MidRange: Hot Takes in 30 Minutes or Less

MidRange Archives

All 310 issues, from first to last.

01/28/2021

📃 Mission Statement

: Limitations matter. This newsletter will be structured around a tight time limit. Here’s why.
#1
02/01/2021

🚮 Stories in the Trash

: Why I find digging through old stuff on Goodwill to be one of my best tools for researching story ideas. Even online.
#2
02/02/2021

⚡️ Get Started

: The challenging thing about creating something new is building a rhythm. Without it, you’re going to struggle.
#3
02/04/2021

💪 Knocking the Hustle

: The controversial nature of the gig economy, as reflected by a tone-deficient Super Bowl ad, may come from the fact that a “gig” means different things to different people.
#4
02/08/2021

🥛 Walking The Oat

: The case for the highly derided Oatly Super Bowl commercial being actually very good at its mission, and as a musical homage of sorts.
#5
02/09/2021

📺 Emptier Than Usual

: Why we must accept that MTV is going to be a <em>Ridiculousness</em> rerun wasteland until the end of time, even if we don’t particularly like it.
#6
02/10/2021

😓 Sometimes, It Doesn’t Happen

: Not every career opportunity is going to turn out quite the way you expect. Make the opportunities that fall through your hands mean something.
#7
02/16/2021

💻 No Complexity Allowed

: A new open-source take on the operating system interface aims to solve what ails Linux on the desktop by ignoring it entirely. It might be better for everyone in the end.
#9
02/18/2021

🍎 Mac & Rush

: Pondering the strange feelings that emerge about a controversial figure—one who died just this week, and yes, THAT one—being into the same nerdy thing that you are.
#10
02/22/2021

🖼 Framing Is Everything

: Thoughts on storytelling and historical framing from a pair of recent docuseries, one significantly better at its mission than the other.
#11
02/23/2021

🐽 Resource Hog No More?

: Amid the latest flare-up of the Chrome RAM consumption debate, let’s wonder aloud if ARM processors could end this debate once and for all. (I think they can.)
#12
02/25/2021

💾 Comeback Story

: Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the lamented mobile operating system webOS expands into new markets in its modern-day home—on television sets the world over.
#13
03/01/2021

🎶 Big Red Annoyance

: How a recent Tedium piece added an incredibly awful annoyance to my life: The Big Red jingle. Please, something else fill my head.
#14
03/02/2021

⌨️ Be A Digital Omnivore

: It’s easy to stick with one phone or one interface, but by trying out other operating systems, browsers, or even types of smartphones, you get a better understanding of your exact needs.
#15
03/08/2021

🪥 Lessons From a Cleaning

: For no particular reason, I decided to spend a couple hours of my day cleaning my keyboard, inside and out. I actually found the process quite enlightening.
#17
03/09/2021

🌊 Low Tides

: Why did Tidal, a service that tried to do right by both users and artists, become a third-tier music service? Maybe mass audiences don’t really care about quality.
#18
03/11/2021

🤑 Values Were Lost

: Can you imagine the same internet that was once sold as a noncommercial utopia produced something as crassly commercial as the non-fungible token? Neither can I.
#19
03/15/2021

🔐 Sequestered In Memphis

: Discussing one of the most entertaining Twitter bugs in quite some time. Sometimes it doesn’t need to make sense for it to be hilarious.
#20
03/16/2021

📺 Background Competition

: I cannot write in the same room where a television is airing, because it destroys my concentration, and I have no clue why. I’m writing this for my own understanding.
#21
03/18/2021

😕 A Culture of Overstimulation

: With basically every culture option under the sun served on a platter, it can be tough to find novelty in any of it anymore. Perhaps a change in perception is the solution to that.
#22
03/22/2021

🤬 I Hate Facebook Groups

: Explaining why Facebook Groups are built so terribly that even The New York Times couldn’t wait to get rid of their incredibly popular group.
#23
03/25/2021

🔐 Lock Up Your Phone

: Why a marketing scheme by an obvious search-bait website actually has me sort of impressed by the brilliance of its growth hackery.
#25
03/29/2021

😈 Chaos For Good

: Why Lil Nas X, in all his Satan-sneaker glory, represents a positive form of chaos in modern internet culture.
#26
03/30/2021

💿 The Lone Coder

: A letter of appreciation to the guy who spent years developing one of the few modern web browsers for vintage Macs.
#27
04/01/2021

🎤 My Words, Your Voice

: What an open letter that emerged from the music industry says about the art of creativity in mainstream culture.
#28
04/05/2021

🔮 Miss Cleo and Me

: A fundraising scandal involving the former president’s aggressive approach to recurring donations reminds me a lot of something that a famous TV psychic did to my credit card 20 years ago.
#29
04/06/2021

📚 The Web Librarian

: One of the web’s earliest creators can teach us what we need to know about building a better future.
#30
04/08/2021

🐚 Finding My Inner Hermit

: The pandemic taught me something I didn’t think I’d ever say about myself 15 years ago: I make a pretty good indoors person.
#31
04/12/2021

📼 Living On Rented Time

: The death of Family Video, the last notable major video rental chain in the U.S., reflects how COVID-19 destroyed even businesses that survived prior disruptions.
#32
04/13/2021

🍽 Golden Slumbers

: Nearly a year after writing about the pandemic’s impact on the buffet, I consider the issue again—after noticing that a Golden Corral location near my house permanently closed.
#33
04/15/2021

🛍 Not-So-Mysterious Ways

: COVID-19’s devastating impact on mainstream retail ultimately rewarded good business practices and harshly punished bad ones.
#34
04/20/2021

💾 30 Seconds of Ubuntu

: Why a fleeting moment in a buzzy movie makes me think 2021 is the year of Linux on the desktop.
#36
04/22/2021

🍎 The Cupertino Shakedown

: Why the leak-friendly Apple press really needs to think hard about their next moves as a ransomware attack threatens to turn into an extortive motherlode of leaks.
#37
04/26/2021

🦫 Beavers Destroy The Internet

: Pondering why beavers would dare use their natural skills to damage something as important as the internet for hundreds of people.
#38
04/27/2021

🕳 Gopher Hole

: A recent saga involving the Linux kernel reflects the way that open-source communities are built around trust—and breaking that trust is a big no-no.
#39
04/29/2021

🐿 Squirrel Story

: How I got attacked by a squirrel when I was in college—and why I absolutely deserved it.
#40
05/03/2021

💿 Kings Of Consistency

: The reason why Kings of Convenience hit so unexpectedly hard with its new single last week might be because consistency is a huge asset in the streaming era.
#41
05/04/2021

📲 First-Mover Advantage

: The problem with the mobile ecosystem, being stress-tested by Epic vs. Apple, is highlighted by the fact that Clubhouse isn’t a Progressive Web App, when it honestly could be.
#42
05/06/2021

🧲 Open MagSafe

: How I accidentally learned that the Linux-based PinePhone is compatible with the iPhone’s fancy MagSafe wallets right out of the box.
#43
05/10/2021

🚗 Road Writing 101

: How innovation has made the process of writing in a moving vehicle a lot less painful than it was just a few years ago (he writes as he’s in a moving vehicle).
#44
05/11/2021

📺 Don’t Make Lorne Mad

: Elon Musk’s appearance on SNL, seen in light of the artists that SNL has banned over the years, is a reminder that orthodoxy reigns supreme on the sketch show.
#45
05/13/2021

