Snail Shells

On doing things the slow, hard way

Illustration by Aidan Koch via Signal Hill

The Snail on the Hill

The occasion for sending this newsletter is, as always, to point toward something I made that is not this newsletter, which I have festooned and padded with other announcements and warbled greetings because somehow I’ve decided that’s how newsletters are supposed to sound.

I have a story in the second issue of Signal Hill, an awesome new audio magazine (aka podcast) that launched in February 2025 and got a bunch of love from year-end best-of lists (including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, BBC, and a write-up in Columbia Journalism Review). My story is about my experience of getting Long Covid, which I still have, though not as heinously as I did a year ago. Writing this “experimental audio essay” was an interesting editorial experience. A few years ago, when I was still producing the Organist, the arts-and-culture podcast I helped make for KCRW and McSweeney’s, my co-producer, Ross Simonini, was always pushing me to make it weirder, to hold the listener’s hand more loosely, or let it go entirely. In our partnership, I’d ended up more accountable to our institutional bosses, and I often felt myself channeling or projecting their relative conservatism (at least compared to Ross’s more aggressively avant-garde tendencies), pulling us back toward those comfortable hallmarks of national magazine writing (signposts! ledes! kickers! hooks! angles! legibility!). It was a productive tension, and I think if the Organist succeeded, one reason was because Ross made it weirder, and because I modulated Ross’s weirdness. Also, to be sure, I am a fucking weirdo, and KCRW and McSweeney’s aren’t exactly staid journalistic institutions, so this is all deeply relative.

When I was making the Signal Hill piece, I was reminded of my arguing-with-Ross days, in a good way. My first and perhaps second drafts of that story really wanted to be a kind of shambolic Weekend Edition (NPR) story about the politics of masking: Even though the last 18 months of my life have been pretty, profoundly disrupted by Long Covid, I still found myself doing lots of indoor activities masklessly: dining at restaurants, teaching classes, shopping for overpriced boxes of premium British tea, etc. I wanted to make a story that interrogated that question – basically, if COVID fucked me over, and that happened because of my lax masking practices, why am I still behaving this way, inviting further disregulation and cognitive decline? With a corollary question of: if the answer is that masking feels socially fraught and awkward (it does, still) then what’s the power and promise of a visible group of “cool people” making masking a part of their culture of coolness? Or put another way: why has one stronghold of masking culture in 2025 become, apparently, extremely cool leftist/queer/DIY/noise/punk spaces? I interviewed a bunch of people from that milieu in wmass (where I live): my friend who runs a wonderful mask-required lesbian bookstore and DIY music venue; a chronically ill podcaster who told me they’d had serious talks with their friends about producing porn with actors wearing KN95s to sexifiy/destigmatize masking… I was about to interview Deerhoof, who require masking at their shows when they can (and strongly encourage it when they can’t), but then I got COVID again and had to cancel…

But the Signal Hill editors, who are kind, cool, and smart (a rare combination), were extremely not into this angle. They liked me contemplating my experience of Long Covid; they really didn’t like me wandering around the hipster lesbian landscapes of Western Mass and wading into the debates around the politics of masking. Their argument was, essentially, we know this already. We’ve had these conversations, these arguments; we’ve listened to Death Panel, none of this is new; please just move on. Which I found surprising, because in my life, whenever I brought these questions up, people would be like I know! Why do all the queer/leftist spaces mask more than everyone else! Please do that story, I’m fascinated! or similar. What I ended up deciding was that it was a generational divide. I’m not sure how old the Signal Hill editors are, but I think it’s safe to say that I and most of the people I talk to about my ideas for podcasts are at least ten if not 15-20 years older than they are. And in their (hip, avant-podcaster) milieu, the question of masking is perhaps like the question of pronouns. There was a period (a few years ago) when my wife and I would somehow learn that one of our son’s elementary-school classmates used they/them pronouns, and we were (in retrospect) absurdly delicate in our curiosity, which was met with perhaps the first legitimate pre-teen eye-roll of O’s young life. To us, we were intrigued, performatively sensitive; to him, the question of his friends’ pronouns was like the question of their hair color, or peanut-allergy status. Just a thing. Shut up about it already. Move on.

And I realized that Signal Hill‘s editors understood Signal Hill‘s listeners far better than I did, and probably the way I was excited and out of touch talking about “Queer spaces” and “Chronically ill trans sources” sounded to their ears like “when did your friend start using they/them pronouns” did to our son’s ears in 4th grade. So I followed their advice and jettisoned all my tape of hanging out with recumbent, ill, queer masked activists and instead wrote a suitably weird, personal piece of Bojack Horseman fanfic about my own j.v. experience of chronic illness.

Link to the entire issue, including stories from weird-radio luminaries like Mitra Kaboli and Rachel James, is here.

I’m still on Substack, still planning on leaving, but it’s hard, and that’s the point

A colleague expressed wry shock that I was on Substack. It’s become the same joke people used to make about podcasts, and made about blogs before that: everyone has one; almost all of them are terminally self-indulgent and boring. But mine is different! No, it isn’t. But I have been doing “this” (posting “new media” on the “internet”) for my entire adult life, and parts of my adolescence too. For someone of my vintage (I just turned 45), this was once novel, special; today, when being a YouTuber or otherwise monetizing one’s online presence is a common aspiration for what feels like a majority of contemporary young people (but not O.! At least not yet, not that I know of…), to crow about how long one has been posting self-indulgent bullshit online doesn’t have the same ring to it. But that doesn’t mean I’m about to stop!

