Week 9 · 2025-02-24 → 2025-03-02 · 8 newsletters

Slow Enough to Notice

slowing-down-and-the-achiever · powering-ai-solar-and-gas · max-stupid-markets-and-momentum

Eight emails across seven days. That is the shape of the week. No dominant news cycle, no breaking macro thread, no flood of AI hot takes. Just a small set of writers picking at three quiet questions: what it costs to keep sprinting, where the electrons for AI will actually come from, and whether the momentum trade is finally rolling over. A sparse inbox can still be a useful one. This one was.

Slowing Down: The Achiever Catches Itself

The most arresting piece of the week came from Steven Schlafman at Where the Road Bends, "Slow Enough to Matter." Schlafman runs Downshift, a program designed to help ambitious professionals slow down, and he spent the post admitting that the program itself was still being driven by the part of him that refused to stop. He calls the wound "ever-becoming," the relentless urge to stay in motion, and traces it to the fear that "if I let go of momentum, if I wasn't actively proving my value in the world, especially at 45, I would fade into irrelevance." The Achiever, he writes, is clever. It shapeshifts. It can even turn slowing down into something to master.

Jenny G. Zhang wrote a quieter version of the same instinct in "The truth about writer's block." Zhang remembers writing three novellas by age 13 and then losing the voice for six years, having taught herself that writer's block was a thing that happened to writers and that the Muses would return when they felt like it. She now calls this "the worst possible lesson I could have internalized," because it framed writing as the organic fruit of tortured savants rather than as a craft you sit down to do. Different domain from Schlafman, same shape of argument: a belief about how things should work that quietly kept the writer from working.

The grace note came from Tanya Windman at Listening Session, with her profile of filmmaker Kettie Jean. Kettie's line about her own work, that her time as a humanitarian worker taught her that "the emotions, experiences, and connections between people are far more powerful" than the big issues she set out to solve, is the same instinct turned outward. Service through smallness, not through scale.

The take: three writers, one move. Each one is calling out a story the high-achiever brain tells itself about how meaningful work gets done, and arguing that the story is what is in the way. Schlafman's is the most honest, because he is naming it inside the work he built to fix it. If you read one piece from this week, that is the one.

Powering AI: The Solar-and-Gas Compromise

Ben James announced his move to Substack with Ben by Fax on February 26, and two days later published the kind of post that explains why the move makes sense. "Data centers will be powered by solar and gas" is the cleanest piece of energy-realism writing of the week. The argument: AI developers cannot wait five plus years for grid connections, off-grid is therefore inevitable, and the math says you start by building a 100% gas-powered data center and then add solar and batteries to bring the cost down. A 100% gas-powered data center, James shows, is more expensive than a 40% to 90% renewable one. The path to cheaper compute runs through hybrid generation, not through purity in either direction.

The companion announcement post is its own signal. James writes that restricting himself to energy felt limiting, because "we are at the end of predictable progress, and the world is being unsteadily remade. We await superintelligence in hundreds of days. Science is accelerating again. Solar costs plummet, and solar tariffs soar. The returns to labour are shrinking, and the returns to capital are exploding." That is a writer telling you why his next year of reading will be different than his last one. Worth tracking.

The take: the off-grid solar-plus-gas thesis is going to define the next two years of data center buildout, and most of the press coverage is still anchored to either the "100% renewable" frame or the "gas is back" frame. James is one of the few writers calling the hybrid the actual answer, with a working calculator behind the claim. The Stargate reference at the end of his post (the $100 billion buildout) is the live test case.

Max Stupid: Momentum Breaks, Builders Keep Building

The Last Bear Standing rang the bell on February 28 with "Max Stupid." The S&P 500 had fallen 5% off last Wednesday's all-time highs, but the surface number understates the whiplash beneath it. The "momentum junkies" who had been chasing 10% daily jumps in Palantir, Robinhood, Hims and Hers, and Applovin were now "yacking up their blow-off tops." The author's own Four Shorts basket from the prior week was down 21% to 30% in five trading days. NVIDIA beat earnings on Wednesday and got punished with an 8.5% plunge on Thursday, trading back to its DeepSeek lows. The framing line: "when good news is punished, it's a telltale sign that expectations have run ahead of reality." Bitcoin, meanwhile, was "swimming with cement boots."

Set against the markets piece, Sahar Mor's "LinkedIn Highlights, Feb 2025" at AI Tidbits is the other side of the same coin. The builder layer is not slowing down. Mor's roundup flagged Anthropic's foundational patterns for building effective agents, LlamaIndex's Agentic Document Workflows, DeepSeek's prompting findings for reasoning models, and PDF and web-automation tooling including francedot/acu and the OpenAI playground preset for structured table data. The single most useful operator tip in the post was Anthropic's counterintuitive note that placing long documents (20K+ tokens) at the top of your prompt, before the query, lifts Claude's accuracy by roughly 30%. Documents first, structured organization via XML, specific query at the end.

Craig Zingerline at Growth-Led ran the founder-discipline companion with "ICP Positioning and Messaging for founders," arguing that most customer acquisition trouble traces back to complexity or unclarity at the top of the funnel. Short post, fair point. The grown-up version of "you don't have a growth problem, you have a positioning problem."

The take: the AI infrastructure trade getting punished and the AI builder layer shipping useful primitives are not contradictory signals. The market is repricing how much of the AI value will be captured by the picks-and-shovels names and the speculative momentum cohort. The builders are continuing to compound, quietly, in the agent and document-processing layers. If you are an operator, the Last Bear post tells you what is happening to your stocks this quarter. The Mor post tells you what to build with next quarter.

Three Takeaways from the Week

The week's strongest writing was the writing about slowing down, not the writing about markets or AI. Schlafman and Zhang were both running the same play, that the story we tell ourselves about how serious work happens is often the thing keeping us from doing it. In a week with eight emails, the inner-work cluster was the only one that earned a second read. That is its own signal about what the inbox carries when the news flow is quiet.

The energy thesis is the one to take into the rest of the quarter. Ben James is publishing the cleanest math on off-grid AI data center economics anyone is writing in public, and his "solar and gas, not solar or gas" frame is the one to remember. The hybrid generation answer is going to look obvious in eighteen months. It is not obvious yet.

If you only revisit three pieces from the week, the picks are Sahar Mor's AI Tidbits roundup for the Anthropic long-context tip alone, the OpenAI playground preset Mor flagged for structured-table-data work, and Tanya Windman's profile of Kettie Jean for a reminder that the most powerful work usually lives at the scale of the individual person, not the issue. Sparse week. Honest signal.