Growing up in New York, first in the city and then later in Albany, a young Herman Melville made frequent trips to stay with his uncle, Thomas Melvill, who lived on a farm near Pittsfield, in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts. In 1850, Thomas decided to sell his property. Melville, now with a young family of his own, arrived that summer for what they believed to be his final visit to the area. It was during this fateful trip that Melville learned that the Brewster farm, consisting of 160 acres abutting his uncle’s plot, was up for sale. Fueled by impulse and nostalgia, he borro ..read more

I’m writing this from a rental property, on a hillside overlooking the northern reach of the Taconic Mountains. A key feature of this property is a small outbuilding, designed and built by the current owner as a quiet place for visitors to work. Spanning, at most, twelve feet square, it features a daybed, a heating stove, and a desk arranged to look outward toward the distant peaks. A ceiling fan moves the air on muggy afternoons. Here’s a view from the desk: This rental property, in other words, includes a canonical example of one of my all-time favorite styles of functional architecture: t ..read more

When I visited London last month, a large marketing push was underway for the paperback edition of Chris van Tulleken’s UK bestseller, Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food…and Why Can’t We Stop? It seemed to be prominently displayed in every bookstore I visited, and, as you might imagine, I visited a lot of bookstores. Unable to ignore it, I eventually took a closer look and learned more about the central villain of van Tulleken’s treatise: ultra-processed food, a term coined in 2009 as part of a new food classification system, and inspired by Michael Pollan’s concep ..read more

Earlier this month, Jim Ratcliffe, part owner and operations head for the storied English football club Manchester United, announced an end to the flexible work-from-home policy that the club’s approximately 1,000 employees had enjoyed since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. “If you don’t like it,” he said in a recent all staff meeting, “please seek alternative employment.” Ratcliffe is not necessarily wrong to view remote work with skepticism. Having covered this topic extensively for The New Yorker, I don’t align myself with the crowd that automatically associates telecommuting wit ..read more

In recent months, I’ve been doing a fair number of interviews about my new book, Slow Productivity. I’m often asked during these conversations about the potential impact of artificial intelligence on the world of knowledge work. I don’t talk much about AI in my book, as it focuses more on advice that individuals can put into place right now to escape busyness and find a more sustainable path toward meaningful accomplishment. But it’s a topic I do think a lot about in my role as a computer scientist and digital theorist, as well as in my recent journalism for The New Yorker (see, for example ..read more

I really enjoyed meeting so many of you at my Politics and Prose event a couple weeks ago. It was meaningful for me to be talking about my books in person again after having to launch my last title during a pandemic. It was also a great opportunity to thank people for their support of Slow Productivity, which just yesterday landed #4 on the NYT’s monthly business bestseller list. (If you haven’t bought Slow Productivity yet, you should! If you read this newsletter, you’ll love it…) It’s with all this in mind that I wanted to briefly share two upcoming opportunities to come meet me and hear me ..read more

Earlier this month, a group of scientists from universities around the world published the results of an ingeniously simple experiment in the journal PLoS ONE. Every month, for ten months, they randomly selected an article from a journal in their field to promote on their Twitter accounts, which, collectively, added up to around 230,000 followers. They then later compared the success of these tweeted articles with control articles randomly selected from the same issues. The result? No statistically significant increase in citations in the promoted articles versus the controls. There was a dif ..read more

A brief book update: I wanted to share that Slow Productivity debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list last week! Which is all to say: thank you for helping this book make such a splash. If you still haven’t purchased a copy, here are two nudges to consider: (1) due to the rush of initial sales, Amazon has temporarily dropped the hardcover price significantly, making it the cheapest it will likely ever be (US | UK); and (2) if you prefer audio, maybe it will help to learn that I recorded the audiobook myself. I uploaded a clip so you can check it out (US | UK). Last March, S ..read more

I know it’s been a minute since I’ve published one of my normal essays. I’ll be returning to these soon as the chaos of the Slow Productivity launch dissipates. In the meantime, I wanted to share two quick notes: one about the book, and one about something interesting (but completely unrelated) that several of you have sent in my direction recently… A note about the book On Saturday, March 16th at 3:00pm, I’ll be appearing at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. I’ll be joined in conversation with David Epstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Range. We’ll talk ..read more

My podcast producer recently turned me onto a show called Acquired, which features its co-hosts, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, diving deep into the backstories of well-known brands and companies, from Porsche and Nike, to Amazon and Nintendo. It turns out I was late to this party. In the eight years since Acquired was originally launched, it has grown into a huge hit. The show now serves more than 200,000 downloads per episode. As Rosenthal revealed in a Fast Company profile last summer, they now face the problem of their audience becoming too large for their advertisers to afford paying t ..read more