Friday Favorites 26

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. This week I learned my plumber plays the hurdy-gurdy at the Rennaissance Festival, so I guess that’s as good a reason as any to go for the first time?

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

I listened to this interview with Maria Popova of “The Marginalian,” one of the few blogs I’ve followed for over a decade — and I eventually realized I needed to pull it up and transcribe the entire thing for myself: her lack of productivity, no editorial calendars, why archives are deeper than the internet, walking four hours a day to think (making her writing merely transcribing) — there’s just so much packed into this interview.
I’m on a roll, because I also listened to Michael Pollan on the same podcast talk about how writing is like a compost heap, laundry lines as narrative, why what we read before bed matters, and so much more. I loved that Pollan’s influenced by Hoaglund’s nature writing — I read his essay collection “On Nature” in 2014 and it had a big impact on me.
This letter on nostalgia reminds me of that line from Patricia Lockwood: “You’ll be nostalgic for this, too, if you make it.”
My favorite niche, hyper-specific thing biographies do is when they go way, way back to explore how an area’s geologic history affected the person they’re writing about.
If you’re a writer, maybe you can relate to this short article about the importance of deadlines? This Friday Favorites post would never make it without a weekly, firm deadline holding me accountable (my Tuesday blog post got deferred to today, in no small part because the deadline was less firm!).
This 1:43-minute video of all the weird sounds David Brynes makes in the Talking Heads discography is hilarious and something I’ve long wanted to create myself.
Really relate to Carmen Maria Machado in how her writing happens in short, concentrated bursts. As alluring as a disciplined writing practice is, it’s always a fantasy to me!
That said, a lot of authors know to show up even when they don’t feel like it.
One Main Character of the Day on BlueSky this week was a writer at Axios (the place that writes news for short attention spans) who described how he uses AI to help him read books his attention span can’t handle. But more interesting is this Defector article responding to it about why we read.
If you like books and maps, boy do I have a website for you.

See you on down the dusty trail,

Deadlines on Isak's Blog

Friday Favorites 26