A friend of mine recently gave me a cool vintage typewriter from his collection. A Smith-Corona. It’s a beautiful blue beast of a unit. Plug it in, flip the switch, and it starts humming – just waiting to tell a story with you. The first morning I had it, I promptly cleared a spot in my office and got right to it. Clack! Clack Clack! Clack Clack Clack! Clack!!! Everyone in the space immediately stopped what they were doing and looked at me like I didn’t have any pants on. It occurred to me how loud “old school” newsrooms must have been with dozens of reporters, editors, and others clacking away like I’d just been. The audible energy must have made for an exciting, if not maddening, place to work. These days the crew at Volume One is pretty quiet, half of them wearing headphones, quietly typing away on backlit Apple keyboards. But there’s something satisfying about pounding out a few lines of analog text – something musical in the cadence of the clacks. The mistakes don’t really matter much. The errant punctuation or awkward spacing is more charming than offensive. Clearly I won’t be abandoning the modern marvels that are my Macs, but there’s something to be said about a piece of old technology that can still get the job done and deliver a sense of authenticity in the process. And when both technology and the pace of life are accelerating every day, sometimes it’s nice just to go back for a bit.