Ever seen an ad on social media that made you wonder, “What on earth was that company thinking?” Or read an email from a charity that made you tear up—and make a donation—in the blink of an eye?
Almost every human on earth is bombarded with thousands of messages per day. Only a few get remembered. There’s an art, and a bit of science, to making yours stick.
A Better Way to Say That explores why some messages work and others don’t. Once a month we’ll dissect the trends, technologies, and Weird Tricks that shape how people are communicating with each other today—and what that means for your organization.
Like many of you, we were aware “the dog days of summer” referred to a stretch of the season when life moves at a languid pace. However, it was only recently while perusing The Old Farmer’s Almanac that we learned the term’s actual dates (July 3-August 11) and meaning (which is much more astrological than we’d imagined).
The end of summer’s dog days lines up, more or less, with the two-year anniversary of A Better Way to Say That. To celebrate—a nicer motivation than “to fill space”—we’d like to share 24 observations, ideas, opinions, and other thought-varieties that have been on our mind grapes since we started sending you this newsletter 24 months ago.
Because the last word is rarely the end of the conversation.
Much like penguins, we enjoy bringing you little gifts to show we care:
It’s a high bar, but Andy Serkis’ animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm being a sappy, unwatchable mess is the most 2026 thing to happen in the film world.
The Pantone birth chart and zodiac color palette generator, on the other hand, is pretty awesome.
Less awesome, unless you find catharsis in “AI messed up again” stories: an Amazon Web Services billing error raised some customers’ monthly bills from a few cents to billions of dollars.
Here’s what one of us is currently reading:
“The Last Emperor appears as a benign old man with impeccable manners—even when treated with extreme rudeness by the British. Daily he has olive oil rubbed into his feet to soothe his aches; occasionally he rouses himself to visit a garden, go on a hunting expedition, or host a mushaira. Evenings were spent ‘enjoying the moonlight,’ listening to singers or eating fresh mangoes. All the while the aged Emperor tries to contain the infidelities of his young concubines, one of whom becomes pregnant by the most distinguished of the court musicians.”
Hot Dalrymple Summer continues with another gorgeous portrait of colonial-era India that offers perhaps the most desirable quality one could seek in a book right now: total absorption. Few creative works are capable of completely eclipsing the outside world for hours at a time, but the Scottish historian/Mehrauli goat farmer really outdid himself with this accessible-yet-intellectually engrossing masterpiece.
This time Dalrymple's subject matter is the Great Mutiny of 1857, in which hundreds of thousands of Indian sepoys rose in bloody rebellion against British colonial rule. Switching deftly between the POVs of a dazzling cast of characters—from the titular Last Mughal, the Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar II, to the murderous British general and cult figure John Nicholson, to the plucky photographer-turned-refugee Harriet Tytler, to the once-rakish-and-subsequently-distraught poet Ghalib—the book draws on an outrageously rich set of Urdu, Persian, and English sources to illustrate one of the early modern era’s defining cataclysms.
All of that’s great, but sprawling, well-sourced histories aren’t exactly rare. What makes The Last Mughal so special is Dalrymple's execution: the beautiful prose that somehow makes words on a page seem audible, the brisk sequencing that never feels rushed, the ever-present wittiness that keeps even the heaviest passages from becoming a slog. Escapism has rarely felt so responsible.
