where have i been?

my summer of writing, taking pictures, learning german

Today is my birthday! Here’s a message—

I spent the last few weeks working on a review of

kyla scanlon

’s debut book In This Economy? which was just published by the Los Angeles Review of Books here. I focus the review on the relevance (or irrelevance) of the metrics we use to interpret the economy, and I consider what it means to conduct “human-centric analysis.” If you’re not familiar with Kyla (and really, you should be), she invented the term “vibecession” and her Tiktok explanations of wonky economic phenomena are second to none.

The way we all talk about the economy—whether it’s me and you, you and your girlfriend, or your girlfriend reading a Peter Thiel-funded quasi-right-adjacent technocapitalist “journal”—informs how we make all kinds of decisions, how we vote in elections, and how we understand the world around us. Public conversations about policy and economics may have a shrinking number of outlets and a completely polarized readership, but it’s a goal of mine to improve my own writing and research this year in the pursuit of meaningfully advancing this dialogue.

Now, I’ve capped off the busiest three months of work in my life, and I have the next five weeks away to read Penguin Classics, take blurry pictures of city streets, learn B1 German, drink Campari, and write for you here. Bis später!

San Francisco, right before I left it, on Kodak Colorplus on my Olympus 35SP