A blogging experiment

Writing essays is great, but not every idea is comprehensive or developed enough to be an essay. Social media posts—at the Twitter I’ve now abandoned, or the much more promising Bluesky I’ve recently joined—can provide an outlet for those ideas, but social media runs to mere quips, and its addict nature means a lot of productive writing gets lost in doom scrolling, meme watching, or inside joke making.

It used to be we had blogs for that sweet spot in between. But blogs got lost in social media and the decline of RSS, and the rise of newsletters pushed non-Tweet writing to longer lengths and less frequent publishing.

But I’m old, and old-fashioned, and I want to be able to write shorter thoughts and reactions without shoehorning them into a mercurial social media platform. So I’m using Substack’s handy sub-newsletter feature to challenge technological momentum and launch a blog.

Here I’ll write less fleshed out ideas than in my essays, as well as commentary on articles I run across, books I read, and items in the news. Because this is still on Substack, and so still tied to email, I won’t blog more than once a day, so as not to clog your inbox. Instead, if I have more than one post to go out, I’ll bundle them into a single email.

I also plan to keep blog posts free and open for everyone, including making comments available to free subscribers. Of course, if you want to support my work, get my essays two weeks early, and join our fun Discord community, become a supporter.

If you don’t want to get blog posts sent to you, and instead just want my essays, click this big button, and turn off “Aaron’s Blog.”

I see this as an experiment. I’m going to try it for a while and see how it goes. I hope you’ll join me.