🤡 Remote Control Takes

: Pondering why there seems to be a sudden rush of bad takes on why people need to go back to the office after more than a year in the remote-work wilderness.
#46
05/17/2021

🔥 Flamin’ Hot Embellishment

: A story about the guy who invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, currently being made into a film, in fact might largely be false—and the subject of at least one other famous Hollywood movie might have done the same thing.
#47
05/18/2021

⏱ A Superhuman Wait

: Writing down my feelings about a startup that decided to admit me to their exclusive service four years after I actually cared. Note: If you don’t want a writer to mock your exclusivity in their newsletter, don’t make them wait four years.
#48
05/20/2021

🖼 Cropped Out

: How concerns about bias led Twitter to drop its machine-learning algorithms for automatically cropping photos.
#49
05/24/2021

☢️ Internet, Explored

: The demise of Internet Explorer (finally) represents what happens when one of the largest companies in the world basically ignores standardization.
#50
05/25/2021

☕️ Coffee Shop Comeback

: Why being able to return to a coffee shop after more than a year of pandemic chaos means so much to me.
#51
05/27/2021

🔑 The Great Key Fob Caper

: Pondering that time my Uber driver was unable to finish the trip because they stopped for gas and realized they left their key fob at home.
#52
05/31/2021

🌎 Utopia Is Complicated

: The problem with the old internet isn’t that we treat it like the good old days of digital utopia; it’s that we don’t have enough detail about it to properly understand it with the depth and nuance it deserves.
#53
06/01/2021

🎨 No Room For Polymaths

: A common challenge I see for creative types in the working world is that they tend to be pushed in one direction, despite having skills in many realms. Too bad, because I like design.
#54
06/03/2021

🛒 Amazon’s Weird Email Rule

: For some reason, despite allowing affiliate links to be shared on social media, Amazon does not allow them to be shared in emails—which stinks for publishers that could really make them shine.
#55
06/07/2021

✍️ I Wrote Some Stuff At Seventeen

: Discussing the time I wrote 5,000-word pieces for a late-’90s gaming website in exchange for free computer games. I was driven by wanting to tell people how awesome emulation really was.
#56
06/08/2021

🗄 Out of Sync, Yet in Sync

: As organizations figure out how to get the toothpaste back in the tube that is remote work, one strategy that might help is by maintaining some of the flexibility remote work offered. If someone wants to leave for a couple of hours to work elsewhere, let them.
#57
06/10/2021

😶‍🌫️ The Worst Possible Light

: Apple’s decision to turn email marketing into a privacy issue means that they’ve put email publishers at odds with their own readers. Maybe Apple should talk to us first before doing something that harms our industry?
#58
06/14/2021

🤖 A Letter to My Robot Namesake

: Amazon has a robot named Ernie, and as someone else also named Ernie, I feel it is my duty to write him a letter to wish him well as he does his thankless job for Amazon.
#59
06/15/2021

💾 Planned Sorta-Obsolescence

: Apple’s move to separate out certain features in its newest operating systems may seem like a not-cool thing to do for users, but in reality, it’s a sign that the company might finally be learning not to arbitrarily leave old devices behind.
#60
06/17/2021

📝 The Power of Structure

: For some people (read: me), the secret to being able to create is having a little tension. Which is to say: The deadline is an important element of the work.
#61
06/21/2021

📱 OnePlus’ Shaky Math

: The cult Android device maker (which I personally use) is making some behind-the-scenes changes, but something doesn’t add up.
#62
06/22/2021

🍗 Thigh-High Problems

: The reason a virtual restaurant called Thighstop now exists is because wings simply became too popular, and Wingstop needs to buy more of the bird.
#63
06/24/2021

🎸 A Modulation Masterpiece

: How a popular music YouTuber did something magical with an old cheesy pop song: He forced you to think differently about it, which is really what good storytelling is all about.
#64
06/28/2021

🕹 The Hidden Motherboard

: The retro gaming world lost a giant over the weekend—and I can’t stop thinking about how I see myself in a pivotal decision that launched their programming career.
#65
06/29/2021

💾 A Shortened Lifecycle

: Western Digital’s decision to prematurely cut off support for an external hard drive leaves its customers holding the bag in the worst way imaginable.
#66
07/01/2021

🪒 Shaving the Yak

: Sometimes, the best adventure to take is the one you stand no chance at succeeding at. But you learn something anyway.
#67
07/06/2021

💡 RSS Rethink

: Perhaps the reason why email newsletters work when RSS feeds didn’t comes down to control—that is, publishers feel like they have some say in the medium. And perhaps good ol’ RSS could borrow from that.
#69
07/08/2021

🤯 FOSS Filter

: Pondering how Audacity’s addition of basic tracking tools turned into an overwhelmingly loud “This is spyware” cry from the open-source community.
#70
07/12/2021

🎨 It’s Redesign Time

: Explaining the thing that drives me to build a full redesign of my site every once in a while—and what I won’t give up in the process.
#71
07/13/2021

😷 Tactical Freedom

: The past year-plus of pandemic has been a constant reminder of how we often favor personal convenience at the cost of the greater good. As a culture, we need to figure out why that is … and consider how (or whether) we can even resolve it.
#72
07/15/2021

🐣 Twitter, Be Twitter

: Twitter’s Fleets feature didn’t work because the problem it was trying to solve with Fleets might actually be unsolvable. And that’s OK.
#73
07/19/2021

💳 It’s The Ecosystem, Stupid

: A Twitter user frustrated about Apple Pay highlights an excellent point about technology support: If companies go out of their way to resist standardization, consumers get none of the benefits of that technology.
#74
07/20/2021

📄 Pure Digital Fantasy

: Considering the provocative nature of a PDF-only publication that takes the stance that HTML is the problem with the internet.
#75
07/22/2021

🏒 Did Tumblr Miss Its Shot?

: Tumblr has all the elements to be a successful social network, including (now, at least) a monetization strategy that could make sense for both creators and the network itself. But they may have waited too long—and its community may not be as flexible as its owners are.
#76
07/26/2021

🤬 Criticism Deflector

: Instead of paying lots of money to get people to stop criticizing him on the internet, Elon Musk should pay lots of money to fight cyberbullying. It solves the same goal of burnishing his reputation, but it benefits a lot more people. Just saying.
#77
07/27/2021

⌨️ Valuable Keys

: It turns out the keyboard I used when I was 11 years old is now seen as desirable among keyboard enthusiasts. Because I miss the old keyboard, I’m now part of the fad.
#78
07/29/2021

📺 The Pitch is the Product

: Ron Popeil’s legacy is fascinating to think about in the present day, because he probably wouldn’t have needed the kitchen appliance to sell if he was just coming up today.
#79
08/02/2021

🏈 S-E-Seriously?!?!

