In memory of Nevan Scott, 1985–2026

We stayed in touch as our various work lives changed—he moved to Europe, I moved into (and eventually out of) startupland. At some point I needed some technical counsel with what I was only just beginning to realize was much more than a blog, and it was Nevan who I reached out to. There’s a real intimacy to letting someone in to your private repo, letting them see all the embarrassing first (and second, third, fifth) drafts, but I never doubted I could trust him. He was not only generous with his support, but eager to step in as a peer and collaborator. He took my work seriously—a great gift, too great to ever fully repay—but he took his own work seriously, too; everything he did, he did well and with care. For the last decade and then some he has been a regular contributor behind the scenes, offering astute feedback and proposing different ways to set things up, showing me how to do the things I could think of but didn’t know how to pull off. And of course, catching typos.

We had a long-running barter agreement: he would reach out to talk about his work and I would listen, offer counsel, help him see what he already knew; I would reach out when I broke something, always with the caveat that it wasn’t urgent, to get to it when he had the time. And inevitably I’d get a pull request an hour or two later with a proposal, plus a bug fix or upgrade he noticed while he was working. It sounds incredibly mundane to talk about it now, a friendship measured in video calls and commit messages, but then the word mundane comes from the Latin mundi, or world. To be mundane is to belong to the world, to be in the world, of it and within it. Not outside of it—not lost, the way so much technology tries to make us lose ourselves—but in the world as only the truly living can be. As we can only be with each other.

Nevan was a teacher. In all his work, in building schools and publications, he never lost his love for teaching. He was most himself, he told me, when he was in class, with his students. In the last year, he began teaching how to use AI in design, a topic on which he was intensely conflicted. He worried he was doing harm. But he also knew that the people who came to his classes were going to learn about AI one way or another, and maybe if he was the one teaching them, they would learn not only how to use AI but how it would try to use them; that this was the kind of learning that should be undertaken only with the greatest of caution.

Caution is, in Samuel Johnson’s definition, “provident care”—that care which foresees and considers the future. Our friendship covered a period of years in which the future would change dramatically: from an excitement and even optimism about tech (unearned and unwarranted, in retrospect), to a dehumanized nightmare, stultifying and terrifying in equal measure. Through it all we both maintained a sense that—whatever the horrors of capitalism—there was something keenly human and joyful about putting words and type on the internet. That we did so is a credit to our collaboration, and Nevan’s beautiful legacy.

Near the end of The Blue Place, as Julia is dying, she tells Aud to “stay in the world.” Aud promises to do so, but the truth is she does not know how. It is so very hard to stay in the world, to hold on to the mundane and ordinary, those fragile human connections, amidst all the forces arrayed against us. I think it is only in the effort to learn that we come close to that knowledge; and perhaps only in the effort to teach that the learning really takes hold.