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Hello readers! This week’s tidbits: Honesty The deepest truth Lies builders tell themselves From the Archives: Seven incredibly non-intuitive things about growing your career For paid subscribers: Subscriber Mailbag: Follow-up questions to Higher Level Design How do I know if I am truly honest with myself? The well goes deep Dear readers, The idea of truth has been on my mind for some years now. As we twist wider the spigot of information running into our brains we wonder more and more: what is really true?

When King Charles III’s maternal grandfather died at age fifty-six in February 1952, his widow, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, sent a message of thanks to people “from all parts of the world.” “No man had a deeper sense than he of duty and of service,” she said, “and no man was more full of compassion for his fellow men. He loved you all, every one of you, most truly.” King George VI deeply loved his family, and above all he loved Elizabeth, his wife for twenty-eight years.

This is not how I planned to spend my precious morning hours. I have a grant to write, a long work to do list and chores I promised to conquer before 9am. But here I am. Because when you open a Christmas turned New Years card and it sends you straight into your feels…you write. At least I do, as I am, after all, a writer. Above is a picture, actually a picture of a picture.

In addition to being a farmer, an essayist, and the author of the beloved Port William novels and short stories, Wendell Berry is a renowned poet. Perhaps his best-known poetry is from his long-running series of Sabbath Poems, musings spiritual and otherwise, written over decades as he has taken Sunday walks on the good earth of his family farm in rural Kentucky. The Sabbath Poems tell us much about Berry’s interior life, and largely carry a quiet, contemplative tone that gently provokes the reader or listener to consider God, time, place, and one’s role among it all.

In the summer of 1995, an envelope arrived at the federal courthouse in Little Rock, Arkansas. Inside was a handwritten, barely coherent plea from Charlie Vaughn, a man serving a life sentence for murder in the Tucker maximum security prison in the south central part of the state. Vaughn can’t read or write, so he presumably asked another prisoner to draw up the document for him. It was a one-page bid for his freedom.

I wasn’t a huge Matthew Perry fan, and I wasn’t even a super-fan of Friends. And yet, ever since his death last week, I’ve felt an intense urge to watch old episodes of the show. Apparently otherpeople have been craving Friends, too, and it’s made me wonder: where is this coming from? And also, when I succumbed to my cravings and started watching it, why did I feel such a sense of nostalgia and longing?

“When ‘The Jordan Rules’ came out, the first day, I went to Jordan. I went up to his locker. He had his head down, and I said, ‘Michael, I just want to let you know, you have any problems with anything I wrote, I’m here, and I’ll be glad to talk to you about it.’ He kept his head down, never said a word. He was always a lot bigger than me and a lot more important.

The male gaze as we currently understand it is not a new phenomenon.  Women are said to be affected by the pursuit of male validation and the internalisation of the male gaze, having an impact on the way that they move within the world, from the way that they date to the ways in which they present themselves, their career aspirations and their personal goals. For once though, I am more interested in the ways in which men are affected by the male gaze.

This piece also appears in my book Welcome to Hell World: Dispatches from the American Dystopia available here. I’ve moved this newsletter to welcometohellworld.com. Please subscribe there. Bill Moro remembers 9/11 fondly. He’d gotten up early that morning to go to work at the paper mill like any other day. Tucked into the southwest corner of Massachusetts, not far from the New York and Connecticut borders, the area around Great Barrington, where Bill has lived his entire 67 years on earth, was once one of the centers of paper production in the country but not so much anymore due to they closed all the plants.