Dear Members,

I'm making a change to how I handle email notifications, and I wanted to explain why.

When I started this site, I set it up to ping everyone whenever I published something new. Honestly, I know that gets annoying—posts going out at random times, sometimes several in a week, sometimes radio silence for ages.

So I'm switching things up. From now on, I'll publish posts without triggering notifications, then send you a monthly roundup like this one highlighting what's worth your attention. Your inbox will thank me, and I won't feel guilty about that 2 AM post I couldn't resist publishing. After all, it's always 2 AM somewhere, right?

There's another reason for this change. I miss the days when you'd bookmark a few sites and actually visit them to see what was new. Before everything became about notifications and algorithms shoving content at you. There was something satisfying about discovering a new post on your own terms.

Call it nostalgia, but I think there's value in slowing down the content treadmill. No urgency tactics, no "don't miss out" subject lines, no guilt trips about supporting my work. Just writing that either speaks to you or doesn't.

Thanks for sticking around. I think you'll like this new approach.

Happy August,

— Dean Bowman

What's New

Emotional Noise: On Writing through the Static
Three weeks of creative paralysis led me to diagnose what’s really wrong with my writer’s block and our thinking.
Dean BowmanDean Bowman
The Illusion of Independence: Money and Creativity
Substack’s recent funding announcement frames itself as a victory for creative independence and cultural renewal. But is it?
Dean BowmanDean Bowman
The Bad Stuff | A Prose Poem by Dean Bowman
A prose poem on the growing absence of good.
Dean BowmanDean Bowman
The Archaeology of Extinction
The cost of insight into a system designed for willful ignorance.
Dean BowmanDean Bowman
Writing for Proof of Life
The hollowness that pervades modern culture and writing.
Dean BowmanDean Bowman