Beck&Stone

This year, the Museion Fellowship is expanding into three tracks: • Public Relations & Communications • Design & Video Production • Web Development & Technology Six fellows will be selected to work closely with the Beck&Stone team and contribute to client projects. Apply by May 30: beckandstone.com/museion/

The Museion Fellowship is designed for young professionals ready to take on serious work and real responsibility in the effort to rebuild American institutions. Fellows work closely with the Beck&Stone team and contribute to client projects through strategy, problem-solving and creative work. Applications close May 30. beckandstone.com/museion/

Applications are now open for the Museion Fellowship, Beck&Stone’s program for young professionals committed to cultivating the entrepreneurship and excellence needed to help rebuild American institutions. Now in its fifth year, this Museion cohort will see an expansion into three tracks: • Public Relations & Communications • Design & Video Production • Web Development & Technology The six fellows selected for this year’s cohort will work closely with the Beck&Stone team and contribute to client projects through strategy, problem-solving, and creative work. If you or someone you know may be a fit for Museion, we encourage you to apply or share this opportunity. Apply here: beckandstone.com/museion/

The more the internet is opened to the whole world and the censorship/moderation mechanisms in the US lose control, the value of educated communication among small circles will continue to climb. A proliferation of noise has made the signal harder to send and receive. Too many performance routines from too many irrelevant audiences or outright bad actors. The digital public square is succumbing to the tragedy of the commons. Public communications are now incredibly complicated because of the sheer numbers of voices and concerns and perspectives that all get equal voice and access via technology. Institutions and enterprises are still learning to navigate this new environment—and what the firm is discovering with them is that the private setting and the curated communication is preferred more and more. Dinners, conferences, magazines, books, fellowships, group chats, are all making a resurgence not because of “how many” but “who exactly.” The goal is not to stay private though. Technology is supremely useful for speed and efficiency of communications—and why the precision of our language and sequencing in our strategies matters supremely. From these smaller, private circles where there is greater levels of shared priors should come more compelling public communications with greater, more specific purpose.

Thank you for complimenting the work from @beckandstone and Design Lead @mkjcksn.

Partner @AndrewBeckUSA joined Blaze News Tonight to talk corporations’ response to the killing of Charlie Kirk and the crossroads they now stand at. Now is a time for companies to reach customers who’ve felt for years that corporate America dislikes them. Kirk’s death was a missed opportunity to repair that relationship with a message of peace. With the America 250 celebration upcoming, they will be presented with another opportunity to make a statement of what makes this country of many, one.

RIP Joe Caroff, one of the great film poster and logo designers. thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/…

We spent the last ~year at Arena crafting the most beautiful print publication in the world, to match the greatest story in the world: 🇺🇸 I have no doubt we succeeded. Now, the time has come to supercharge the mission and do *more* - especially online. If you want to write, please get in touch. We are excellent editors, and our readers are extremely savvy and love the publication. Arena is a great place to publish. We have readers in every state, which for a small magazine focused on technology and capitalism is quite unique. Soon, I'll be writing weekly myself, which I haven't done for years. Exciting times!

I am pleased to present the new identity for my farm, Henry Hills. It is a beautiful design for my beautiful place Designed by the gentlemen of @beckandstone @mkjcksn @AndrewBeckUSA. I can't say enough good things about their work - I recommend them to you! Henry Hills🌽🇺🇸

“The world is a heap of ruins, and the strong man builds his house atop them.” - Donoso Cortés The state of our institutions leaves us two choices: rebuild or be conquered. Proud to be part of the team that builds.

