Welcome to our second family meeting!

For newer subscribers: This is a quarterly housekeeping update intended to double as a light, entertaining inbox diversion for your Friday morning.

For old subscribers: Thanks for including us as a valued member of your inbox.

Thanks to beehiiv’s growth network, we’ve leveraged the support of other newsletters to double our subscriber base over the course of a month or so. A big shout out to everyone who has come over from The92, Wild Capital, and Capybara Dispatch. Another big shout out those who discovered us from Freddie deBoer’s substack from his May 2026 subscriber featured writing.

A final big thanks to the handful of other subscribers who came from existing subscriber referrals. You guys are all heroes.

I’d apologize for beating this drum if it weren’t such an essential metronome, but: If this newsletter is something that you find to be a net positive in your life and you look forward to each piece, I would immensely appreciate that you share the newsletter with a friend, spouse, or someone who you think would similarly value it. Ultimately, this is how you can best support the work here.

While I am arrogant enough to think that most of you are here for my writing, the long-term vision of Millennial Dad Journal is to feature a collection of different voices to highlight a wide variety of perspectives on the Rubik’s cube that is modern parenting.

In the coming months, expect some posts from new authors who I am excited to feature on these pages.

If you have any inkling of writing something for Millennial Dad Journal, I’d highly encourage you to submit a piece.

The guidelines for submission are pretty broad; the main criteria is that the writing is good.

What does that mean? Just like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart argued in the 1964 court case Jacobellis vs. Ohio regarding the legal definition of obscenity, I know it when I see it.

Also: you definitely don’t need to be a millennial dad to write something for MDJ. As I’ve mentioned before, the majority of subscribers here aren’t even dads themselves. Contributions from moms, dads to be, grandparents, or anyone with any investment in the parenting game are encouraged to submit.

To read more about the submission process and to send in a submission, check out the link below:

Millennial Dad Journal is about six months old. When I started this, I was pretty set on never using social media whatsoever.

Ideologically, I loved the idea existing entirely outside an ecosystem which I fundamentally disagree with and think is incontrovertibly harmful to children (and adults).

On a much smaller scale, relying heavily on the social media attention economy to grow Millennial Dad Journal feels like when a podcaster whose mission is supposedly to improve the lives of young men shills for DraftKings and FanDuel.

Six months in, I am reconsidering this position. While the video/image first incentives of TikTok or Instagram are a little too much for me to bear, I’ve settled on Facebook as a possible growth/community destination for the following four reasons:

In April I created a Facebook page for Millennial Dad Journal. But then for the reasons described above, had some misgivings about actually using it and never really did.

This newsletter is occasionally a democracy (just like our great nation), so I am putting this up to a vote:

Based on your response above, you are also welcome to “follow” the Facebook page.

If you are interested in the AI philosophy behind this newsletter, you can read about it. The short of it is that the actual writing never has and will never involve AI whatsoever, but I semi-regularly use gemini for some of the “publishing” aspects of running this newsletter.

Of course, as the technology evolves and matures, the views here may change one way or another. Although the “no AI writing” part will never change. That I can guarantee with even more certainty than the old Men’s Warehouse spokesperson.

One caveat to this is that I am moving away from AI images for articles but have kept the AI image for this recurring piece, as it is simply too good.

Between the last family meeting and now, my wife and I hired a house-cleaning service.

This is something I have somewhat conflicted feelings about. I hate outsourcing things to third-parties, generally have trouble accepting anything that could possibly be considered an unearned luxury, and have a strong aversion of adding anything else that threatens our ability to maintain a financial margin.

But with two girls 20 months apart who are both under 3, the ongoing mess in our house became untenable. To keep it in a state that resembles reasonable, my wife and I would have to spend literally all our non-parenting time scrubbing, mopping, and dusting, only to see those spaces revert back to disaster an hour later.

So we now have someone come every other week. They do a fantastic job and it is definitely worth the expense. I assume that since they set the price, it represents a fair wage that is worthwhile to their family-run business.

