Some of you know me because of a daily political newsletter project I ran in 2017-2018 centered on American politics. I am eight years older and wiser, with much more clever and original ideas, so I come to you now with a new project: a weekly political newsletter slash website centered on Toronto.

The project is called Show Up Toronto, and it launches today. The scope may be smaller geographically but it’s not any less ambitious, just more focused. My current goal is to aggregate public organizing, mutual aid, and advocacy events from around the city, so that it’s easier to discover how to get involved in organizing even if you’re not already plugged into the right social media circles. I am also actively interviewing organizers in the city for a related research project, and if you are an organizer in Toronto I would love to hear from you.

On the advice of a smart friend, I wrote a manifesto for the project to serve as my own north star, which I’m reposting below. I think it’ll be clarifying and engaging even for people who don’t live in Toronto. If you do, sign up for the newsletter or RSS feed and tell your friends.

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In October I gave a talk at Monktoberfest in Portland, Maine, a small and intimate tech conference with a big impact in the industry. It’s quite unlike any other conference I’ve been to, which is explicitly the point. I’d been hearing about the conference from friends for years, and it somehow still managed to exceed all my lofty expectations.

Monktoberfest asks that your talk be something you wouldn’t be able to hear at any other conference. Mine was about values and how they show up at work and what happens when there is a gap between your stated and enacted values. It’s a theme that percolates through a lot of my writing and something I’ve spent many sleepless nights ruminating on, and giving this talk to such a receptive, empathetic, and compassionate audience was incredibly meaningful to me.

You can watch the talk here:

Seeing as I am personally allergic to watching any YouTube videos longer than five minutes unless I absolutely have to, I’ve also included a lightly edited version of the text of the talk below.

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I feel objectively worse than I did in 2016. We have so much more information about how bad things are going to get now, and the fascists have had eight more years to prepare for how to roll out cruelty en masse on day one. We have so much less slack in ameliorating the worst impacts of climate change, after yet another eight years of inaction. I’m terrified.

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Omnivore is a read-later app. You know, one of those things that lets you save interesting articles you encounter throughout the day and the service will go crawl the page and download the content in a nice readable format and zap it to whatever device you wanted to zap it to, so that later when you’re not anxiously toggling between the same seven feed aggregators for fifteen seconds at a time, like maybe you’re waiting in line in the grocery store and you can’t do the NYT mini because they’re on strike and you don’t cross picket lines and god forbid you have a single second of mental silence, you can open the app and begrudgingly educate yourself on something that you alleged wanted to learn about at some point in time.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, for no reason at all connected to the news or the state of social media or the way we’ve constructed an economic sytem that allows petulant man-children to set billions of dollars on metaphorical fire because strangers on the internet made fun of him while simultaneously pretending that homelessness is an intractable inevitability that can only be solved by brutalizing the unhoused rather than taking away those billions of dollars from aforementioned megalomaniacs.

Sorry, where was I.

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