2026 is the perfect time to start a print newsletter
In the summer of 2026, I read “Empire of Ink”, a history of the evolution of the Newspaper in America. One of the many things I took away from it was our nation’s history (from before the founding until well after the Civil War) of small scale print shops. Our nation was littered with one person operations where individual editors would collect news from their communities, clippings from other papers, add a bit of their own writing, set type by hand, and distribute hand-pressed copies within their communities, and distribute with the help of the Post Office. This kind of small scale publishing was the norm before industrial printing enabled massive scale (and professionalization and consolidation). For many decades ours was a nation of small-scale editors - all copying one other’s work and ideas, adding some of their own, and helping their communities figure out what to pay attention to.
Curation, just like writing, can be a powerful way to add to a conversation and help ideas spread. Discretion and taste is more important than ever in a world awash with content, where attention is the scarce resource. I’m always really thankful when others help me figure out what to pay attention to. I love it when my friend Heidi tells me what Oscar nominees are worth checking out, or when my friend Meriwether (who has incredible knowledge of poetry) helps me find work that I’ll be able to understand and enjoy.
The category that I find myself drawn to curate isn’t a kind of media, instead it all surrounds a common idea.
That summer was also one when a set of books and conversations helped me start seeing the outlines of something I’ll call “Cheet Grass Progress”, after the invasive weed.
Cheet Grass Progress is an observation about how our society and culture thinks and talk about progress itself. As our technology gets better, as we become more interconnected, as our world becomes more understandable, I have this deep unease that somehow the set of things that actually matter are getting harder to see, harder to name, and harder to defend. I had written an essay that touched on it a few years back, but that is only part of the picture. Everywhere you look, there’s this growing consensus around a very flat/smooth/simple set of commonly held ideas about what it means for things to be “better” (cheaper, flexible, faster, reliable, capable, ubiquitous, measurable, known), and in the elevation of this set of facile goals, there are lots of more nuanced virtues being left behind.
The best analogy I have for this is biodiversity of values. If you’ve ever been to the Bay Area, you’ve seen Cheet Grass - that gorgeous weed that looks like wheat that has covered most of the hills surrounding the bay in gently rippling amber waves against a deep blue sky. It’s beautiful to look at, but it’s a disaster ecologically - it strips the soil of nutrients, isn’t hearty enough for anything to eat, and grows back faster than everything else after wildfires. It’s outcompeting anything else that grows - a monoculture we didn’t plan and doesn’t serve any function. Go to a meadow that has been Cheet Grass for a while - there aren’t birds chirping, beetles digging, voles burrowing, or humans able to harvest it - only Cheet Grass rustling. There’s a certain narrow beauty to it, but there’s also a million other things missing or struggling because of the overwhelming success of this one thing.
That’s how I’m feeling about progress today. Our society seems increasingly committed to a really simple vision for what progress is: cheap goods and services, automation and ease, speed and availability, knowing and measuring everything, and the proffering of infinite options. That vision is appealing - who wants to argue for hunger, toil, delay, ignorance, or constraint? But we’re suffering from the increasing amount of societal focus on these as the set of things worth pursuing, when few of us would say that these comforts give our lives their meaning. In ecological terms, this thin set of values is currently outcompeting more nuanced, hearty, challenging, diverse (and ultimately, fulfilling) ideals, and is coming to dominate our culture, and narrow our imagination for what a good, virtuous, meaningful life can look like. I’ve wanted some way of writing about this in a way that isn’t hopelessly abstract. Reading Empire of Ink helped me start to imagine what that could be. I wanted to start collecting examples. I wanted to start curating.
So that’s what Naming Value is about - it’s my attempt to try to find more language and examples to talk about the way our society’s values are changing, and point out ways we can do better. In it I’m collecting snippets of ideas (from books, articles, and friends) that feel like they’re worth paying attention to, all of which have to do (in one way or another) with Cheet Grass Progress - or envision something beyond it.
It is intentionally short and infrequent - I want to feel attached to anything that makes it onto the page. If something is in NV, I think the idea or media is really worth paying attention to. The world doesn’t need another long list of links. If you’re like me, and you spend enough time looking at lists of links like Reddit or HackerNews, you end up skimming the headlines and comments - with volume substance becomes secondary. NV is short because I want everything in it to be excellent.
This project sounds dour, but I promise it’s profoundly hopeful - there are a million reasons to be pessimistic about the present moment, but I’m confident we’re going to find our way out of this funk. Everyone I talk to shares this underlying hunger for something substantive, and I think we’re going to find it together. It takes a shared sense (and shared vocabulary) of what is broken to be able to fix it.
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