PicoBlog

Whereas I think of the international financial system as operating in the stratosphere - remote from oversight by democratic institutions, Henry Farrell and Abe Newman understand it more as America’s “underground empire…a relentless machine of domination, the product of decades of careful engineering.” They flew into London this week, and I was chuffed to be invited to discuss their important book with them at the LSE. They are both professors, Henry Farrell at John Hopkins University and Abraham L Newman at Georgetown University.

Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media newsletter. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button: Hüseyin Kilic had no ambitions to operate a media business when he opened an account on Blogspot in 2011. In fact, he barely had any concept of what a media business was.  At the time, Kilic was a university engineering student and occasionally traveled to his hometown in Turkey to help his father run an internet café.

A number of words in English end in -age such as village, mortgage, courage, luggage, baggage, assuage, manage, garage, mirage, forage, camouflage, sausage, rage, page, wage, hostage etc. How they assume different pronunciations still amazes me. In today’s newsletter, I’ve curated a list of these words and how they are pronounced at their endings. For most of these words, the ending “-age'“ becomes -ɪdʒ, such as village /ˈvɪlɪdʒ/, hostage /ˈhɒstɪdʒ/, lineage /ˈlɪnɪɪdʒ/, forage /ˈfɒrɪdʒ/, manage /ˈmanɪdʒ/, courage /ˈkʌrɪdʒ/, sausage /ˈsɒsɪdʒ/, mortgage /ˈmɔːɡɪdʒ/ and even assuage /əˈsweɪdʒ/.

One of the first things I set out to do before writing Material World was to try to get my head around the basics of how batteries work. Much ink is spilled these days about these little cells and their Importance to the modern world (and the modern economy). But it is one thing to drone on about something being Very Important; it is quite another to understand why. And in all the thousands of wise words I had read about batteries in wise newspapers, I had encountered precious little to explain how they actually worked.

Since this is a craft newsletter, I spend a lot of time talking about writing processes. Every author has their own process—and often a different process for every book—and I always find it illuminating to hear about them. (Here are some entries on Zadie Smith, César Aira, and myself.) But as interesting as process and craft questions are to writers, it’s something that often gets ignored in book coverage. I think the most common complaint I hear privately from other authors is “No one asks me about craft!

Welcome back to Year 2049! 🔮 Thanks for joining me on the journey to learn about all the ways AI is shaping the future of our life and work. Subscribe for free to get practical insights, case studies, and tutorials delivered to your inbox every Friday 👇 Hey friends 👋 Today, I’m sharing one of the most mind-blowing (and useful) things I’ve done in ChatGPT. I’ve already shared this a while ago on my Instagram, but a lot of you have asked for a step-by-step tutorial.

Improbably, a Providence team playing without Josh Oduro and with starting point guard Jayden Pierre a game-time decision due to a recent calf injury somehow had a 71-64 lead with four minutes to go at Butler. With Oduro home welcoming his first child and Pierre coming off the bench hobbled, outsiders would have figured that the only way in which PC was to have a shot on Saturday afternoon would come from a gargantuan effort from Devin Carter and a cold shooting day for the home team.

We interviewed Craig Morgan to share his insights on launching a paid newsletter. Craig is a sports writer who previously wrote for The Athletic before starting AZ Coyotes Insider, where he writes exclusively about the ice hockey team Arizona Coyotes.   This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. You can watch the full interview in the video below. Define your audience. Before going paid, consider who your readers are and whether there’s a market for what you want to write.

Cyle Reynolds is chef and (with partners Jordan Rubin and Sasha Brouillard) co-owner of Crispy Gai in Portland, Maine. In addition to getting his start in Portland, Reynolds has cooked in Michelin-starred restaurants in Thailand, Chicago, and New York. Where did you grow up, and how did you get into food? I grew up in northern Maine, in Kingfield, and there wasn’t a whole lot going on up there. I always liked to cook.