How I write for the New York Times using Eyeball
A channel called RESEARCH and lots of saving.
I wrote this article last week that was published in the New York Times Magazine.
It was another in a series of pieces on film for the magazine but my first time using Eyeball in crafting a piece of writing. I thought I share how I went about it in case it’s of use to some of you.
As a reminder: I made Eyeball, a minimal link-saving iPhone app for writers and creatives. We just released a big update that included a Favorites feed; leaving/deleting channels; a monthly pro tier; all your channels appearing in the widget. Give it a whirl on iOS.
First of all, it’s satisfying to be able to use something you built in your own work. It’s must feel wonderful for a carpenter to make a table, but extra nice if he also made the hammer.
I have a channel called RESEARCH where I tend to save anything that I might write about. After Trump was elected again, I had an idea about all those crappy diverse films that were forced upon us since his last election and how distant that era felt already, how out of step with the times.
So I started reading stories about films from this era, about things I’d forgotten like inclusion riders. Every time I saw something, with two clicks, I added a link that I wanted to save straight to this channel.
I used Apple Notes to jot my thoughts down, that’s where all my rough ideas live and where I work out words and phrases. Here is some dialogue from “Succession” I never ended up using.
And then I started thinking about different eras in film and how they are remembered, like 80s action films and blaxploitation and film noir. I started wondering if the era of the BIPOCbuster (see other working titles above) might be a genre in itself. What are the tropes of the genre? I added clips of films, old and new, to my collection, to peruse while standing at my laptop or stuck on the subway.
From the chaos of all that information and with some notes in Notes, I could see connections and began to craft my article in Google Docs.
Thinking constantly about the utility of Eyeball, I’m sure it is still too simple and therefore useless to people who desire organization, who tag each link or save all their text in Reading Lists in a stack of unread, old Economists. What works for me is to have all these video and articles and tweets in one chronological feed. I work with giant piles of paper sitting on the table. I want to have things sitting next to each other and discovering how they connect. I like a thick soup of chaos from which to sup. But I realize that isn’t for everyone.
I think the difference between making something “minimal” versus “plain” is that minimalism requires a lot of work to have been done to turn the complicated into something almost mundane. Those steps saved are incredibly valuable. Whereas plain is already a finished process, anyone can do it, it’s easy to replicate. It has no value. I struggle to make sure Eyeball is minimal, not plain. I don’t want to add too much to the app but I want Eyeball to do more while becoming ever simpler.
Some observations that came out of dogfooding the product while writing this New York Times article:
Perhaps some organization would make the app more useful. Maybe being able to jot down notes next to your links in Eyeball would be cool? Maybe we should build some sort of Notes/Notion lite thingie into the app? Auto-populating tags? I don’t know. I have some ideas.
It would be nice to select a bunch of links in Eyeball and have them magically open in tabs on your laptop. Is that useful? I don’t know how to do that.
18% of people who have downloaded Eyeball have this iPhone app, which is not designed for Macs, on their Macs. That’s really unexpected. Would Eyeball be better as a Mac app?
This is what Eyeball looks like on a Mac. Kinda cute. Eyeball is great at importing links. But it should be easy to export, too. I was getting annoyed with all the clicks to review the links as I was writing the piece. I’ve started building ways to send your saved links to other apps or copy the link so you can paste it somewhere else. Look for this, probably in an update next week.
TasteDump — some of my favorite recent links shared with and by me in Eyeball:
Reading this profile of Brady Corbet as I look forward to seeing The Brutalist next week.
Christian Lorentzen review of a book about the 20th century’s finest writers.
“While going through her papa's old belongings, a young girl discovered something incredible - a mindbogglingly intricate maze that her father had drawn by hand almost 30 years ago.”
In 2012, Facebook was struggling to communicate its story to its ever-growing team and so it made a Little Red Book to distribute internally. This is it.
Francis Bacon in his studio.
“It’s easy to be right. It’s hard to build things and take financial risks that reward you for being right.” Good tweet.
I love Hainanese chicken rice. I’ve been making this version from Julius Roberts for weeks now. The simple broth that comes from poaching the chicken is sublime.