I have exactly one inbox for reading blogs and following news, and it's expressly not my e-mail client—it's my feed reader. (Looking for a recommendation? Here are some instructions on setting up NetNewsWire; for once, the best app is also the free and open source one.)

Anyway, with the rise of Substack and the trend for writers to eschew traditional web publishing in favor of e-mail newsletters, more and more publishers want to tangle their content up in your e-mail. Newsletters work because people will see them (so long as they ever check their e-mail…), whereas routinely visiting a web site requires a level of discipline that social media trained out of most people a decade ago.

But, if you're like me, and you want to reserve your e-mail for bidirectional communication with humans and prefer to read news at the time and pace of your choosing, did you know you can convert just about any e-mail newsletter into an RSS feed and follow that instead?

Many of us nerds have known about this for a while, and while various services have tried to monetize the same feature, it's hard to beat Kill the Newsletter: it doesn't require an account to set up and it's totally free.

How to convert an e-mail newsletter into a feed

Suppose you're signed up to the present author's free monthly newsletter, Searls of Wisdom, and you want to start reading it in a feed reader. (Also suppose that I do not already publish an RSS feed alternative, which I do).

Here's what you can do:

1. Visit Kill the Newsletter and enter the human-readable title you want for the newsletter. In this case you might type Searls of Wisdom and and click Create Feed.

2. This yields two generated strings: an e-mail address and a feed URL

3. Copy the e-mail address (e.g. 1234@kill-the-newsletter.com) and subscribe to the newsletter via the publisher's web site, just as you would if you were giving them your real e-mail address

4. Copy the URL (e.g. https://kill-the-newsletter.com/feeds/1234.xml) and subscribe to it in your feed reader, as if it was any normal RSS/Atom feed

5. Confirm it's working by checking the feed in your RSS reader. Because this approach simply recasts e-mails into RSS entries, the first thing you see will probably be a welcome message or a confirmation link you'll need to click to verify your subscription

6. Once it's working, if you'd previously subscribed to the newsletter with your personal e-mail address, unsubscribe from it and check it in your feed reader instead

That's it! Subscribing to a newsletter with a bogus-looking address so that a bogus-looking feeds starts spitting out articles is a little counter-intuitive, I admit, but I have faith in you.

(And remember, you don't need to do this for my newsletter, which already offers a feed you can just follow without the extra steps.)

Why is Kill the Newsletter free? How can any of this be sustainable? Nobody knows! Isn't the Internet cool?

v39 - Broken Home

Breaking Change

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Video of this episode is up on YouTube:

Loved this post from Joan Westenberg, about the limitations of goals:

The cult of goal-setting thrives in this illusion. It converts uncertainty into an illusion of progress. It demands specificity in exchange for comfort. And it replaces self-trust with the performance of future-planning. That makes it wildly appealing to organizations, executives, and knowledge workers who want to feel like they're doing something without doing anything unpredictable.

And the liberation of constraints:

Constraints make solutions non-obvious. They force the kind of second-order thinking that goals actively discourage. Instead of aiming for a finish line, the constrained mind seeks viability. It doesn't ask, "How do I get there?" It asks, "What's possible from here?"

My first corporate job required me to set annual goals for myself. I still remember them, both because I spent all summer trying to think of easy ones and because I nevertheless accomplished zero of them:

• Speak at a Java user group
• Teach basic finances to kids via the Junior Achievement organization
• Host 5 lunch-and-learns for my department

One of the best managers I ever had didn't give a fuck about my goals (in fact, he never even bothered to inform me he was my manager). On day one of my first project he threw out some random ideas:

• Why not require all production code be pair-programmed instead of reviewed after-the-fact?
• What if no method in the codebase was allowed to be longer than 3 lines?
• You're hitting 100% code coverage in Java, but why do you have zero JavaScript tests?

The last thing he said killed me: why do people sweat hours over every last test of their server-side code but give zero shits slinging thousands of lines of untested jQuery spaghetti? That constraint—of forcing myself to apply my testing zealotry to the front-end—is what led to my initial open source contributions and my speaking career. It's why I wrote my first widely-adopted open source project. It was also the topic of my first talk at a Ruby conference. I proceeded to spend the next few years becoming "the JavaScript testing guy" in half a dozen different software communities.

I'm honestly not sure where I'd be if it hadn't been for that passing comment, but I am absolutely certain that applying a constraint was more effective than setting a goal would have been.

Hat tip to Kyle Daigle for sending me this Instagram reel:

I don't scroll reels, so I'd hardly call myself a well-heeled critic of the form, but I will say I've never heard truer words spoken in a vertical short-form video.

It might be helpful to think of the harmony we witness in Japan as a collective bank account with an exceptionally high balance. Everyone deposits into that account all the ingredients necessary for maintaining a harmonious society. Withdrawals are rare, because to take anything out of that bank account effectively amounts to unilaterally deciding to spend everyone's money. As a result, acts of selfishness—especially those that disrupt that harmony—will frequently elicit shame and admonition from others.

Take trash, for example. Suppose the AA batteries in your Walkman die. There are few public trash cans, so:

• If you're visiting Japan – at the next train platform, you'll see a garbage bin labeled "Others" and toss those batteries in there without a second thought

• If you're living in Japan – you'll carry the batteries around all day, bring them home, sort and clean them, pay for a small trash bag for hazardous materials (taxed at 20x the rate of a typical bag), and then wait until the next hazardous waste collection day (which could be up to 3 months in some areas)

So which of these scenarios is more fun? Visiting, of course!

But what you don't see as a visitor is that nearly every public trash can is provided as a service to customers, and it's someone's literal job to go through each trash bag. So while the visitor experience above is relatively seamless, some little old lady might be tasked with sorting and disposing of the train station's trash every night. And when she finds your batteries, she won't just have to separate them from the rest of the trash, she may well have to fill out a form requisitioning a hazardous waste bag, or call the municipal garbage collection agency to schedule a pick-up. This is all in addition to the little old lady's other responsibilities—it doesn't take many instances of people failing to follow societal expectations to seriously stress the entire system.

This is why Japanese people are rightly concerned about over-tourism: foreigners rarely follow any of the norms that keep their society humming. Over the past 15 years, many tourist hotspots have reached the breaking point. Osaka and Kyoto just aren't the cities they once were. There just aren't the public funds and staffing available to keep up with the amount of daily disorder caused by tourists failing to abide by Japan's mostly-unspoken societal customs.

It's also why Japanese residents feel hopeless about the situation. The idea of foreign tourists learning and adhering to proper etiquette is facially absurd. Japan's economy is increasingly dependent on tourism dollars, so closing off the borders isn't feasible. The dominant political party lacks the creativity to imagine more aggressive policies than a hilariously paltry $3-a-night hotel taxes. Couple this with the ongoing depopulation crisis, and people quite reasonably worry that all the things that make Japan such a lovely place to visit are coming apart at the seams.

Anyway, for anyone who wonders why I tend to avoid the areas of Japan popular with foreigners, there you go.