#522: Learning To Live Again
Getting out of prison, finding your calling, and printing the old-fashioned way
Happy Thanksgiving, loyal readers. If you celebrate, I hope you are filling your day with the taste of delicious turkey and the company of loved ones. Whether you’ve subscribed to Article Club for 10 days or 10 years, I appreciate your being here. (Extra points if you share this newsletter with Uncle Bob at the dinner table.)
This week, I have three articles in all. They have some similarities and common themes. Two pieces involve people remaking their lives and charting new paths. Two pieces include heavy doses of nostalgia. Two are about the death of print. All three are about the quest for knowledge. All three are bittersweet.
Read them, you’ll like them. They are about:
a man who spent 24 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit
a man who finds his passion in midlife, for a trade that is dying
I hope at least one of the articles resonates with you. Leave a comment if you want to share your thoughts. As always, thank you for your readership and your support of Article Club. If you appreciate the newsletter, I’d be honored if you shared it with a friend or colleague. Have a great weekend ahead!
1️⃣ Learning To Live Again
George Bell was wrongly convicted in 1996. He didn’t kill a store owner and a police officer in East Elmhurst, Queens. But he spent 24 years in jail anyway. New York City paid him a record $17.5 million settlement after finding out they had the wrong man. But money’s not everything. Mr. Bell can’t replace the quarter century he has lost. All he can do is try to make sense of it all. He says:
I didn’t wanna just run around being bitter. That shit is cancer, man. And it takes too much damn energy to run around with a frown every day, know what I’m saying? I can say that if I didn’t go through prison, I wouldn’t be who I am to this day. I wouldn’t have the mindset that I have. Unfortunately I had to go through that. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. But it happened. By the same token, I don’t let what happened to me define who I am today. In a sense it does define me, but I don’t let the fucked-up stigmatization of that shit hold me down in life right now. That’s why I work so hard. That’s why I go hard in every project I take, because I know how precious life is. You could be here right now and you don’t know what’s gonna happen five minutes from now. I don’t know if I’m gonna go home and God’s gonna say this is it for me, know what I’m saying? So I try to do so much. Every day. As much as I can.
By Ryan D’Agostino • Esquire • 27 min • Gift Link
2️⃣ How To Fix A Typewriter And Your Life
This Thanksgiving Day, you want schmaltz? I’ll give you schmaltz. Paul Lundy was moving through middle age, in his mid-50s, and desperately wanting a change. One Sunday morning, he read a feature article in The Seattle Times about a 92-year-old man named Bob Montgomery who had a shop in nearby Bremerton where he fixed typewriters. He had been fixing typewriters for 70 years.
That’s all that Mr. Lundy needed to know. Pretty soon, he was Mr. Montgomery’s apprentice. “He showed Lundy the right way,” Kurt Streeter writes. “No anger. No frustration. Just quiet insistence that good enough was not good enough.” Over time, Mr. Lundy learned the trade. Years later, when Mr. Montgomery died, Mr. Lundy took over the shop. “It’ll always be his,” he says. “I am just borrowing it.”
By Kurt Streeter • The New York Times • 9 min • Gift Link
3️⃣ Echoes From A Letterpress
Reading about Mr. Montgomery and watching The American Revolution this week reminded me of my respect for how print publications used to be made. You see, dear reader, just a few decades ago, we didn’t have ready-made templates on Canva or revision history on Google Docs. For more than 500 years, ever since Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, actual humans would painstakingly arrange individual metal letters, one by one, on a plate, then ink it, then press it to paper, in order to format and publish text. (No way Article Club could work this way!)
When Francesca Kielb, managing design editor for The Michigan Daily, experiences a similar realization, she ventures to the basement of a campus library, where a man named Fritz keeps a letterpress studio. There, Ms. Kielb learns the intricacies of moveable type and meets old U-M journalists who remember the transition from typewriters to Macintoshes. Print might be dead, she muses, but when Fritz gives her a page that he just pressed, Ms. Kielb has an immediate reaction. “It was beautiful.”
By Francesca Kielb • The Michigan Daily • 12 min • Gift Link
✅ This Week’s Poll
Last week, only 19% of you said you are reading more now than you did five years ago. But when you’re reading, what are you reading?
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