: News that the University of Texas and University of Oklahoma are ending their relationship with the Big XII to move to the SEC has prompted accusations of greed that will destroy college football. The reality is far worse—and dumber—than most realize.
#80
08/03/2021

💻 Two Visions of the Future

: Between Microsoft and a buzzy laptop manufacturer, two separate visions are floating around out there of more sustainable computer upgrade paths for consumers. Maybe we should just be glad that folks are thinking long-term.
#81
08/05/2021

🎨 Art Direct the Web

: Not enough websites change or adapt the design based on individual pieces of content anymore. Maybe there’s room to change that.
#82
08/09/2021

😶 It Could Be Anyone

: Considering the strangeness of the most generic notification I’ve ever received—an anonymous internet businessman who read my LinkedIn profile.
#83
08/10/2021

📏 Gridlock

: Looks like chatter is rising in the web design space about dropping the traditional grid format. And even though I’m a fan of grids, perhaps it’s not totally heresy.
#84
08/12/2021

✍️ Medium Complexity

: The writer-centric platform, which I’ve written for on many occasions, is changing its model again. The word “whiplash” comes to mind.
#85
08/16/2021

🤬 Narrowing My Attack

: After getting reminded for the billionth time about the emptiness of political debates, I’m going to try something new: less complaining about politics. After all, I don’t even write about politics.
#86
08/17/2021

📰 Contextualizing Bad Aggregation

: The saga of Snopes’ co-founder getting nailed on plagiarism charges is a good reminder of the internet era in which it first emerged.
#87
08/19/2021

🤔 Jeopardizing Conduct

: The decision to make Mike Richards the host of Jeopardy! really shows a lack of understanding about why people care about Jeopardy! They should rescind that decision and fire Richards, stat.
#88
08/23/2021

🧠 Repetitive Stress Injury

: Our solo creators are stressing themselves out trying to keep up with the onslaught of content creation they’ve been tasked with doing. It’s kind of like playing a musical instrument for too long.
#89
08/24/2021

🥛 Tripping Into Dumb Luck

: Why the viral #CrateChallenge actually turned out to be a motivator to finally push a milk-crate-related project I’ve been developing onto the open internet.
#90
08/26/2021

🎥 Streaming Without Nuance

: The movie industry is finding their big blockbusters perform better on the silver screen rather than a small screen. But what if the lesson to take from that is that people want more nuance in their small-screen experiences?
#91
08/30/2021

📰 The Paywall Dilemma

: News outlets are becoming more restrictive with their access than ever in an effort to make their paywalls stick, but it threatens to make misinformation far easier to access. A blogging pioneer has a great idea to potentially solve this problem.
#92
08/31/2021

🪛 Make Louis Rossmann Famous

: The right-to-repair guru, already well-known on YouTube, has been gaining a reputation outside of the platform lately in part because he has been a willing voice for a budding movement. Right to repair needs him.
#93
09/02/2021

🍎 Small Concessions, Big Problem

: The series of concessions Apple has made over the past week feel like they’re bracing for a potentially even larger concession around the App Store. We should have never let it get to this point.
#94
09/06/2021

🗓 Let Us Have Our Holidays

: Ransomware attackers are specifically targeting long holiday weekends, like this one, to attack companies of all sizes. The result is that some people may be having to go in this weekend rather than enjoying a three-day break.
#95
09/07/2021

💾 Open To Interpretation

: There’s been a growing push by companies that produce open-source software to either modify the models or move away from them completely. How dangerous is this to the OSS ecosystem in the long run?
#96
09/09/2021

🦴 Clues Blues

: Can we talk about how strange it is that, out of all the things original Blue’s Clues host Steve Burns could have talked to his audience about amid the show’s 25th anniversary, he chose student loans?
#97
09/20/2021

🤣 Norm-Core

: Watching old Norm MacDonald clips on YouTube as a mental health aid.
#98
09/21/2021

🌩 Thunder On The Surface

: Microsoft apparently is finally giving into all the complaining tech-heads and embracing Thunderbolt on its Surface line. Wonder if they fixed the security concerns.
#99
09/23/2021

🔧 Staying the Course

: Perhaps the problem with the digital software we use (particularly of the software-as-a-service variety) is that there is no incentive to build things that continue to work well for long periods of time.
#100
09/27/2021

🙏 Bless This Mess

: Why I spent the weekend cleaning my piles of junk by putting them into more intentional, somewhat organized piles. (Hint: I want to be creatively inspired.)
#101
09/28/2021

💨 The Art of Puffery

: The website Ozy might have gotten a bit too bold with its claims of readership, as a New York Times column notes. For many site owners, large or small, it’s an understandable instinct best not acted upon.
#102
09/30/2021

🗞 More Thoughts on Ozy

: The problem with Ozy is that it existed to raise up one man’s career, and what helps raise profiles doesn’t convince people to click links.
#103
10/04/2021

🔗 Dead Link Department

: How a working link printed in an old newspaper got me thinking anew about the dead links that cover the internet.
#104
10/05/2021

🖥 Bring Back Personal Websites

: Facebook’s epic downtime on Monday is the best possible reminder we have that the native internet already does what Facebook promised us all. Let popular television actor Matthew Gray Gubler set the example for you.
#105
10/07/2021

🪛 Don’t Do This

: Computer companies are increasingly encouraging users not to open their devices … while still making it entirely possible to do so. This is actually a positive trend, and Valve’s Steam Deck is at the forefront.
#106
10/11/2021

⛏ Your Plot Of Land

: If you care about freedom of speech on the internet, don’t expect Facebook, Twitter, or the law to give it to you. You have to build your free space and take it yourself. And that’s not as hard as it sounds.
#107
10/12/2021

📲 Porting A Port

: An engineer wanted a USB-C port on his iPhone, so he hacked one in himself. It’s the ultimate manifestation of “if there’s a will, there’s a way.”
#108
10/14/2021

🥚 Robin’s Viral Egg

: That impressive Robin Williams YouTube impression reflects a real shift in how people become famous in 2021: By ignoring the casting agents and going directly to the audience with a big idea. Still feels kind of icky, though, doesn’t it?
#109
10/18/2021

✋ Up Against The Limits

: Discussing an annoyance of SaaS-based tools: Forcing users to make significant upgrades based on temporary surges. You broke my heart, Zapier.
#110
10/19/2021

💻 Pretending I Saw the MacBooks Yesterday

: I am currently in a cabin without internet access, so I have no idea what the new MacBook Pros look like. I wrote this ahead of time as if I know what happened. You know more than me.
#111
10/21/2021

🏕 On Grid Removal

: I largely was off the grid for a couple of days this week, and I feel like (as much as I hate it at times) the occasional shift is necessary.
#112
10/25/2021

🎥 When Speculation Gets Ugly

: The tragic and complex situation around the accidental shooting on the Rust set requires investigations and in-depth reporting, not armchair critics. Let the process play out.
#113
10/26/2021

🗂 Don’t Be the Straggler

: Frustratingly, a few key apps—most notably Dropbox—are falling down on the job of natively supporting Apple Silicon, affecting performance on the new M1 devices. Strategically, this is a bad place to be.
#114
10/28/2021

✏️ An Ode To Picross

: Picross, or the nonogram, is a game that I’ve found to strike the perfect balance between mental challenge and low-stakes calmness. Here’s why you should try it.
#115
11/01/2021

🎭 Old Drama, Replayed

: That feeling when one of my blood-boilingest rants appeared on Hacker News more than three years after I originally wrote it—and long after the conflict was settled.
#116
11/02/2021

🏫 Packed Like Sardines

: Dorms are crammed areas, but a viral story about a dorm designed to emphasize open areas—with an unusual architect—has me thinking about my own dorm room days.
#117
11/04/2021

🖋 The Newsletter Underclass

: The Atlantic is doing good work by bringing in newsletters. But it, like Substack’s recent moves, puts the indie roots of email newsletters at risk by potentially starving new voices of attention.
#118
11/08/2021

🪶 Obsessed With The Bird

: Personally, I feel bad that Big Bird’s vaccination has upset the same group of loud people who dominate every discussion that aims to divide us culturally.
#119
11/09/2021

🕹 A Holiday Film for My Generation

: The upcoming 8-Bit Christmas promises to hit the nostalgic spot for middle-aged people who grew up in the late ’80s obsessed with Nintendo. Even if it sucks, it will be amazing.
#120
11/11/2021

🤨 What Makes Something Obscure?

