I want to start by acknowledging I have been super absent from the substack for the past 6 weeks or so. Things have kind of reached a fever-pitch in my personal and professional life, and it’s hard to not feel like what I’m writing doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the horrors™️. Recently a person I was good friends with for about a year was exposed for some pretty bad dude behavior.

❤️ Did you know that if you hit the HEART at the top or bottom of this post, it makes it easier for people to find this newsletter? (And makes my day!) This recipe originally appeared on my food blog, where it received rave reviews. It is now available exclusively on Substack for supporting members. Here’s what two readers had to say about this recipe: Today we’re taking a trip back to 1960’s America with a vintage bundt cake recipe called “Sock It To Me Cake.

Hi there. I was planning to write a goofy newsletter all about television shows but then yesterday morning I was in the bookstore reading poems and crying and thought, no, that’s better. So this is going to be about sad poems. Not just sad poems—death poems. Even within the subsection of sad poems that is death poems, there are so many kinds! Dead mother poems, dead father poems, dead husband poems, dying self poems!

I’ve been putting content on the internet for all of my adult life. The works ranged from security research, to open-source projects, to long-term writing on a variety of topics. In an earlier article, I extolled the virtues of publishing just for the sake of it: “The concepts in our heads are nebulous and ever-shifting. Putting them on paper forces us to pressure-test our assumptions and address gaps. You don’t need to be the world’s leading expert to write about a particular topic.

In 1858, William Ewart Gladstone – a former chancellor and future prime minister who was also, when not taking a slightly creepy interest in the moral salvation of prostitutes, a classicist – noticed something odd about the work of Homer: the world he depicts does not contain the colour blue. The only time the Greek word for the colour, “kyanós”, is used in either the Iliad or the Odyssey it refers to the eyebrows of Zeus: assuming the king of the gods was not some sort of Sonic the Hedgehog figure, that suggests the word then meant, simply, dark.