I've Got Mail (And That's Good)
Starting this April, I will send out every week (or as often as I’m able) an email that pulls together my short dispatches from the past few days at work (Field Notes), any longer pieces I’ve published, links to what I’ve been reading elsewhere, and anything else that seems relevant.
I’m primarily motivated, like many others these days, to free myself from my near-total reliance on social media — where posting an update doesn’t actually mean everyone who follows me will see it. In fact, if my experience across personal and professional social media is any guide, it means the opposite: that most of them won’t. It’s an old, simple, but now weirdly novel, idea — when you make something new, the people who’ve said they wanted to see your stuff, should see it. All these years later, that’s still what email provides better than anything else. Social media, the downfall of so many gatekeepers over the past decade, has itself become one.
I’m also motivated by my desire to distribute my writing through the one channel that best and most naturally supports it, the only one in which we’re already conditioned to read at length — email. To rely 100% on social media for promoting writing is to be perpetually swimming upstream, forcing 500, 800, or 1,000+ words upon people who came to see 10-15 and then keep swiping. Modern day giants of literature, cultural criticism, and thought leadership might win that battle against the current. I (and probably you) will not.
This project, if it becomes what I intend it to be, is as much about writing itself as it is about the topics at hand — something to get me writing, to get you reading, and to keep us all thinking. While I might have a hint of ambivalence about being just the latest person with a newsletter, I also recognize this as a good thing. In a way, we’re pushing back against social media as the opaque, omnipotent, God-like delivery system for all information, and directly requesting, like people once did, what we want to hear and who we want to hear it from. My humble hope is that you find it worthwhile to get small portion of your information from me.