Issue 5 is available today, free for everyone to read on themanual.org. We’re also making our digital editions, which we usually price at $15, free to all. You can download in ePub and Kindle formats, or find it listed among your issues when you log in to your account.

For now, there will be no print edition. It is my hope that we can eventually return to Issue 5 to commit these magnificent articles—some of our finest to date—to print. Please enjoy our web and digital editions freely as a token of my appreciation for your continued patience.

What’s inside

Like our previous four issues, Issue 5 includes six critical articles and six personal lessons from some of the best minds writing and working on the web today.

To start with, Eric Meyer argues for a web that takes a stance on how we should treat each other, because, as it turns out, the web isn’t neutral after all. His lesson considers the temporary discomfort that often precedes the remarkable.

Kelli Anderson leads us to the edge of language and invites us to move beyond it into experiences that are distinctly real and yet unnamed. Her lesson ricochets from youthful rule-breaking to controlled experimentation.

Jessica Collier examines the opportunity we have to write our own history through the decisions we make about language in our products. Her lesson reflects on the perspective she’s kept from the academic career she left behind.

Mills Baker advocates that we lean on technology to relieve some of the social burdens it’s created for us. In his lesson, he shares what he learned from working his way up the ranks of a call center.

Heather Ryan urges us to consider whether our work will be accessible to future generations, and why we should make sure it is. Her lesson traces deserted landscapes, real and imagined.

Finally, Kate Kiefer Lee reminds us that the work we do is not an end in itself. Instead we can each define for ourselves the place of work in our lives. Her lesson peers through the senses down a rabbit-hole of nostalgia.

Thank you

I want to thank everyone who worked hard to bring this issue together. To each of our authors, who poured so much of themselves into this issue’s articles and lessons, and our illustrators, for their beautiful companion pieces, thank you most of all.

A particular debt of gratitude is owed to Lisa Sanchez, our Editor In Chief, for singled-handedly sewing this issue together—and also Paulo Pereira, for preparing our web and digital editions. Lisa, Paulo, please know that I am humbled to work with such talented, generous, and supportive friends. Thank you.

Thanks as ever to our friends at MailChimp and Hover, for their support in publishing this issue.

And to everyone reading, thank you. These pieces are for you, lovingly gifted by our authors, and bolstered by our illustrators. Do their work justice. Consume every word with the passion in which they were delivered to us. Share them far and wide.