: How can something be obscure if you still use it? Short answer: It’s a question of framing. Here’s the general definition I use for what makes something obscure.
#121
11/15/2021

🐧 The Great Linux Tablet Hope

: The JingPad A1, which just started shipping to Indiegogo donors, is looking very promising thus far. Here’s a first look—a full review is on the way.
#122
11/16/2021

💸 Money Breaks Things

: The newsletter ecosystem, like other publishing ecosystems before it, wasn’t allowed to grow naturally … and that has complicated the path forward for creators relying on it as a career path.
#123
11/18/2021

🤦‍♂️ Oops, I Did That

: Talking myself through a moment in which I accidentally locked myself out of an important Twitter account because I tried to get clever.
#124
11/22/2021

☕️ Some Brewed Morning

: The weird feeling of having your strange SEO experiment linked in one of the largest newsletters on the internet. (Howdy, Morning Brew.)
#125
11/23/2021

🍏 The FrankenMac

: Thinking back to a time in my life when an old iBook gave me a window into a broader world … and why I got rid of it.
#126
11/25/2021

🎶 A Chart-Record Feast

: Two of the most important records in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 fell this week, and man, I can’t wait to nerd out about them.
#127
11/29/2021

🕸 Bring back Web1

: The reason why Web3 feels a bit hollow to me comes down to the fact that it’s clearly being driven by commercial forces, when prior iterations of the internet were not to the same degree.
#128
11/30/2021

🥘 Recipe Ransacking

: Should copyright cover recipes? It’s a question coming up more and more as cooking becomes big business, and plagiarism becomes a bigger problem.
#129
12/06/2021

👕 Jukt Bonds

: An incredibly thoughtful story about the second act of an infamous former journalist has me rethinking my wardrobe.
#131
12/07/2021

🎧 The Bad Bluetooth Story Blues

: In an effort to write up some inside baseball about Vice President Kamala Harris, Politico misses an opportunity to teach a broad audience about a common technology’s inherent security risks.
#132
12/13/2021

🍂 The Best of Two Annoying Worlds

: The case for not raking leaves, but mulching them with a lawn mower. Not only is it easier, but it also helps encourage natural processes for your lawn.
#134
12/14/2021

🍪 Avoid the Cookie Cutter

: The creator economy is often driven by top-tier success stories, rather than lower-rung sustainability. There’s only so much we can take from those stories without watering down the uniqueness of that creation.
#135
12/16/2021

💰 Money, the Great Insulator

: When it comes to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen selling their catalogs, our opinion of their work no longer really matters, good or bad. The massive payday, honestly, says it all.
#136
12/20/2021

📼 Working Past the Mothballs

: With an obscure-yet-surprisingly-relevant sketch that most people were likely unfamiliar with, Saturday Night Live’s unexpected need for curated old content paid off over the weekend. Those with archives should take notes.
#137
12/21/2021

🔴 Little Dot, Big Headaches

: Apple’s efforts to improve privacy on MacOS run into a brick wall for visual artists who find a new feature that puts a tiny dot on their screens to be extremely problematic for their use case.
#138
12/23/2021

🪨 Lump of Coal

: How a strangely written email with an unusual source accidentally created a compliance headache for a bunch of companies trying to comply with two major privacy regulations.
#139
12/27/2021

💽 Small Device, Big Impact

: In the first of our year-end awards, a video about the MiniDisc’s surprisingly robust impact highlights how a well-researched documentary video can get you to rethink a common object.
#140
12/28/2021

🕹 Out of Control

: With a business structure just as shady as its titles, the most notorious maker of X-rated Atari 2600 games had a story worth retelling. A deep dive into that tale shows how diving deep into the archives can build a stronger story. The result ranks as MidRange’s history article of the year.
#141
12/30/2021

✍🏾 (Finally) Getting The Last Word

: After a year full of really chewy media stories that generated a whole lot of bloggy rants, the one that really matters the most is the survivor’s tale of a bad media workplace amid the Great Resignation.
#142
01/04/2022

🪦 The Device Graveyard

: The reported end of life for classic BlackBerry devices makes me think that we’re about to see a lot of dated-but-not-forgotten devices grow useless as networks improve and technologies fail to keep up. Not just BlackBerry phones, either.
#144
01/06/2022

🚂 We All Live in Ryan’s World

: A New York Times Magazine piece makes the case that the toy-driven empire of Ryan’s World, the YouTube-forged success story led by 10-year-old boy Ryan Kaji, is fascinating even beyond the unusual surface details.
#145
01/10/2022

🏀 Advertising Airball

: Can you write a more dystopian marketing phrase than “the official COVID-19 home test of the NBA”? God, I hope not. No, it was not a slam-dunk partnership.
#146
01/11/2022

🌥 Cloudy With a Chance of DIY

: After a couple of frustrating experiences with high-profile cloud services, I’m giving the open-source option a shot. Here’s why I’m giving NextCloud a go.
#147
01/13/2022

🧭 When the Compass Breaks

: Thinking about an individual developer’s unearned greed in the context of an App Store’s unearned greed.
#148
01/17/2022

📡 Filling a Quota

: One of the most controversial networks on the cable dial came into existence for reasons of perceived balance. As that network loses its main funding source, it raises questions about why a big media company could make that call in the first place.
#149
01/18/2022

🔎 The Culmination

: Reflections on a source code release 25 years in the making, something that came about thanks in part to a spare detail in a story that I wrote half a decade ago.
#150
01/20/2022

🐊 The Long Tail Whips Back

: The music industry’s deep legacy might have dampened the prospects for new musicians going forward, a prominent music critic suggests. The problem might reflect deep problems with copyright law.
#151
01/24/2022

🥁 The Power of Rhythm

: The nice thing that writing a newsletter around a timer is that it really focuses your writing. The challenge is trying to apply it elsewhere.
#152
01/25/2022

🤨 The Question I Keep Having

: Considering what MidRange is going to become, and how that ties into what Tedium currently is. Real talk: I’m going to be honest about the road I see going forward.
#153
01/27/2022

🧠 The Idea Generator

: The great secret of this newsletter is that, often, I have no idea what I’m going to write about before the timer starts. Yet, I somehow finish the piece. If you want to do that, you need practice.
#154
01/31/2022

📣 Free Speech Zones

: An exchange between the founder of Twitter and a number of loud critics secretly highlights what the broo-ha-ha about free speech has really been about.
#155
02/01/2022

🟩 Wordle Wars

: The fact that even a simple, successful word game has at times felt divisive says something deeper about our society. Collectively, we have no chill.
#156
02/03/2022

📂 Frustration Provider

: Apple’s unusually aggressive push to retire widely used kernel extensions has caught a lot of cloud providers on their back feet—and the laptop-maker might be causing a lot of unnecessary headaches for end-users in the process.
#157
02/07/2022

📲 Tied Up in Contracts

: As phone providers start pushing three-year device contracts, the question becomes when phones hit the price-performance level that a contract isn’t actually necessary.
#158
02/08/2022

🇪🇺 Semiconductor Second Chance

: The chip manufacturer ARM, with its NVIDIA acquisition cancelled, appears to be going public at a time when the EU really wants a larger share of the semiconductor market. Maybe the homegrown ARM could help?
#159
02/10/2022

📺 The Monoculture Lost

: Our culture is less collective than it was a few decades ago … and really, is that a bad thing? Some thoughts on embracing the small pockets.
#160
02/14/2022

💰 Tales From The Crypto

: Cryptocurrency understandably took a big leap into the public eye with this year’s Super Bowl, but the way it did really raises questions about the level of risk we’re encouraging regular people to take.
#161
02/15/2022

💻 Vindication At The Source

: A journalist falsely accused of being a hacker by a governor for political reasons finally gets the last word.
#162
02/17/2022

💯 Century Club

: Why the makers of three major web browsers, nearing a very large version milestone, are suddenly worried about a bunch of sites breaking. (Hint: It’s kinda like Y2K.)
#163
02/21/2022

✍️ Who Owns Markdown?

