I’ve really enjoyed 2020’s flowering of Substack writers, but I also enjoyed this criticism of the medium’s impact on thought: nintil.com/substack-milqu
One reframing: is there an adjacent model which can support book-depth thought? Or even three-month-essay-depth thought?
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I’ve heard the argument that maybe one can support book-writing by writing a weekly newsletter *while* writing a book. Ideally the newsletter might be exhaust from research or book-drafting sessions. I think is trying this! I’d love to see success stories here.
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Note that this approach is the opposite of a common practice: write a blog for a few years; get popular; staple posts together into a book. I like some of those books, but they usually seemed just as good as blog posts: they don’t seem to be accessing new depths as books.
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Maybe it doesn’t matter if Substack’s model can’t produce book-depth thought. After all, if the model could “only” support the creation of lots more SlateStarCodexes, that would be really incredible!
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Anon friend suggests that much Substack criticism can be read as: "Yeah, [your fave neighborhood restaurant] is great, but I fail to see what they’re doing for world hunger, farming challenges related to depleted soil, etc, to say nothing of how useless it is to dead people"
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I like this framing too!
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people say real intimacy doesn’t scale, but I think personal blogs work bc one-sided intimacy is just as interesting + meaningful as two-sided intimacy. teenage-girl-making-youtube-covers-in-her-bedroom energy is powerful 
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I've been dreaming for awhile about doing a book club that commissions its own books (slash three-month-essays)!
We'd run like - ten members, $100 per month, $1000 per month grant to a selected writer to produce pieces in X unit time.
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Love this idea
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Yeah, my tweets are mostly note-exhaust. It probably makes them more insufferable / verbose!!
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But if book-depth thought is often ineffective as you suggest in transformative tools for thought, isn't this for the better? To put it another way, newsletter are books with spaced repetition and applications (writer's assumptions are restated and applied to new problems).
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It’s a good question. “Book-depth” is a modifier on “thought.” I don’t think that thought has ton be (or even should be) presented in that medium. The distinction isn’t about word count: if you can serialize book-depth thought in newsletter form, all power to you! But hard to do.
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