Hello friends,
I’m writing to you today with some news about the newsletter: I’ve set up a Patreon supporter page.
The idea behind the Patreon is to allow readers to (a) provide general financial support for the newsletter and my writing on the Internet and (b) receive exclusive paywalled content like subscriber-only editions of the newsletter and podcast-style conversations beginning in March.
This newsletter has been one of the most fulfilling projects I've pursued as a freelance writer. But each one takes time and labor, and it's not possible for me to consistently apply myself to them without making some money from them. While my hope has been to publish the newsletter on a weekly basis, and I've hit that rhythm at times in the past, I've generally written them more sporadically because other work that I'm compensated for has had to take priority. I'd love to make the newsletter a consistent and sustainable long-term enterprise in 2021, and I think that will be realistic if I hit my goal of $1800/month.
You can head over to the Patreon supporter page here. There are 6 tiers, but if you’d like you can also type in a customized monthly amount at the confirmation stage and you get everything at all the tiers below it. You can cancel any time, and have the option to shift tiers at any point. Once you’re signed up, you should get exclusive content sent straight to your inbox.
I know it’s rough out there these days, but a little bit can go a long way, and any amount at all would be appreciated.
On the fence? Allow me to briefly make the case for why I think you should consider joining.
The newsletter has made a splash. Help make it bigger.
I’m proud to say this newsletter punches above its weight.
The readership size is still very, very modest compared to major politics newsletters, and is just in a different universe than the newsletters which dominate Substack’s newsletter leaderboard. But editions of the newsletter have gone viral from time to time. My original reporting, analyses and interviews here have been cited by publications like HuffPost, republished in The Chicago Tribune, and landed me a full episode-length interview with “The Daily” at The New York Times. Some editions of the newsletter have resulted in invitations to give lectures and been taught in college courses.
With more resources, I’ll be able to take more time to write — and experiment. I can, for example, invest in assistance with expansion into audio and video conversations.
Writing is labor
While the Internet has normalized the idea that information should be free, the actual production of information is never free. Journalistic writing requires time and effort — research, interviews, thinking, consulting experts, debating peers, travel, digging up documents, building up sources, and of course the writing itself. Not every article entails all of those activities, but you may be surprised at the layers of effort that contribute to any given piece and often go unmentioned by writers.
If you regularly turn to this newsletter and find it useful, consider dropping a few bucks at the Patreon!
Say no to algorithmically-fueled analysis
Political analysis and commentary on the Internet is blossoming in terms of quantity but withering in terms of quality. New outfits are springing up all the time but the digital era has wreaked havoc on the revenue model for publishing journalism, and newspapers, magazines and online publications rely a great deal on the attention economy — mediated by social media giants — to desperately try to keep the lights on.
That attention economy has perverse incentives and effects if you value careful thinking, intellectual nonconformity, or coverage of any region or issue considered remotely niche or offbeat. Social media spaces are designed to drive engagement in the form of affirmation and conflict, a dynamic which shapes public intellectualism both on social media platforms and at the media outlets that rely on them. As a result too much of the commentariat slides toward reciting familiar talking points or formulaic polemic to rack up views, likes, and followers; nuance, ambivalence, unclassifiability and unpredictability are risky.
Part of the reason I started a newsletter is to try to escape that dynamic, to avoid being beholden to algorithms and design cues that serve huge corporations at the expense of public enlightenment. Newsletters allow writers to build a direct relationship with readers and not be held hostage by billionaire executives who regulate users’ daily political news dose based on their whims and strategic calculations about the election cycle, or want things to surface on people’s feeds when they’re so polarizing or so obviously agreeable to a user that they become engagement fodder. (The one drawback with newsletter delivery is that a non-trivial share of each newsletter seems to get sent to promotions folders, and sometimes junk folders, for Gmail accounts — the good thing is there are steps you can take to help guard against that.)1 Newsletters provide a space for thinking out loud without worrying about popularity or only catering to base instincts.
So: support a newsletter and stand athwart the attention economy’s stranglehold on media! Even better: support this newsletter.
In defense of an introspective left
The American left’s intellectual scene is experiencing a rebirth.
There are some people who think the left is best served by constant reassertion of first principles and seeing internal questions as weakness and a distraction from holding the line against perceived adversaries.
But if the left is serious about changing the world, then it must be serious about truth-seeking and fostering a democratic culture. Without lively internal debate, empirical rigor, dispassionate self-evaluation, and non-moralizing exchanges, the left politico-intellectual scene risks forgoing the anchor of independent thought and crippling its own capacity to evolve at the very moment that it shows greater potential than it has in living memory.
Here’s one example of how I’ve sought to embody that outlook with this newsletter: Last summer in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd I critiqued calls by leftists who said we shouldn’t study the efficacy of riots because the very act threatened to distract from the causes of the riots and strengthen right-wing critics. In my writing I argued that riots should be taken seriously as conscious political actions (and that not doing so can be racialized); that it’s possible to disentangle the ethics of rioting from their effectiveness; that the social scientific literature showed they have a range of effects on the body politic; and accurately forecast that they were unlikely to be a major electoral liability. This newsletter is a space for exploring difficult questions that demand engagement rather than averting our eyes.
So: support this newsletter and support critical thinking on the left!
Okay that’s all for now. Check out the Patreon. Spread the word!
If you want to offer feedback, suggestions or requests, please feel free to write to me by replying to this email.
If this is happening to you, you can train Gmail to recognize this newsletter. Here are some tips: (1) Drag any edition of this newsletter in promotions to the inbox, and when prompted indicate that you want future emails from this address to go to the inbox. (2) Add this email address to your contacts. (3) Apparently sending a message to my substack address / replying directly to a newsletter may help as well. (4) Check promotions and spam from time to time — always a good practice anyway!