| Hi, After much hemming and hawing, I have decided, after 700 consecutive weeks, to stop doing my weekly Sunday New York Times Digest. I began doing these on my blog in December of 2007 — almost 13 and a half years ago — and kept doing them every week without fail until last week, May 2, 2021. I initially conceived of these digests as a recurring feature on my blog. I’ve been reading a newspaper on Sunday morning since I was a kid — first the Seattle Times, then the Los Angeles Times, then the New York Times, and every once in a while I’ll read the Sunday Wall Street Journal — so when I was in grad school in 2007, I figured that because I was reading the Sunday New York Times in hard copy ritualistically anyway, I might as well get some content for my blog out of it. In 2014, I started sending these digests out as an email newsletter in addition to posting them on my blog. Then, a little over a year ago, I stopped posting them on my blog. Now, after existing exclusively in email newsletter form, I’m ending them entirely. Why? Well, for one thing, these digests ate up a lot of my time, sometimes my entire Sunday. Sometimes my entire Sunday and most of my Monday. I really would try to read the whole paper, always starting with the Business section, then the Sunday Review, then Arts & Leisure, then Sunday Styles, then Travel (or more recently At Home), then the front page, then any special sections, then the Book Review, then finally the Magazine, and then, when they have it, the T Magazine. I settled on this order after discovering that if I started with the front page I’d get too perturbed by its inventory of horrors to read the rest of the paper. Starting with the Business section, I’d make note of articles I found interesting on a piece of scratch paper. After going through the whole paper, I’d switch to my computer, pull up the articles I wrote down in Safari, copy the headlines and URLs into a Markdown document using a custom aText snippet and AppleScript, then decide what to quote from each article. That was usually the fun part. There’s satisfaction in selecting just the right quote. Sometimes I would have two dozen or more articles after doing this. If so, I’d go back through my headlines and quotes to see if I could delete items that, upon closer examination, no longer seemed worth sharing. My selection criteria was chiefly articles I found interesting, particularly ones I found interesting and well written, or at least ones that had a striking, quotable line or two. (It’s amazing how much a single quotable line improves an article.) I tried to stay away from political horse race journalism, preferring instead pieces with far-reaching historical, social, and/or technological themes, though I’m sure I included lots of ephemeral nonsense too. Much to my surprise, a good number of people were interested in my idiosyncratic roundups. I am particularly grateful to people such as Austin Kleon, Michael Leddy, Daniel Pink, and others who plugged and promoted my digests, and to the people who supported me monetarily via my Buy Me a Coffee page. Your contributions did indeed buy me coffee because that’s what I made every Sunday morning before sitting down to read the paper. I also really appreciate the kind emails people have written me over the years about my digests. Those always made my day. These digests have been, weirdly, was one of the more popular things I’ve ever done, and so it feels a bit risky to stop doing them, but I want to make space in my life for other things, things that aren’t tied to a single publication (that isn’t paying me), things that represent my voice more clearly, things that aren’t a newsletter. Everybody and their mother has a newsletter these days. I hope to send out one more digest that’s a sort of “greatest hits” of articles from all the digests I did — every one of which is archived on my blog and/or on TinyLetter — so feel free to stay on this list and look for that in the coming weeks. Otherwise, if you’d like to keep abreast of my doings, I invite you to subscribe to my blog and/or follow me on Twitter — both are places where I’ll undoubtedly continue to share the occasional New York Times article; I have no plans to stop reading the New York Times. And you’re certainly welcome to reach out to me via email. I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for reading and, if you are so inclined, stay tuned, Matt  | 
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