Good Question is a fortnightly newsletter co-written with its readership, based on survey responses to low-stakes, open-ended questions. Each letter typically includes an essay, a mildly amusing data visualization, and various links to things I think are good.
Message In A Bottle is the email subscription platform I built to distribute May I Recommend. It’s important to me to have a fully analytics-free experience, with no indication of who’s opening it, what links are clicked on, or any other traditional “engagement metrics”. I want to feel like I’m tucking a carefully rolled letter into an old rinsed-out rootbeer bottle, sealing it with cork and wax, and then lobbing it out into the ocean and waving goodbye. Who knows whose shores it will wash upon? Maybe someday they’ll write me back, or maybe I write the letter for no one but myself.
This site is set in Rosario for paragraph text and Ibarra Real Nova for titles. It consists of a Sinatra app with a Postgres database hosted on Heroku. Emails are sent using Mailgun.
When I include images, they are typically sourced from the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium, or The Cleveland Museum of Art.