Sometimes the nature of this work (being glued to a computer) feels like a foggy blur—soft around the edges, every Zoom unfolding into another blank document. What did I do today? Memorial Day, already? Where’d All the Time Go? Lately, in an effort to be more focused and [LinkedIn bro voice] intentional, I’ve been closing my email while working on a task: Writing a story, putting together a pitch deck, I’ve even been writing emails in Google Docs then copying and pasting. It’s remarkable how easy it is to get distracted on the Internet (oooh look at this feature about an in-demand record producer) and it’s equally remarkable how simple it is—for my brain, at least—to fight back against that.
Got some new work for you all that we’re very excited about. The links!
A project
We launched a new package of stories for our clients at Acumen America this week. We’ve been working with Acumen on Where to Next since the onset of the pandemic and this theme, focused on the gender gap in America, is the seventh we’ve produced for them. You can see all of the gender gap stories here, but I’m particularly proud of this one about the absolutely insane and shameful gender pay gap that persists. There are a lot of devastating stats about how wide the gap is and how it hasn’t changed—women in the United States earned 80 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2002 and the number remained nearly stagnant for two decades, with women earning 82 cents for every dollar in 2022—but I came away from my conversations with Jaime Gloshay, a co-founder of Native Women Lead, an organization that supports and invests in Native Women in business, realizing that it’s not just the workplace that has an impact on the gender gap, but the way we lend money.
By embracing relationship-based lending—looking at what a potential business does in the community and talking to them about it, as opposed to simply looking at a FICO score—there is a real opportunity to lift up Indigenous women. “There are a lot of flaws in the current lending framework,” Gloshay says. “And it is contributing to what women earn and the cycle of poverty in Indigenous communities.”
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A recipe
I made this excellent fennel salad recipe from Andy Baraghini’s The Cook You Want to Be: Everyday Recipes to Impress. (If you can’t zoom in for all the steps, the LA Times has the recipe.) One of those recipes that has, like, two more steps than you want it to, but I was prepping on a Saturday afternoon for my friends and it didn’t feel like work at all. As the name of the book suggests, it impressed. Will make this one again and again and again.
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An article
Not ashamed to admit I saw Dave Matthews Band many, many times in high school and college. Double digits, we’ll say that much. (Nowadays I listen to a few live shows for one day every 18-24 months to scratch the itch—I’ve moved on to other things.) This GQ profile is extremely fun, though. It has all the hallmarks of a good celebrity profile: hilarious anecdotes, sick burns, great quotes, death, and—most importantly—it is very interesting even if you didn’t see Dave Matthews Band play back-to-back nights at Alpine Valley in 2004.
Most of the time, though, if someone tells you they don’t like Dave Matthews, they’re really voicing a deep tribal aversion to the type of person they picture when they picture a Dave Matthews fan—spiritually incurious trustafarians, pumpkin-spice basics, fleece-vest IPA bros, or whichever straw-man stereotype offends their imagination most.
But it’s as unfair to judge Matthews himself by the perceived predilections of his audience as it is to judge David Lynch by the most insufferable dorks at a midnight Inland Empire screening. Especially since Matthews is ultimately more of a brooding bohemian than anything else. Plus he’s never been afraid to risk alienating some of the folks under his big tent when it comes to things that actually matter.
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A song
Very excited to see John Mayer and what remains of the Grateful Dead play some shows at various ballparks across the country this summer. They kicked off their tour in Los Angeles last weekend and they sound great. If you had told me in the summer of 2002—when I saw Mayer on the Room for Squares tour, NBD—that the guy who wrote “Your Body Is A Wonderland” would be the guitar player for one of the more popular post-Jerry Grateful Dead outfits, I’m not sure how I would have reacted. Anyway, listen if you like: the Grateful Dead, John Mayer’s Born & Raised, guys who make funny faces when they play a guitar solo, long songs, grey-bearded musicians touring well into their 70s.
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A short story
Not the first time I’ve shared a Ben Lerner short story in this newsletter and probably not the last. This one is about voicemails.
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A run
Ran through The Nichols Arboretum (aka The Arb) here in Ann Arbor last weekend. Everything is really starting to pop. Saw a few orioles. Perfect afternoon.
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Noah will be with you in two weeks. Thanks for listening.