Sure, our house reverts back to its Chernobyl-esque homeostasis after about 3-4 days. But the calming feeling of a clean home represents a return to normalcy that not even Warren G. Harding’s 1920 presidential campaign could rival.

I finished two books this quarter. Normally I’d like to have read more, but both of these were spectacular in different ways:

First, I read Against the Machine by Paul Kingsnorth, which I was completely blown away by. Far and away one of the best books I’ve read in years. He diagnoses a feeling (that I think is universal) about modernity in a way I hadn’t really come across before, weaving seemingly disparate ailments of the modern world into a cohesive narrative and explanation.

It has plenty of stuff that both the right and the left are typically outraged by, which to me is generally a sign of an intellectual argument with actual integrity. If you feel like there is something fundamentally off with the runaway train direction of humanity (or equally, if you think screen-world, unaffordable luxury-condo living is the greatest thing ever), I would encourage you to pick this up.

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More recently, I read Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The Penguin Random House website considers this 2013 novel a “modern classic”, with which I’d definitely agree. It’s about two Nigerian teenagers who fall in love, but are taken separate ways by the inertia of life; with one coming into her own in America and the other living life on the margins in England before eventually becoming “a big man” back home. It’s primarily about a few things; the long arc of relationships and what time does to people, the dichotomy of race as an overwhelmingly dominant construct in America vs. its virtual nonexistence in Nigeria, the socio-cultural politics surrounding Black women’s hair and hair care; but like all great novels, it plumbs the depth of the human experience to also somewhat be about everything.

I typically gravitate to non-fiction, but I occasionally read novels that make me extremely jealous and motivated given the writer’s overwhelming talent. I end up learning a lot more in these books than I do in the vast majority of non-fiction reads, as they’re essentially a masterclass in understanding human nature. This was definitely one of those novels.

There were a number of articles I really enjoyed over the past few months, that maybe you’ll enjoy too:

The Missing Kayaker | Jamie Thompson

This is an incredible, straight-up bonkers story with some masterful journalism from Jamie Thompson. I am glad that I had not heard of this story before reading the article, as the twists and turns made for a riveting experience more reminiscent of binge watching a Netflix show than reading an article in The Atlantic. With all that said, certainly heartbreaking and cruel to many of the individuals involved.

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Why Steve Kerr Stayed with the Warriors | Wright Thompson

This was the best human interest story I’ve read in quite sometime that captures the totality of a highly accomplished person, both personally and professionally. Whether or not you follow sports the title spoils the ending, but that’s really well beyond the point.

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Optimization | Scott Galloway

I very much enjoyed this piece on the shortfalls of optimization culture, as well as the “maxxing” incentives that the digital economy creates.

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the Bill Frisell problem: why we fail to recognize things we ought to love | Daniel Frank

My music taste is too pedestrian to the point where I had never heard of Bill Frisell or Steve Kimock, but the primary argument of this article is one that I found myself nodding vigorously to. Here’s a chunk of it:

This is one of the reasons why reading old books and watching movies from a different time or place is so important. In every era, there are the kinds of people who possess the exact same psychological frameworks as today’s Trump supporters, rationalists, or woke. But when you read their thoughts and ideas, whether in a Tolstoy novel or a 1960s Italian film, your modern pattern-matching gatekeeping heuristic fails. Because these people don’t use the same contemporary language or share the specific affiliations of the groups you normally reject, the gatekeeping doesn’t work. You can’t easily sort them into the “bad group,” so you can actually engage with these perspectives more neutrally.

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Technology Weakens Our Minds. It’s Time To Resist | Cal Newport

You probably already know that I’m a devout follower of the church of Newport, and think he’s a (or maybe the) leading voice on what I think is the most important issue of our time: the preservation of our minds and human potential. This article is a big picture view on some of the stuff he gets into more deeply in his other work. A good snippet:

I’m done ceding my brain — the core of all that makes me who I am — to the financial interests of a small number of technology billionaires or the shortsighted conveniences of hyperactive communication styles. It’s time to move past fretting about our slide into the cognitive shallows and decide to actually do something about it.

That’s all for this month. Enjoy the summer and thanks for being here.