The Varieties of Productive Experience

But Maybe Without the Variety

I’d like to ask my readers to help me out, and to get a little reward of their own in the process.

The recent explosive growth in Substack readership is a great opportunity to get more people on board as readers of The Tracinski Letter. Not only will this help me gain a larger direct readership for the ideas and perspectives I cover. It will also provide a stronger base of support for all of my work. The more readers I get, the more I can do with this newsletter and in other forums—here and around the world. (More on that below.)

And here’s where you can help: A recommendation from you to your friends will be more effective than any publicity I can drum up, and Substack just created a tool for doing that. If you tell your friends and acquaintances about The Tracinski Letter, you will get credit for the referral, and if they ultimately subscribe, you will get a bonus. Here is Substack’s description of how it works.

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How to Participate

1. Share The Tracinski Letter. When you use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post, you'll get credit for any new subscribers. Simply send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.

2. Earn benefits. When more friends use your referral link to subscribe (free or paid), you’ll receive special benefits.

• Get a 1 month comp for 3 referrals

• Get a 3 month comp for 5 referrals

• Get a 6 month comp for 25 referrals

To learn more, check out Substack’s FAQ.

It really does help me out to have my readers talking about the publication and getting the word out, so thanks in advance for any referrals you choose to give.

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Quem é John Galt, Afinal?

One more announcement: My book, So Who Is John Galt, Anyway? has been translated into Portuguese and is now available in Brazil under the title Quem é John Galt, Afinal? If you know any Portuguese-speakers, please pass this on and recommend the book to them.

Many thanks to Matheus Pacini, who found the publisher and did the translation. I enjoyed fielding his questions about American idioms and discovering that there is no direct Portuguese equivalent for “swashbuckling.”

The overseas audience for Objectivist ideas seems to be growing rapidly, particularly in Latin America, and I’m planning to do more work to take advantage of this opportunity.

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Well, OK, one more one more announcement, before I get to what I was planning to write about. As I was putting together this edition, the news broke that the Supreme Court has ruled 6-3 that affirmative action in college admission is unconstitutional. This sounds like good news, but the devil is in the details of these rulings, so I’ll be spending the long Fourth of July weekend getting up to speed on the decision and its implications.

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The Varieties of Productive Experience

I linked recently to Sonny Bunch’s review of the movie Tetris, about the scramble to secure the rights to the only commercial video game produced in the old Soviet Union. I found the film energetic and enjoyable, even though the story was embellished with an overwrought subplot about a corrupt apparatchik.

More recently, Sonny identified this as part of a trend: the “produpic.” If a “biopic” is a picture based on the biography of a famous person, a produpic is a film based around the origin story of a product. Which actually sounds like a great idea.