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A newsletter about politics, productivity, and power... business and books... culture and capitalism... writing and working... and more.
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Hey there—welcome to Reframe Your Inbox. If you’re a longtime subscriber, thanks for sticking with me. Feel free to skim this if you want to see what’s new (or just skip this introductory email entirely).
For the new subscribers, I’m Adam, a former U.S. Senate speechwriter turned American expat in London turned full-time writer and new puppy parent now based in America’s (hopefully soon-to-be) fifty-first state of Washington, DC. I’m also the author of Reframe the Day: Embracing the Craft of Life, One Day at a Time, a book about building more fulfilling days.1
For those who somehow stumbled across this page or got this from a friend, please join us!👇
What is Reframe Your Inbox?
Reframe Your Inbox has existed in some form since the fall of 2017. After leaving Capitol Hill, I’d begun publishing semi-regular political commentary on Medium, and I created an email newsletter with the aim of delivering my writing to the inboxes (rather than the spam folders) of friends, family, and former colleagues. Over the past few years, this newsletter has evolved from a vehicle for delivering the thoughts and hot takes (and not-so-hot takes) I accumulated working in U.S. politics to a wide-ranging exploration of culture, tech, productivity, books, reading, politics, writing, life, and work—to name a few. (My Substack page includes my writing going back to the start of 2020; for anything earlier, head to my website or my Medium profile.2)
Over the coming months and (hopefully) years, Reframe Your Inbox will continue to explore everything from how the internet has changed book writing, to the eerie parallels between autocratic leaders and big tech companies, to America’s ongoing democratic crisis. One day I might be talking about the craft of reading and writing; other days I might focus more on the world beyond the individual—on politics, capitalism, culture, or power. Regardless of the topic, however, there are at least three things you can expect from future editions of this newsletter:
1. No more than 1,500 words
The essays and interviews you’ll read here will not exceed 1,500 words. Sometimes they’ll be less, but I’ll do my very best to make sure they aren’t more.
Why? In part because everyone has too much content to consume and too much other stuff to do. Most readers cover 1,500 words in 5-10 minutes, which seems long enough to capture and consider a coherent argument but not so long that it ends up in the “read later” folder (also known as the “oh yeah, I meant to read that but…” folder).
The more fundamental reason for the word limit, though, is that a boundary like this helps me manage my own expectations. While I usually start writing with some idea of what I think I think, I often figure out what I actually think through the process of writing.3 But to do the writing, I have to start writing. And for whatever reason, I find it way easier to start writing when the anticipated output has some constraints around it.
If, for instance, I want to write about how the modern working world’s obsession with convincing us that it’s possible to “do it all” is a scam, I’m going to have a pretty hard time sitting down and starting. It’s not necessarily the topic that’s difficult. Nor is it writer’s block. It’s something closer to what the author Steven Pressfield calls “Resistance”: the mysterious, insidious force that keeps you from starting.4 If you don’t start, you don’t have to confront the inevitable “what if” questions: What if it’s really hard to write about this? What if I can’t figure out how to say what I mean? What if I don’t write it as clearly as I feel it? What if it takes way longer than I expect?
Setting a word limit doesn’t resolve these questions, but somehow it makes them feel less daunting. In fact, it makes the entire act of writing feel less daunting. With a word limit, to return to the earlier example, my mind no longer thinks I’m asking it to try to say everything there is to say about the myth of “doing it all.” I only have 1,500 words. There’s going to be a limit on the amount of brain pain (aka “work”) I can expect. The limit might be entirely artificial, but the mind doesn’t seem to care much about whether an expectation is real or manufactured.5
As for why I chose 1,500, well—I tried to think of a meaningful reason. But really it’s an arbitrary limit. (The power of lowering expectations by setting arbitrary limits: a topic for a future newsletter.) 1,500 words is a length that allows me to explore something in depth, but without demanding too much from me (or you). For whatever reason, it feels doable. And that feeling of doability (?) makes it marginally more likely that I’ll actually sit down and start.
2. No hyperlinks
I’m increasingly obsessed with building personal systems that eliminate distractions and cultivating environments that are conducive to focus and concentration. To that end, here’s another mainstay of internet writing that you won’t find in Reframe Your Inbox: hyperlinks.
Reading on the internet can be a truly miserable experience. (Interesting experiment for the scientifically inclined, or for someone who’s about to get a new phone: visit the CNN or Forbes websites without an ad blocker and see how long it takes your device to melt.) It’s not just the ads and the tracking cookies and the “Read this next” suggestions that algorithmically insert themselves every few paragraphs. It’s also the fact that most online writing, including my own, is drowning in hyperlinks. Whether we realize it or not—and usually we don’t—these links aren’t mentally free. They’re incredibly distracting to our brains, even if we don’t actually click on them or even notice that our attention has wandered.
To make your RYI reading experience a little less unpleasant—to reframe your reading experience, you might say—nothing I publish here will include hyperlinks. Instead, I’ll follow the example of Boston College history professor and “Letters from an American” author Heather Cox Richardson. Her massively popular daily essays include a list of references at the end, but the text itself is blissfully link-free.6 You don’t really notice how much of a difference it makes until you manage to finish reading an entire article without opening a single additional tab—or even without wondering what interesting stimuli might have been waiting for you beneath that underlined text.
3. No content recommendations
In keeping with the spirit of de-hyperlinking, I’ll also do my best not to include recommendations for other online content. Except for this one, future editions of Reframe Your Inbox won’t leave you with a list of articles to read or videos to watch or podcasts to listen to. Not because I don’t value and benefit from other writers who create these lists, but because we’re all already overloaded with stuff to consume. You don’t really need to know the random-but-interesting stuff I happened to stumble across on the internet.
Having said that, I will always do my best to give credit, provide attribution, and cite sources. That’s what the footnotes are for. Oh, and there’s a key exception to the “no content recs” rule: books.
Thanks for reframing your inbox
Reframe Your Inbox will come your way every couple weeks or so—sometimes more, sometimes less. New subscribers still get the first three chapters of Reframe the Day for free. Just email me (adam@adaml.blog) and let me know you’ve signed up.
Wondering where to start?
If you’re new to Reframe Your Inbox, here are a few recent(ish) articles to give you an idea of what you can expect (with apologies for immediately violating my own no-hyperlinks rule):
Why Obama Writes (Nov. 16, 2020)
How Do Republicans Get Away With It? (Sept. 26, 2020)
Good Work Takes Time (Sept. 7, 2020)
Why I Can’t Stop Reading Pandemic Novels (Aug. 25, 2020)
Remembering John Lewis, America’s Pilot Light (Jul. 31, 2020)
Most Individuals Are Good People with Good Intentions. Is That Good Enough? (Apr. 11, 2020)
I Used to Think Political and Economic Progress Would Emerge from “The System.” Not Anymore (Feb. 24, 2020)
Thanks for reading! Feel free to get in touch anytime at adam@adaml.blog. (Note that puppy parenting tips are extremely welcome.) And if you like what you see, please…
Learn more and grab your copy at adaml.blog/reframe-the-day.
You can find my website at adaml.blog, my Medium profile at adamlowenstein.medium.com, and my Substack page at adaml.substack.com.
For more on this, see my May 2019 essay, “The clarifying power of writing and storytelling.”
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art (2003). I discuss Pressfield’s concept of “Resistance” in chapter 3 of my book, Reframe the Day.
For more on expectations, see my May 24, 2020 newsletter, “Reframe Your Inbox (Unrealistic Expectations Edition).”
Read “Letters from an American” at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com.