I have threatened to ditch Substack for an open-source or at least less-heinous platform in my last few newsletters but didn’t have time to weigh the relative benefits and intricacies of Ghost v. Buttondown v Listmonk, etc. And I still haven’t. So I’m going to stop announcing on this newsletter that I’m leaving Substack until I do. Which might take me a while because the place I am leaving it for (right now I’m thinking listmonk) is aggressively un-user-friendly, at least for a relatively non-technical person like me. Why am I doing this to myself? I am tempted to make a grand, virtue-signalling argument about why I cannot abide by allowing my self-promotional navel-spelunking to take place under the aegis of a company that platforms Nazis, the reality is that if I found Substack’s web form slightly more accessible, I’d probably just keep going – there is a nice, “passive income” feeling that comes from the handful of new subscribers I get every week from the generous recommendations of Jamie Lauren Keiles, Rafael Frumkin, Miranda Mellis, maybe a few others… (to be clear, there is no paid tier to these ramblings – the income is in the form of today’s realm’s true coin: attention…)

Likewise, I haven’t deleted my X or Meta accounts. I find Facebook more accessible than Bluesky, and more of my blind friends post more interesting things there. The deeper I get into the plain-text self-hosted open-source hacker-adjacent world, the more fascinating I find it, and the more I realize that to truly commit to it means floating away from the mainstream conversation. I was interviewing a developer at a corporate-owned open-source company the other day, asking about who used Linux (the open-source operating system) in that office, and they were like, “most of us are on Slack, but the Linux guys have transcended Slack, they don’t even use it, they’re all talking to each other on Matrix or IRC or something.” This cracked me up, it perfectly distilled my experience of this world: you gradually become so fed up with the shitty closed corporate tools that you migrate to the hackery open ones, but as a result you are surrounded only by fellow yak-shavers.

But there’s still real, deep value, I’m finding, in causing myself minor (and sometimes major) inconveniences and isolation in the name of – if not political action, then at least a greater mindfulness about the things I buy, the tools I use. Lately, this has been happening a lot around computers. I’ve been folding Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools like emacs, emacspeak, and pandoc into my workflow and the change has been sorta transformational. There’s an odd paradox I’ve been circling the last few years with my tentative entrance into this whole quasihackery UNIX-like ecosystem: at first blush, it’s unbelievably complicated. Programmers tend to talk about “bootstrapping,” which as far as I can tell is a process that happens all the time where a program (like, say, an OS installer) compiles itself into a compiler that then compiles the code needed to run the system, like an ex-nihilo Big Bang that results in a fully formed universe (or program, or whatever). My experience of trying to learn how to use these tools has felt like nothing so much as an extended, intensive experience of bootstrapping: with emacs for instance, it took me several tries to even make it through the very basic tutorial, which ends with a link to emacs’s onboard documentation system, which itselfhas a fairly robust tutorial that teaches you how to use the onboard help system. Not to belabor this, but what I’m saying is: you take a tutorial which prepares you to take a second tutorial which teaches you how to begin to learn how to use the software. But once you make it to the other side of that bootstrapping, a tremendously powerful and pleasurable directness, plainness, and simplicity arises, justifying (I think) the ridiculous complexity it took to get there.

[several additional paragraphs about how I use computers these days deleted from this space because my wife and only reader of this newsletter before publication expressed intense and almost painful levels of boredom in reading them. L’s antipathy to my obsession with this stuff came into greater focus recently when I was hanging out with two blind hackers at a conference (I mean hackers in the original sense of someone who tinkers with computers; not in the more popular sense of an Ed Snowden-esque whistleblower). They both talked about how their wives were more than happy to give them “sighted assistance” for various tasks – driving them to a meeting or train station; identifying something around the house – but this willingness evaporated when that sighted assistance entered the realm of nerdy computer shit (like helping them read the screen on an inaccessible BIOS bootloader). I wondered what the difference was, and I think it’s because a lot of this tinkering, while rewarding and fascinating and important and useful, also deeply resembles playing video games, or alphabetizing one’s collection of craft beer or rare Tropicalia vinyl, or any other middle-aged self-indulgent dad activity whose time, in the eyes of one’s spouse, might better be used doing pretty much anything else, from mowing the lawn to taking the kid to the park. As I continue writing and talking about this stuff, I can feel readers and interlocutors turning into my wife, insofar as they quickly pivot from “ah that’s a cool story about the intersection of open-source and accessibility” to “wow this is basically some guy telling me about the different types of ski poles he’s owned and which he prefers send help quickly I’m dying]

A final note of self-aggrandizement

The Chinese translation of my book (published in Taiwan by Yuan-Liou, and translated by Xie Shukuan) won the 2025 Openbook Award for Best Lifestyle Book in Taiwan. My understanding is that “lifestyle” here refers to a genre that English doesn’t have, precisely… I imagine (with very little information to go on, I’m basically making this up) it’s a genre of nonfiction that excludes argumentative essay and political biography but includes memoir, cultural journalism, and self-help? (If you speak Chinese and feel like offering a better gloss on the word, which is at the link above, I’d be very curious to learn more!)

In any case, I like the idea of The Country of the Blind as a “lifestyle” book – my memoir’s unofficial motto is indisputably Jorge Luis Borges’s line, “Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.” So if blindness could be a lifestyle for Borges, then I’m more than happy to learn I’ve written a Lifestyle Book!