After English, you learn everything else

After you study English, you learn everything else.

Sophomore year of college — around 15 years ago — I switched from being a sciences major to an English major. I changed my career aspirations from making fake limbs to wanting to write poetry and travel essays for a living. This did not happen, but lots of other exciting things did.

Most adults will tell you that leaving science for English is unwise and two completely paths — one with security and the other of ( at best) uncertainty.

I was contrarian: over the last decade, most people going into college have walked away from the English major and it’s cousin, History — enrollment has fallen by a full third in those areas. Humanities enrollment in the United States has declined by seventeen percent overall.

Our system doesn’t make it easy for English majors or those who study humanities. But I have no regrets — I love being me. And I am here to state: I think the skills of the humanities are more important than ever.

As much as I wish, I have not made a living with poetry and long form travel essays (yet), but I’ve done lots of other jobs that give me money, and I have been better because of my tendency towards humanities. I have not always thought that.

My career and life are multi-hyphened. I’ve morphed into a teacher, a summer camp programmer-anti-borden machine, a small-time radio reporter; a food delivery driver, a business/tech podcast writer and researcher. A desert dweller; an urban dweller to a college-town-deep-south dweller. It’s the life after the English major. A life of adventure and constant learning, and a heavy dose of self-doubt. I really never know what I am doing, but I am always trying to figure it out.

Hence, the reignition of this newsletter: I'll be sharing insights from what I read and discover—sometimes recommending things I find interesting or important, other times offering essays, interviews, or guides. In some ways, this will be a common place book. It’s all aimed at helping post-humanities majors thrive in a world that doesn’t always value those skills and tendencies.

Do I wish I learned about how start-ups made money, or how to code, or understanding marketing skills? Yes, I did. All stuff I had to learn on my own. So, I am bringing useful information to know that isn’t usually taught in English departments, but explained by me, someone who loved .writing, art, and reading.

You’ll also get updates on my book, which is under white-hot production of my keyboard. And of course, I am going to share links that I would send to friends — just good stuff to check out. Because I believe a great film, good fiction, a play, a musical, an underground band, a stellar poem can make you a better person, change your life, open your world, at least make a few minutes better. We are creativity and we need it. It fuels our understanding of the world.

Here we go:

Short story: Let’s start with the excellent short story Spit by Ruby Opalka published in The Atlantic. It’s a clear story about summer love starting off with this wonderful opener: “Frankie met Lucia in that summer of tombstoners and storms, when the tomato plants got blight and the bean plants fruited early.”

Be transported with the main character, Frankie and understand what it means for people we crush on, fall in love with, no matter how temporarily or permanent. The people who do the falling become a part of one another’s DNA in literal and metaphorical ways. This short story will brighten your day or night, especially if your into teen comedies, romance, a short story that isn’t a puzzle but rather a radiant yellow brick road.

Ruby seems to be working on a short story collection that is coming from her dissertation. The stories were all inspired from a geological feature, which I think is neat and a great way to grow a story. Read more HERE on Ruby and her writing process.

Understanding business and Lina Khan: In another Atlantic creation, see the Wrath of Khan, which asks the question: Is Lina Khan, the FTC chair good or bad for business? In it, the writer gets into the weeds about pros and cons of an antitrust policy and the landscape for VCs, founders, and growing businesses. If nothing else, this piece has lots of balanced voices and considerations, and worth your time to get a handle on what it means to be a business — VC-powered or not — today.

Is the purpose of any company, startup or not, to reach an exit or get acquired? Is that the only purpose? I’m not so sure it should be or is for those moon-shot entrepreneurs. This article maps where we’ve been and where we may hope to go when creating an environment for businesses.

For example, take this context-building graph:

For most of the 20th century, a business hoping to expand was generally looking to go public, which would reward employees and long-term investors for creating a sustainable enterprise. The venture-capital model that emerged over the past few decades has a different blueprint for success. VCs plow money into a company at its inception, typically pushing it to prioritize rapid growth over generating revenue—let alone profits—and they expect a quick return on investment. More often than not, the goal of VCs is to find a buyer. According to an NVCA survey from 2020, 58 percent of American founders hope to sell their company. Others will do so grudgingly. In the early 1990s, about 70 percent of venture-backed exits were IPOs, and the rest were acquisitions. Nowadays, acquisitions make up about 90 percent of exits.

A good video explainer: Related, we live in a world of monopolies…again. Watch this from How Money Works to get a lay of the land with what’s going on with the companies that dominate the market. In order for David and Goliath story to work, David needs a good sling, but startups out there don’t have many slings to take on the big companies.

Although, as the Lina Khan piece argues: “the number of pre-seed and seed deals expected to close in 2024—that is, investments in new start-ups—is roughly the same as before the pandemic. Meanwhile, outside the VC-driven world of Silicon Valley, small business is booming.” Yes, indeed, since the pandemic, since President Joe Biden took over, there have been 16 million new business applications. So, there are small players working in the Silicon Valley universe, which is indeed, it’s own universe, and everywhere else. Monopolies rule, but it seems others are still able to play a form of the game. Still though, it’s a fact that Google still dominates markets like search, a daily infrastructure that most people use. What if we had an environment that allowed a company to take Google on?

Excellent essay on the best year to start writing about movies: Critic, Wesley Morris, a thunder of talent, has a a great piece of writing about the pivotal year of 1999. This was the last year movies were allowed to be abundant. From this year onward, we, as a culture, have been dipped in nostalgia, IP, and lots of sameness when we watch a movie. See the top 10 list thus far.

Great advice from Flack Newsletter:

In any case, you don’t have a choice. When you’re building software, the quickest way to improve the product is to get what my old boss, Substack CEO Chris Best, calls “contact with reality,” so you can learn from real-world experience and calibrate accordingly. In comms, when the product you’re building is opinions (the softest ware of all), testing out ideas in the real world is even more important because the interaction between your comms strategy and the collective human psychology of your audience is simply too complex to predict in the abstract. You have to put things into the wild and see how they do. Cross the river by feeling the stones.

Tip for picking up a new skill: The novelist Emily Grandy suggests having an “UGLY HOUR” where you take an hour to experiment, try something new. Maybe a new piece of tech (set up that calendar, try out A.I.) or playing the guitar, or knitting. Spend an hour trying something new: it will be ugly, but that’s okay.

Prompt for you, not the bot: Because I believe writing is a form of power and therapy, I’m going to be posting these prompts for you to write. Taking inspiration from Ruby: Take 3 minutes and write down a set of geological objects you care about. A rock, a mountain, a stream, a yard even. Now tell a small, less-than-five sentence story about that object. Look at those stories and see if you see something bigger in one of them. Keep writing.

That’s all for now. More soon.