Moving Day
A new single source of truth.
A few weeks ago I went looking for something I wrote.
It was an older essay. I remembered the ending, more or less. I remembered writing it late on a Friday and feeling good about it. What I couldn’t remember was where it lived. Was that just an old Word file? Substack, maybe. Or Medium. I think it started as a note somewhere, grew up into a piece, and settled wherever it landed.
I found it eventually. It took three searches across several platforms and more time than the essay deserved. And somewhere in that little scavenger hunt, a thought showed up and refused to leave.
I didn’t know where my own writing lived.
That’s a strange thing for a writer to admit. I’d bet it’s also more common than any of us wants to say out loud. You start a newsletter and the essays go one place. You build a website and that becomes another place. The short stuff, the two-paragraph observations, the “I have to write this down before it’s gone” moments, those scatter to wherever short thoughts scatter (social media, Google Docs, Apple Notes, etc.). Each decision made sense when I made it. Then one day you go looking for something you made, and you realize the whole body of work is spread across the internet like a family that only sees each other at weddings.
So I fixed it.
If you’ve clicked over to seanmcdevitt.com lately, you’ve seen the result. The site got a full rebuild on a platform called Micro.blog, and everything lives there now. Every Substack essay made the trip. So did a stack of the shorter notes, the ones that never quite earned a full send but still felt worth keeping. One location. One archive. One front porch.
The phrase I kept repeating while I worked on this was “a single source of truth.” It’s a term borrowed from people who manage databases, which is a group I don’t usually take writing advice from, but the idea fits. One place where the final version of everything lives, and one address I can point to when someone asks where to find me. There I am.
I want to be fair to Substack here, because it earned that much. It delivered these emails on time, every week, and it made starting a newsletter about as easy as starting one can be. I’m grateful for it. The move comes down to something I learned about how I actually write.
I don’t write in one size. Some weeks the thing I need to say runs a thousand words. Some weeks it runs forty. The old setup only had a lane for the first kind. A newsletter platform wants a Newsletter, capital N, and everything smaller either gets inflated to fit or dies in a drafts folder. I have a drafts folder full of forty-word ideas that deserved better than that.
The new setup has room for all of it. A weekly essay, same as always. And as many short notes as the week hands me. Two sentences about a game that went sideways. A paragraph about a sentence I loved and can’t stop thinking about. They get to exist now, at their natural size, without me dressing them up for a bigger occasion.
Here’s what changes for you, and I think it’s good news. The Saturday email becomes a Sunday morning digest. One email, once a week, with the essay and whatever notes I posted along the way. Skim it or sit with it. Your call.
I’ll be honest about why Sunday. When I picture you reading this, and I do picture it, you’re at the kitchen table. There’s coffee going lukewarm beside you because you got pulled into something. Maybe the dog wants out and is being ignored. Sunday morning is built for that kind of reading. Saturday, I’ve come to accept, is built for living (or work.. I’m nodding to my mother-in-law). An email that arrives while you’re out at dinner gets buried by morning. An email that arrives with the coffee gets read. I’d rather meet you at the table.
A little housekeeping, and then I’ll let you go. The old site, saturdaynightfive.com, stays up for a while. Nothing there is disappearing yet. But this is likely the last email you’ll ever receive from that platform, and probably the last one under that name.
Names are funny things to retire. Saturday Night Five was a promise, a small one, that I’d show up at the same time every week with five things that earned your attention. I loved keeping that promise. I plan to keep making a version of it, just from a new address and on a new morning. If anything, the promise gets bigger. You’ll see more of the writing now, including the small pieces that used to stay in the notebook.
There’s one more reason for the move, and it’s the one that took me longest to admit. A newsletter that lives on someone else’s platform is a tenant. It follows the landlord’s rules, sits inside the landlord’s app, and gets shuffled around when the landlord redecorates. I wanted the writing to have a home instead. A place with my name on the door, where an essay from last year and a note from last Tuesday sit on the same shelf, and where anyone who wonders what I’ve been thinking about can find out in one stop.
That’s what seanmcdevitt.com is now. The full record, all in one place, growing every week.
So here’s the new deal. I write all week. You get one email on Sunday morning. You make the coffee, I’ll bring the words, and we’ll figure out the rest of it together like we always have.
Be seeing you.
Three Blind Mice
Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Friedman knows what he’s talking about when he describes three of our world’s leaders as the stupidest people the world has ever seen.
Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin are drastically different men, but they do have one important thing in common: Each thinks he is the smartest person in any room he enters. Alas, though, because they have all done the dumbest thing you can do as a leader — surround yourself with sycophants — they have all blundered into dead-end wars from which they can extricate themselves today only by eating a banquet of crow. Watch out. There is nothing more dangerous than a reckless leader faced with a plate of crow: Sometimes his instinct is to double down on a losing strategy instead.
The world will be better off when these three are off the world stage and wiser men take over and negotiate ends to these stupid and pointless conflicts.
Pomodoro
One of the ways I’ve been keeping myself on task is the Pomodoro technique. For me, I found a YouTube channel that is just perfect for this: Good Timers.
I’m able to start a project, click on whatever timer I want and I get rain and white noise and that helps me stay on point and focused.
It works for me. It might work for you.
The Cardinals and the Trade Deadline
The Cardinals are fading after the All-Star break again, and with the deadline a few days out, everyone wants to argue buy or sell. That’s the wrong question. The better one is what the front office’s actions will tell us about how they see this team.
The position player picture has narrowed. A year ago the whole outfield was a mess. Now it’s really just center field, third base, and catcher. Watch Nootbaar. If they trade him, it means they think Joshua Baez is ready. If they don’t, he isn’t. Wetherholt already answered his question with an eight-year extension. Bloom needs to lock up Walker and I expect that’s getting done right now.
The rotation has been steadier than expected, but apparently the arms in the minors look more like 2028 than 2027. That creates a timing problem, because parts of the position core will be running out of control years right as the pitching arrives. Bloom has to fix this.
Speaking of fixing, the bullpen can’t be fixed with one deadline arm. Neither can the bench, which keeps losing games with bad at-bats and missed plays.
I haven’t watched enough to be knowledgeable enough to know what Bloom will do, but we will all know soon enough.
Seth’s Riffs
Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow, Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip, and This Is Marketing, writes a daily email full of excellent short ideas about life and business.
Now, he’s collected even shorter ideas that don’t make it into the daily email on a page called Seth’s Riffs. Each one is a sentence or two.
Here are a couple I liked:
Anxiety might simply be choosing to experience failure in advance.
Waiting for perfect is never as smart as making progress.
Defending mediocrity is exhausting.
People are very good at stories. That’s our core competency.
