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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Indeed. No idea what Substack’s message is here but it’s sad/fun to imagine a whole community is talking up a restaurant’s humanitarian efforts, writing thinkpieces, etc, but it’s all a hallucination and the restaurant never said anything of the sort. What do you do?!