Re-Send: Parks4Sale, Rebel #VapeLife, and Staring at the Sun

Good morning, poppets (well, afternoon since this was stuck in my TinyLetter outbox and was majorly delayed, and you may still get a dupe email, sigh)! I’d love it if you could check out my “Proust Goes Tech” chat over at Crunchbase. I’m not normally the one being interviewed. But when my dear friend Alex, EIC of Crunchbase, asks me to sit down with his colleague Grace Gu to discuss my skills, fears, and tweet requirements, with colleague Holden Page on the line as well, it meant that there were three Missive readers I absolutely couldn’t let down. Grace did an amazing job of distilling my verbose meanderings into something coherent and, dare I say, awesome. As I wrote to Alex yesterday, if I die today and these answers are the last thing I send out into to universe, I am so very OK with that. So please give it a read, and share if you are so inclined :)

Let’s get to business.

Trump looked at the sun during the solar eclipse, while an aide yelled “Don’t look!” Because of course he did. Sigh. Honestly, considering how savvy Trump is with media, it felt like a Putin-esque play for “Solar eclipse no match for dear leader’s eyes” but that would be insane for anyone to say…. oh. Tucker Carlson called it the “most impressive thing any president has ever done.” But he’s joking, right? Right…

But speaking of satire, I was reading Vox yesterday and noticed an ad that really ground my gears, advertising national monuments for sale as timeshares using distinctly Trump-esque gaudy gold typeface. My face started melting and my soul fought to leave this mortal coil until it took me a hot second to realize it was parody. You should all check out ParksForSale.com, produced by the Wilderness Society, to learn about which national monuments are on the Trump administration chopping block.

Read the Washington Post’s portrait of how six young men ended up in Charlottesville. It’s an impressively empathetic look at the disaffected dudebros of the Alt-Right that doesn’t pull any punches when it points out their simmering but veiled white supremacy and narcissism.

Set aside time today to read Ellen Pao’s reflections on sexism in venture capital, in her first longform piece describing some of what led her to filing her suit against her former employer Kleiner Perkins. I’m still reading it myself, but her observation that “Sometimes the whole world felt like a nerdy frat house” seems pretty on the nose, in my experience.

And finally, Lawrence Police, I salute you.

Keep up that #vapelife, friends. Until tomorrow :)