Summer Roundup! (2026)
Space and Time: A collection of recommendations and updates
Looking back I am surprised and a little bit sad that this is the first official “round up” post of 2026. In July no less!
In my best year, I hit 10-12 of these. Given my love for curation and recommendations, these are important to me.
But here we are! Given that this year is already proving to be exceptional with respect to my round up posts, I decided to experiment with the usual formatting of these. Instead of distinct sections (reading, podcasts, projects), everything is intermingled. Take what seems interesting, à-la-carte.
For the future version of myself reading this, these were the months where I
Went to Rio for my fourth time with Clutch. This was the first time Tessa joined. We had a delightful time exploring together, heading to Ilha Grande and being surrounded by mountains and all that water. Months later, when on Lake Travis, I’d find myself daydreaming about being that far south again and getting teary eyed.
Went to Paris (for my first time ever), Kate’s wedding, and Switzerland (for the first time ever). I will try to always remember biking around the overlapping streets together, turning out onto the broad views of the Seine as the sun was setting, that odd angry man who ran the bistro we stopped at for dinner who I witnessed punch himself in the face, all those pastries (and that particular breakfast croissant sandwich from Désirée). And remember the wine nights with Luke and Rod, Kate and Remi. Don’t think we could ever forget the Hilma Af Klint exhibit, overwhelming in scale, glowing! Tessa gifted me a Louise Carmen notebook and we customized it in their tiny store together. Months later, I’d sit down to write in it for the first time and a full short story would spring onto the page in a single sitting at Switchyards. And don’t forget the long gorgeous drive to Switzerland, the electric car fiasco and the jovial hacker at Avis, the musical cows like wind chimes, the summertime meandering through the evening streets of Bern, and all the rest.
Turned 30 and we celebrated 3 years of marriage
Happy summer everyone!
My conversation with Matt Webb is out.
Matt Webb is a writer, inventor, and the creator of Poem/1, a clock that tells the time in AI-composed verse (my very own Poem/1 is sitting on my shelf as I write this, after Matt raised ~100k on the kickstarter).
Matt and I talk about “design pathfinding”, why inventing in the AI era means making things before you fully understand things, and how jokes, demos, and small experiments can reveal unexpectedly serious possibilities. Matt walks through the origins of his app Galactic Compass (an app which simply points to the center of our galaxy at all times) and Poem/1, along with his approach to note-taking, writing, Kickstarter and storytelling strategies, and building a creative practice around curiosity. Matt is exceptional at staying sensitive to the feelings objects evoke and following strange ideas wherever they lead.
You can also check out the first interview of this project with Keegan McNamara of Mythic Computers here.
“Listers”: a bird watching documentary
Watch this indie documentary! Two brothers live in their van for an entire year trying to see or hear as many birds as they can, pursuing what is known in the bird watching world as a “big year”. Why?
1) Quentin was stoned and flipped through a bird book
2) "That's a good way to learn something, trying to do it at the most extreme level"
This is a perfect example of what my favorite docs have in common: an authentic scrappiness regarding the documentation aspects, genuine passion and ambition often about something seemingly mundane or obscure, a cast of oddball characters, plus the bonus of showcasing experts at work. It shares many virtues with my favorite doc of all time, The Parking Lot Movie.
I made myself an experimental app for tracking books I want to read in one place.
It works from basically anywhere on the internet (instagram, goodreads, twitter, iMessage, etc) and each cover links to the original source where I stumbled into it. It is using Google’s free OCR API (1000 images a month are free) to extract title and author too, so it’s clean data + gorgeous covers. I call it “wtr” (pronounced ‘water’), as in “want to read”.
This entire acoustic set from Big Thief is wonderful, amidst a verdant Irish spring.
But I particularly love the last song ‘Space and Time’. This is the song’s marvelous debut according to Pitchfork, though I’ve found plenty of live takes of it from 2024 shows.
I keep a bucket list of shows I haven’t seen yet and Big Thief is at the top of that list. I recently heard in an interview with them the probable secret for why I am so drawn to their live recordings: they view live shows as a different kind of practice, as a way to experiment with their familiar songs. You get the sense that their songs can go anywhere and they often go to entirely new places than the ones on the albums.
How the so-called “attention crisis” may be a “curiosity crisis”.
This fantastic essay from John Paul Brammer, How I learned to read way way more, resonates with how I’ve maintained healthy reading habits in a digital world. John discusses it poetically without becoming too abstract. I think this quote capturing how John stopped fighting his own attention by becoming more playful with his reading sums up the spirit nicely:
“I had to cooperate with the zigzag”
I redesigned my website
My site got a whole lot simpler. The 2024 → 2025 era of the site was defined by an early 2000s interactivity and could generally be called sprawling. It had digital gardens, a page with the best cup of coffee I’d had recently, marquee scrolling text, and other fun stuff like that. But in 2026, I felt a pull towards simplicity.
Introducing, the Dumbish Phone
Tessa and I have discussed replacing our iPhones (like everyone) for a long time. I actually thought about starting a company that was basically what Light Phone has become back when I lived in New York in 2017… We’ve thought about buying one of the many “dumb phone” options like the Light Phone, Meadow or even tinyPod which turns your Apple Watch into a delightful iPod style “phone”.
We’ve thought about buying simple flip phones and we’ve considered getting rid of cellphones altogether, but have never taken any concrete steps to try and add constraints and friction to our phones.
But this past week, Tessa did some hacking with her iPhone to make it a shell of its former self and I quickly copied her. The north star was to try and make it more like an eReader. We’ve both now switched our phones to black and white, removed all of the apps that lead to doom scrolling, leveraged Apple’s native “focus” filters to limit which sites and apps and contacts can reach us and be reached, and added screen covers which make our phones feel like eInk. It’s been a pretty good experience so far, here is what our phones looks like now.
Here are the apps I’ve kept on mine (in addition to the obvious ones like Messages, Maps, Notes, etc): Pocket, Printernet, Soft, Brick, Podcasts, Spotify, and ChatGPT.
10 rules for students and teachers, from John Cage
Some things which stood out to me: consider everything an experiment, find someone wise or smart and follow them, the only rule is to work as work will always lead to something, separate the creative self from the editor self, enjoy yourself, read everything you can.
Faith in eventually
An old gem I recently discovered from the designer Jason Fried about trusting that you’ll get there. On its face, this short blog post is about pursuing a new product or design, but of course, it’s really about trying to do anything meaningful and difficult.
Ending the round up with a request
I am on the hunt for more wonderful documentaries and have wanted to find one which follows a professional novelist from the start of a new novel to the publication of the novel for a while now. Does anyone know of something up this alley? The LLMs suggested two which I plan to check out: 'Scribbling: A.S. Byatt' and 'Imagine: Ian Rankin and the Case of the Disappearing Detective'
That’s all for this summer roundup!
Remember: blessed are the curators! Consume wonderful writing, videos, interviews and the like with the magic of the internet, but don’t forget to do your part to help others find the good stuff <3
Jake