11.05 | oops, i went viral

✉️ letter #81

Well, that was unexpected. I know it might sound counterintuitive, but when I make videos and post them to the public internet, I am almost always just making them for myself.

In the early days of getting onto YouTube, I realized that attempting to play the algorithm and optimize for more followers and views was a potentially useful skill, but a bit of a joy-killer for my creative process. So, as much effort as I put into actually writing, rewriting, tinkering with sound effects and pacing, and all of those random graphics… I didn’t plan on anyone watching except maybe a couple of my friends. Maybe, if things got wild, I'd break 1000 views someday.

🎼 the soundtrack | arteries - hey, nothing

Now, it's hovering at 150k and I've gained a thousand new followers. My cousins in San Francisco are telling me it’s popped up on their feeds. Haha, hi fam. Yeah, I started a channel a little before the pandemic. No, please don’t watch the early ones—I hadn’t really grasped what mics were for yet.

Anyhow, random people trying to add me on Instagram made me mildly embarrassed that my entire life for the last decade was easily accessible to strangers, so I’ve taken the long-belated step of privatizing my main account. My public accounts now include a new Instagram and a new TikTok alongside my Youtube. Feels like the end of a more innocent internet era.

Just to be clear, I’m doing this mostly as a cautionary measure and not because I’ve been harassed in any way yet. There are a couple of weird, trolly comments on the video, but for the most part, I’ve actually really enjoyed whatever nerve I touched that got a bunch of people to comment on their own experiences with the higher education system as it currently stands. It’s been nice to hear from other older students struggling with a disconnection they weren’t expecting, and from younger ones worried about the environment they honestly have no choice but to be in. A couple asked me to talk a little bit more about Climate School and what that specifically was like.

Which made me realize – I did a LinkedIn post about it two months ago, but hadn’t yet re-fired up my newsletter at the time (my internet presence is scattered, chaotic, and resists my best attempts at strategy). I will reprint it here:

Science and thinking on climate has advanced so far since the last time I did a masters: corporate sustainability has evolved from feel-good branding into real operational restructuring; the wind/solar price drop means some truly exciting energy decarbonization options are now feasible; how global climate solutions are being created & transformed in real time is fascinating to watch, and hopefully something I get to participate in soon.

Beyond that though, it's been a blast taking advantage of this year-long foray into academia. Some highlights:

• ⚖️ I had only a tenuous idea of what Climate Justice was coming into the program, but Sheila Foster's incredibly structured and powerful lectures really helped me realize how centering equity is foundational for any future actions we take. Especially from our ivory tower, it's easy to accidentally sideline people when in pursuit of decarbonization numbers, even if those people are ostensibly who we are "decarbonizing" for.
• 🎍 One of the most surprisingly delightful courses I joined was Black Ecologies, which focused on thinking outside the typically Euro-centric view of learned history, sociological context, and solutions frameworks. As much as I loved the mythbusting though, what really stuck with me was how Kristina Guild Douglass challenged us to wrestle with genuine emotion, moving beyond qualitative facts towards deeper examination of our foundational truths.
• 🌐 Global Institutions in Climate Finance was a tremendous front-row seat to the multilateral mechanics that both drive and often gum up climate transitions. It’s the first time I signed up for a class purely because of a professor’s star power -Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty hugely influenced how I view world economics today and it was remarkable to hear firsthand his takeaways on our ongoing challenges inside the rooms (the World Bank, the IMF, the UN) where they are debated.
• 🤝 And I've truly enjoyed my summer work at the Climate Knowledge Initiative at Columbia Business School as part of the Climate School's Global Impact Lab. It's been a joy to mesh learnings from the year with all of my prior work experience in the pursuit of scaling climate impact. I'm excited to say I'll be sticking with them for a little while longer through the fall as a Fellow, expanding some of the insights we've discovered into a future model for collaborative climate leadership decision-making.

Ahem. Excuse the hyper-positivity bullet-point summarization required for LinkedIn posts. Never say I don't know how to code-switch.

🪢related threads

This list is pretty random this time because, quite frankly, most of my time recently has been spent trying to figure out a better content creation workflow:

• It's been a great week for everyone who has spent the last decade navigating the rollercoaster of political dread in America. I didn't so much watch the results this time as see the memes on socials roll in, but I rejoiced in it. The New Yorker in me likes to think that our election of the sweetest Dem-Soc to ever push progressive policy as mayor helped kick off a true Blue Wave, but that's probably just because I'm a New Yorker so I naturally think the world revolves around me.
• I'm in the midst of menu-planning for a family Thanksgiving dinner this year, so I very much was tickled by this piece in Nautilus that is, in the author's words, "the real foods of fantastical lost worlds." Think: what would all the fairies of Avalon have eaten, or what courses would have graced Atlantis dining tables.
• Friend Afra Wang has written one of the most heart-felt essays I've read on why finding out writing was generated by AI feels so much like betrayal. I didn't get a chance to fit into my last newsletter, so here's my missive to please read it. Particularly, the paragraph that starts here is so relatable: "I, too, have struggled with anger over sloppy AI writing that has made me viscerally uncomfortable. My reactions can be a little pathological: I fanatically delete my own em dashes, and I once even mistakenly thought a few sentences a writer friend wrote were AI-generated... "

✨enjoying: a piece of pop culture fun

I'm starting a monthly series for short video that will be all about recommending a good read that fits in with whatever theme I'm going by that month. November's recommendation is Stephen Graham Jones' Buffalo Hunter Hunter, a cross between a vampire horror and a Western.

Gothic fiction has spent centuries treating Indigenous landscapes as "cursed" backdrops to provoke fear in outsiders. Jones flips the script: taking classic European gothic monster lore and turning it into an instrument of targeted retribution, giving his Blackfeet lead absolute agency.

• You can get the book through this bookshop.org page of mine.
• If you want to hear more about the book from the author himself, here's an interview with Stephen Graham Jones himself:

🗨️a final quote

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
-- Audre Lorde

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