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Hello friend,

I'm in Austin over the 4th of July weekend to visit family. Every time I come back to Texas I have incredibly mixed feelings about how this town is metastasizing away from Richard Florida's utopian vision of a "Creative Class rising."

He predicted Austin was going to be a melting pot of young technologists & artists enjoying music, culture, and creative experimentation while they were building new companies together. The future would be invented in these intellectual crucibles. Area code 512 was to be an idyllic sleepaway camp funded by venture capitalists and unicorn startups. Talent from around the world would pull up their roots and flock to Texas to experience tacos and the "Live Music Capital of the World".

Invest in hipster coffee shops instead of sports stadiums and economic prosperity will follow.

Hello friend,

It’s been over a year since I last visited your inbox. If you don’t remember me or simply don’t want to receive any more of these letters every week, just click unsubscribe. No hard feelings.

On Friday, we launched a new MIT Museum website, and started our 100 day countdown to the opening of the Museum in its new building at Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA (October 2! If you’re in Boston around that time, hit me up and I’ll make sure you have a ticket waiting).

Below is an image from the first floor “Commons,” which serves as a gathering space, portal into the museum offerings, and the hub of retail activity (tickets, museum store, and a cafe).

Hello friend,

Do you remember the way your first computer smelled?

When I was quite young, maybe 7 or 8 years old, my dad came home one day with a plastic briefcase. Inside, ensconced in grey protective foam, was a device I couldn't quite comprehend when I first saw it.

Hello friend,

Thank you for all the outpouring of kind words for my newsletter last week . It was a huge catharsis to write it, and I was so touched that it seemed helpful to many of my readers. I’m still working through responding to the many of you who sent me a note. In the meantime, please keep your pandemic stories coming, and I’ll keep trying to write back as soon as possible.

So I was tempted to make this week’s newsletter about .

Hello friend,

It's been a very long while since you've heard from me. A lot has happened since I last showed up in your inbox.

Below is an extended, personal essay about COVID-19, my brother's death in January, and how technology is both empowering and crippling me as I continue to process what happened. It's heavy. I had a good cry multiple times as I was writing it.

If you'd instead like to start your weekend on a more upbeat note, I understand, and I would suggest deleting this letter right now or putting it away for some other time.

Hello friend,

Uhhhmmm… Happy New Year?

This week, we watched unprecedented events unfold at the United States Capitol, and as I am writing this, we don’t know how many more twists remain in this Shakespearean drama.

I regret my jokes at the end of last year about how “it couldn’t get any worse than 2020.” At the very least, to the extent that this country is relevant to the rest of the world anymore, we have a lot of explaining to do in 2021 and beyond.

There’s something about December that sends me into a frenzy of trying to wrap up projects as if I’m trying to make up for not being as productive as I could have been all year.

Resolutions are unmet. Projects are incomplete. Life is still in disarray.

Obviously, it’s all in my head, but Decembers tend to be a terrifically unhealthy mix of holiday slowdown and productivity fiction. Of course, it’s 2020, and I think there are probably even more reasons to go easier on myself this year.

I wrote a tweet earlier this month.

I have a confession.

Somewhere in middle of Act II of Hamilton, I think between "The Adams Administration" and "We Know," I fell fast asleep. This was the original cast on Broadway, mind you, and I was sitting in some of the best seats in the house. I was so close that I could see the actors' sweat and King George's spittle fly across the stage.

Apparently I was snoring quite loudly, disturbing other people around me. However, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the commensurate professional that he is, didn't seem to notice and the show continued flawlessly. I woke up during the curtain call as someone next to me stood up.

Hello friend,

Due to my choices, I died many, many times when I was a child. Luckily, I kept my fingers inside the pages and could always undo my mistakes.

My brothers and I grew up with a shared library of Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) books. These non-linear stories put the reader in charge of the narrative by introducing a decision tree. You start reading on the first page, and the soon book confronts you with a series of choices where you flip to a different page depending on what you want to happen next.

Hello friend,

This is another Bricolage episode of the newsletter. From the first Bricolage:

I made a plan for weeks like this, where an extended essay on a single theme is a bit out of reach for me. Every once in a while, I will publish a much shorter, skimmable (but hopefully still surprising and joyful) email.

These smaller newsletters will contain one or two quick thoughts and links about Soulful Computing that I may have found over the past week. Sometimes I'll use this opportunity to provide updates on topics covered in a prior email. These letters might exist in that taxonomic space somewhere between a Twitter post and a short blog article.

