Hi,

A short one this week, as I've been preoccupied with family matters.

Polish stuff

A few weeks back I helped prepare some of the materials for this online conversation next week at YIVO about Pola Nireńska. It's with Weronika Kostyrko, the author of The Dancer & The Holocaust, a biography on Nireńska that is only available in Polish, but will hopefully be published in English one day.

If you haven't heard of Nireńska, she was a cult influential figure in 20th-century dance, who spent most of her later life in Washington DC. She was also a Polish Jew who stopped talking Polish after the Holocaust killed many of her relatives.

Living in the States, she married an ethnic Pole, the also-famous Jan Karski, who for years didn't even realise she spoke Polish.

This fact blows my mind. Imagine deciding to marry somebody, not realising you were both native speakers of the same language!

The YIVO meeting will undoubtedly be fascinating for anybody interested in Polish Jewish history or dance. It takes place on Wednesday Sept 14th at 1pm EST / 7pm GMT / 8pm CET. Register here.

Non-Polish stuff

As part of the Ship 30 course I'm doing, this week we were encouraged to rewrite the bios in our Twitter profiles. The main aim was to let readers know clearly if you're somebody they would want to follow or not..

Mine was originally this:

Writer, editor, translator & podcaster (and recovering editorial office chief...)

It's not very good because although, sure, it looks like I do lots of things, it doesn't niche down in any meaningful way to the casual observer. It's a grey miasma of words that doesn't tell you if I will be at all entertaining or valuable for you.

So now it's this:

I write about Polish-English nonsense & self-development fails | Over 14 yrs in online media + an award-winning book in my CV | Procrastilearning as a lifestyle

I'm hoping it's a bit better, but it's tricky since I don't really have a niche. My online writing on Twitter, as well as this newsletter, are vehicles for me to explore that.

If you have any feedback about the bio, please do reply to this email, I'd love to know. If you check my Twitter profile itself, you might see either because I am using Birdy.so to A/B test which performs better. I'll certainly be changing it again, whatever the Birdy results, especially since regular revision is encouraged (people's work and lives are ever evolving, after all).

Podcast recommendation of the week

The other week, I listened to the entirety of Things Fell Apart, an 8-part series from Jon Ronson.

Listen to the 3-minute trailer here.

I've enjoyed Ronson's work immensely over the years. Back in 2001, he was one of the first people to bring vitamin marketer / conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to the public eye, which some people are still annoyed about. His short book from 2016 was also the first time most people had heard of Trump adviser Roger Stone (somebody cheekily uploaded the audiobook to YouTube if you want to listen).

Ronson gets away with interviewing whoever he wants, no matter how extreme, because he is probably the least intimidating person imaginable. And this continues to be true in Things Fell Apart, which features 8 origin stories from Western media's culture wars (i.e. fun topics like abortion, Q-Anon, trans rights & book burning).

All 8 episodes are excellent, but I would especially recommend episode 3, which I found very moving (click here to stream it from the BBC website).

That's it this time. Remember to tell your loved ones this week that you love them if you haven't done it in a while. It never hurts.

Adam

Adam Zulawski

TranslatingMarek.com / Procrastilearning.com / More stuff

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