This is a newsletter about ideas.
I’ve always been fascinated by the ideas that inspire people, that drive society, that generate conflict, that make it possible to live. From my first blog about the Christian music industry in college to my political journalism to my scholarly research in intellectual history, I’ve puzzled over why people think they way they do, where their concepts come from, how they mutate and change over time. My entire writing life—and arguably my life tout court—has been a battle with ideas.
My interest in ideas has never been about erudition for its own sake or solving intellectual puzzles; it has always been a way of surviving. I write to explain the world to myself, to make life mean something. So even this newsletter is not literally or primarily “about” myself in a diaristic way (though it sometimes may be), it is shaped by different vectors of my first-person experience: growing up in fundamentalist evangelicalism, working in media, falling in love with philosophy and France, writing a dissertation on the history of social science, being a political activist, being gay.
I think of it this way: I’m person with a regular job who has too many humanities degrees, lots of professional writing experience, and I life a find interesting and rewarding. This newsletter is a kind of ongoing self-education I want to share with anyone else who likes to read books and think about all the different dimensions of life—especially politics, literature, identity, and relationships—in a similarly open-ended way. It will also serve as a first draft of my research and thinking for more formal writing in other venues. It will be casual and attempt to be accessible to all kinds of readers even when it is about somewhat abstruse, intellectual subjects.
Who am I?
I grew up in Texas and have lived in Washington, D.C., New York, Paris, and Boston. I received my Ph.D. in intellectual history from Boston College, M.A. in Humanities and Social Thought from NYU, and B.A. in journalism from Patrick Henry College.
Because of my background, religion and philosophy were my first “intellectual” pursuit. I went into philosophy through “French theory” and broadened out into what we might as well call the “Continental European tradition.” But I was more interested in the history of ideas than in doing philosophy, so I did my PhD in history and ended writing a dissertation about sociology as an academic discipline and a style of public intellectualism. In the process, I accidentally learned a lot of “real” history. Again because of my background, politics has been a common thread through all of these turns; because of my career so has media, especially digital media. Despite my “great books” education, for most of that time literature was severely underrepresented in my reading, something I’ve tried to remedy the past five years or so. Sublate all of those into some kind of Hegelian machine and I guess I might say I aspire to be something like a cultural critic or maybe just a good old-fashioned public intellectual.
I’ve recently written some memoir-ish essays that should give you an idea of my personal and intellectual journey and some of the concerns that shape my writing here:
My published writing has appeared in The New Republic, The Point, Jacobin, Dissent, Commonweal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Slate, and others that have disappeared under the waves of the internet.
Thanks so much for reading! I hope you enjoy, and please write me if you do.
