This newsletter has a lot of new subscribers this week, which is tremendous (waves hello!), but it's also added a lot of pressure. Especially because I've been distracted—and rather than crafting something with heft and insight I keep going back to small and furry.

In these past two weeks I've been locked in a battle with backyard squirrels over who owns my tomatoes. If you follow me on Instagram, you know how strange it's gotten. (The header image is from my Insta.)

Here's the issue: I believe that I own 100% of the garden tomatoes. I planted them. I weeded. I watered. They set their roots on land I tilled. The garden is mine.

But the squirrels seem to hold a different opinion. We haven't spoken directly, but they appear to believe that they—not I—own 100% of the garden tomatoes.

The squirrels saunter in whenever they feel like it and nip as many as they'd like, working in broad daylight, without fear of consequence or regulation.

Things appear in my garden that I didn't put there: Little broken stems and acorns and other half-nibbled detritus. They leave the place a mess.

They're not so much squirrels as they are hooligans, really. Ransacking and littering my land.

This never used to be a problem. Or maybe it was, but I didn't care as much. A filched tomato here and there never really bothered me.

I thought of it as the price I pay for growing things in what's basically their domain: I paid for the land, sure. I work this corner of it.

But in a lot of ways the land is their kingdom. They flit between my yard and my neighbor's yard because it's all the same to them. So what if I lost a tomato here and there? Did it really matter?

This year, however: It's become too much. It's annoying how much they believe it's theirs. It's creepy how brazen they've become.

I probably should have anticipated this. You can't expect squirrels to self-regulate now, can you?

So I've become increasingly desperate and absurd. Stern warnings didn't work. Fencing didn't work.

I tried coaxing Abby, my Cavalier King Charles spaniel, to be a little more… I don't know… can't you just do something? Bark? Give chase? Act like a dog?

But since Abby does not identify as a dog, she had no idea what I was getting at.

Abby is like most people I talk to, actually. Most people don't really care about tomatoes. Most people don't really understand what the big deal is: If you choose to have a green garden, you're gonna have to deal with squirrels.

Most people either don't plant tomatoes at all. Or they put up with it… because that would mean missing out on the garden entirely.

You might interpret this epic and ridiculous battleground as a metaphor for something larger.

Who owns these tomatoes? Well, who owns data? Privacy? Who has rights and who doesn't? How far do we go before everything is just absurd?

In my backyard, it's already gotten to that point. I read online that squirrels don't like shiny things. Or balloons. Or things with faces.

So I went out and bought a series of 4 or 5 shiny Mylar balloons. Now my tomatoes are being defended by a handful of helium-filled Minion-shaped balloons, with SpongeBob backup.

(Someone else online suggested procuring a realistic-looking stuffed bear and mounting it on a post in the garden. (Why a bear? Because squirrels also don't appreciate the work of A.A. Milne?) Anyway, mounting a Teddy bear to a post seems unhinged, doesn't it? Asks the woman with a backyard full of Minion balloons.)

Anyway, those balloons: I tied them to posts in the garden, here and there. They float and bob in the wind. I caught one out of the corner of my eye the other day as I walked through the yard, and I jumped—because for a minute it looked like a real person who actually cared about keeping my tomatoes safe.

And, of course, every day a little bit of the hot air leaks out.

At which point the whole scene becomes a little overwrought, doesn't it?

The debate of who owns the garden.

The question of who belongs here and who doesn't.

The vulnerable tomatoes.

The things puffed full of hot air who appear to be guarding things... Data and Privacy. Borders and Fences and Walls. And Tomatoes, of course.

And me, trying to make sense of it all.

* * *

Here are some things I thought were worth sharing this week.

1.

This anonymous, crowdsourced list spills tea on which publications pay writers and how much. They're mostly magazines and newspapers, but there are also a few content-rich companies here who hire writers. Let's add more! Check out WhoPaysWriters.

B2B marketing agency Godfrey recasts the national treasure that is Fred Rogers as the Patron Saint of Business-to-Business Marketers.

This is the kind of piece that could easily take the schmaltzy onramp to Interstate Corny.

But Godfrey's Scott Trobaugh and Cliff Lewis deftly swerve around the clichés and take us to someplace honest and real.

Lots of great Freddish B2B advice here, including keeping our sense of wonder, speaking simply, and finding the person behind the machine. "Especially during his factory tours, you can tell that he's channeling that 'voice of the customer' through every question he poses along the way," Scott and Cliff write.

I'd expand that idea a bit to include audience... not only customers. Slip on your Fred Rogers sneakers here.

