It's all around you, but you can't touch it.

There's a song that I like a lot by Arcade Fire, called "Creature Comfort". It's a pretty heavy song in parts, and last week's email about depression was heavy, so I'm not going to get into the details (though the video is below). But the song is aimed at young people, and about how they are trained to hate themselves. The opening verse says:

I'm writing a book--but don't worry! I'm not going to try to get you to buy it!

The thing is, I had my first book published 22 years ago this month, and I've had fourteen published since. I had a three-book six-figure deal. I spoke at New York Comic-Con. I co-wrote a book with James Patterson. I'm a New York Times bestselling author.

But that book came out six years ago and I had thought that I was over with it. I considered myself retired. I only recently started writing again just for fun, just because I had a neat idea….

It has been a week. That’s what I say at the beginning of every one of these newsletters, but I think that only highlights how much of a year this week happens to be part of.

There’s been a lot of good stuff that has happened this week! And I’m not just talking about the de-extinction of dire wolves (which I’ll talk about below). But there have been a lot of people who are Doing Things and Taking Action. My wife and I went to the big protest on Saturday—we didn’t think we’d be able to go, but we wanted to drive by and honk and wave at least. And the cool thing was that it was SO crowded that we couldn’t hardly get there—streams of people walking, carrying signs, waving flags. It took us two full hours to go half a mile. It was inspiring.

You know that this newsletter isn’t supposed to be political—it’s supposed to be a breath of fresh air to get your mind off of hard things. And it is that.

But this has been another week, another bunch of hard news. I see protests happening all the time—which is great!—but it can often feel hard to stand up. I know that I have been intimidated out of going to protests more than once, which I regret…