Thinking Week

I took a few days to think about what I should think about. Here's what I thought.

Me.

Writers who put out columns every day are at grave risk of becoming stale. It’s the Tom Friedman phenomenon. He wrote a great book about the Middle East, full of life, and thereby earned a sinecure on the opinion pages of the New York Times. For a few years, everything he wrote was interesting. But several years later, he was still writing the same column. By this point, his predictability is a national punchline.

I’ve seen this happen a lot. It’s happening now to a lot of the writers who joined Substack at the beginning. I won’t name them, but you’ve probably noticed it. They just become repetitive.

You might remember that I originally took to Substack because I’d written a book, but I doubted anyone would pay attention to it if I published it in a book format. No one reads books anymore. No one has that kind of attention span. So I serialized it here. What I wrote was good, and I was right, but I’ve been elaborating upon those ideas here for more than five years, and I think I’ve said enough about them.

To my relief, it seems to me that many of the ideas I most wanted to convey when I began writing this newsletter are now quite widely understood. I don’t know whether I had anything to do with that. Probably not. But I now notice that things I’ve written here—things I did not see discussed widely or at all at the beginning of the first Trump Administration—are now discussed everywhere.