Now in its fourth year, the Museion Fellowship has succeeded in bringing incredible, underutilized talent to @beckandstone and our circles—fresh reinforcements on Horatius’ bridge. As such, I feel to post what @AndrewJCuff and I wrote of its purpose when we began the program: Ask any CEO of a corporate, white-collar company to name their most valuable asset and their biggest current need. Most will answer both questions the same: high-skilled employees who are dedicated to their work. It’s your people who build your firm, create your company culture, and scale your ideas into enterprises. And there seems to be a shortage. When we began Beck & Stone ten years ago, we had a difficult time finding qualified people to work here, even in the deep creative talent pool that was pre-2020 New York City. We were in a weird niche: a creative agency paired with specialized consulting services, serving institutions who sell ideas: magazines, think tanks, churches, university centers. It’s not easy to find an employee with sharp aesthetic instincts who can also code a website, strategize a subscriber campaign, and still understand the subtle differences between the audiences of First Things and The New Criterion. On the supply side, working here was a tough sell when Google and Droga5 were down the block. Now, the opposite seems true: the brightest and most independent minds feel stultified at Silicon Valley firms or climbing the ladder on Wall Street. They want ceiling-less, open-door opportunities, not status quo drudgery. The unorthodox—but necessary—lengths Beck & Stone went to find and vet talent, and the long talks persuading the best people to apply, taught us something about what young people want out of work. It taught us that companies with a pioneering mentality don’t need to worry about skilled worker shortages. The reputation we’ve built for professional trust, loyalty, and understanding has made us a magnet for institutions outside the mainstream who need world-class design, strategy, and consulting—and young professionals who want to become part of that reputation. Job openings we post in recent years have hundreds of applicants, all who understand what we’re building—and want in. What do the best employees want? They want their work to mean something beyond the paycheck. To strategize and build, not just check off a to-do list. To set standards and goals, not sell clients on fluff. To feel valued and be mentored, not tiptoe around office rules or mores. To let work enhance their quality of life, not to invest years in a toxic, miserable office. The word Museion is the Greek root of our modern English museum. It referred to the shrine of the nine muses, the patronesses of art, music, and other studies. The Museion Fellowship carries forward the ancient cult of creative genius, the seed of culture, from past into future. We are capturing the revolutionary energy across our country by offering a new prospect for rising stars and future operators stuck in the monotonous confines of today’s corporate world. Through a creative, intellectually-stimulating environment and close contact with icons of art, literature, politics, and innovation, we’re redefining the pathway to success by bringing passion back to the office. Like every company, we’re only as good as our people. That’s why we’ve chosen to start with step one and help create the change—and the change-makers—we want to see in the professional world.

Read more about our current Cohort and the Fellowship. beckandstone.com/museion/

Introducing the new Museion cohort, MMXXV: Luca H. Cacciatore and David Carlson. The Museion Fellowship cultivates entrepreneurship and excellence to rebuild the West's institutions. Congratulations to our Fellows—and welcome to the team.

Coloring books are for kids — and your kids should be coloring early 20th century bookplates. a.co/d/5hNeXay

Killer little Macmillan monogram in the front of a copy of their 1916 pocket classics edition of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.

So I have a pretty crazy story... In the past year I wrote some ~40 essays anonymously and built a company's audience to many thousands of followers without using my name or sharing on my own channels. They spent all that time building a technical moonshot, and it seems like they may have just pulled it off! It's going live, like imminently, and we somehow seem to have hundreds of people waiting to use it lol. Pretty nuts! The longer version is that, more than a year ago, my friend Logan (@ZorpZK) asked me for help with his startup's branding and content. He wanted me to help them build an audience while he focused on building the product (a Zero-Knowledge Proof of Work blockchain from scratch, which is kind of a holy grail in applied cryptography rn). I said sure, and just started a writing a weekly column on their blog (anonymously) and helping them write tweets. Things kind of expanded, I hired a personal assistant, and I guess I kind of run their content operation now lol. And now more than a year later, they're aiming to launch the chain tomorrow! If this machine @nockchain runs, it's a very big deal. But the coolest part from my angle is just that I actually succeeded with the task I was given... I grew their Twitter account and email list to many thousands from scratch without using my name or my own channels (I felt like that would have been cheating). A ton of people are talking about it now, publicly and privately, including elite people in the space, and it seems there are ~hundreds of people around the world ready to start mining as soon as it launches. And we did absolutely zero of the fake and common crypto marketing tactics. We just wrote interesting stuff, made some cool stuff, consistently, and with a unique and honest brand/voice/perspective. People flew to our party in Austin this past December because they were fans of the blog! A month ago, we had no idea if we had accumulated enough attention/interest. We really could not know in advance if there would be miners joining the competition at launch time. But it seems that all the brand and audience we've built up in the past year actually worked. There seem to be mining groups in multiple countries already. I'm not counting our chickens before they hatch, who knows what will happen, but this is what we're seeing. Obviously, nothing would matter without the engineers building something important, so they get all the credit. But I'm pretty proud, too. Outside of my own brand/company, I never built a company brand and audience from zero to one before (many people contributed, obviously, Logan laid all the groundwork, @beckandstone contributed much of the design heat, etc). It's exciting to have made it this far, but nerve-wracking. A fair-launch with no pre-mine is a really tricky thing (everyone starts mining at the same exact time and all tokens go to miners in open competition). So it's very risky and unpredictable, but at least on the first leg of the media operation, I think it's fair to say the ship has successfully left harbor. Wish us luck! God willing, this thing goes live tomorrow.

Proud to share @beckandstone's work for America's foremost cultural critic, @rogerkimball, at rogerkimball.org. A beautiful new personal website houses for Roger's prolific writings, books, media, and more—all powered by our forthcoming WordPress product: Inkwell.

Bekku-sama, Sutōn-sama @AndrewBeckUSA @ausstone

When Stone and I began the firm almost ten years ago the typical brands in our industry were called things like “HUGE”, “Good Robot”, and “Accenture” (which used to be called “Anderson”). But nameless brands become faceless corporations where there is no trust or accountability because are no people to take responsibility. It begins with the name on the door.