More specific is better

Good morning from icy Philadelphia. We had more than a foot of snow yesterday, a welcome reminder that nature is always in charge. Even as I have now missed two of two scheduled work trips so far this year and miss connecting with people in real life, I feel lucky to be comfortable and safe. I hope the same is true for all of you this week.

I have just three reading recommendations for you this week after neglecting those summaries for awhile. Most of these links are squarely about our world of news and information. But first, let's get inspired.

To be inspired by

I found this chat between Gilbert Cruz and Guillermo Del Toro a complete joy and balm this past weekend. Cruz is the editor of the New York Times Book Review, and Del Toro is a director, most recently of Frankenstien. Both of them are sincere book lovers, and neither are snobs, which makes for fun and joyful listening. But the conversation also goes deep. It is a testimony to how nourishing just one work of art can be for its appreciators, be that one person in one moment or many people over centuries.

For Del Toro, the art to be appreciated is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. His devotion to that work and true respect for Shelley are my favorite things about his publicity tour. I've been a Gothic girly since my tweens but never loved Frankenstein. It was the biography Vindication by Lyndall Gordon that brought me into Shelley's fan base.

Celebration of young women's creativity was almost impossible when Shelley published Frankenstein anonymously in 1818. It's no longer rare, but I'm still frustrated by how many cultural conversations about women's art quickly leave the artists behind in favor of discussions of them as mere harnessers of some larger phenomenon, as if being Jane Austen or Beyoncé is a right time, right place situation.

Del Toro is interesting in this conversation because he is so specific about how this one work has continued to inspire him for most of his life. Explaining why his favorite edition is the original 1818 text, he said, "It's a little undisciplined, it's a little ungainly, it's a little unrepentant," beautiful musings about a canonical work written by a then teenager. "But it is absolutely the one closest to the pulse of the biography of Mary Shelley, the id of Mary Shelley." Come for the discussion of horror as catharsis and grace as punk rock, and stay for the reminders about joy and meaning.

To learn from

There has already been a lot of analysis of how things got so dumb at the Washington Post, and it will keep coming. If you intend to disengage from this particular discourse, first read this piece by Charlotte Klein with additional reporting by Ben Terris in New York Magazine. It's fun when shitty bosses get their comeuppance, and details about Will Lewis’ bad management (and bad clothes!) are plentiful. That feels satisfying. More instructional are the beats the story gives to let each specific strategy and business failure land. Unlike Lewis's management, which seems particularly unskilled, his business failures feel completely run-of-the-mill. It doesn't take an idiot to run a news organization into the ground, and we should be more honest about that. For a large news organization to be both high-quality and profitable, it instead takes a near impossible combination of investment, runway, and luck coupled with brilliance and discipline across the entire organization.

To Do

It feels like more of us are willing to spend significant time trying to harness our effort and energy toward a healthier and more vibrant civic future. Please read this open letter by New Civic Future (an effort by a group of people with deep roots in either news, civic, or democratic work) if you haven't yet.

The foundations of civic renewal the group outlines are completely practical and wildly ambitous—a fantastic combination for any movement.

Sign on if you like what you read. I did, and am eager to participate in what comes next. The group lays out five foundational principles for civic renewal. I invite you to think about which principle you're most excited by and challenge yourself to come up with one thing you can do to advance that value. I feel committed to each of the pillars, but I want to be more creative about the "relational" elements of this work I can otherwise run out of energy for.

To come

Some long-overdue and desperately needed help for this newsletter is on the horizon. Thank goodness. I'm working with Mattia Peretti of the excellent News Alchemists newsletter as a coach (reach out if you'd like to hire him, too) and we'll develop some formats and features to increase the value and community this newsletter can offer without incresing the number of late nights I spend researching and writing. If you have suggestions for what you would like to see more of, less of, or ideas you'd like to share, please tell me. I'm moving things around on the backend so please email me directly at alvarez.sarah@temple.edu

Your feedback is so welcome and desired. Thank you to Maggie Cassidy for her thoughts on reporting as a vocation and to Sarah Hulett for all the AI articles and keeping me on my toes.

Until next week, take care.