The Jiffy: Sleep hiking into a better tomorrow.

It’s daunting to start a newsletter if you’re someone with anxiety.

What’s the tone? What’s the branding? What’s the point? Will anybody read it? Do the world’s inboxes really need another newsletter? And from me? What is “me”?

During an especially overthinking episode, I went to my IG stories and asked you for some inspiration (which newsletters are worth it, who are the must-read writers improving your daily existence, etc.), and you came through!

And I’m not sure if you saw it yet, but you were so inspirational that apparently the editors of Divine Intervention Magazine noticed:

I can’t believe I was scooped by Divine Intervention Magazine about my own newsletter.

Anyway, here are the newsletters you recommended, and they were super inspiring as I plastered my vision board with ideas, so thank you!!

• The Unpublishable, by Jessica Defino: “The beauty industry’s least favorite newsletter”

• The Food Section, from Hannah Raskin: “James Beard Award-winning independent journalism covering the American south”

• Kyla’s Newsletter, by Kyla Scanlon: “Human-centric economic analysis to help all of us understand the world better” (also coined the phrase, “vibecession”)

• From The Desk of Alicia Kennedy: “Essays, criticism, and interviews on food culture, media, and politics”

• 40 Ingredients Forever, by Ali Slagle: “Recipes that are abundant in flavor and joy yet streamlined in process and shopping (because they’re all made of the same 40 ingredients)”

• Wonder Tools, by Jeremy Kaplan: “Wonder Tools helps you discover the most useful sites and apps”

• Perfectly Imperfect, from Tyler Bainbridge & Alex Cushing: “a newsletter offering ‘A Taste of Someone’s Taste’”

By the way, “divine intervention” is defined as: “the interference of a deity [that would be you, the audience] in human life [that would be me], popularly extended to any miraculous-seeming turn of events [the fact that you have subscribed to this newsletter is a miracle].”

• Jiffy Vision

• Some other sources of inspiration

• The MX Morningstar Farm CSA

• J’Fay Supreme: Our Very First Sleep Hiking!

This month’s centerfold is Taco! But first:

Jiffy Vision

The Jiffy is an homage to a heyday of printed publications — the 20 years or so between the mid-1970s and mid-1990s, which I think was the peak of special-interest niche magazines and alt-weekly newspapers.

It was a time when publishers responded to Big Television stealing their readers’ time and attention by dividing the public into “segments” and flooding them with more specific magazines to inform and excite. Not only did audiences respond approvingly, so did advertisers.

And it worked for a while, until the internet. But those were some fun times. Here are magazines from this era that informed my vision for The Jiffy:

Any longtime reader of The Jiffy will notice that I totally lifted was inspired by the context-free centerfold mini-posters that are found in every issue of SuperMag, as well as their table of contents, which warn that “if you thumb through this issue,” you might find some things.

Also, I want to pay respects to Rona Barrett, the original Ms. Rona and gossip queen, and the airbrushed masterpieces of Robert Tinney for Byte Magazine. The maps from the East Village Eye will be helpful reference when I start designing village maps for subscribers of J’Fay Supreme.

Some other sources of inspiration

Other sites that have been very fruitful trees of inspiration include Fonts In Use (especially their pages cataloging the 1970s and 1990s); the art magazine archive at Gallery98; and everything at Design Reviewed.

If you recall from the feed this past weekend, we made a bit of history. Taco showed us how she spends her Sundays in an unprecedented, intimate, and exclusive Instagram carousel. She’s a living legend known to many of MX Morningstar Farm’s friends, fans, and family, and she also gave us a preview of the MX Morningstar Farm CSA.

The MX Morningstar Farm CSA

Maria Zordan, co-owner of MX Morningstar Farm, told me that they’re working hard to make adding a CSA share into your routine as easy as possible. “As a consumer,” she says, “the idea of a CSA share always felt like a bit of a hassle for me. A one-day pickup is often unsurmountable for a person as busy as myself.”

The farm’s CSA manager and farm staff have spent years developing a model our CSA to be something that, as Zordan says, “all of us farmers would be happy to join.”

Here’s how it works at MX Morningstar Farm:

1. Pick up is flexible. Come in during open hours anytime Tuesday through Sunday of each week (“And no, you do not need to tell us when you are coming. It's absolute freedom!”)

2. Pick up is at the farm store. Zordan encourages you to talk with the staff about what’s new in your share, on the shelves, or just in the neighborhood.

3. Use a 10% same-day discount. While you’re there, you can take advantage of a discount on any purchase made before you leave. 

4. You get a great newsletter. Here at The Jiffy, we love a good newsletter, and what’s better than receiving regular updates about the farm, the food, the farm friends, and most importantly, Taco?! Written by CSA manager Steph Moran and packed with photos, you’ll know just what to expect in your CSA share every week. “The photos are so cute, the prose deserves its own print magazine, and the crop history and data Steph researches each week always teaches me something new,” Zordan says.

For more information on subscription options, pricing, deadlines, and more, you can visit their website here.

J’Fay Supreme: Our Very First Sleep Hiking!

Let’s say you’ve been having a hard time sleeping these days. Or that you’re too busy to go out and get the most of nature. Or that it’s just too cold to leave your house. Or that you live in a big city without easy access to balsam firs, beaver dams, egrets, or reservoirs to provide an escape.

That’s OK! Because I’m launching a new series here called Sleep Hiking: Relaxing Hikes For You To Sleep To, available to all supreme subscribers of the newsletter.

Here’s how it works: I’ll go out and hike, capture all the most relaxing natural vibes, narrate them into a captivating, sleep-inducing story, and bottle them up into a soothing audio trek that will help you nod off in no time. It's Sleep Hiking: Let me do the hiking, while you do the sleeping.

OK. Pull up a pillow, and kick off your shoes. It’s time to take a hike.

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