Jack Cheng's Blog

I’m thinking about formats today. Though, it’s more accurate to say I’m often thinking about them for this newsletter. In the past, it’s been a book publishing dispatch, travelogue, link grab-bag, weekly pieces of first-draft poetry, and other, more shortly lived experiments. Since 2021, I’ve been pretty good about including a photo with every issue, though my cadence has slipped from weekly to monthly since Rufus was born (maybe not surprising to any of you parents reading).

All that’s to say th...

This week I joined Every as a senior editor. I’ve been freelancing part-time there for over a year, editing essays (and in a couple of cases, fiction), and editing will continue to make up a majority of my work. I’ll also be writing my own occasional pieces like the two I shared in issues #454 and #452, and (and!) doing some light product work (which I’ll get to in a sec).

This all started a few years back when a mutual friend (👋 Linda) connected me with Dan Shipper, Every’s co-founder, to coach ...

Happy Lunar New Year, friends. I have a new essay out this month for Every about taste. I kept seeing this word thrown around in online AI discourse, and it seemed to mean a different thing every time I saw it. So this was me trying to parse the different definitions.

In the essay, I only touch briefly on the role of status in cultural taste, and that’s because David Marx already wrote a whole book on the subject—that I read as part of my research. It was my first introduction to Marx’s writing a...

Current events have me thinking, oddly enough, about plant sociability.

Sociability describes how aggressively plants spread. Some stay where right they are, others creep a little, or stay in moderate but contained patches, while the most aggressive will, if left alone, dominate the landscape.

An example might be Canada Goldenrod, which spreads both by seed and rhizome (horizontal arms that shoot out from the main stem). I first saw three, four plants show up in the alley behind our garage a few y...

I came home Christmas week after my second residency teaching at Antioch MFA and promptly got sick. I thought it was another stress cold (do you ever get those, when you somehow manage to hold it together just until a big project is finished?) but then the cold lingered, and worsened, and I spent many an afternoon doing what I would normally do except from bed.

No complaints, really. But that I’m sending this Sunday letter on an actual Sunday for a change (instead of Monday or Tuesday) is maybe a...

Our new internet plan included a free year of a mobile line so I picked up an old Pixel 3a, installed a minimal launcher (the truly excellent Before launcher, which I also have on my e-reader), and am trying it out as a dumbphone.

The usual challenges aside of having devices on separate ecosystems (photo syncing, headphone pairing – and not being able to use Bebop), it’s worked decent. I went today to get a haircut and flu/covid boosters and even forgot to bring the iPhone as backup. I got along ...

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced here, in Michigan, an autumn as stunning as this one. Some combination of geography, weather-induced leaf sugars, and Rufus being almost sixteen months old (yes, already). I’m out more during blue hours and golden hours – pack walks in the mornings, afternoon pickups on daycare days when the low angle light catches the tops of trees, afternoon outings when the sunset hits the downtown skyscrapers near the newly opened park on the river.

I have no good pictures....

My former creative director Marty passed away. When I think about jobs I’ve held that were more like true apprenticeships, working under a master, a mentor, Marty’s name is the first to come to mind. From a brief tribute I wrote on Instagram:

It was working under Marty Cooke that I first saw myself as a professional writer. Because he saw me as one. He taught me it was okay, sometimes necessary, to spend a month writing and rewriting a single paragraph till you found a new way to say something fa...

A short documentary project I’ve been working on for Building Beauty is finally live: A tour of a house Christopher Alexander designed for two writers, Ann Medlock and John Graham, in Washington State.

This has been in the works since late last year! I did all of the editing/post-production, and what stands out to me now, ten months later, is just how much film editing experience I’d gained between the first and final cuts.

The biggest lesson was concision. That first cut was over 18 minutes; ...

I tried to sit down and do another of my intermittent daily routine check-ins, but everything I wrote was more or less about Rufus’s schedule. We’ve heard from friends that for the first year you have a new-parental brain fog – from lack of sleep, stress, hormonal changes, etc. It takes that long, they said, to feel like yourself again.

Other parents have said two years. Or longer. But I have been noticing expansions, lately, in my attentional bandwidth. One way I can describe it is self-awarenes...