A Book To Protest Entropy
I write so I can think, but I brought the words into the physical world so I can remember
Tldr: I have a book out called A Misfit Highwire Act and you should go get a copy of it.
When I was a young reader, my favorite books were essentially collections of short stories. I read many books with collected stories of heroism, peril, or prison breaks in World War 2. I devoured compilations of Grecian and Egyptian myths . As I got a little older, I enjoyed collections of articles from writers such as Lewis Grizzard, Dave Barry, and PJ O’Rourke. While these authors also wrote full books, I always enjoyed the collections of their essays, which permitted me to skip back and forth to topics that seemed germane to my life or that sparked my interest.
While I loved their collection of past writings, each of the authors above were widely known and established writers when they published their first “book of a bunch of stuff I wrote elsewhere”. It seems presumptuous or me to put out such a collection as my first published work.
On the other hand, the medium-to-long-form essay is the a great way to talk about certain topics and ideas. One of my favorite essays of all time is PJ O’Rourke’s Ghosts of Responsibility, which is a gothic short story masquerading as an autobiographical personal essay about young love. It was published in the October 1980 issue of National Lampoon. I’m grateful it found its way into a compilation of stand-alone essays that O’Rourke published later in life. Without that collection, this tremendous and heartbreaking essay would be largely lost to time. By publishing it in a retrospective, O’Rourke gave that essay a second life to reach new readers.
There are a lot of new readers for this newsletter (welcome!) and if you think there is value in what I’m writing, I encourage you to consider picking up my book.
I published this book in part because I’ve written things over the last 15 years that I think should persist. One of the first essays in the book is In Praise of a Physical World in which I wrote about my despair as a young father watching my children grow up in a world of digital impermanence. I made a plea to steer away from the quick decay of the purely digital and to make things real by making them physical. The blog where I initially published that essay no longer exists.
My book is titled A Misfit Highwire Act and if you’re not hot on Amazon, you can get a DRM-free PDF copy via Gumroad.
The cover of my book is inspired by Philippe Petit’s famous World Trade Center tightrope walk.
The story of Petit’s audacious stunt is stunningly told in the movie The Walk. Petit has a vision of daring and glory that made perfect sense to him but seemed insane to an outsider. He meticulously planned a logistically complex stunt at his own grave risk, knowing that his reward for it may simply be a prison cell. But he was compelled to do it.
It is of course arrogant and self-serving to compare myself to Petit. But we do share an awe in outrageous and esoteric things. Much of my book is chronicling my pursuit of the most outrageous stories that no one knew about. Much of my greatest writing is when I turn a sharp focus to a fascinating idea or story that is flying entirely under the radar.
In my essay Cinefex, in Memoriam I wrote about the tremendous beauty and quiet ambition in the labors of love from visual effects artists over the last 40 years. Similarly, Andy Serkis’ War for the Souls of the Apes tells the largely unknown story of the fight for the dignity of actors and artists in the emerging world of character-driven visual effects.
My writing on dignity includes 8 essays that oscillate between despair at a technocratic world that treats people like cogs and my tenacious love for good work and beautiful things, from writing to illustrations to technical achievements to timber framed houses. Anything that uplifts people and feeds our wonder and connection with each other is something that inspires in me unending marvel. I have to write about such things.
My subtitle is “essays on everything” because the topics are all over the board. I include essays on data, visualizations, politics, and AI, for which I’m better known than any of those other topics. Many of those essays lean into both the “misfit” and “highwire” implications of the title.
I’m a technologist who often comes across as a luddite. I’m a moderate to flies off the handle. I promote the emerging world of artificial intelligence while questioning what value it brings and if that is worth the losses that will be endured. There is risk in holding the line on beauty, dignity, or truth. Holding the line anywhere will set you as an outsider in a world where the greatest value is aligning with “your team” in whatever has happened in the last 48 hours. There is some value to the misfit, but there never a place for him to belong.
The most potent theme running through this book is about aligning the world toward the preservation of the past and the active participation in building a future worth having. I’m a warrior against entropy, which is a silly fight to pick because this is the side that will lose. But if we align ourselves properly, we can keep the important things alive a little bit longer.
