Short Announcement

Since September, as some of you may remember, I started my Substack. The goal I set at the time was to write for a year, that is, 52 posts. In practice, I reached 49 posts, plus three additional posts that, for various reasons, I chose not to publish there for the time being. The past two weeks have been characterized by deliberations about how to proceed, and therefore I haven’t published anything during them. Bottom line, I’m taking a break until I decide on the format that suits me for continuing to publish—a break during which, no doubt, a post or two will accidentally slip out here and there (there’s one already in the works).

On a personal level, it’s been an interesting exercise. Between a quarter and a third of the posts already existed before I started the project—and the drawer is still growing, and ideas are still popping up. Even so, there were quite a few times when I felt that I was lowering my intellectual standard or sliding into a level of popularity that simply doesn’t interest me. Suddenly, I had less time for my more serious writing, which, I must admit, doesn’t provide the immediate feedback that motivates me to persist—and it is much more demanding. Suddenly, I’m seeing things I wrote that I simply wouldn’t have written if not for this framework, and I’m very fond of them.

(For those who remember: the post about the storyteller, the various series, about victory, the critique of hypocrisy in the political right in Koselleck, the lucky Hans in modern politics, and Lewis’s Four Loves)

In practice, this is a rather meager yield compared to what I believe is, at the very least, interesting, compared to everything that was published. Moreover, the experiment nicely demonstrated that for the kind of writing I’m interested in producing there is no large audience. The growth in subscribers has been average—about half from Israel and half from elsewhere. On the level of the platform, there’s nothing here to boast about, and by and large, that’s fine. It just means this isn’t a path for primary or secondary income for me. Also, at the moment, I’m juggling three jobs and daily preparation in Ancient Greek, which in any case forces me to make some compromises at least until the end of the summer.

Thank you very much to everyone who has read so far. I hope you’ll stay tuned if and when I arrive at a new format and pace that I feel I can sustain.