Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

2013 in Review

Last year, inspired by Joe Kissell, I wrote a summary of the enormity of what 2012 had encompassed. It was freaking huge. Joe enumerated for years all the words, books, articles, and such like he worked on. This year, I'm inspired again by Joe: he decided to stop the extensive documentation of his year, having felt he'd proven his productivity. I'm somewhere in between: less documentation than last year, but still quite a bit to share.

In June, I bought The Magazine from Marco Arment. It's been one of the greatest things I've worked on in my life, and it's a constant joy of collaboration with contributors both before and after the purchase. We just put out Issue #33 — we produced 26 issues during 2013, and now have some subscribers who are paid up though the end of 2015. We'd better deliver.

I launched the weekly podcast The New Disruptors

Podcasting

Incomparable Hugo Book Club Podcast

On the latest episode of The Incomparable podcast, we talk about the five Hugo Award nominated novels from 2012. It's a mixed bag, and nothing that stands out as a novel that we'll be reading 5, 20, or 50 years from now. You can't have a Dune or a 2001 or American Gods every year. But there are great books being written, and these five don't seem like the best five of 2012.

Every contest is based on popularity, but I fear the Hugo process is way too biased towards the partisans of given authors, especially the most popular ones. You have to pay to get a ballot (which also includes free electronic copies of all the stories and novels and other material). Some people read broadly and vote on personal preferences. Others pony up $65 in order to vote for their favorites without having formed opinions of the others.

Buddies

One Million Dollars!

My friend/colleague/employer/foil Marco Arment was employee #1 at Tumblr, and it thus is no surprise that people have been curious as to the number and total value of the bags of cash that will be thrown out of helicopters onto his palatial Hastings-on-Hudson estate soon. His boss, David Karp, reportedly received from Yahoo's $1.1 billion offer about $220 million or $250 million, depending on the source.

Marco wrote a blog post about his time working for David from 2006 to 2010, which began as a collaborator on consulting work and morphed into Tumblr. It's a lovely bit of writing about how two people (even in an unequal power relationship) can produce sums greater than their parts through productive agreement and disagreement.

But on the Accidental Tech Podcast (ATP), Marco and his two co-hosts, John Siracusa and Casey Liss, go into the issue of money much further

Photography