This is a newsletter about ideas.
Consider it the intellectual notebook of a post-academic who is familiar with quite a few humanities and social science disciplines, has written for various websites and magazines since about 2010, and generally enjoys reading, thinking, and talking to other people about ideas. I’ve had some kind of blog for most of my adult life, so this is the latest version of that.
I went to an extremely right-wing evangelical “Great Books” college, and a lot of my intellectual journey has been shaped by wrestling with that fusion of ideas and politics. 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. Politics has been a common thread through all of these turns; because of my career so has media, especially digital media. 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 currently have a couple of areas of interest, including making sense of the politics of the past decade, and gay literature. I’ve written a few 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.