: Writers do, not developers. If your argument against Markdown starts with the needs of developers rather than content creators, you’ve already missed the boat.
#164
02/22/2022

🔨 Redesigning the Nail

: On the ultimate failure of Apple’s Touch Bar as a laptop feature, contrasted with the unqualified success of the Elgato Stream Deck.
#165
02/24/2022

📻 Don’t Tune It Out

: Thoughts on how to parse what’s happening in Ukraine right now, for external observers who may all-too-easily be tempted to tune it out.
#166
02/28/2022

🎸 The Death of Consistency

: Being great and consistent at what you do is an excellent way to build a track record, but what happens when that’s no longer enough? Consider another buzz strategy.
#167
03/01/2022

⚠️ Solving the Brand Safety Problem

: Advertisers specifically avoid showing up next to big news stories. This is a big problem that threatens the long-term future of news. And we need to build creative solutions—with the help of advertisers.
#168
03/03/2022

🪧 It’s a Creator’s Market

: The fact that G/O Media let a strike happen on its watch is a massive miscalculation in an era when readers are more likely to follow individual journalists than brands.
#169
03/07/2022

🏐 Journalistic Calvinball

: Let’s stop pretending that there is one traditional path to becoming a successful journalist. That ship sailed long ago.
#170
03/08/2022

🥁 The Unwanted Supergroup

: Epic Games’ deal to purchase Bandcamp is a weird one, but in a way, it harkens back to where Tim Sweeney first started. However, it will break if Sweeney’s megacorp forgets that.
#171
03/10/2022

📫 Congratulations, You’ve Been Platformed

: Substack’s new app, no matter the justification, changes the rules around the pledge the company made to its customers—and puts up a fresh barricade to the openness of the open internet.
#172
03/14/2022

🔗 Domain Transfer

: How a small personal gesture gave me a different perspective on the Russian sanctions.
#173
03/15/2022

📺 Vanced and Vanquished

: Google’s problem with YouTube Vanced reflects the fact that first-party mobile apps don’t allow for enough customization. Fix that, and minimize the number of people moving into gray areas.
#174
03/17/2022

🧐 A Difference of Opinion

: Just to clarify, I do respect what Substack has created. My challenge is that I want to see what that ecosystem model looks like without being so distinctly built around a monolithic platform.
#175
03/21/2022

A Senseless World

: A reporter’s tragic death in a nightclub shooting over the weekend—at a paper I used to work at—has left me grasping for words.
#176
03/22/2022

⚠️ An !important Distinction

: A co-creator of CSS comes out of the woodwork to explain that the !important tag is being used incorrectly by most people.
#177
03/24/2022

☎️ Dial Up the Nostalgia

: Old landlines are starting to gain a bit of old-school nostalgia, per the New York Times. The reason? Simply put, smartphones simply don’t feel as creative or eye-opening by comparison.
#178
03/28/2022

💻 Remove the Screen

: The fad of removing monitors from MacBook screens to use them as a de facto desktop machine seems a little silly to me, but it does feel like it’s pointing out a potential market for Apple.
#179
03/29/2022

💻 How Fast Is Too Fast?

: Over the last decade, solid-state drive technology has improved to the point that it’s now significantly faster than any traditional hard drive. New generations of SSDs promise to be even faster—but require active cooling to do the job, which may be too big a tradeoff for most users.
#180
03/31/2022

✅ Mark One Off

: No, it’s not the world’s biggest deal that Google Docs now supports Markdown. But it certainly feels like a friendly nod to the numerous writers that use it.
#181
04/04/2022

😥️ The Centralizer’s Lament

: The guy who helped created Twitter, Jack Dorsey, seems to be regretting his work around that these days. Is this an opportunity for the open internet to get back into the conversation?
#182
04/05/2022

🍔️ Your Way Or The Highway

: You might have heard Burger King is getting sued over the size of its burger patties. If you’re at all offended by this, do you think you would get absolutely anything from that class-action suit?
#183
04/07/2022

👔 The Cult of Corporatism

: Two hit shows on Apple TV+ have a hell of a lot to say about corporate culture right now, and it feels like just the right time to hear it … even if the source of said commentary is interesting.
#184
04/11/2022

💬 The Room to Speak Up

: Lost in our recent debates on free speech is the context around what created the circumstances for you to speak up. As long as that context is missing, the discussion will always remain hollow.
#185
04/12/2022

🍨 Bad Subliminal Work

: The new Baskin-Robbins logo falls into the trap of trying to aim for a new demographic while not properly integrating visual elements that made their old look iconic.
#186
04/18/2022

🕹 A Belated Modern Embrace

: For decades, I wasn’t really much of a modern gamer at all. But now, I’m dipping my toes into a new area. Stress will do that to you.
#188
04/19/2022

💬 New Slang

: Taking a quick look at the world’s greatest FOIA request, an 83-page document listing the FBI’s attempt at capturing the internet’s slang.
#189
04/21/2022

⚡️ Lightning Sputters

: Apple’s long-in-the-tooth approach to ports and charging cables is feeling pressure on all sides these days, including from a Brazilian judge.
#190
04/25/2022

📺 The Path to Ridiculousness

: Netflix is built around content that aims broad, rather than the more narrowly tailored stuff that builds passion but perhaps starts out with smaller audience bases. It needs to make the niche work in its favor—by making it good enough to pay a little extra for.
#191
04/26/2022

🤬 The Internet of Jerks

: When it comes down to it, the thing that makes a lot of people nervous about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is that it seems like he favors the jerks—which isn’t fun for those who prefer a jerk-light internet.
#192
04/28/2022

💻 Dude, You’re Getting a CAMM

: Pondering the unusual new kind of memory Dell randomly foisted onto the world this month. Despite rumors of its proprietary nature, it’s actually a smart idea.
#193
05/02/2022

💬 Free Speech Disconnect

: A common explanation for how free speech works on the internet doesn’t seem to be connecting with the public. Perhaps we need to use a Tim Robinson sketch to make our case instead.
#194
05/03/2022

😣 Resistance Through Inconvenience

: If there’s something that you don’t want to do, the most effective way to prevent people from doing it is to make it so challenging and frustrating that no person will want to.
#195
05/05/2022

💸 Pound of Flesh, Returned

: The Intuit TurboTax settlement reflects a high-profile example of what happens when a company weasels out out something it agreed to do … at least for a while.
#196
05/09/2022

🎸 Shout-Out to Todd Rundgren

: Discussing the sun-kissed violence around what is arguably Ozark’s best scene, one soundtracked by a Laura Nyro fanatic.
#197
05/10/2022

📝 A User’s Guide to MidRange

: As I’ve been doing a bit of site-moving of late, I wanted to honor some of MidRange’s best, most unusual pieces. Hope you agree.
#198
05/12/2022

🟢 Pale Green Ghost

: NVIDIA—finally—embraces open-sourcing its drivers for Linux, a long-lingering source of tension within the open-source community. And it may not be because of gamers or desktop users, either.
#199
05/16/2022

📃 eInk on the Cusp?

