Do newsletter-writers still post year-end roundups of everything they wrote in the preceding twelve months? Last year these seemed to start rolling in on November 27th, but so far, I’ve only seen one or two.
Whatever, I’m going for it. I have the now-old-school approach to Substack of using it to boost and supplement my primary work of writing essays for venues with more traditional publishing methods. I want to steer readers like you toward my best work.
In that spirit, here are the essays I published this year, in reverse chronological order. I hope, if you missed some or joined this mailing list only recently, that you’ll take a look at one or two in a spare moment this week. Of these, the first two are the ones I’m proudest of:
Fix Your Gaze: Can Art Really Cure Us from Digital Distraction? Commonweal, December 2024
There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore, New York Times, Oct. 25, 2024
Adieu, Delphine, Notre Dame Magazine, Autumn 2024
“Stolen Pride” Examines Race, Alienation and Politics in Kentucky (review of Stolen Pride by Arlie Russell Hochschild), Washington Post, Sept. 11, 2024
What I’m Reading: Same Bed Different Dreams, Ed Park, Notre Dame Magazine, Sept. 4, 2024
Another Productivity Hack? (review of Slow Productivity by Cal Newport), Commonweal, June 2024
Experiencing the Total Eclipse, Commonweal, April 9, 2024
Seven essays in a year is not very many by my standard. I’m usually good for a dozen. Even that is not many by other writers’ standard. But the work adds up. In the nearly-a-decade since I started writing for audiences beyond academia, I’ve published over a hundred pieces. I’m sure they aren’t all great, but I can say with pride that few of them are throwaway takes in response to the news cycle. Fewer still are interminable incoherent rambles on my peculiar grievances.
If anything sums up 2024 for me, it is the crisis of faith. I had several of them. I’m grateful to those who helped me get through the worst moments.
I wrote a long essay about one of these crises this year. I showed it to a few friends, and they thought it was pretty good, but it remains in the drawer. Maybe I’ll send it out next year, maybe I’ll hold it back in case I get the chance to publish an essay collection one day, maybe I’ll just hang onto it forever in the knowledge that I now understand this crisis much better for having written the essay.
I’m also grateful to my editors. The mistaken belief at the bottom of Substack is that writers don’t need editors. Editors are supposedly just gatekeepers and proofreaders — they keep out the riffraff, give space to their pals, and correct their spelling. In the minds of some, editors are all out-of-touch, censorious old men.1
The editors I worked with this year didn’t just open the gate, let me prance around, and “fix” my mistakes before clicking “Publish.” (Anyone who fits that description is not an editor; in all likelihood, they’re stealing from you.) Rather, my editors challenged me to be better, because they knew I could be better. They boosted my faith in myself and, probably without realizing it, pulled me out of multiple low points.
This is my sixteenth (and final) Substack post of 2024. I posted sporadically at the beginning of the year and more consistently toward the end of it. I have no posting “strategy” for 2025 or beyond. I continue to be unsure if it’s worth it to keep writing in this venue. But I seem to keep doing it.
If I learned anything from my crises of faith this year, this was it. Faith is when you don’t know if something is worth it but you continue anyway. It’s not too far from the definition of insanity that’s often attributed to Albert Einstein (but probably not actually said by him).2
It may be wrong to call the sort of doubts I endured this year a crisis of faith. “Crisis” suggests that the condition is transitory and abnormal, as if it should be possible to have things some other way — a problem-free assurance, I suppose. I’m not sure you can have that. I’m thinking now that if your faith in whatever you have faith in (God, family, capitalism, socialism, democracy, the liberal arts, rock ‘n roll, love, yourself, Josh Allen) isn’t in “crisis,” then you might be lying to yourself.
That’s all I have to say for now. Here’s to more madness in 2025. Thank you so much for reading!
Some guy earlier this year posted a comment beneath one of my Substack Notes about how useless are the crusty, demented editors at legacy publications. Buddy, in all likelihood, the editor you’re mad at is a 26-year-old Brown grad.
I love the contrarian take on this definition in an article by Geoff Miller in Inside Pitch, the magazine of the American Baseball Coaches Association:
I am so tired of hearing people tell me that “the definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results.” Anyone who has seen a dictionary knows that’s not the actual definition of the word…
With all due respect to Dr. Einstein … I’m convinced that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results should be the definition of consistency, not insanity.