I was reluctant at first: A friend had taken the ModPo poetry course — twice — and she’s now pursuing an MFA at Columbia, living in a 4th-floor walkup while her wife remains here in San Francisco. I don’t need that kind of hassle in my life.… Read the rest
Rough Drafts
Prose that hasn’t been published elsewhere
Why do we keep using Facebook?
To sum up: there is a lot of research showing that Facebook makes people feel like shit. So maybe, one day, people will stop using it.
John Lanchester’s long essay about Facebook in the London Review of Books has been getting shared a lot in my circles; Wired editor in chief Nicholas Thompson called it “the most intense, critical essay on Facebook that I’ve ever read.”
While it covers a lot of familiar ground (tl;dr: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer, you’re the product”) Lanchester makes a couple of points that have been troubling me.… Read the rest
Email you can trust.
tl;dr: I’m joining ValiMail as head of communications, because I like email and want it to work right.
I’m kind of a fan of email. I’m weird like that: Most of the journalists and tech experts I know say they hate email.… Read the rest
The big swim.
I have loved the San Francisco waterfront since I first saw it. For years, my commutes have taken me along the Peninsula coastline via Caltrain, and then along the Embarcadero on my bike. I’ve got a folder full of photos of the waterfront.… Read the rest
Breakthrough
Pelicans stood on the breakwater, gravely watching us as we swam by. I’ve come to think of the shorebirds as different kinds of people, a sort of audience for my swims: The cormorant people, the gull people. It’s clear they’re looking at us as much as we are looking at them.… Read the rest
The Delta and the Bay
Last weekend I entered the water much better prepared than the week before, and managed to swim for two and a half hours. The water temperature varied from 59F-60F, and the morning was fairly calm, overcast giving way to sunny sky.… Read the rest
Water textures in the SF Bay.
Yesterday I swam around Aquatic Park on a sunny, windy afternoon with shreds of fog whipping themselves away from the Golden Gate and across the blue sky.
The wind on the cove gave different textures to water in every part of the cove: Just off the dock and along the buoy line I was swimming into the chop, punching through each wave and gliding just beneath the jade-green roughness of the surface.… Read the rest
Getting used to the cold.
I swam for an hour and 25 minutes on Saturday, with my swimming buddy Zina, and it was good. The sun was shining, the water was calm, there were no currents to speak of, and we explored a new-to-us route that took us from the far end of the breakwater guarding Fisherman’s wharf to the far end of the Fort Mason complex and back, for a total distance of about two miles.… Read the rest
2.5 miles in a purple Speedo.
I wore my swirly purple Speedo for a two-hour swim in the Bay on Saturday.
It was the morning of a joint Pride celebration with my club, the South End, and the Dolphin Club next door. Fifty or sixty of us were going to swim from a bayside beach about a mile away, back to the beach between our two clubs, where rainbow flags had been strung over the water between the docks.… Read the rest
Take a memo.
If we learned anything from former FBI Director James Comey’s testimony this week, it’s the importance of well-written memos.
Comey’s memo to the Senate, spelling out his introductory statement, is clear, crisp, and to the point. It contains a wealth of precise detail that lends credibility to his report.… Read the rest