: If you haven’t been watching what’s been happening in the eInk space of late, you’re potentially missing out on some interesting innovations.
#200
05/17/2022

💸 Rich Guy Causes Chaos

: On Elon Musk and his strange attempts to (apparently) weasel out of the Twitter deal. It reminds me of a movie character who immediately ditched something he wanted as soon as he got it.
#201
05/19/2022

🎙 Time of No Reply (All)

: The iconic podcast Reply All is ending its original format after an eight-year run. Drama nearly consumed it near the end, but for a long time, it was one of the greatest podcasts out there.
#202
05/23/2022

🪟 An Open-Window Admission

: After years and years of basically being Mac and Linux only, I admit that I’ve grudgingly come to appreciate Windows. I would appreciate it a lot more if it had an easy-to-access third level key to type em dashes and curly quotes, but it’s better than I’ve given it credit for.
#203
05/24/2022

🔐 The Missing Second Factor

: Google, for some reason, let its Authenticator app break for a sizable chunk of its Android users over the weekend, leaving at least some of them without an easy way to log into their accounts. WTF, Google?
#204
05/26/2022

🙊 Take Care When Speaking Up

: Politically charged public tragedies like the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, can lead to poorly timed messaging when not thought through. Don’t be afraid to give yourself a moment of discussion.
#205
05/30/2022

🐻 The Hyphens are Load-Bearing

: Why there’s a new slasher movie coming out based around the Winnie-the-Pooh cultural franchise—but not the Winnie the Pooh cultural franchise.
#206
05/31/2022

🔓 Jailbreakers’ Revenge

: A famed jailbreaker is making headway in an antitrust case involving the famed Cydia app store. His argument: Apple made so many changes that it was infeasible to keep the store running.
#207
06/02/2022

📸 The Other Side of the Lens

: Sony, which produces a number of camera components for smartphones, implies that the DSLR might soon meet its match in the form of a smartphone camera. Cue skepticism.
#208
06/06/2022

🥛 Past the Expiration Date

: Old hardware that isn’t being actively updated anymore is often still useful—as long as those who own it have the option to figure out an upgrade path. Old iOS devices don’t have a path forward.
#209
06/07/2022

🎪 Open-Tent Policy

: Why you shouldn’t take a combative tone when it comes to explaining an expert topic to someone else. Don’t be a keeper of the gate.
#210
06/09/2022

🖼 Absurd Images From Thin Air

: Pondering the cultural value and obsessive nature of using Dall-E, the tool that generates images from whatever weird ideas you can conceive.
#211
06/14/2022

⏱ Netflix’s Timing Problem

: In a world of Barry and Severance, the once-innovative model of dumping a whole season at once feels kind of old hat. And the best example of this might be Netflix’s crown jewel, Stranger Things.
#213
06/16/2022

🕹 Meet Your Heroes

: On the time I met Zophar, the guy from Zophar’s Domain, a quarter century after I first worked on his site.
#214
06/20/2022

☝️ The Fingerprint You Leave

: As third-party cookies go the way of the dodo, digital fingerprinting is going to become an increasingly prominent tactic for tracking users. As a new website suggests, your taste in browser extensions alone can be enough to identify who you are.
#215
06/21/2022

🌍 The Bad Default

: A big reason why Internet Explorer limped into the history books comes down to Microsoft’s slow upgrade strategy at a time when the browser was dominant.
#216
06/23/2022

🧐 Monocultural Studies

: A debate kicks up about whether the browser universe would benefit from a single dominant browser. We’re not in the Internet Explorer days anymore, but the choice still doesn’t makes sense.
#217
06/27/2022

🃏 Tech’s Role In Stacking The Deck

: There are a lot of issues that Friday’s Supreme Court ruling on abortion exposed. One that shouldn’t be ignored? The role that big tech may have played in the decision.
#218
06/28/2022

😈 Turning Heel

: As proven by Kraken’s leadership manifesto and other recent leadership dramas, it’s now cool to be a total jerk even if it makes you insufferable. You’ll still get plaudits anyway. From somebody.
#219
06/30/2022

📻 Repeating In The Name

: The radio station replaying Rage Against the Machine’s signature song over and over is doing its best to devalue the work for purely corporate reasons, but the song is too good to be diluted.
#220
07/04/2022

🏠 MidRange’s New Digital Home

: My secondary newsletter finally has a place to live after a couple of months off the newsletter grid. Sure took long enough, didn’t it?
#221
07/05/2022

🎮 Web3, in Console Form

: If you’re going to try to convince gamers your hilarious-looking Web3 console is worth checking out, you need more than a render and the promise of the blockchain.
#222
07/07/2022

🤓 On “Manchild”

: A defense of learning to embrace whatever you’re into, even if it doesn’t match the norms of your age range. Nothing wrong with being a nerd.
#223
07/11/2022

🎸 ERNEST Goes to Nashville

: There’s a guy named Ernest Smith who has a current hit on the Hot 100, and I didn’t notice until now because his stage name is a mononym. Shout-out to ERNEST.
#224
07/12/2022

🏫 Inflated Grades

: Columbia University gets caught puffing up its numbers on a prestigious ranking—which raises the question about what the people running said list were doing.
#225
07/14/2022

✍️ What Did Medium Solve?

: Medium in many ways helped workshop the modern writer economy. The problem is, most of the solutions Ev Williams landed on found better homes in other places—and were the product of chaos on his own platform.
#226
07/18/2022

🧦 What a Guarantee Means

: The outdoors brand Bass Pro finds itself the target of a class-action lawsuit because it apparently didn’t follow the rules of its own lifetime-guarantee socks.
#227
07/19/2022

🍎 Benchmark-Gate

: A longtime Apple journalist’s takedown of the culture of performance benchmarking on YouTube might have been a little too sharp. Is there room for less drama?
#228
07/21/2022

🎹 I Can’t Stop Thinking About This Song

: How a song by an unknown singer, posted over the weekend, led me on a journey to learn more about who he was. Meet Joey Wilson, a Philly songwriter whose songs will haunt you.
#229
07/25/2022

☣️ NFT Toxicity

: A bad NFT published on GameStop’s new service drew controversy over the weekend, but the real story might have been the trolls going out of their way to defend it.
#230
07/26/2022

🧭 Where the Paths Diverge

: Ten years ago this month, I started a new job, where I’m still at—and a well-known creator in the retro community quit his. To me, the diverging paths are too interesting to ignore.
#231
07/28/2022

💔 Facebook Broke the Contract

: Ultimately, we signed up for specific experiences when joining a social network. When we no longer get those experiences, even in a small way, we should not be expected to stick around.
#232
08/01/2022

🍰 Niche Problem Solving

: Showcasing my deep respect for a food writer who decided to take a layer cake on a plane for some reason. Surprisingly, it went off without a hitch.
#233
08/02/2022

