PicoBlog

Welcome to Pen and Spoon! I can’t believe this is my 49th Substack. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing each and every one, but I need to shake things up a bit. From next week - my 50th newsletter - my recipes will be for paid subscribers only. I’ve thought long and hard about this, but every newsletter takes a great deal of time to research, write, test and buy ingredients for - and paid subscribers enable me to do this.

Hey BPL fam, In this edition of Behind Product Lines, we’re going to dive deep into a product and marketing case study. We’ll be looking into Clickup - a project management and productivity tool for individuals and teams of all sizes. What makes their story different from others? Well, despite being a late entrant into the market by several years, Clickup navigated through the notoriously crowded project management tool space and gave top players like Monday and Asana a run for their money.

For four whole days, my stomach was in knots. A tiny submersible craft containing five adventurers in search of the wreckage of the Titanic had gone silent. Every few hours, my phone lit with updates about their possible fate. We were told they had 96 hours worth of oxygen. Their precise location was unknown. It was a race against time and the ocean depths to find them. And sadly, as we all came to learn on June 22nd, the quintet were lost to the depths of the North Atlantic because the submersible had suffered a catastrophic implosion.

Disclaimer: I am aware that this problem is extremely ridiculous and does not matter in the great scheme of things and there are SO MANY way worse things going on in this hellfire we call a world. Anyway. I had a really bad haircut. I had really long curly hair, and I hadn't had it cut in nearly two years because of money/lockdown/etc. It was looking kinds gross at the ends and the salons in the UK are open again so I decided to get it cut just to make it healthier.

Welcome back to Ask Amanda, Dear Readers. Please feel free to share your own stories about lost friendship and heartbreak in the comments below. We are reading, and we love you. Dear Amanda, How can someone overcome the sadness of a friendship lost?  There is a lot of advice for “relationship” breakups, but I recently lost a friend who I loved who just ended up hurting me badly. I am still angry for the wounds he made, but I miss him all the time, and I don’t know if others understand because no one ever speaks about overcoming a broken heart when it comes to friendships.

If this newsletter is going to be about identifying good bagels, then the first thing we need to do is lock down the criteria for what a good bagel actually is. There are plenty of delis, bagel shops, markets, diners, and pop-ups that would have you believe theirs is the best bagel in town (and, perhaps, as good as New York!), but until you know what it is you’re supposed to be looking for (and biting into) then how do you really know?

Welcome to our weekend conversation! A message came from a reader this past week. M. wrote: I think there may be a future post that you could do about how to deal with writers who plagiarize -- do you permanently blacklist them? do you make them jump through extra hoops? do they get put in "time out"?  A very interesting subject. No one likes or supports plagiarism. But what frameworks are in place for lit mag editors and writers to handle it?

There’s nothing that devoted and knowledgable fans of this genre love more than mixing it up about which artists, albums and songs qualify as power pop and—perhaps, more importantly—which ones definitely do not. Approached with an open mind, it’s a fun way to celebrate the music we all love in online forums, fan pages and record store aisles. Done poorly, it can quickly become an exercise in reductive reasoning, self-importance, and purism.

I love vocabulary. When I was young, any time I heard or read a word that I didn’t know, I would write it down in a spiral-bound notebook. Then I’d look up the definition and carefully write it out so I could learn the word’s meaning and use it. Call me a word geek, but my passion for writing started with reading and loving the art of communication. (Yes, it’s an art because a well-written piece or verbal presentation is like a beautiful painting.