What is going on is it somehow 2004 again

I have a lot of books in my apartment. I'd say about a quarter of them are unread, and half of those I've carted around to four different apartments and into a new timezone. Having so many unread books is one part hope--I do, on some level, intend to read every single one of them. 

It's also of course partly delusion.

Really? I'm really going to read all of them? (I probably won't read the entire 2000+ word volume of Isaiah Berlin essays, it's true, or more than one volume of Dickens or Trollope).

And it's hard not to think of them also as a kind of reproach: I used to read hard books! I used to read 60+ books a year! I used to not be so fucking stupid. I read Tacitus--why has Seutonius been so hard to get into? Is Arendt so much more difficult than Hume or Cicero?

Whatever. Things change, life changes, we leave college, we move to Texas, we make new friends, we spend half our lives doomscrolling Twitter or getting drunk alone on a Tuesday night, we get a cat, we go to therapy, we move to New York. Now we celebrate when we make it through a particularly long Atlantic piece, or if we read one "serious" book after a string of trashy science fiction novels. We join book clubs that are really clubs of people we like that also like the idea of books…

The unread books might as well be a metaphor, too, for the essays I've imagined writing and the dialogues I've had in my head with stupid (or occasionally even insightful) Tweets. I have a lot to say that I keep to myself for the most part, but I spent a few days recently with one of my best friends from college. We talked non-stop about all kinds of things, just like we used to 15 years ago, and it made me realize it doesn't have to be this way. If I cared about an audience maybe I'd start a newsletter or podcast or something but that's all too serious and formal and uncomfortable. And the people on Twitter are mean. Instead I'll blog, which I've long suspected was my missed calling.

Well, it's never too late!

I plan to use this blog to talk about things that interest me in books I've read, or in movies and plays I've seen. I want to talk about the things I'm thinking about in politics, philosophy, and art. I want to say things that are probably stupid or obvious, or sometimes maybe I'll write a whole essay. I want to explore the things that my idiosyncratic education (which was essentially Evangelical Christian Straussian, in retrospect, lol) stopped short of, or about how the pandemic and related events kinda radicalized me.

Here's a sample from the running list of potential topics I've been adding to the last couple of weeks:

• Does the state exist? Can one have moral duties to something that doesn't exist?
• The case for political alarmism
• Liberal internationalism and its failure in Zweig.
• Left liberalism vs Social Democracy
• What to make of Rebecca West's (kinda funny) homophobia
• Why coherentism seems obviously true
• Why being right isn't enough
• Why the early 20th century British literary attitude is so appealing to me
• Liberalism and the weird mysticism of institutions
• What's the deal with these stupid New York theater reviews?

Maybe I'll write about some of these, and maybe I'll read a few more books off of the unread bookshelf.