Friends,
Hello and greetings from our very first edition of Unpacking — a newsletter by yours truly! This is an experiment for us, and we’re looking forward to your feedback along the way. If you are receiving this email, it means you signed up for our newsletter at some point in the past few weeks, and we’re so glad you did!
For our opening salvo, we’re going to introduce ourselves and set our intentions for Unpacking.
Introductions
I’ll go first. Hi! My name is Carrie Porter. I’m a journalist focused on media research, currently working from a tiny village outside Cincinnati, Ohio where I’m spending time with extended family during the pandemic. Most of the time you can find me in Los Angeles with my husband and one-year-old daughter. Twitter: @carolineporter
Hello! I’m Emily Roseman, the other newsletter-author here. I’m writing to you from Alexandria, VA, where I recently moved with my fiance and pup, Hazel. I also work in the world of media research, sometimes with Carrie here. Otherwise, these days you can find me watching horror movies. Twitter: @emilyroseman1
What you can expect
Unpacking is a place to compare notes and make sense of things happening in our worlds. We may send this newsletter about once a week, though it will vary depending on what’s going on and what we have to say about it. Some weeks, Carrie will be the primary author; other weeks, Emily will be the primary author. Or, you might find us in dialogue.
Our intentions
We are going to lean into the ways newsletters can support long-distance/remote conversations, especially since we know Covid Winter is Coming. We are interested in imagining a new version of the water-cooler chat. Can this newsletter help fill the cubicle-size hole in our hearts?
And it’s more than that! Get ready for some of our pie-in-the-sky hypotheses about media, work and the relationships entailed, everything from peer-to-peer interactions to power constructs.
On occasion, we will share ideas and strategies for newsletters, à la our Newsletter Wizards work, though this will not be the primary home for that magic :)
How are we going to do this? We’re going to do some EXPERIMENTS. This might mean we have to break rank with some of the best practices we’ve discovered.
We’re keen to try out new ways to share information and stories, and Unpacking is our home for this. Hopefully you’ll be game to tag along for the ride, and like we said, please share your own feedback and ideas.
Water Cooler Convo
For now, we leave you with our inaugural Water Cooler Convo, a space to share things we might talk about if we were, you know, colleagues in an office on a Friday afternoon:
Here’s a twitter thread that might make you LOL or cringe: McDonald's on Twitter: "it's always “when is the McRib coming back” and never “how are you doing person who runs the McDonald's account”"
Emily: Looks like newsletter-ers aren’t the only ones leaning into the “personality-driven” thing.
Carrie: This is both funny AND humanizing corporations, which is problematic.
Emily: Ok, on the subject of (attempted) humor, it’s time for me to come clean — I am currently obsessed with impression-style humor. Some of my current favorite comedians: Sarah Cooper, Caitlin Reily, and Jordan Firstman. This is a relatively new obsession, and I’m curious if a) there’s always been great impressionist comedy and I’m just discovering it now, or b) there is something about TikTok empowering this form of humor, or c) there’s something about this kind of comedy really hitting home right now … any thoughts? Or articles I should read about this?!
Carrie: For your weekend entertainment, Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a worthy, relevant watch. And if you are looking for some election-friendly meditations, the Politics without Panic primer on Headspace is pretty handy. I’m also making my way through the Election Sanity Challenge, compliments of the Ten Percent Happier folks.
Emily: Been thinking about trick-or-treating and local news. What are the best trick-or-treating trackers or explainers you’ve seen in terms of adapting (or ditching) this tradition in COVID-times? It is somewhat fascinating how local towns decide and issue their own trick-or-treating guidance. It’s a crazy mesh of a) local news, b) local government, c) national and state safety ordinances, and d) emotions surrounding this funny October tradition.
Carrie: P.S., here’s a pretty picture of autumn in NC.
Reactions? Thoughts? Have any movies or impressions or trick-or-treating hot takes you want to send our way? Respond to this email, or send us a note at newsletterwizards@gmail.com.
Your newslettering-pals,
Carrie & Emily