In Praise of “Competence!”

Clark Boyd
Nov 5 · 4 min read

Correspondence. It’s one of the many things that makes my quiet life here in the Slaughterhouse worthwhile. Since I moved away from Boston and the US, I’m actually trading letters with people again. OK, they’re not handwritten, but the emails do have multiple, sometimes non-work-related paragraphs.

One recently hit my inbox with the subject line “Competence.” That made me giggle. It reminded me that, at one point, I even changed my Twitter handle to “Competence Man.”

The original reason for doing this is funny. The brand name of the oven in our Brussels…

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Clark Boyd

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Writer and editor. 20+ year career in public broadcasting with The World, from the BBC World Service, and WGBH radio in Boston. Now living in The Netherlands.

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