Back for more? Brave.

By the time you’re reading this, it’s been 112 years since the last passenger pigeon on earth died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her name was Martha. 

There had once been billions of her, so many that flocks blacked out the sky for days, yet she spent her final years alone in an enclosure being observed by schoolchildren who had no idea what they were looking at. 

I have never read a sadder sentence, and I’ve read 4 years of newsletter performance reports. I’m talking 318 subscribers, an 11.4% open rate described in the quarterly review as “holding steady,” and a CFO that would like a word with you.

Anyway, this week’s issue is for you, Martha! Fly free. 

Nobody warns you that ghostwriting is 20% writing and 80% wildlife management without a permit, salary, or tranquilizer gun. 

My client sees 3 notifications and a nice little hit of dopamine. I see the whole biome at 6 a.m. with no Diet Cokes in me, and somewhere in year 2, my brain started narrating it in Attenborough, unprompted, permanently: Here, in the comments, the male displays. He has nothing to display. He displays anyway. 

I know these reply dudes and dudettes better than I know some of my cousins. I know their headlines. I know their hours. I know which one is going to say “love this” before he says it, the way you know a storm’s coming in your knees. 9 species, catalogued below, for science and for whatever’s left of me.

Field note: There’s a 10th type, and she doesn’t belong in a taxonomy of pests. She leaves 1 comment, 3 lines long, better than the post it’s attached to. She isn’t farming anything. She knew the thing and said it. My client gets the credit, she gets 9 likes, and we all move on with our morning like nothing happened. 

We like her.

— Sarah Suzuki Harvard

Back Market wants you to narc on a 10-year-old

Back Market — whose entire business is convincing you that an old MacBook, owned for 5 years by a 19-year-old man, is a bargain and not a biohazard — bought subway placements that say "Catch a 5th grader using an em dash." 

A 10-year-old punctuated above grade level, and a French refurbishing tech company wants him brought downtown.

Picture the bust:

8:55 a.m. Unmarked Kia sedan idling outside Hunting Ridge Elementary. The kid comes out with his little Spiderman backpack. 

8:56 a.m. Agents move in. "He's got an em-dash on him!" someone screams. They find 2 more semi-colons in a printed essay crumpled up in his Jansport, plus a paragraph with a functioning topic sentence. His mother is told he'd been writing clearly for months. 

9:04 a.m. On the news, the neighbors say the usual thing: he was polite, kept to himself, punctuated correctly. Nobody suspected.

In any other decade we'd have given him a gold star and a Scholastic Book Fair coupon. Now, those kids get profiled on the L train in front of adults who haven't finished a book since Twilight: Breaking Dawn.

Alright, that’s my time. I’m the unread group chat with 47 messages. See you next week. 

—  sarah suzuki harvard 🫡

Chat, are we cooked? Your Claude chats are public. Not hacked, public. Like on Google, findable by anyone who types the right words into a search bar. Medical records, kids’ phone numbers, company files marked internal only, all of it sitting there because somebody hit “share” and assumed that meant sharing with 1 coworker. Anthropic says the system is “working as intended,” but that’s also what my landlord says about the leak in my ceiling.  If my logs surface, the whole internet finds out I asked a machine trained on the sum of human knowledge whether a straw has 1 hole or 2. (I say 2!)