You know those conversations you get into sometimes where you’re discussing some complex topic like politics or religion, and it quickly becomes apparent that the other person has read precisely none of the stuff you’ve read, and they’re completely unfamiliar with all the ideas you take for granted, and the gap between the two of you is so wide that you’re just kind of left at a loss trying to figure out how to close it within the span of a single conversation? Maybe you’ll feel like you could get somewhere if you were at least starting off on kind of the same page regarding your foundational premises and values, but simply getting to that minimum baseline would require you to work your way backward through such a long chain of underlying assumptions and beliefs that it’s hard to even know where to begin. You might consider recommending some articles or podcasts for the other person to check out in order to get a sense of where you’re coming from – but then again, even with that approach you’d probably still have to send them dozens of different ones to give them the full picture, because practically every article and podcast you might recommend will be aimed at a target audience that is understood to already have all the context they need to fully understand the intended perspective, and is already up to speed on all the relevant discourse, and is just looking for the latest tidbit on top of where they’re currently standing (as Tyler Cowen puts it). It seems like hardly anything nowadays is written with the intent of presenting entire worldviews from the ground up, from first principles, so that even the uninitiated can come to understand them. There’s hardly anything you can send somebody where you can just say, “Here, all you need to read is just this one thing, and that’ll give you the whole explanation of where I’m coming from on this topic.”

But that’s what I want to try to do with this site. I want to have a little handful of posts that I can direct people to and simply tell them, “If you want to know what I think about this topic, just read this one post.” Of course, the downside of this is that in order to really cover all my bases, those posts will inevitably have to be quite a bit longer than the average blog post – and accordingly they’ll also have to be a lot fewer and farther between. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing; just speaking from my own experience, I’ve found that the pieces I’ve read that have really stuck with me the most over the years have been the ones that were clearly the result of some long-term sustained effort by the author, not the ones that were just dashed off on a whim. There are plenty of creators out there today who are constantly posting new short-form content every week (or even every day) – often not even so much because they actually have some particular big idea that they feel like they need to get out there, but simply because churning out a constant stream of content is their job, and they’re just coming up with new content as they go so they have something to fill the page every week. And to be clear, that’s not always a bad thing; many of my favorite creators follow just such an approach. But I just want to try something a little different here. Instead of a never-ending rapid-fire barrage of super-short posts about the latest trending topics of the day, I just want to have a few big, thought-out posts that I can always refer back to when needed. I realize this approach probably won’t win me a whole lot of readers – but hopefully, if you’re the kind of reader who doesn’t mind taking the time, you’ll find something of value here. I’ll try my best to make it worth your while, at least.

If you want to send me an email, my address is nwrains2@gmail.com. Even if it’s just to point out a typo or a dead link or something, I’m always happy to get messages. Alternatively, if you’d rather just send a quick anonymous message, you can use the form below. Thanks!