Lightening-n-Brightening Up for Spring

Travel, vineyards, weirdos, robbers -- all coming up

Flowering almond tree in Penedes, Spain. Photo: Helena Centerwall

Dear Subscribers,

Happy Spring.

Thank you so very much for subscribing to “Rossi Reports.” It means a great deal to me.

My original idea for this newsletter was to explore the history of current events, but I’m now reworking that idea — by expanding the concept of history to “anything that happened before today” and widening the definition of current events to “anything that anybody, including me, is currently thinking about.”

That means I’ll now be writing more posts — and many will be breezier.

This change was prompted by reading other Substack newsletters, some of which are filled with fantastic reporting and insights, and many of which are not.

Many Substack newsletters read something like this:

“Over coffee on the porch today, I saw a butterfly. I love butterflies. They’re a symbol of life’s infinite transformations.”

This got me thinking: “Why the heck am I reading five books and doing six interviews for some of my Substack articles when other people with a gazillion subscribers are writing about butterflies over their coffee?”

Perhaps quick-to-skim, lighthearted posts are actually what people want to read, especially if they’re scrolling with their phone.

So I’m trying an experiment: future posts are going to cover all kinds of things — from train trips to funny stories and weird-n-wild people that I meet, including fresh-out-of-the-slammer bank robbers.

Of course, I will also post research-heavy articles, because I like reporting and research and reading books. But I’m not going to post as many of these headier articles.

Instead easy, breezy, but hopefully stimulating topics soon will appear under the heading “Rossi Reports” including:

Crazy Ladies with Passports — Colorful stories about traveling across Europe, often with female friends. We’ll be covering such mysteries as “The Whisper Train to France,” where it’s probably best if you just pass notes to the person beside you, lest one of your fellow passengers silence you. Also in the cards: a summer reading tarot cards in a coastal village in Croatia AND the unusual history of the Barcelona building that I just can’t seemed to leave.

Things just happen when Meg Tufano, here shown with a parakeet, shows up.

Northwest Nostalgia — In case you missed the wild grunge era of the 1990s in Portland and Seattle, I’ll drag you along on amusing adventures (and the occasional dark ones) during a creatively charged era in a region where dampness causes mental mold, resulting in personalities that seem like they fell out of a novel. My unintended romantic overture to the Amazing Mr. Lifto, of circus sideshow fame, was just the beginning.

Jetsetting with My Mother on a Barcelona Balcony: Something wonderful happened to my mother when I brought her to Spain — she became enthused about living again and appeared to lose 20 years. However, something scary happened, too: when I took her on a quick jaunt to Paris to meet a prince, the journey fried her memory. In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about how I coaxed it back.

Mom at one of our favorite Barcelona balconies.

Changing Cities: The bulk of greenhouse gas emissions come from our cities. These posts will explore ideas for how we can change them.

Dream Chats: I’m convinced that we talk with each other when we sleep. An upcoming post will tell the eerie story of why I think that.

In other words, I’m going to try out a lot of new material, delve into novel topics, and generally lighten-n-brighten the content. I’ll be counting on you to let me know what you like and what you don’t.

The only topic I’m unlikely to write about is butterflies hovering over my coffee on the porch. But having written that, I am probably destined to have a mystical experience with the beautiful winged things.