Blunt instruments of critique

The email Back in July, I received an email from a long-time reader of this weblog (allow me to use the old-school spelling, which I always loved), and there was a specific bit that made me go, Hold that thought — I will get back to it. But this past summer has been exceptionally hot and unbearable, and slowed everything down — my response time, my thinking throughput, my work (creative and otherwise), my correspondence, and so forth. I hope my interlocutor has assumed a comfortable position to hold that thought for almost three months, so here we are. In their email, there was this observation: One of the things I really liked about your writing about tech when I discovered your blog were those long-form articles where you used to analyze and criticize something in a really in-depth way while maintaining a very measured tone. You really went through the pros and cons of the matter, it all felt very… objective. Lately I seem to notice a change in tone. You sound more curt, more…