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Dan Dunn, a former nightlife columnist, spent much of his adult life doing what nightlife columnists do: drinking. He’s a whiskey aficionado, cocktail expert, and beer enthusiast; wine was the only tipple that never tempted him. For a booze writer, that’s less a problem than an opportunity. In 2014, Dunn hit the road to learn everything he could about American wine. He wanted to know where it stood 40 years after the Judgment of Paris, when upstart U.S. wines famously bested French vintages in a blind tasting. He turned his 15,000-mile trip into American Wino: A Tale of Reds, Whites, and One Man’s Blues (Dey Street, $16.99), a memoir- slash-travelogue. Dunn’s conclusion: “At least right now, they’re not making wine anywhere in the United States better than California.” (He should know. He visited at least one winery in every state, including all four in Wyoming.) But, he adds, “Forty years from now? Things are going to look a whole lot different.” Dunn’s glass is about half-full when it comes to these six vineyards.

Table Mountain Vineyards

Ryder Carroll is a bike- sharing, glasses-wearing product designer from Brooklyn, N.Y. Early in March, we met in a crowded coffee shop. No one recognized the 35-year-old, even though he’s a cult Internet celebrity: Carroll invented the Bullet Journal system, a method for notetaking and day-planning that people who love paper and pens swear by.

Bullet Journaling is, according to its official slogan, “an analog system for the digital age,” and thousands of young, urban professionals are adopting it as a way to organize their busy lives. Carroll’s How to Bullet Journal instructional videos have been viewed more than 2 million times on Youtube. Devotees make their own videos and post journal photos to Instagram, where a search for #bulletjournal returns more than 66,000 results. A handful of fans write offshoot blogs, and a Reddit group formed to discuss and appreciate Carroll’s invention. “This technique is a gold mine,” one commenter posted on Youtube. “I track everything more accurately than my colleagues that don’t use a Bullet Journal. It’s saved my ass time and time again.”

Carroll’s ass- saving model grew out of practices he developed as the child of American expats in Vienna. He suffered from attention deficit disorder, and tutors and teachers tried to teach him how to take notes. “They didn’t help,” he says. “I wasn’t doing the work. I was spending all my time trying to be organized.” In time, he figured out a setup that worked well enough to get him through Skidmore College with a double major in creative writing and graphic design.

Carroll didn’t consider promoting his method— or even naming it—until he offered help to a co-worker overwhelmed by planning her wedding. “Her notebook was insane. There was no structure whatsoever,” he says. Impressed, she encouraged him to tell others. His first Youtube video appeared in August 2013; in September 2014 he launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund bulletjournal.com. He asked for $10,000, met his goal in eight hours, and wound up with about $80,000 from almost 3,000 backers.

I’ve been Bullet Journaling for a couple of weeks now. I was skeptical, partly because I didn’t feel terribly disorganized to begin with—even though my “system” relies on three productivity apps, e-mail, a wall calendar, a notebook, and little scraps of paper—and partly because notebooks are terrible for collaboration. They don’t back up to the cloud. You can’t cut and paste, except in the most literal sense.

But there’s a lot to like. The illustrations here show how I’ve been interpreting Carroll’s system, which is based on various “modules.” (It’s not revolutionary so much as it is a simple and sustainable solution.) I can report that I’ve done all but one of the tasks I set out to do about a month ago. I feel more focused and, despite the extra time I spend maintaining my journal, less busy. And isn’t that the point of being organized? <BW>

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