Good evening,
As many of you already know, it is very easy to think of oneself as a “writer” without writing anything. Because writing can be created for one audience while being hidden from another, and is associated with a substantial amount of sitting and pondering, one can be a writer without actually writing something for a very long time. So with the title “essayist,” or its much worse neighbor, “critic.” In an effort to snap out of dilettantism of this kind, I’ll be using this newsletter as external motivation to actually write. Thanks for subscribing.
It’ll have two main outputs:
Roughly monthly, a brief roundup of what I’m reading.
As inspiration strikes, longer essays, like this one on medieval cosmology.
The name is a riff on Progress Studies, a burgeoning field of research on what makes societies iterate faster in technology, culture, and so on. I have some questions about that field, and at least some essays will be about progress, and what kinds of it are worth moving towards. I’ll try to avoid personal meditations, because I’m not good at them, and self-indulgence, except for a potential essay about Patrick O’Brian’s naval novels I’m itching to put on paper. I get most of my ideas from what I’m reading, which means you can mostly predict upcoming essays from my Goodreads.
Some bits about me: I live in New York, and spend much of my time helping run a nonprofit called Interact. In a past life (last year), I was a reporter covering tech for an outlet called the Washington Free Beacon. I’ve also done a fair amount of freelance writing, including on megafauna nationalism, Native American history, Hispanic voting patterns, and the Disinformation Board. And I edit intermittently as well, for places like Ambrook Research and the Institute for Progress.
Finally, a thank you to the Managing Editors at the Washington Review of Books for the encouragement to write.
Reading
Madeline Schwartz spent the better part of a year attending the trial of the Bataclan terrorists, and the result is a tight 6000 word diary account of the French justice system and the difficulty of doing justice in the face of evil. Some of the best writing I’ve read in a while. It’s surreal how much effort can go into so few words, and it takes a special journalistic discipline to do what Schwartz does with such economy.
Pseudonymous writer Kerwin Fjøl explains that mnemotechnics (the art of giving weight to an idea through ritual, the physical world, or other instantiations) matter more than ideology for making tribes. Invokes McLuhan, Deuteronomy, Simonides of Ceos, anabolic steroids.
“Where Do I Find a Christian Wife?” by Matthew Pierce answers the titular question with a helpful breakdown of possibilities, including “Under the enchanted forest rock” and “The last place you left her.”
We’ve all read a million pieces about expertise, whether it exists, and why experts are often bad, but Oliver Traldi may have come up with the pick of the bunch. The basic idea:
Leah Libresco Sargeant uses Scott Alexander to talk about the tension between our desire for spaces made for humans to be “absolutely comfortable,” and our need for “sublime” spaces that in many ways feel alien, terrifying, or discomforting. Especially loved this comment from a reader:
Katherine Dee names and explains the particular philosophical nihilism shared by mass shooters.
In the New Yorker, “Can Chile’s Young President Reimagine the Latin American Left?” A rare piece with a question in its title that actually tries to answer the question.
Links
A fascinating mapping of Earth’s forest cover over the last 6,000 years.
High-powered new study provides good evidence (as if more were needed) that school shooting drills traumatize the crap out of kids and we shouldn’t do them. 40% spikes in depression, sustained at least 3 months post-drill! More on this later.
Weird
Apparently the UK wouldn’t crack the top 10 hardest-drinking American states if it was a state, which surprised me. On a trip there earlier this month, locals said Brit drinking culture is way down over the last decade. Hardest drinking state (by self-report data) is New Hampshire by a country mile, followed by Delaware, Nevada, North Dakota, Montana. Utahns are bottom of the list (no surprise), with Bible belt states also showing up low.
Wow, I'm disappointed by the Brits ngl