Summer of Failure

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene’s wreckage, I revisited this piece that I wrote last summer after historic and devastating flooding in Vermont

1. I’m winding down the Summer of Failure: this’ll be the last post on this theme for a bit before we move into a less fatalistic feeling fall, though I have one more (extremely special) podcast episode in the works. Dive into the whole rabbit hole here. 2. Finally, a content warning: I think most […]

There’s a not-so-secret fantasy I’ve heard a lot of entrepreneurs voice over the years: the wish that some sort of catastrophe lands you in the hospital for a while, tended by a fleet of nurses. It’s a rather dark and horrible vision, the idea that you need some sort of deus ex machina to save […]

On the surprising relief of letting (a very big) something go… I’ve really appreciated all the notes from y’all on the first part of my conversation with Heather Thomason of Primal Supply Meats. I know there are a lot of you that have recently experienced similar turmoil or have either made, or are grappling with, […]

On making the (seemingly impossible) decision to pull the plug. Hello! If you’d like to skip straight to listen to my interview with Heather Thomason of Primal Supply Meats, click here. True to form for The Summer of Failure, I saw a couple of days ago that one of my favorite area restaurant’s last service […]

Vermont— yes, seemingly the entire state—flooded over a few days a bit over a week ago. It made national news, so maybe you know this. You may be far away and file it away under “yet another natural disaster” in the abstract feeling that these things tend to take on. I didn’t really register the […]

Greetings! This post is part of a series called Enough is Enough, a summer of exploring failure. We kicked off with a piece on Queer Failure, and if you’d like to read the full series, find that here. Today I’m thinking my way through something that’s been troubling me these past six months or so: […]

Welcome to the Summer of Failure Perhaps you, like my partner Kha and me, have been binging on season 2 of The Bear. If you’re not, no real spoilers ahead. All you need to know is that this season sees the scrappy group working to transform sandwich joint The Beef into an upscale restaurant, The […]

We tend to think of businesses as enterprises that need to last, sustain, grow, and grow some more. If you view a business as an asset—an entity that can grow and sustain value, with a primary purpose of building wealth—then it’s impossible to square temporality or failure as positive possibilities. But if, as I’ve been […]

This post is adapted from [Im]Possible Business, a zine exploring radical business alternatives. Learn more and download the publication here. Read another post in this series: Business as Queer Failure Utopias have always entailed disappointments and failures. — Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother Étaín was an “underthings” store in Portland, Maine, that offered an inclusive […]