Last November I had the privilege to be a writing coach at the Inkhaven residency, an experimental month-long blogging retreat in Berkeley, California that attempted to pressure-cook the nutrients, insights, and words out of stellar writers using a simple commitment device: write and publish a 500-word blog post every day, or get kicked out. That’s it.
I mean, there were details. We also fed the participants and provided them with Optional Content, like workshops and visiting writers to consult with and social activities and such. But fundamentally, Inkhaven was there to light a fire.
Sometimes the best way to learn is by doing. You can read books about carpentry all night and day, or you can go out there and build ten bookshelves.
And oh, what bookshelves our bloggers built. Here are a few. I figure if you’re here reading me, you already have good taste, so you might find a new blog to follow among these:
Jenn wrote a sequence about her father’s death and the secrets unearthed afterwards. These got larger-scale attention, and absolutely deserved it. My dad could still be alive, but he’s not. After my dad died, we found the love letters. Dissolution.
I also really liked less social engineering and more actual engineering for this fertility crisis, please, her objections to the ongoing fertility/demographic collapse discussion – namely, it seems like it’s pretty happy to throw decades of social progress for women under the bus. I’m not entirely unsympathetic to the movement but we gotta have something better than that, and I thought this piece really captured that.
One of my favorite pieces from Vishal Prasad is on computer modeling to figure out why sex evolved and includes some fascinatingly weird-looking models of how relevant strategies might reach equilibrium over time. He also wrote about Agartha, a white supremecist conspiracy theory meme which has in recent times reached a surprisingly multicultural level of abstraction, and I also enjoyed learning about this.
Vishal also spent all month studying his fellow bloggers and on the final day made an Ur-pastiche, a post each in the style of many other bloggers in the program. I’m delighted by how not only it really gets at the styles, but each parody also has real content! How’d he do it? The man’s a wizard!
Tomás Bjartur writes a lot of things, including banger fiction. I recommend Lobsang’s Children, a story about a child subsumed by a strange family legacy. Also Rational Teletubbies, which is, and this is the highest compliment I can give a piece of writing, a straight-up fever dream.
Ben Goldhaber wrote Unexpected Things that are People – like, treated as people in a legal sense. You will enjoy this.
He also wrote Gork: The hero we need, an unexpected genuinely hopeful piece about twitter/X’s resident goofy problematic large language model, Grok. This analysis of its social context made me get the value of AI as a trusted public source of information. He explores this more in other pieces – we can certainly improve on Gork! – but this article is a good place to start.
Linch wrote a defense of middlemen as crucial cogs in the modern economy and I found it pretty convincing.
He also featured a guest post from a definitely-real angel investor about some of the hottest upcoming startups of Silicon Valley!
Can’t afford your meds this month? For $20, HP’s AI-optimized healthcare accessibility gamification engine gives you a chance to cover one prescription. There’s even a jackpot tier – all drugs paid for 3 months! HP has already fully funded the insulin medication for over 10 families, and dramatically impacted the lives of thousands more.
As a millennial with ADHD, I for one can’t wait!
Camille Berger wrote some astoundingly beautiful and thought-provoking things. Here’s Burning Utopia, a short and compelling bit of fiction about the possible futures of AI, and here’s That Lying Bitch, a could-happen-tomorrow-sci-fi story about social dynamics and what it might look like when humans lose our edge.
Relatedly, Tsvi BT wrote a really touching piece about what love could look like in a truly post-scarcity future. Dream big!
He also wrote Forum Poweruser Forum, a delightful bit of speculative fiction about web forum design. A friend of mine summarized it well when said that he “couldn’t decide if this is horror or pornography.”
Adrià Garriga-Alonso wrote a great and approachable piece on why some of the statistical methods you might have learned in Stats 101 – like the Student’s T-test – are janky fossils from a time before computing was cheap and fast, and how we can easily do better.
Guy at Rival Voices wrote an approachable introduction to jhanas (states of bliss associated with Buddhist meditation, that many non-Buddhists also report attaining) that was well calibrated for the “skeptic killjoy” audience, which is to say, me.
Justin Kuiper examines clickbait, why it works, and considerations in deploying it ethically and tactically. He’s an expert at the youtube game and so has a refined eye for it.
Signore Gallilei does some great approachable science explainer type stuff. See Tides are weirder than you think, and on a more meta level, You can just do experiments. Then check out the youtube channel!
Amanda from Bethlehem writes these compelling, opinionated, extremely fact-based pieces. Here’s one on medical assistance in dying: Dying of a terminal illness is not rare.
Justin Miller at Nomads Vagabonds has thoughtful and lucid takes on AI and society. Here’s one on moving society past the point where we can trust a picture or video at face value (because of AI).
I didn’t read every post published at Inkhaven, and there are many fantastic posts and fantastic authors not included in this little sampler platter. My apologies to those not featured; this is my personal failing. You-the-reader can find them, and scroll through bloggers and posts that might pique your fancy, at the Inkhaven Blogroll.
Cannot stress this enough: literally everyone was good at this.
If you’re reading this on February 28th, the day of publishing, you have the rest of the day to consider signing up for the second Inkhaven cohort this April – that’s right, it’s happening again, and soon! It’ll be in Berkeley California at the beautiful and ergonomic Lighthaven campus.
I won’t be working this one but I will be attending as a writing advisor, so I’ll be around that month and will attempt to dispense guidance and wisdom (if not full time.) Give it a go if you think you can blog with the best of ‘em.
Since I’ll be there but won’t be helping run the show in April, I’ll have more time for actually writing, and I have some upcoming projects I think you’ll like. Supporters help make that financially possible by throwing me a few bucks on Patreon. You could be one of them!
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