Thank you for helping me figure out which sections to remove from the newsletter. As distasteful as it must have been to consider my navel, y’all have a clearer view of it than I do.

Free Fonts and Literary Journals will be lists. I might update those lists every year or two. That’s a better fit for these topics and what I have to say about them.

Nerdy Software will go where it belongs: the Uses page on my website. If you are unhappy with the software that you’re using, I may be able to suggest an alternative.

The sections that remain:

• Introduction
• Podcasts
• Bougie Products
• Personal Finance and Investing
• Reading
• Survey
• Lists

Here are five ideas for sections that I could add to this revised list. I’ve described the ideas below and included three examples for each. This month’s survey is your chance to tell me if any of them would interest you.

• An Email Message That I Didn’t Send: We all do this, yes? You compose a message, either in our head or for real. Then you think better of it. (N.B., this section proved difficult; I kept thinking better of thinking better.)
  • Brent , would you let me ask you programming questions? At least until I know enough to help you improve NetNewsWire?
  • Jeff, do you want to read Data Visualization, Second Edition, as a two-person bookclub? I know that we both want to learn R.
  • JWZ, your babymonster is all grown up, with kids of her own. One of them makes me laugh like I’m 12. Thank you!
• Haiku Album Reviews: White men should not make records or charge for concerts after 40. That’s also my cut off for writing reviews. Why not appropriate poetic form while I’m at it?
  • Observatory: A teapot in a tempest. Twangling instruments.
  • Fall tribute album based on reviews, not the songs as such: Secret Love.
  • To All Trains is too clever by 7/8. Requiescat FM Steve
• Received Wisdom: These are a few of my favorite quotes.
  • "There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it."
  • “You don’t learn how to do something by not doing it” (Ann Leckie, via Kieran Healy). If you distrust the experts, check yourself.
  • “Maybe the real thing is, you going in there and saying some things to your dad that you didn’t get to say." (Midnight Burger, via Jenica Rogers)
• Runner of the Month: My Sifan Hassan essay in 25 words or fewer.
  • Nikki Hiltz is everything every athlete aspires to be. They are successful, supportive, enthusiastic, genuine, generous, brave. They make the world better.
  • Jess McClain’s superpower: handling heartbreak with grace. Fourths in the Marathon and 10,000 meters made her a double Olympic alternate. And then… Atlanta
  • Molly Seidel is running’s Lady Gaga, DFW, Drew Barrymore, or Aaron Swartz. Brilliant and honest, she knows herself too well and not at all.
• This Month I Learned: Surprises or insights that don’t merit their own entry in another section.
  • The Warner fight demonstrates the value of familiar catalogs. Like television, we will stream (Sony, Universal, and Warner) songs via individual subscriptions. Spotify is dead.
  • “(Overusing) Commercial eye drops and artificial tears… can make dry eye worse…. There is, as yet, no lab made replacement for the human tear film.” Mary Roach, Replaceable You.
  • Reciprocity is the original sin. Shame because we owe someone a gift, meal, invitation, call, or message. Resentment because they owe us. Neither is real.

Those are my ideas. If you have others, let me know.

In the survey, you have two other choices in addition to the five above:

• I don’t mind the idea of new sections. The problem is that none of these ideas appeal to me. Maybe keep trying?
• Nah, I’m good. I already have too much to read. No need to add any more sections.

Welcome to March 2026’s Disappearing Moment, an inventory of my experiences. I hope you enjoy it.

Podcasts

• All Bones Considered (I Liked It): Cincinnati’s Spring Grove made me appreciate cemetaries. This podcast helps me embrace the wonder that is Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill.
• Home Cooking (A Personal Favorite): Genre-defining. I love everything about it. A podcast like this, you don’t listen to it all at once.
• Techtonic (A Personal Favorite): The 2026-03-26 episode with Janet Vertesi. For yourself and your community.

Bougie Products

I cannot stop thinking about Kokoro Furikake (SFW).

Personal Finance and Investing

We used FreeTaxUSA this year: good interface and good help, via chat, for $8. (See also, United Way's MyFreeTaxes.) Direct File, we hardly knew ye.

Reading

• Richard P. Bentall, A proposal to classify happiness as a psychiatric disorder (I Loved It): “(H)appy people seem to wish to force their condition on their unhappy companions and relatives.” Fuckers.
• Harvey Max Chochinov, “Seeing Ellen and the Platinum Rule” (I Loved It): I want you to treat me like this makes me cry every time that I read it.
• Paul Ford, “The A.I. Disruption We’ve Been Waiting for Has Arrived” (Worth My Time): “All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it.” Would that it were true.
• merritt k, “Have a Fucking Website” (A Personal Favorite): Also, have a fucking email address that you control. You cannot afford not to. I will configure it for you if you want my help.

Survey

To see the survey and respond to it, you have to subscribe via email and answer it through an email interface.

After 10, 11, and 11 responses to the last 3 surveys, y’all submitted 6 votes in last month’s survey. Your least favorite sections in the newsletter: Free Font (3 votes); Nerdy Software (2 votes); and Introduction 1 (vote). Thanks for helping me decide.

Your responses to the surveys, and other stuff via email, text, and phone, make this a conversation. Seeing and feeling seen by people we love and admire. Isn’t that everyone’s fondest wish? I write this for you, sometimes about you, once in a while at you. Always, always, always with love and admiration.

What I Want to Learn

• Anki (or another process for spaced repetition that works for me)
• Bayesian Analysis
• C
• Dancing (Contemporary Social: the Latin, Swing, and Waltz families)
• Emacs (and Vim Classic; I’m not choosing sides)
• FINRA Certifications (Securities Industry Essentials and Series 7)
• Gleam
• Haskell
• Inferential Statistics
• Julia (instead of, or in addition to, Python or R)
• Knife Skills
• Lisp (as one of the Rackets or Schemes)
• Mathematics, especially Discrete
• Novel writing
• OCaml
• Piano and Musical Notation (sight reading)
• Quarto, so also Git (and Jujutsu), LaTeX, and Zotero
• Regular Expressions (and awk, sed, and grep)
• Spanish
• TypeScript
• Uncle Greatness (for our three nieces and two nephews)
• Voice (Singing and Speaking)
• Wok Cooking
• XML and its related specifications
• Yiddish
• Zig