✍ Writing & Words
✏️ New Word Learned:
Zugzwang: a chess situation where a player must move, and any legal move worsens their position, giving them a disadvantage
✍️ Streamers Are Clowns: bradley-andrews.com
✏️ New Word Learned:
Clepsydra: an ancient time-measuring device worked by a flow of water.
🗞️ 5 Easy Rules to Understand Technology. My latest newsletter is out now. I draw heavily from Melvin Kranzberg’s Six Laws of Technology, which I believe should be mandatory reading for all technologists and media ecology heads.
✏️ New Word Learned:
Ensorcell: to enchant; fascinate
✍️ Third spaces are alive and well. A kind stranger in a coffee shop gave me this book to read last weekend. Read the full story here: bradley-andrews.com/2025/10/0…
🗞️ My new post “Long Live Everything” is out now:
It’s not the quality of a creative act that people necessarily respond to—it is the freedom that is represented in the act. The bendings of our culture lean so heavily toward criticism, consumption, and conformity that even the smallest hint of the alternative constitutes a mini-revolution. People who slant away from the well-worn paths tend to inspire others without even being conscious of it. When someone begins doing what they want—as opposed to just doing what they’re told—it gives courage for others to do the same.
✏️ New Word Learned:
Limerence: the mental state of being madly in love or intensely infatuated, particularly when reciprocation of the feeling is uncertain.
✏️ New Word Learned:
Badinage: humorous or witty conversation
✏️ New Word Learned:
Parturition: the action of giving birth to young; childbirth
✏️ New Word Learned:
Etiolated: having lost vigor or substance; feeble
✏️ New Word Learned:
Pettifogging: placing undue emphasis on petty details
🗞️ From Dispatch #002 of Mercury’s Playbook:
Indeed—of all the marketplaces and industries in the world, luxury is perhaps the most intriguing when it comes to consumer psychology, simply because it proves that utility and functionality are not the end-all-be-all of product appeal. It provides a rich study into one of humanity’s most fundamental desires—the need to feel special, superior, and set apart. When it comes to crafting desirable products, no one does it better than the luxury industry because luxury is product charged with meaning to the utmost degree.
🗞️ The very first dispatch of my business strategy newsletter is out now: mercurysplaybook.com
✍️ I wrote some brief thoughts about the concept of ‘F**k You’ money & why I’m not surprised our billionaires persist in their moral malaise. I realize this is semi-political & therefore subject to polarization, but I hope the more pertinent theme I am trying to circumambulate comes through.
✍️ I wrote an open letter to the anonymous person who stole my shoes last night. 🥾🏃♂️
✍️ New post on the blog: Conversations With Dead People—Who’s On Your Mt. Rushmore?
Thinking alot about those special voices we internalize and the dead people we converse with.
✏️ Found a “new word” list from 2022 in an old pocket notebook. There are some real gems I forgot about; definitely one of my favorite habits!
In hip-hop, the Seven Minute Drill (made famous by J. Cole) is a songwriting exercise where an artist has 7 minutes to write a verse with no prep. I am short on time today, so decided to test myself. This is what came out. Will definitely use more often.