Table of Contents

• News: 2 Events

• The Riff: The OG Algorithm

• The Books: Ideas, History, Memoir, Journalism, oh my!

• The Other Stuff: Including a piece from me in Runner’s World

• ICYMI: August on CNF Pod

• Next Month: Harvest Moon Raging, a look at what’s coming up

Reserve Your Ticket Now (It’s Free!)

Bestselling author Chuck Klosterman closes out his book tour for Rock*: An Alternative Mainstream History of Mainstream Alternative Music for a live recording of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast at Gratitude Brewing in Eugene, Saturday, Oct. 24, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET. Space is limited and this event will be JAMMED. RSVP with a free ticket here.

Come See Us at Roundabout Books!

Lauren Fleshman, author of Good for a Girl, will be interviewing me at Roundabout Books in Bend, OR on Thursday, Nov. 12, at 6:30 p.m. This is a ticketed event. Lauren won five NCAA championships as a runner at Stanford and two national championships as a pro. She ran the 5k. Steve Prefontaine ran the 5k. Maybe I can get her to chat about that? Come check us out!

You Might Wanna …

Glenn Stout is running the traditional workshop down in Archer City. Forces conspired against me going, but I sure hope you go ===> enroll.

The Riff

For whatever reason, I started thinking that the classic “recommendation” newsletter was played out.

It seemed like they started with a surge in the early 2010s and then people like me, around that time, copied that form, and then more people copied that form until your entire inbox was full of a thousand people recommending stuff to you, often with affiliate links so they can make a buck of their taste.

[I don’t use affiliate links, though I’ve considered it only to perhaps set up micro scholarships to offset the cost of going to writing conferences, in which case maybe I should set up a Bookshop.org affiliate page. I’m gonna chew on that bone for a bit.

UPDATE: I did create a storefront at Bookshop.org https://bookshop.org/shop/cnfpod]

If you really like the person’s newsletter you’re subscribing to, getting a list of their recommendations is a bit of an entree into their thinking and what makes their brain tick. In a way, you get to know them just a little bit better in the weird parasocial way we feel we actually “know” these people.

The other reason to champion the classic “recommendation” format is that back in the pre-Internet days your friends or siblings would buy a CD from The Wall or Sam Goody or Newbury Comics with $20 worth of allowance. Maybe you’d listen together after school, drink a Zima. But just as often your friend or sibling would be like, “This album is awesome. You gotta get it.”

And you did.

One to one.

Before social media, our friends were the OG algorithm. We hung out with people with similar taste … or different taste. We’d experiment. We’d swap CDs or borrow CDs or VHSs or DVDs. You’d wait vigilantly beside your tape-deck radio hoping to catch Will Smith’s “Boom!” on that night’s countdown on Fun 107 so you could hit record and tape that song.

Wild times. Better times. Truly.

Not in a saccharine way. Not in a “it was better in my day kinda way.”

Because we had agency.

And we outsourced our agency for convenience and we outsourced that convenience to the phone and we outsourced that phone to social media and we outsourced social media to AI and now AI has come for our brains. It’s already here. And the oligarchs are jamming it down our throats as if AI is the new religion, the latest opiate of the masses.

I’m not “up” on the AI dialogue quite yet, but I am awfully skeptical since this tech is being forced on us by media, investors, tech founders on the hunt for a huge IPO, and influencers.

I fantasize about a day where a billion people, at the same time, delete Facebook or Instagram or ________. I would love to see it crumble, platforms left with nothing but AI bots talking to each other.

So, yeah, long live the recommendation newsletter so that we try out some new stuff that an actual human thought enough of to pass along.

Like these:

The Books

1. The Playbook: The Hidden Forces Shaping Winners and Losers in the Modern NFL by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg. A lean book about how the NFL front offices are building the modern team.

2. The Vanishing Family: Love, Fate, and the Quest to End Dementia by Robert Kolker. You can catch Bob’s first appearance on the podcast here, and I eagerly await the chance to speak with him again about his latest book.

3. Bodega Stories by Amaris Castillo. A Brooklyn native and daughter of Dominican immigrants. This book looks great, and we’ll talk about it. In fact, wouldn’t you know, she spoke to me about Pitch Club for Poynter.

4. Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War by Catherine Grace Katz. She’s back and this time she turns her eyes away from Yalta to the most famous dirigible known to man.

The Other Stuff

5. I wrote a thing for a place.

6. RIP Dolly Parton, right? Here’s a nice feature about her from The Ringer from 2016. She was 80. Who else is 80?

7. RIP Tim Curry. Great actor. He was 80. WHO ELSE IS 80??!!

8. Really digging the new Phoebe Bridgers album.

9. I’m a little late to this, but “The Big Dig” is proving to be a great narrative podcast. Growing up in Massachusetts, few things were as big as “The Big Dig.” [Maybe the Blizzard of 78 … and I’m fishing around for something meaty about that with the 50th anniversary of that storm less than two years away.]

10. An oral history of … Will Ferrell?

11. My favorite interviewer (Joe Donahue) interviewing someone (Ann Patchett) I’d love to interview.

New Pitch Club (the email list has officially eclipsed this one in 1/10th the time) drops Sept. 1 with Adam Popescu. If you want to get better at selling stories, join the forever free club. It might be moving to its own website in 2027. Stay tuned!

ICYMI (and you did …)

• Episode 540: Holbrook Mohr and Mitch Weiss Tackle the Atomic City for The Atavist

• Episode 541: ‘Touch the Work Every Day’ says Shanda McManus

• Episode 542: Earl Swift and the Battle to Get the Reader to the Last Word

• Episode 543: Doubt, Vulnerability, Confidence. Is Chris Bennett Talking About Writing or Running?

Coda

I hope you dug this Buck Moon issue of RATA. To support what it is I do, you can:

• Buy copies of The Front Runner wherever, or pre-order five copies of the paperback.

• Subscribe to Pitch Club

• Leave kind reviews for the podcast on Apple Podcasts and/or leave kind reviews for The Front Runner on Amazon and Goodreads. Can’t stress enough how important these are for no-name rodeo clowns like me.

As my pal Kim says, buying a book or leaving a review is a vote for the next book; it makes us just a tad more attractive to publishers. And, boy, these days, I’m busted, man.

If you have a few bucks burning a hole in your pocket, you may check out Patreon.com/cnfpod.

Otherwise, stay wild, nose to the wind, rage,

b.r.o.

PS — Next Month: Harvest Moon Raging

I’m ginning up a serious promotional push for the paperback of The Front Runner. I’ll clue you into everything I’m doing (and not doing). Seriously this time … I forgot that I had teased this last month and I will make up for it.