Before I dive into the material I have collected since my previous email it’s time to announce my second letter.

You might or might not remember that I started sending out actual, physical letters. The letters are a mix of these emails and of my own work (photography); they’re also something I do for fun.

I think it’s important to have fun, regardless of who you are and what you do. And it’s especially important to have fun in this neoliberal, joyless world that measures people by their utility.

The next letter is going to be a bit experimental in that anyone getting the letter will receive a print of one of my photographs (there’s a catch), but there’s some work you’ll have to do yourself (that’s the catch). The idea/thinking behind all of that is going to be explained in the letter that comes along.

Serious artists don’t do these kinds of things. They sell editions of 3 for thousands of dollars using galleries. For sure, they won’t tear up a print and then ask someone to put it back together themselves, telling them that that is part of the work.

But since I’m not a serious artist you can receive one of these letters if you send me your address and $10 (US). That’s really all there is to it.

As before, there’s going to be a deadline. If you get in touch and pay by the end of next Sunday (8 November 2026) I will send you one of those letters.

Simple as that.

“Well, when the capitalist death cult takes me early,” Kate Zambreno says, “as it no doubt will because I literally work constantly, I'm glad my daughters, my children are going to have my books. I'm glad they will know what my interior life was like and what life is like, the texture of life was like for me. Because I don't have that, of my mother. No one has that. Of this generations and centuries of silenced mothers or people.”

CPhMag.com is going to be 25 years next year, or rather the blog itself is (for the most mundane reason, I changed the name halfway through*). If I were to start something like this today, would that have the same chance of getting seen? Of making some sort of impact, however minute it might actually be? I’m really not sure.

I think the people who start using the internet creatively these days are mostly fucked. Now, the internet sucks. The creative energy that went into the early internet has either dissipated, or it has been channeled into really distasteful, harmful things. I mean just look at what Mark Zuckerberg or the other tech bros are producing these days!

Don’t believe me? Then read this long interview with someone who has been instrumental in building a really useful site for people who knit.

“Here's what I found,” Becca Bailey says about pattern designers, “a designer who started between 2007 and 2014 had about a 60% chance of reaching 100 fans and about a 25% chance of reaching 500-5,000 fans. Around 2015, there was a dip that suspiciously follows the 2013 retirement of Google Reader, followed by a bump that lines up with the first year the Instagram discovery algorithm was introduced. After that, we can see a steady decline, ending in 2024 when a new pattern designer has only a 10% chance of reaching over 100 fans, and no chance—literally zero designers in my sample—of getting over 500.”

Meanwhile, Germany’s Nazi problem got a lot worse. In order to understand how so many Germans now openly vote for Nazis, this article is really helpful: “The AfD made no secret of its aims and means, and for many this was the appeal.”

Well, that was depressing.

But it’s John Berger’s 100th birthday, and there is a new biography (that I’m reading right now). There were/are art critics, and there was John Berger. Simon Torracinta wrote a really good article about the man. Make sure to read it.

And then order yourself a copy of one of Berger’s books and read it. You won’t regret it.

With that I will conclude for today. As always thank you for reading!

— Jörg