The Intimacy of the Handwritten

My dearest Incurable Humanist,

We have a new logo!

Why is this relevant, you might be thinking? Well, you see… I’ve always loved my grandma’s calligraphy. She’s always had the most perfect handwriting. When I was little, my grandparents used to host many cocktail parties and sit-down dinners at their home in Caracas, so they would send out invitations, and my grandmother would handwrite the person’s name on the envelope. She would also write the place cards for each seat.

I was never invited because I was too young to attend, but I always wanted to be involved in some way, so I would sit with her while she wrote the invitations and place cards. I always loved this attention to detail.

As you know, The Incurable Humanist is a space for grief, migration, and art, and part of what matters to me so deeply is that these things are profoundly intimate experiences. They are lived in memory, in family stories, in objects, in gestures, in the small details that only one can fully know. This is why it felt important to preserve something made by hand. No AI, no technology, no digital tool can ever fully replace the texture of a real handwriting.

So I’ve been thinking about how to include this. I asked her to write “The Incurable Humanist” on a piece of paper, then digitized it, and now it’s our new logo — preserving her handwriting and keeping that sense of real handwriting, like a letter to a friend or writing in your diary.

Until next week!