📬 Return to Sender

: A recent GOP political campaign around email deliverability could force spammy political messages into your inbox—despite strong evidence that user error and ineffective marketing might be the real issue.
#234
08/04/2022

📺 Minimizing HBO Max

: For some reason, the incredibly popular HBO Max service appears to be going through some things—and it feels like creators are left holding the bag once again.
#235
08/08/2022

🪤 Avoiding the Copyright Trap

: Creators are getting nailed by photographers for simply wanting to celebrate the creative works of another person. This is backwards, and collectively, we should solve for it. Here’s one idea.
#236
08/09/2022

🚂 Toys, Take Two

: Toys “R” Us gets a second lease on life in Macy’s locations across the country. It may not match the chain’s former glory, but at least they held on somehow.
#237
08/15/2022

🖼 We Can Harness AI to Create New Things

: A lot of ink has been spilled on the potential destructive effects of AI-based art. But in the hands of the right kind of creator, it can actually expand their reach—rather than shrink it.
#239
08/16/2022

🕊 If You Love a Newsletter, Set It Free

: A suggestion to Substack, which seems to get upset whenever a popular paid newsletter leaves its platform for outside pastures: Don’t get mad when people leave.
#240
08/18/2022

🍕 Pizza Punchline

: The pizza chain Papa John’s sets itself up as a source of mockery by launching a new product while implying pizza is somehow in decline.
#241
08/22/2022

🗞️ Gimme Stelter

: If CNN doesn’t want Brian Stelter, fine, whatever. But I think Brian Stelter is an important voice and our culture needs a place for a journalist who reports effectively on journalism.
#242
08/23/2022

🔓 Don’t Mess With Mudge

: A shocking whistleblower report on Twitter’s security issues—from a legendary whistleblower—paints a company disinterested in repairing its significant infrastructure challenges.
#243
08/25/2022

🛝 The Other Slippery Slope

: Companies like CloudFlare often avoid trying to get involved in content issues out of a concern of setting off a slippery slope. But looking at their recent actions in the context of their original stated goals, it feels like they let something else more fundamental slide.
#244
08/29/2022

🤓 Off-Grid Nerdery

: An interesting thing I’ve noticed about small talk in recent years: The more niche your interests are, the harder it is to have it. This one’s for the nerds not into Marvel.
#245
08/30/2022

🖼 An Optimization Too Far

: There is a genuine risk that search engine professionals will attempt to use AI images as an SEO tactic. We should prevent this from happening now, before it turns Google Image Search into mush.
#246
09/01/2022

⛈ Regulation Without Regulation

: If CloudFlare wants to stay out of content debates, it needs to reconsider its relationship with the government. Being a pseudo-governmental body is no longer enough.
#247
09/05/2022

📱 Shrinkage

: Understanding the odd status of the small phone, which Apple is moving away from and Android seems to finally be embracing once again. Carriers might be getting in the way of your next one-handed device.
#248
09/06/2022

⛈ Assessing CloudFlare’s Hand

: CloudFlare lost the PR battle in the Kiwi Farms situation, in large part because it mostly ignored the legitimate concerns that led to the campaign in the first place.
#249
09/08/2022

🏝 Mutiny on Dynamic Island

: Rather than minimizing its camera punch, The iPhone 14 Pro comes with a new user interface option to draw attention to it. Eh, here’s a hater’s take.
#250
09/12/2022

📚 Wiki-Defense

: A high-profile history and politics YouTuber takes direct aim at Wikipedia. I’ve taken my own jabs over the years—but I’ll be quick to defend it.
#251
09/13/2022

💻 Pixelbook on Pause

: Google’s decision to stop development on a new Pixelbook and disband the team working on the hardware line highlights how the strategy never gelled—despite the original model still having a head-turning design all these years later.
#252
09/15/2022

💨 Work History Go Poof

: Legendary tech journalist Kara Swisher reveals that even she is not immune to having her old work removed from the internet by short-sighted content management.
#253
09/19/2022

🔌 The Suicide Cable

: The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission warns the public about a very specific kind of cable being sold on Amazon that has a telling nickname.
#254
09/20/2022

🎙 Serial Disconnect

: Adnan Syed’s conviction was vacated, and a podcasting giant returns to the case after many years away. What should we make of the sour feelings some listeners have about Serial?
#255
09/22/2022

🖼 Not Too Artificial

: Getty Images sets a line in the sand on AI-generated images, citing copyright concerns. The image it presents of itself to its customers might also be a factor.
#256
09/26/2022

🕹 Shoryuken Slots

: Trying to make sense of the fact that the Virginia Lottery now offers an online lottery game based on Street Fighter II.
#257
09/27/2022

🐞 It Came From an Old Patch

: A decades-old workaround in the Linux kernel held back the full potential of modern AMD chips—until recently, when it was caught by AMD.
#258
09/29/2022

🔓 Fast Hack

: The popular business magazine Fast Company is smarting from a brutal hack this week—an incident that highlights the need for stronger security, but also a strong dose of empathy.
#259
10/03/2022

✍️ Why I Signed

: A quick explanation of why I broke a decades-old rule for myself and signed an open letter to support libraries and the Internet Archive.
#260
10/04/2022

🏛 The Power to Change Things

: Contrasting the tough actions of the FCC in light of a Supreme Court case that potentially threatens Section 230. It’s a great reminder of the power the government wields to change our communications.
#261
10/06/2022

🪴 No More Walled Gardens

: Amid Twitter’s forthcoming purchase, I find myself wondering if platforms like Substack, which appear to be moving in a walled-garden direction, can be discouraged from doing so for the public good. We saw the mistakes of the Web 2.0 era. No need to repeat them.
#262
10/10/2022

☕️ Burning the Beans

: The ready-to-retire Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has had a respectable career, but his hard-line stance against unionization, and the fact that he’s making it about him, seems destined to leave a permanent mark on his legacy.
#263
10/11/2022

🎃 The Plastic McRib?

: McDonald’s brings back one of its standby Happy Meal classics just in time for Halloween, which makes one wonder why they got rid of them in the first place. They should offer them every year from now on.
#264
10/13/2022

🦵 Fake Leg Empire

: Why is Meta spending so much money trying to make legs happen? And what lessons can you learn from this so that your own projects maintain a reasonable scale?
#265
10/17/2022

🎙 Podcast Risk

: The consolidation of the podcasting space, as highlighted by the plight of Gimlet, raises concerns about whether large acquirers are as committed to the creative work as much as the reach.
#266
10/18/2022

🥗 Dressing Up The News

: On Olivia Wilde, Kanye West, and why a solid news diet needs to go beyond special salad dressing. Not every important story will have an interesting hook.
#267
10/20/2022

✍️ Meet Lex

: The new AI-helped word processor Lex has been getting a lot of attention this week, and I have to admit I was curious how the word processor felt about all the attention, so I did an interview. With Lex.
#268
10/24/2022

📲 Pulling a Bono

: In its fight to win some ground on the messaging ecosystem, Google appears to be intentionally borrowing from the stupidest idea U2 ever came up with—upsetting the iPhone user base.
#269
10/25/2022

🍴 Splitting the AI Fork

: Not long after Getty Images comes out against AI-generated art, a major competitor decides to wholeheartedly embrace it—including as a source for royalties.
#270
10/27/2022

🫶 Normalize Imperfection

: John Fetterman, managing an auditory processing disability caused by a stroke, should be appreciated for the bravery of what he did on the Pennsylvania Senate debate stage the other night.
#271
10/31/2022

🤑 See What Sticks

: Elon Musk appears to be taking a “let’s see what we can get away with” approach to running the large social network he just bought. Whiplash impending.
#272
11/01/2022

🧶 Crocheting on a Tightrope

: The challenge of real-time reporting is that doing it well is really hard. But coming up with some made-up facts about the victim of a crime? That’s the easy part.
#273
11/03/2022

🗿 Past the Personality Cults

: Many people on Twitter seem to be looking past the network they’ve made their digital home for more than a decade. I wonder if it’s because the cult of personality spell has been broken.
#274
11/07/2022

🐘 This is a Mastodon Pop-Up

: So, we’re doing something different for the next week or two, and we’re sacrificing MidRange for the task. The reason? There’s a heckuva lot of confusion about the suddenly popular Mastodon. Maybe we can help.
#275
11/08/2022

🗓 Does Mastodon Need a Buffer?

