Hell of a week eh? Twitter is in freefall, the UK’s self-inflicted economic wounds look unlikely to heal anytime soon, and—to top it all off—old orange face himself is back in the news. The weather is turning here as we try to force a small boy into layers he clearly doesn’t want. And woe betides you if you were trying to get Taylor Swift tickets. For your daughter, you say? Yeah, sure thing.

Now you’ve seen how this particular sausage gets made, and how precariously put together it is, I feel comfortable sharing somthing—I’ve been on the backfoot the last few weeks. A lot of juggling, trying to make it all work. A weekly deadline that’s harming more than helping. So I’m going to take a piece of advice I was given recently and let a week slide. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes I’m excited about, and can’t wait to share when ready. But not today. What was going to be this week’s newsletter will be with you on Tuesday, giving me time to lock in a series of essays on religion and spirituality which will go out before the end of the year.

Instead, let’s us this space to talk. Here are a few things on my mind right now, feel free to bring any of your own:

• Last week I wrote about definitions of success, and wondered what does success mean to you? Is the definition your own? Or did you get it from someone else? What happens if and when you get there? What’s the exit strategy?

• If football is your thing, how are you feeling about the World Cup? As a lifelong Manchester United fan, Beckham’s role in legitimising it as a paid ambassador has left a horrible taste in my mouth, and more than a few friends are planning to boycott the tournament and stay tuned out. I’m very tempted to follow suit. Interested to hear from others.

• For the Twitter folks here, of which I reluctantly count myself—what next? Moving to Mastadon? Crying because it’s (almost) over, or smiling because it happened? Or excited for the chance to finally kick an unhealthy habit?

• Are we all caught up on Andor before next week’s finale? The best Star War in a long time. Only going to be two seasons apparently (a fact gleaned from this excellent Rolling Stone interview with the showrunner). Where’s it going? And—channelling Tom Waits—what the hell were they were building in there?

• Anything else you want to raise—bring it along. Nothing off limits.

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And another thing … Substack launched “Chat” in their app, meaning we could potentially move these threads there. But from my stats I can see there’s only around 3% of you reading via the app—which, for the record, I love, I read all my newsletters there—and the folks who come by these threads are overwhelmingly doing so on non-mobile devices. So I’m on the fence. Help me decide:

Finally, for those of you based in London, some of the dads in the community are meeting for drinks—next Tuesday in Dalston. Cheers to Adam for herding all the cats. Details are here, if you’re so inclined.

See you after the click, or else sometime next week. Have a good one!

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