goodbye to all this

keep in touch!

There comes a time in every poster’s life when she must log off and touch grass. For me, now is that time. I am going to stop writing Substack posts and start rubbing my face in the grass instead.

Maybe I’ll pop up every couple months to send spates of links to recent writing; maybe I won’t post anything except really big announcements about books I’m writing and the like. But I won’t be putting any original writing on here for the foreseeable future, and if you just subscribed you should know that. I hope you don’t feel cheated. (Since I haven’t even really started my next book yet it’ll be a while—to the tune of years—before I resurface with any book-related announcements.) In the meantime, you know where to find me: The Post, The Point (I wrote the editor’s letter in the forthcoming issue; it’s about Dean Kissick and romanticism, lol), The Boston Review, etc. Email me if you want to talk; hang out with me if you ever come to DC, or wherever I end up moving when my husband is done with the gauntlet of the academic job market. (If you live in New York, I’m in town often and will be around the last week of February.) If you’re an online friend starting a newsletter please let me know, or just sign me up for it.

I will stop writing on Substack, but I won’t stop reading it. There are plenty of Substacks I love. I especially like

rayne fisher-quann

,

David Sessions

,

Tracks on Tracks

,

Max Read

,

John Ganz

,

Brandon

, and

BDM

. I’m excited about

Cluny Journal

. I even like reading

Ross Barkan

and

Sam Kahn

, although we often disagree and I doubt they’d say the same of me. In any event, I look forward to following along as they launch their new publication,

The Metropolitan Review

. I agree with all the boosters who think there’s plenty of interesting writing on here right now. Nonetheless, it’s not a good place for my writing. It’s not you, it’s me; Substack isn’t bad, but I’m bad at Substack.

Why? I think the service my Substack has offered, to the extent it has offered any service, is a peek behind the curtain. My published writing is polished (for better or for worse), but my Substack posts are disheviled and uncertain. On here, I say all kinds of things I’m not sure if I believe yet. I fume, pick fights, and try thoughts on like clothing, just to see if they fit. This sort of shameless riffing is not without value. I like reading writers’ diaries and letters because I like to see writers who are usually controlled go to pieces (or maybe more aptly, I like to see them in a state of disarray, before they’ve even had a chance to integrate the pieces that will later come apart). I believe in the art of the Post: Posting is unhinged, unplanned, and unperfected. It involves a kind of lunatic exposure that is perversely admirable. But Posting is one thing and writing is another. It isn’t that way for everyone, and it isn’t that way for everyone on Substack, but it is that way for me.

And somewhere along the way, Posting stopped being fun. I still post as carelessly and pugilistically as I did when I had 500 subscribers and they were all my friends. Back then, no one really cared what I said, so I felt like my parasocial online buddies and I were figuring things out together in a playful, low-stakes way. Now I have ten times as many subscribers, many of them aren’t my friends, and it’s no longer prudent for me to mouth off with abandon. The more I talk, the more I make people angry. Making people angry is fine, but you have to be selective about it or you find yourself awash in anger all the time.

There are many hills I would die on, and the “vibe shift” discourse is decidedly not one of them. I was going to respond to this post by Ross Barkan and then I thought—why? Do I really want to have a public feud about vibe shifts, of all things? I would rather correspond with Ross about it in private, where we can have a discussion and not a pissing contest, especially because I’m not even sure what I really think about it. I have intuitions but no firm convictions. Like so many of my posts, my vibe shift post was an exploratory gambit, more of a provocation than a proclamation. My thoughts about the supposed vibe shift aren’t settled. I have questions, not views. For instance: what is the explanatory benefit of describing a material shift like the elimination of DEI programs as a “vibe shift”? Maybe there is one; I genuinely don’t know.

Probably the best thing I’ve read about vibe shifts—though regrettably I didn’t read it until after I posted—is this piece by

John Ganz

. One thing that’s good about it is that it is not a disquisition on free-floating vibes: it’s about something specific, namely the particular vibes attaching to or associated with a particular milieu. It doesn’t equivocate between claims about a micro-movement and claims about public opinion writ large, because it has a concrete object of analysis. Also, I think Ganz is right that Dimes Square was or is about a shift to vibes (and away from substance). It might also be useful and apt think about how the pundit class seems to be making the same shift, insofas as they’re embracing “vibes” as the currency of analysis and thereby prioritizing affect over content. But I leave that project to someone else. (Hopefully Ganz.)

For what it’s worth, I don’t really think most of the things Ross attributes to me in his post. I don’t think he read what I wrote very carefully; I think he’s responding less to what I said and more to my “vibe,” which annoys him (which is perfectly fair). But more importantly: whatever. Duking this out, adjudicating what I did and didn’t mean, seems like a waste of both my time and his. My final word on the subject is that vibes are Heideggerian world-pictures. I leave someone else to “unpack” that oracular statement, as people used to say in grad school.

I’ve spent my whole life preparing to be a writer. I’ve never wanted to be anything else. I haven’t spent any time preparing to be a public figure, even in a small and basically irrelevant corner of The Culture. I have no idea how to be one, but probably not like this—not, that is, by being an incontinent poster. So it’s time for my incontinent posting to end.

You might start getting regular emails from me about the most random shit years from now. Once, I considered doing a series of close readings of a work of philosophy on here. The project petered out, but I could see myself doing something like that again someday, though I would need to charge for it. I write for a living, and I can’t afford to write longer and more deeply researched stuff for free. Currently, my job doesn’t allow me to do paid posts, which is one of the reasons I’m leaving. What with the tone on here, I’m sure some people will fault me for declining to throw caution to the winds, quit my job, and go all-in on trying to cultivate a career on Substack. I’m not going to do that for a few reasons. For one thing, I like my job. For another thing, I favor an institutional over influencer model. Also, I need health insurance, because I have three autoimmune diseases and just recovered from cancer. And finally, I have a great deal of skepticism about whether the kind of essays I’d want to write would “do well,” not because Substack isn’t a serious platform or there isn’t an appetite for longer denser stuff but because that isn’t what the audience I’ve amassed expects from me. This is by far my most viral and popular post ever, and while I stand by it and think it’s true, as far as it goes, it’s most certainly a “hot take” and not at all the sort of thing I’d write if I were in a position to charge. Maybe someday I’ll ask you to pay me to write about trad wives and Shirley Jackson, or Schopenhauer, Merleau-Ponty, and the body (it shocks and dismays me that there isn’t much writing about this yet, since I’m stunned at how totally Schopenhauer anticipates much of Merleau-Ponty!). Maybe there is a market for that sort of thing. But if there is, I won’t find out for a while. Until then, so long. You can find me in the paper or outside touching the grass.