Welcome to The Finite Scroll - a weekly-ish lets call it monthly newsletter for curious people. It should take less than 5 minutes to read and give you something that piques your curiosity. 

It’s been a while since the last newsletter. I blame the always‑crazy, post-Labor Day, back‑to‑school madness that is September. I felt moved to write as today the sun has officially set on a product that defined a distinct four‑year chapter of my career. I spent a total of seven years at The New York Times, and the team I built and the work we did in Audio between 2020–2024 is the Times work I’m most proud of. The launch of the New York Times Audio app was our first and biggest milestone on that journey.

From the day we pressed the Launch button on NYT Audio 🚀 to the sunset last week 🌅

After Friday, October 3, NYT Audio will no longer be available or supported. Even while I was at the Times, it was clear this was how the story would go. We built NYT Audio as a standalone product because we knew we could move faster and explore audio more broadly than we could inside the News app. Too many eyeballs. Too many stakeholders. I’m really grateful we got the support and investment to head out to Audio Island for a couple of years to craft our experience and learn what worked, what didn’t, and what might make sense to bring over to the News app.  

For any NYT Audio fans out there, the good news is you can still listen to Times journalism right in the News app on the Listen tab, an experience that shares much product DNA with NYT Audio. The Listen tab was also the last product I shipped before I left the Times in the spring of 2024.

The team we built and the product we shipped during those four years will always be a career highlight.

Part of this was because it was the first new app the Times had launched in over nine years. Part of it was because it was a chance to build something genuinely new at the intersection of emerging consumer behavior, ubiquitous technology, and storytelling. Being a builder in those moments is rare and special. Part of it was because it was an opportunity for me to get back to my zero‑to‑one startup roots and help envision a new product - and nurture a new team culture - from scratch.

I started building that team in December 2019 and had only hired two people when we all decided to work from home “for a few weeks” on March 7, 2020. We know how that story played out. Overnight we became a distributed team — something new for the Times — and without missing a beat we drove a discovery process that shaped the vision for NYT Audio. Over the next four years, we grew into a team of 40+ incredible humans and brought that vision to life. We did this during a uniquely challenging and uncertain time for the country, and I remain in awe of the collaboration, creativity, compassion, and resilience everyone showed while never letting their push for great work fade.

Far from everyone who touched NYT Audio but this screengrab from a distributed ramen making class we did during Covid captures the vibes of this great crew.

I’m so grateful to everyone who poured a bit of themselves into NYT Audio and helped make audio as big and important as it is for The New York Times today. To that crew I say one last time... We Hear For You 🎧 ❤️🫡

Things I've been into recently

📻 This Is How the AI bubble Could Burst - Excellent discussion on the Plain English podcast with Paul Kedrosky on the state of AI investment today, what has to go right for it to pay off and what could happen (and when) if it doesn't.

🎥 📻 One Battle After Another - One of the most memorable movie-going experiences I’ve had in a while. The acting. The story. The music. What a fucking film. See it in a theater if you can and if you have seen it and want more, this podcast conversation from Wesley Morris’ Cannonball is great. 

At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money.

📖 David Foster Wallace - I’d of course heard of him but never read any of his work. This post from Ted Giaoa on 8 things DFW Tried To Warn Us About kind of blew my mind. He talks about the implications screen addiction - in 1996 - in a way that could be ripped out of today’s headlines. Makes me want to dip into some of his work.  

I’d say that since around 2016 we have been living in a state of constant escalation without a destination or cliff. Every day, everything stays the same but it also somehow gets worse. Every month there is an event, or series of events, that promises rupture. Every single moment feels like the air is about to snap in half, and is as boring and stifling as a hot summer day with no wind. It’s all too much, and nothing seems to happen at all.

👂 The Shepherd tone - I found this piece about an engineered sound from the mid-20th century to do a pretty spot-on job of describing what it has felt like to exist in this country over the past nine months. Listen to it and tell me it doesn't exhude how this time has felt.    

📉 Social Media In Decline? - I found these two charts from this Financial Times piece from John Burn-Murdoch to be both depressing (the reasons people give for using social media) and hopeful at least globally (we seem to have hit a peak in social media in 2022, with younger people leading the charge on the pullback) Unfortunately, the United States seems to be the exception 😞

It would be a hugely welcome development to discover that we have not merely reached social media saturation point, but that the experience has been degraded to such an extent that it has shocked people out of their stupor and is causing them to pivot to healthier uses of their time.But that brings me to the catch. There is one notable exception to this promising international trend: North America, where consumption of social media’s diet of extreme rhetoric, engagement bait and slop continues to climb. By 2024 it had reached levels 15 per cent higher than Europe.

🃏 Designing and Building a Card Game - I loved this conversation between Cal Newport and Tim Ferris, particularly the part where Tim goes into detail about his process designing a new card game from scratch in collaboration with the Exploding Kittens crew. Ps: the game is called Coyote and we got it - it’s really fun. 

🥧 Bake off is Back - Someone recently asked me what my favorite "comfort watch" is and it is without a doubt, The Great British Bake Off. With new episodes dropping on Fridays on Netflix, it is the perfect balm at the end of the work week as we head into the weekend.

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