It's a general trivia email. Every day I send a fun fact of the true story behind it.
Been writing for seven years. Not going to disclose how much I make a month, but I describe it as not quite full time job money but a lot more than beer money.
Hey Dan, don't think I've ever introduced myself, but obviously your work with Now I Know is pretty rad. I do slightly similar stuff with my newsletter Tedium (though I aim for the deep dives, admittedly), and I just wanted to say that I respect the work you've done over the years to build out an audience as well as broader interest in the newsletter medium as a whole.
We wouldn't be talking about newsletters right now were it not for efforts like yours.
I've only read the linked-to article once, but this doesn't seem nearly as bad as it sounds (minus the patent trolling aspect).
Here's how I think it happened -- and, for sake of clarity, I worked at a large-ish law firm, have a bunch of friends who worked in the huge ones, and even know a partner at the named firm.
1) Lawyer and his wife start (with others) a company. Company invents something (kind of) and lawyer, being a lawyer, files for a patent.
2) Someone else comes along and creates something kind of/sort of like what they did. They have a patent so they look at suing the other company.
3) Lawyer works at a law firm which represents the target company. The law firm has 1,300 lawyers and two dozen offices around the world. He tells his firm's general counsel about the issue, likely to set up "chinese walls" as to not run afoul of any ethical obligations. Note that he's kind of stuck otherwise -- his company is going to be adverse to the law firm's client, and he's stuck in the middle.
4) When the firm's client hears about this, they freak the eff out and demand that the attorney in question be fired. He's fired.
Interesting. Wikipedia shows about 50k active editors (5+ edits) for any given month in 2006 -- I didn't keep the URL, but that's pretty much right. I didn't realize how much output the "9%" yielded.
It's a general trivia email. Every day I send a fun fact of the true story behind it.
Been writing for seven years. Not going to disclose how much I make a month, but I describe it as not quite full time job money but a lot more than beer money.