The Brown Barge

I can think of few things cooler than serializing a utopian novel, while also building a community of like-minded readers.

- Spencer Orenstein

Imagine you had a friend who was funny enough to be on peak SNL and smart enough to win a fancily named science prize. Now imagine that friend wrote a newsletter. Congratulations, you have conjured up Experimental History.

- Spencer Orenstein

A newsletter with a very standard name and very non-standard writing.

- Spencer Orenstein

I like this Substack so much that it inspired me to write a long Note to one of Substack's co-founders, which then inspired me to start this newsletter.

- Spencer Orenstein

Question: What do you get when you take a heaping tablespoon of funny, add in two scoops of smart, and a dash of poignance? Answer: Museum of My Nostalgia.

- Spencer Orenstein

One Word is so beautiful that it made me cry. I don't think I can give a stronger recommendation than that to anything in life.

- Spencer Orenstein

I didn't think anything could sound less appealing to me than a newsletter about perfume from a mysterious mononymous writer, but olfactory seconds taught me that: 1) perfume notes are a lie, but they're all we have; 2) I don't know myself as well as I thought I did.

- Spencer Orenstein