My grandmother trusted the evening news because she’d watched it earn that trust for decades. Nobody told her when the rules changed. Nobody told our parents either. A new essay on cognitive inheritance.
Three trips to Paris. One underground conference. A question I can’t
shake about what we owe the open source commons we’ve built together.
New essay:
There’s something that gets lost between a screen and your eye.
Not the idea — the ideas make it through fine — but something else. The weight of it. The sense that someone actually made something.
So I’m trying something different.
I write essays. Long ones, about cities and open source and the way technology changes how we move through the world. And if you go to jesse.blog/mail, you can subscribe and add your mailing address — and I’ll send them to you. On paper. With a stamp.
You can read it on your porch. Fold it up. Spill coffee on it.
And if something moves you — a thought, a pushback, a story of your own — you can write me back. And I’ll write back.
It’s slower. That’s sort of the point.
High tech makes big promises, but it can’t replace the human experience.
My trip through San Francisco’s transportation layers — from stalled Ubers to looping Waymos — reminded me what we lose when systems forget the people they serve.
Read the full story:
Most teams don’t fail because of the big disruptions. They drift because of the subtle drag—those half-knot inefficiencies you barely notice until it’s too late. In 2026, efficient leadership means learning to spot and correct the imbalance before it slows the whole ship.
Read the full piece:
✍️ Just published: On The Sacred Act of Writing: Distraction Free – my reflections after a three-month sabbatical and how I’m building a daily writing ritual to protect focus and flow.
Ready to dive deeper into distraction-free writing?
#writing #focus #distractionfree #writingritual #flow
I didn’t think it could get any better. The warm mornings, a blank page, a hot coffee. And then I remembered, I had a box pressed Melanio Gran Reserva Limitada in my bag.
