Issue 12 | July 30, 2026 | Sign up
I spent a recent weekend hiking Santa Cruz Island off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, where the endemic foxes are cat-sized. It's all low chaparral, scrub oaks and scrub jays, temperate and sun-warmed. We spent windless nights in a valley guarded by eucalyptus. The visitor's center is full of corroded tools from its days as a ranch. But what I really loved was our hikes up the island’s spine, and the grassy bluffs that overlook the deep, unforgiving Pacific.
People have been fighting the wind and waves to come out here for not just centuries, but millennia. European ranchers held it for 180 years. The Spanish, the prior 300. But the Chumash have been coming here for 10,000 years. Bits of human bone here attest to societies that cared for their sick which are twice as old as the oldest pyramids.
I will say, it really resets one's clock to stare at those waves. Makes one wish we were all looking that far ahead.
Vignettes of the island
The ferry is one hour over savage waters. Passengers were leveled; we clung to the bow as sheets of saltwater rose high overhead. In places, the channel is 2,000 feet deep. I love to imagine the gumption of ancient peoples who attempted this amidst breaching monsters of the deep in tule reed canoes.
I aimed to sleep under the stars but was awoken with many starts to terrible glinting fox eyes everywhere. I eventually surrendered and slunk into my brother’s tent.
My sister Lauren, co-author of this, kept us abreast of all the bird species, like the Island Jay. While most island-bound animals devolve in size, this jay species doubled.
My brother-in-law Robin, also co-author of this, introduced me to his 40-100mm lens responsible for so many of these images; turns out we both use the Olympus system and could trade.
We scoured the island's National Park Service visitor’s center which, despite glancing notes on the native history, mostly just displays replica stoves and apple peelers from the island’s time as a ranch. It says little about the prior 10,000 years, as if nothing much happened. Though I’m sure much did. It’s just that those loves, wars, diseases, rescues, feats, treacheries, rises, and falls, were all performed before the use of metal or mortar, and so have left no trace upon these rocks.
All that we can now, at the visitor's center, is the scar period.
On the way back our ferry veered into a superpod of several thousand dolphins and sea lions and one colossal humpback whale slapping its fluke in detonation.
I plan on writing more trip reports like this. Should I?
Practical application: Not so much a recommendation as a desire: I'm learning photography so I can better capture that which words cannot.
There's a principle for this: Share the Lore
To do great work, we must know what preceded it. And the most useful parts of that story are never written down. For our part, we aim to volunteer more than we are asked, and overshare with a generous spirit. You never know what gets fossilized and reused.
Inside Fenwick
Did you know Fenwick keeps an inspiration archive? It’s full of ebooks, social posts, data visualizations, and the best stuff we come across.
Worth reading
Yeti doesn’t market coolers. A serviceable summary of what happens when you commit to the bit and the bit is marketing feelings.
Videos
The 5 stages of Halaand. (Sound on.)
Clay anthropomorphizes software. They’re hardly the first. But it works because of the flinty hard acting skills. Dumb and effective are separated by the thin line of taste/quality.
PostHog’s bananas budget. You can feel when a marketing team is having fun. Whereas most orgs operate on a, “The beatings will continue until morale improves” basis.
Visually
Nice websites: Contra,
Framer’s gallery of stunning websites.
Long reads
Extinction-level capitalism. Yeah, pretty much.
Skill nostalgia. Or, why are there no master cashiers?
Why do astronomers obsess over Venus?
On AI
Anthropic gobbles poison pills. This is information warfare at its cleverest: It’s doing the harm, and asking, why must harm exist?
Just fun
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