If you're enjoying these newsletters or if you have any feedback, I'd love to hear from you.

(Originally posted on November 3, 2020)

Hello friend,

Today is Election Day in the United States in the middle of a pandemic. Citizens will participate in a presidential election that will be a crucible for the American form of Democracy.

Hello friend,

Aboard the Lunar Module Eagle (LM-5), Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were 30,000 feet above the moon surface and rapidly descending. It was July 24, 1969, and The Apollo 11 mission had been proceeding relatively smoothly. About 4 hours later, the astronauts would make history as a man took a small step onto the moon.

Something went wrong.

Hello friend,

Dak Prescott, the 27-year-old quarterback for NFL's Dallas Cowboys, suffered an especially gruesome ankle injury last Sunday. I don't recommend looking it up. Suffice it to say, his season is over, and his career as a professional athlete forever altered.

The Cowboys were hosting the New York Giants at their home field in Arlington, Texas. The AT&T Stadium is one of the few NFL venues that is permitting people to attend the games during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even with the seats only filled to 25% capacity, 20000 fans slipped into stunned silence when Dak hit the ground. They then roared with appreciation as he rode a cart off the battlefield.

Hello friend,

When I started this Soulful Computing newsletter project, I promised myself that I would prioritize consistent publication. I’ll send out a newsletter every week, no matter what. People talk about a productivity technique called “don’t break the chain.” It’s often misattributed to the comedian, Jerry Seinfeld. From the doist blog:

Hello friend,

Dressed in a long-sleeved, untucked white shirt, he climbs onto a platform in front of the audience. For the next ten minutes, he says nothing at all as he looks out into the eyes of his followers. Each has paid a small fee to receive this gentle, loving gaze. A woman bursts into tears, the intensity of it all overwhelms her.

After this first of many gazing sessions, he retreats backstage to recharge. In this interstitial, facilitators guide the acolytes through meditation and healing sessions. Someone stands up to testify that they no longer suffer from chronic back pain. A woman tells the crowd about how the gaze will open their minds to new realities.

Hello friend,

I had a meeting with a colleague a few days ago, and she requested that instead of a video chat over Zoom, we should pick up the phone and have an old-fashioned audio-only conversation like human beings.

Our chat turned to phone calls on landlines and what it was like when entire households shared the same phone number and the clicks of someone picking up the extension in the other room, “MOM! Get off the phone!”

Hello friend,

Time is weird in 2020, wouldn't you agree?

I've been thinking a lot lately about a practice I learned from my friend, Jamie Zigelbaum, when we were working together at his studio in the, to put it mildly, "chimeric" building at 33 Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

In the late afternoon, every person at the company stopped work for a few minutes to write up a note about the day. We'd post these notes in an email thread or Slack channel, and they were as honest, personal, and transparent as they could be in a quasi-public forum. We'd read them privately, and mine would always run too long.

Hello friend,

Dan Bricklin's professors at the Harvard Business School thought he was wasting his time creating an electronic substitute for the paper ledgers he and his classmates were using to complete their coursework. In the 1970s, data entry was for secretarial pool transcription and the technicians keeping the mainframe oiled and calculating. Harvard graduates shouldn't sully their hands in such details.

The professors didn't realize that Bricklin's invention would forever change business practices and give birth to the Personal Computer revolution within the next decade.

Hello Friend,

Happy Upgrade Day.

You are on an operating table, immobilized, but fully awake. You glance sideways and see the brain implant in a sterile package marked with the Neuralink logo. It is smaller than you anticipated.

"You may feel a little pressure," says the robotic surgeon, but you don't sense anything except a faint vibration and cool moisture.

Hi friend,

I recently joined a global study group.

I spend so many hours with these people during the pandemic that I now call them my friends.

They have no idea that I exist.

Hello friend,

I took the Apple Watch for a long walk last weekend. It did something unexpected and unattractive. I'm left wondering if I have any place for it in my heart, anymore.

You see, we've had an off and on relationship for the past several years.

In the beginning, though, it was a seduction. I was walking by the Apple Store in the Oculus in New York City on my way to somewhere that now seems forever lost.

Hello friend,

Let's talk about source code. Here's a program.

Right now, your instinct is to immediately delete this newsletter, thinking you've made a terrible decision.