The factory tours in Mister Rogers' Neighborhood were always my favorite. Lying on the wall-to-wall in my parent's rec room, watching "Misterogers" on a television set the size of a Chevette, I thought it was cool to see the origin story of stuff lying around my own house. Like crayons. Flashlights. Elbow macaroni.

The segments were slow and soothing but also spellbinding, because Fred always answered the question I was thinking almost before it formed in my head.

At the crayon factory: "The crayon pigment is added to the wax." But what's pig-...? "Pigment is like colored flour." Ah.

It's interesting to watch a few of these tours now as a grownup, and from a marketing and content perspective.

A lot of companies focus on answering their customer's Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). But what if you took an hour with your team and brainstormed the questions your customers would ask... if they knew to ask them?

My friend John Jantsch calls these FUQs: or Frequency Unasked Questions. FUQs are questions people should be asking but aren't. Sometimes they don't know enough to ask. Sometimes they don't have the opportunity. And sometimes they're embarrassed, worried that the question is overly simplistic or just plain dumb.

Godfrey shares the crayon factory tour in its post. YouTube has a bunch more. Like macaroni. And construction paper.

P.S. My OG Fred Rogers post is here, if you missed it: "Empathy, Marketing, and Misterogers."

Newsletters are immortal, Dave Pell writes. And email is the best communication tool you have: "Think about it: When that newfangled social media startup wants to get you back on their site, what do they do? They send you an email."

Yep yep yep: We at MarketingProfs built our entire business on email. And this personal email newsletter you're reading right now is my most favorite thing to create. Love is a word I often pair with it.

Dave Pell says the best email newsletters adhere to six Ps: Personal, persistent, personalized, permanent, performing, and perpetual.

I'd add a seventh P: privilege.

It's a privilege and an honor for a newsletter to get an invitation to an inbox. And the best newsletters are woke on that point.

If you or your company have an email newsletter, don't squander the opportunity to deliver something special to your subscribers. Tweak your mindset from "blasting" your list to hand-crafting something inherently more personal.

Does your email program feel like a letter that could come only from you? Or only from your company? Read Dave's inspiration here.

Where to start? Here's a suggested email template from Chandra Blouin at Studiothink, writing in MarketingProfs.

I just debated for a full few minutes whether I should include this article in this week's TA.

I have a content committee inside my head, seated at a long observation table like a panel of Olympic judges. I summon them forth at these times, when I can't decide whether a particular story or section or article really fits in a speech, or a book, or here, in this newsletter.

Judge Nitpick voted NOPE, because this article is about grammar mistakes. And this newsletter is about the joy of writing in an authentic voice and worrying about something pedantic like grammar later. It's a tone mismatch, Nitpick said.

Judge Hold Your Horses (who loves to squabble about everything) threw some shade at Nitpick and voted YES, because this article makes the point that everyone makes grammar mistakes and so in a roundabout way actually support my joy-in-writing philosophy: Don't fret about grammar, because none of us are perfect.

I reviewed the tape.

In the end, I called it for Judge HYH. Which is why I'm dropping this link on the 5 grammar mistakes everyone makes. (I make No. 1 all the time.)

My gal Nancy Duarte is keynoting the MarketingProfs B2B Forum this year. She's a tremendous, inspiring public speaker. And in this Harvard Biz article, she shares her tricks for calming down or amping up prior to a talk, with both spiritual and practical exercises. Use these next time you have to present before an audience of any size, on stage or in a conference room.

Which should you do? Well, that depends on whether your resting state is more Yerba Mate or kava-kava.

I love that she name-checks my buddy Nick Westergaard here, who shares a secret he learned at Band Camp. Story here.

There is no one way to write, just as there is no one way to order a pizza or to raise a child. But I believe that all good writing shares three fundamental attributes. I shared them last week with John Elsasser at the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).

We also chatted about a few other things: Like why I believe that the most successful people also write consistently. Read it here.

P.S. I'm keynoting PRSA's International Conference this fall in Austin. (See Events, below.) Meet me there! We'll go for tacos!

World's best book review. Chartered accountant Katherine Thompson stopped reading my book, Everybody Writes, so she could... well, write! Love this:

World's best Sleepover. A shoutout to (recently maligned) libraries everywhere and the cutest thing I saw this week.

World's best job? Are you an email marketer + KUWTK superfan? This is your dream job.

Your Ad Ignored Here: Cartoons from 15 Years of Marketing, Business, and Doodling in Meetings. I wrote the foreword to this book by my friend Tom Fishburne, which is a perfect beach-read because it's really a beach-skim. Because cartoons, yo.

Tom wanted to grow up to be a cartoonist. He became a marketer instead. But eventually found his way back to the thing everyone told him was impossible. Best line: "One of the most rewarding things in life is to make a living doing the hard thing."