some travel notes and photos here in the very near future; if you’d like a preview, check out my recent Instagram uploads and poke around in my Bluesky feed.

Spotted in Toronto in the window of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario. Mouse over the image to read the text, with its admirably correct hyphenation. P.S.: I’ve rarely felt so ashamed to be a USian.

I’m working on my monthly linkstack (here’s last month’s); on a review of Stefan Fatsis’s new book, Unabridged: The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary (love that title and subtitle); and on critiques of some brand names that have caught my attention.

And here’s a follow-up to the Typepad situation I wrote about last month (“RIP Typepad”). After several attempts I managed to export all 3,400+ of my old Typepad posts, dating back to 2006 (!), and to import them to a new WordPress blog. Well, most of them: As I write this, those old posts are filtering into the new site: 940 of them, now 955, now 1,155. Maybe someday all 3,400 posts will land there. Most of the images and comments are also showing up, so that’s a relief. Of course, all the internal links will turn into pixel dust after September 30, when Typepad as we knew it disappears from the face of the internet. And some formatting is still off kilter¹. But at least I’ll have an archive of posts I worked hard on, like “Where Hillary Clinton’s Marketing Went Wrong,” from 2016; and “Word of the Week: Longtermism,” from 2022. And much, much more.

Finally, welcome and thanks to everyone who subscribed and followed this newsletter during my two-week vacation. Maybe I should take more time off! It seems to be good for business, not to mention my perspective on the world.

1. Why isn’t anything ever on kilter?