Wednesday Walk: The Bright Bathroom
Wednesday Walk: The Bright Bathroom
Puzzles with our faces, a surge in growth, and the hidden waste of lighting
A New Year
Hello all and welcome to 2024! I am excited and energized to enter the fourth(!) calendar year of this little project and am glad to have you along for the ride.
There are quite a few new subscribers joining us (more on that below), so if this is your first time reading Willoughby Hills, welcome! In this newsletter, I explore everything from racial and social justice to how we grow our food to commercialism, commerce, consumption, travel, transportation, nostalgia, and more. In addition to the newsletter, I also produce and host a podcast every other week, and you’ll get emails about new episodes (there’s a great one coming on Thursday).
Every Wednesday, I offer a few short ideas that I hope will inspire you to do some more reading, thinking, and exploring. Let’s take a little walk together.
Jigsaw Jamboree
When I announced taking a break over the holidays, I mentioned wanting to have some time with my family. We had an amazing week at home with each other and I am so thankful that we kept things low key.
Perhaps one of the best activities we did was assemble custom puzzles made from our old vacation photos as a family.
I honestly was never too excited about the idea of assembling a puzzle with random artwork. A few years ago though, Shutterfly was either offering puzzles as a free promotion at the time or were heavily discounted, so I ordered a few.
The kids weren’t quite old enough at the time, so they’ve been sitting in our cupboard for a few years waiting for a long holiday week like this to make their debut.
There’s something really great about working on something together as a family. At times, each of us was focused on our one little part and at others, we were helping each other by working together. As a bonus, the photos reminded us of past vacations, which we reminisced about as we worked.
If you’ve wanted to do more puzzles but were unmotivated by what’s for sale on your toy store shelves, Shutterfly offers everything from 30 piece kid puzzles to 1,000 pieces. The 252 piece option was perfect for our seven and ten year olds.
Updates on Substack and Nazis
Last month, along with many other folks who publish on Substack, I shared a letter here in Willoughby Hills calling out the leadership team of this platform for allowing white supremacists to not only post on Substack but to also monetize their newsletters. Because Substack takes a cut from each paid subscriber to any newsletter, the company is profiting off of this hate speech.
The prevalence of Nazi content on this site was not something I had paid much attention to in the past, partially because Substack can be so siloed. Many of you may only be on Substack to read my work, or you may follow other newsletters and not even realize that we share a publishing and monetization network. There isn’t a ton of cross-pollination here, which is both good and bad.
At any rate, the letter to Substack leadership garnered a response from
, one of the cofounders of Substack. , who has been spearheading the anti-Nazi campaign has a great summary of his response (which is really a non-response) and what it all means for the community. (Also worth reading if you’re interested is ’s analysis of the situation in Wordloaf).I am still trying to decide what’s best for this publication: moving to greener pastures or staying and fighting the hate. As a tool, Substack is well suited to my particular skillset, allowing me to build a singular community around both writing and podcasting. I moved my whole podcast archive over to Substack last year because Substack does not charge to host and syndicate a podcast while most other services do (Substack gets paid indirectly by taking a cut of my subscriber revenue).
As I’ve been trying to decide what to do next, I’ve noticed recently that my subscriber growth has accelerated faster than at almost any point in my time publishing on this platform, which seems oddly coincidental. Here’s a graph showing my subscriber growth over the last 90 days or so.
Growth on this newsletter has always been slow but steady, but then it suddenly accelerated over the last few weeks. I posted the Substackers Against Nazis post on December 14, indicated by the red triangle above. There’s a brief dip in subscribers after that, but then there’s a sudden surge.
For a while now, most of my subscriber growth has come from within the platform, usually in the form of other newsletters recommending me.
As far as I know, nothing I’ve written has gone viral recently in a way that might encourage new subscribers to find me, which makes me suspect that Substack may be helping to drive new subscribers to publishers like me that aren’t happy about their “free speech” stance and are contemplating leaving.
I will share more updates as I have them and if they’re of interest, but I thought it was odd that over the holiday when I took a break from writing and podcasting, I saw quite an unexpected spike in growth.
Lights Off
Over the holiday break, I started reading The Day the World Stops Shopping by J.B. MacKinnon, a book which looks at the effects of our insatiable consumption and what it might take to change it.
Not surprisingly, much of the book focuses on the items that we buy from stores, but MacKinnon also talks about how we consume in hidden ways, like the use of energy to heat, cool, and light our homes.
Reading MacKinnon has made me hyper aware of waste. Last night, I was at our local music center for my daughter’s chorus practice when I stopped into an out of the way bathroom.
The bathroom was at the end of a long hallway, in a wing of the building that was pretty quiet. I had been sitting near the entrance of the bathroom for more than an hour and noticed not a single person walking past.
As I ventured inside, I was met with a lot of very bright lighting that had seemingly been on at full blast all day long. There were round fixtures over the general area, plus LED lights flanking the mirrors and over the toilets. It’s hard to tell in the photo, but this bathroom was BRIGHT!
As I looked around, there appeared to be a motion sensor on the ceiling, but it didn’t seem to be active, as the lights seemed to already be on when I opened the door.
It was a small but meaningful reminder of the waste of our culture. As I walk around my house turning off single lights that are not being used to save a few watts, there are countless commercial spaces around the planet that are always illuminated, whether they are occupied or not. I wish we could do better, and MacKinnon’s book has been thought provoking in little ways like this.
By the way, MacKinnon’s book also inspired me to make a TikTok about fast fashion. I’m new to that platform, but am enjoying using short form video to deliver information. Give it a watch and follow me over there if you’re on TikTok too!
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Other Wednesday Walks
If you’ve missed past issues of this newsletter, they are available to read here.
multiple generations of our family enjoy doing puzzles. It's a great activity for so many different reasons. Thanks for the Shutterfly tip.
This holiday my family played spades together for the first time. I hadn't played since my 20s. I laughed so hard and realized my trash talking skills, while dormant for a long long time, were still fully powerful😂