*a quick promise to you: our newsletter will always only ever be written by humans and never by robots. we wish we could say that this is out of love & respect for writing & the environment, and while those are both true, it’s mostly that we really tried a couple years ago for months on end to get the robots to write in this very weird (but always hilarious, obvi) tone and it just…has not delivered. easier AND funnier to keep it highly manual and we are very okay with that. thank you for your understanding.

so first: this newsletter is a passion project. a labor of looooove. and truly, honestly, i love writing it. i love hearing from y’all about what you liked, what you agreed with, what you disagreed with. it’s probably my favorite part of each week, wrapping it all up and feeling really excited about the send.

i do it for free! because i like it! and also, i hope one day i won’t do it entirely for free anymore, but for the moment, it’s cool. i’m not charging. AND ALSO, it would be super hella rad if you wouldn’t mind supporting this lil passion project endeavor of mine. how, you ask? i shall elaborate:

1) share this newsletter with just one person you think would like it. not everyone. not your whole audience. just think of ONE person you think would like it, and tell them they would like it and send it on to them. i don’t want just ANYONE in my subscriber list - i want more people like you!

2) click on the ads if i’ve got em in the newsletter (like the one below)! you don’t have to fill anything out at all, just clicking helps me out. how? because they pay me for your clicks. i could sit here and be like, I TOTALLY BELIEVE IN THIS PRODUCT (and sometimes i do, like with that 1440 news site) but really, the point of the ads is to get a lil cash-money. if you click and let that bad boy open in a new tab, it’s LIKE you’re paying me but really it’s a business that can actually afford to pay me instead.

thanks for your readership. it’s been such an absolute pleasure writing for y’all and i hope to do it for many, many months to come. ❤ okay. now back on my bullshit below.

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while normally how a mansplainer gets his water, “well, actually” will explore the different angles of an argument or conversation & favor celebrating nuance & complexity over the short-term satisfaction of “hot take culture”.

It has been 22 days since the last major government news story I have to address in my newsletter.

It has been 0 days since the last major government news story I have to address in my newsletter.

Well, the government’s back on their bullshit and so am I, I guess. I really toyed with the idea of not addressing the events surrounding the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, but then I remembered that the whole point of this newsletter is discussing things like business, technology, the internet, our digital lives and how, at least in the US, those things are becoming more and more intertwined. It would be pretty hard to talk about what I wanted to talk about (Doritos and Frito-Lay and the price of greed) knowing that the story dominating many social feeds right now is this shooting? Attempted shooting? There were “shots fired,” but not like, AT anyone, so we’ll just call it The Really Stupid WHCD Event (TRSWHCDE, okay that’s a little long but whatever).

Speedy primer on what happened in case you’ve been actively avoiding it: On Saturday evening, a man breezed past security at the Washington DC Hilton, where the White House Correspondents’ Dinner was about to begin, and fired shots in the lobby somewhere before being tackled and arrested. The journalists and White House officials in the dinner heard the shots and had to duck and/or run for cover. Some people looked scared and some people didn’t look scared. Prior to all this happening, this man wrote a “manifesto” (it was basically an email) about how he was going to try to kill the WH Administration members one by one (except Kash Patel because…maybe they have a mutual love of…shots?) because he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”

Those are the quick facts. And, as it was happening, like clockwork, everyone rushed to judgment. Too many press outlets were releasing information like it was factual when it wasn’t, and too many people online had Very Loud Opinions too early on. For some, it was about the “violence of the left,” (which always conveniently ignores violence in all other forms.) For some, it was a sudden change of heart around the President (???) and a show of solidarity and support for the administration. For some, it was (and I can’t actually understand the words I’m about to type here) a Very Good Justification for ~checks notes~ a ballroom? 

And for plenty of people, it was a Very Obvious False Flag Operation.

Now, before I get into what I’m really hoping to impart here, I want to say that there are many, MANY good reasons for people to be suspicious of these events.  And in order to be thorough, I needed more space than I have here, so you’ll need to read the rest on the blog 👇

we like to highlight tools, places, services, methods, or other things that make work suck less. these are some of those things.

some events we think are worthwhile to attend, both virtually & in-person.

if you’re looking for grants or funding, we’re sharing some of our favorite opportunities here.

Need some tips on how to make your grant applications stand out? Check out this replay from a recent Hello Alice webinar on how to level up your grant apps with AI.

each week, we’ll end our newsletter with action item(s), or “what TF are you supposed to do about all this now?” we hope they help. 🤞🏻

XOXO,