: Breaking down a few more of the nagging Mastodon questions you might have—including why tools to schedule your posts aren’t common just yet.
#276
11/14/2022

📅🔥 The Infernal September

: The case that what Mastodon is experiencing isn’t so much an Eternal September but a trial by fire. Get to know the term “Infernal September.”
#278
11/15/2022

🗳 With Mastodon, You Have Choices

: While Mastodon releases features at a regular clip, its nature as an open-source tool means that you can ignore them if you’d like, or add your own. That’s a refreshing shift from closed social networks.
#279
11/17/2022

🍖 Is Mastodon Fetch?

: As we close out the pop-up newsletter, let’s talk about the haters for a second here. Do they have a point? Or, are they missing the point?
#280
11/21/2022

🚪 This is Your Escape Hatch

: If you’ve had an unhealthy relationship with social media for a while, the past month could offer an opportunity for a reset. Don’t miss it.
#281
11/22/2022

🐭 Bobbing For Leaders

: Bob Chapek’s departure from Disney was a bit of a surprise—but not as big of a surprise as his replacement, Bob Iger. What the heck happened?
#282
11/24/2022

🍏 The FrankenMac

: Thinking back to a time in my life when an old iBook gave me a window into a broader world … and why I got rid of it.
#283
11/28/2022

✍️ The Signs, They Aren’t A-Changin’

: Bob Dylan learns the hard way that if you duplicate your autographs in a $600 book using an autopen, you will get called out for it. This is a story about the failures of capitalism, really.
#284
11/29/2022

🪣 Don’t Fall Into The Well

: New social media networks put a lot of work into onboarding you with cool features. But what truly matters is what those networks look like over time—and open looks better than closed.
#285
12/01/2022

🐝 Not The Bees

: Hive Social’s bad security practices, which are dangerous enough that a security team fast-tracked disclosure, puncture a hole in the formative platform’s long-term prospects.
#286
12/05/2022

🤬 Don’t Let Him See You Mad

: The recent leak of secret correspondence from Twitter’s archives seemed designed to anger a lot of people. You don’t have to play into the performative anger—even if there’s actual anger there.
#287
12/06/2022

🗓 A Case of the Mondays

: We’re working in the office less, and that shift in work is changing the way that we handle Mondays. It’s only really a problem if you see it that way.
#288
12/08/2022

🪧 Time for a Walkout

: For the first time in decades, The New York Times sees its staff walk out. This is an important move for the labor movement when it comes to journalism. Take a break from reading the Times today.
#289
12/12/2022

👋 Left & Leaving

: On The Weakerthans, a killer album about transitions, and the transition we’re seeing within our own online cultures.
#290
12/13/2022

🥧 Unfulfilling Pi

: When a recent controversy blew up around the Raspberry Pi, the foundation implied shortages created a charged atmosphere. That might be an under-admission of culpability, but the fact is, high Pi prices and low availability are making x86 look good right now.
#291
12/15/2022

✍️ Let’s Revue

: Revue is shutting down, and as MidRange started on Revue, I feel a certain way about it—especially after learning that Revue’s owner also wants Substack.
#292
12/19/2022

🧠 The Mental Block

: This past weekend was assuredly the most chaotic in the history of social media, and all based on the whims of a hyperactive decisionmaker. I don’t know about you, but my brain is shredded.
#293
12/20/2022

📚 The Challenge of Correctness

: A famed YouTuber reveals that a famous fact he uncovered is in fact totally wrong—and hires an archivist to do cleanup.
#294
12/22/2022

🐘 White Elephant

: A Web 3.0 company purchases Mastodon’s second-largest instance just before Christmas. What does that say about federated social media, anyway?
#295
12/26/2022

🎸 August and Everything After

: To start off the 2022 MidRange Awards, we give a nod to a guitarist who has taken music YouTube by storm over the last two years—all out of a sincere hatred of terrible pop songs.
#296
12/27/2022

🥁 Reshaping A Drummer’s Legacy

: An uncomfortable retelling of a beloved rock star’s life soon after his passing offers insights few stories of its nature can—and it’s for that nature, despite said discomfort, that we rank it as MidRange’s feature article of the year.
#297
01/02/2023

🎓 Senioritis

: MidRange is ending. I’m graduating from this newsletter. But not for another month. I think announcing its death early might just be the kick in the pants it needs as a creative project.
#299
01/03/2023

💾 Lifetime Half-Life

: A popular video application gains a whiff of scandal after ending a “free lifetime updates” policy midstream—and it’s not the only example of a lifetime license falling by the wayside over time.
#300
01/05/2023

🧲 MagSafe Standard

: Apple wins unexpected goodwill after handing its MagSafe technology for mobile devices to the operators of the Qi wireless charging standard. It’s an excellent template for Apple to innovate while avoiding regulatory scrutiny.
#301
01/09/2023

🧆 No Mo Noma

: The Danish fine-dining institution is closing its doors at the end of next year in favor of a less aggressive business model. The model has some serious labor problems that have emerged in recent years.
#302
01/10/2023

📈 Old Metrics in the New Society

: Measuring fediverse-style social networks like Mastodon based on traditional metrics like daily active users doesn’t make sense because maximizing user counts is not the goal. Building a sustainable network is.
#303
01/12/2023

👉 Out of Touch

: Apple apparently is thinking about throwing out a stance so sacred it arguably led them in the wrong direction with their laptops for about half a decade. The Macs may finally get touch.
#304
01/16/2023

🦠 Post-Virality

: My next project is going to focus on what I call a “post-viral” form of social media. As I build, I’d like to explain what that is real quick. It matters.
#305
01/17/2023

🔧 Build in Public

: I’m not really the kind of person who wants to hide what he’s creating, so let’s just show it off. I’m laying out my cards for my future plans for for MidRange’s replacement in this post.
#306
01/19/2023

💨 Fanning the Future

: A new type of cooling device for laptops and small computers could help make noisy fans obsolete—but one hopes it does so in old machines too, not just the latest and greatest.
#307
01/23/2023

🥁 Does Rhythm Have Limits?

: As MidRange winds down this week, I take a look back at an early thesis of mine—that building a strong rhythm is is the secret to creative work.
#308
01/24/2023

⏲ The Best of MidRange

: A few of the many issues that MidRange has featured over the past two years. Not every issue was perfection, but these 10 were pretty good.
#309
01/26/2023

✌️ Not Least

: The final issue of MidRange, an experiment in brevity that turned into a two-year project. I will miss my morning keyboard rants.
#310