Some Things I Am Enjoying Right Now
Elkay water bottle stations These always make me feel like I'm at an airport, and like perfect hydration is possible. It doesn't matter if I'm filling a...
A newsletter in your inbox? From Neil???
Look, this whatchamacallit was a long time brewing and is a bit messy in a bunch of ways. Bear with me, have fun, and remember that I like you and want to...
Words of Advice
A friend recently asked me to write some words of wisdom to their kid who’s graduating high school. They and their spouse were putting together a book of...
The Joy of Phish, Pt. 2
Oh, hi. For a refresher on how we got here, you can re-read the TinyLetter archive of Pt. 1. I’m trying to figure out how to make the new What Is Neil Doing...
The Joy of Phish, Pt. 1?
One evening this past July I was at a Phish concert, standing on the amphitheater lawn right before the music started, and I felt something drop onto my...
Bicycles I've known and loved (and sometimes lost)
I have a lot of disparate memories associated with bikes and biking: beach town cruising, years of commuting, moving house once “like the Viet Cong” my...
Where is "Old Town"?
Apparently 11 years ago last week I was in Lisbon, Portugal for a long weekend with my friend Joel. I say "apparently" because if you’d asked me on...
An answering machine greeting I'll never forget
One of my good friends as a kid, one of my closest early friends who I can really say “I grew up with him,” was a kid named Will. I can remember so much...
I've done it again
Partially inspired by my own recent listicle here and also by Action Cookbook’s absolute banger of a newsletter recently, I have taken a few hours to...
Who are the people in your neighborhood?
New year, newsletter. I spent over 2 years not knowing any of my nearest neighbors, despite living in an apartment complex containing dozens of units. The...
Counting down and walking away
Hi. I’m sure I could have spun these together with some connective material, but I didn’t. I hereby present my first newsletter listicle: 11 memorable...
Listening to Weird Al in the laundry room
One of the formative experiences in my late adolescence was doing laundry at nerd camp, also known as the Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented...
Am I becoming a Tom Miller?
My hometown newspaper, the Corning Leader, aka “the Misleader” has never been in my lifetime a particularly intellectual forum for thoughtful discourse or...
The Lake House
We’re back at it again with the three-months-of-content newsletter! To what do we owe the pleasure? Anxiety. Desire. Accomplishment. Perfectionism....
Art, but for children
Hi. This series continues again, finally. October was just last week, no? Oh, for Pete's sake. Let’s start with a sort of apology. I must issue two...
Crying at the Sleepover
It is safe to say that I cried more during the month of May than I had in any month before. Probably more even than the past several years combined, to be...
Castle of Lost Dreams was on port 23
Something that weirdly prepared me for life in 2020s was hanging out in text-based, international chat rooms of the mid-90s. Not creepy ones or repetitive...
I remember how to write these, I think.
The other night as I tried to get to sleep I wondered: how many hotels have I slept in? I came up with twenty-five and that's almost certainly missing a few....
Pink Flamingos
Sweet socially distant readers: One morning in college, we collectively woke up to discover dozens of pink lawn flamingos installed on the “Upper” quad. This...
AMC & the Little League World Series
Hi. Each August as a kid, I'd find myself in southeastern Ohio visiting my grandparents for a few days. They lived in a sleepy town, Marietta, wholly...