What have I been up to lately? Recent essays and plans

Glimpses from elsewhere, and the path for the future

It is an extraordinary feeling, to look up and notice millions of eyes on you. Until this month, I had never experienced it.

Last month, it happened twice, and suddenly I find my world changed. My Twitter platform is four times the size it was only a few months ago. The sometimes-richest man in the world just called me smart (and gay). I face the sudden hint of a prospect of turning my investigative writing into a more serious job, a path I have long dreamed of.

Funny that it happened while my Substack, the place I intend as a hub for my serious writing, was lying mostly fallow. There is something about that word—serious—that entails expectations. When I write here, I know that I am placing it directly into people’s inboxes, demanding it be noticed, demanding it be read. So I want to polish things, to perfect them, to make the words sing—and I sit and plan a thousand beautiful articles and write them in a slow trickle. I can blame law school and my podcast work, and both of those do keep me busy, but I have always been unpredictable when writing on command.

For years, I have at once craved and shunned the spotlight: writing quiet essays in quiet corners of the internet, hoping vaguely to be seen and dreaming of writing professionally but preferring to cultivate ties in my own cozy communities. Something funny happened last year, though: Twitter started allowing long posts. Where I feel a pressure to deliver on Substack, a Twitter long post feels like a letter dashed out and tossed into the wind—an ephemeral thought, perhaps blown somewhere, perhaps not, but one that cannot possibly be an intrusion. So I began to write more there. First gradually, then all at once, things started happening. Tweets have a potential virality that articles can almost never match, and much of what I have tossed into the wind has spread much further than I anticipated.

Twitter is ephemeral, though, and a post tossed out there is, after a short while, often never seen again. More importantly, the people who I most want to write for, those who seek my writing out, who invite me into their inboxes, often simply do not see what I write there. It is impossible to build the same continuity, the same sense of community, on Twitter as can arise on Substack. I want to cultivate a garden here, a space worth spending time in. Given that, I want to figure out the best way to balance things.

Particularly now that I have opened up paid subscriptions, I want to write in a way people value, whether that means putting a great deal of my writing here or only my more polished longform. This remains, for now, a part-time passion project. I do not intend to paywall anything except writing I deliberately want to keep private and occasional bonuses—while I deeply appreciate all support, I write for the public. The below poll is non-binding, but will give me a sense of what works. In short, I’m trying to decide how regularly I should mirror the essays I write for Reddit or Twitter, and whether it’s better to do occasional link posts like this one or to pull essays here directly. I welcome all feedback here.

In the meantime, here is my recent notable writing, on Twitter and elsewhere. My linking an essay here is not a guarantee against mirroring it on my Substack in the future, but I owe you all at least a centralized repository of my recent work:

1. Effective Aspersions: How the Nonlinear Investigation Went Wrong

This tells the story of a botched investigation among the Effective Altruists, a case study of how not to do amateur investigative reporting. I am proud of this article and put a lot of care into it, but I wrote it directly and specifically for Effective Altruists, so it gets in the weeds at times. My intent has been to write a follow-up to it for my Substack after events develop a bit more. This is the first in a series of deep dives I conducted in the course of the past month in a half or so, one that inspired my recent turn towards more investigative work.

2. The (Non-)Exoneration of Bryan Johnson

I owe you all a true article on this topic, and I have one waiting for me to put the finishing touches on it. In the meantime, though, feel free to look at the Twitter form. This is the second of my recent investigative deep dives, the first investigation I was commissioned to do, and perhaps the most visible thing I have ever written. In it, I re-examine a story I got badly wrong on first blush, one that strikes at the gap between legality and morality, as a centimillionaire won a court case against the fiancée he kicked out of his home shortly after her chemotherapy for stage 3 breast cancer. Note that you will miss much of the story without a Twitter account, as I spread parts of it over several longer threads.

3. FAA Scandal Updates

This is the third of my recent deep dives, and the second time I have had millions of eyes on me. While I posted the central summary here, I have spent the past week digging into every detail of the story, interviewing more than a dozen people and reading every document I can get my hands on. I’m working on a comprehensive article telling the story of the people who uncovered and fought against the scandal over the past decade, but in the meantime, I’ve posted several shorter updates to Twitter, notably including a thread examining a FOIA-obtained internal review to examine just what “cleared by an internal investigation” actually means and a 2013 slide emphasizing that adverse-impact diversity and job performance trade off against each other and asking where to draw the line.

4. In Support of "Copenhagen Ethics"

I was surprised by the reach of this small essay, my defense of the idea that people have greater moral duty to those close to them. It outlines a key part of my ethics, something I think people often overlook. “Asserting power is not a neutral act. You tell people: I have identified a problem. I know what will make it better. Trust me—let me step in, let me Do Something—and the world will become a better place.”

5. Scott Alexander: The Prophet Who Wasn't

Scott Alexander is one of my favorite writers, and the one who has had the most influence on my own online communities. He could start a movement, if he chose, but he consciously chose not to. This is my reflection on what he chose and why.

6. Stancil v. Sailer: Judging a feud

How should one engage with people who have some harmful viewpoints? Here, in the essay that led to my ongoing investigation of the FAA hiring scandal, I examine a weeks-long feud between a racist and a progressive who loves to fight and outline why I willingly pay attention to, interact with, and even learn from people who have some views I deeply oppose.

7. The Affirmative Case for Surrogacy

People often defend surrogacy on libertarian grounds. I defend it as a positive moral good, an expression of the same hope and commitment to the future that underlies all parenting. This is a topic that weighs increasingly on my mind of late.

8. Inconvenient Identities and a Rebuke of Parts of the Gender-Critical Movement

There is a certain subset of people who fit in specific identity groups, but whose personal narratives are more convenient for those who would be their enemies than for their natural allies. What should one do with a man in a dress who claims to be nothing more or less than a man in a dress? After a recent controversy at a gender-critical conference, I prod at this in two closely linked essays.

9. The Lie in My Property Law Casebook (and Part Two)

“Although reliable data about shoplifting is hard to come by, one leading study concluded that ‘Black and Hispanic shoppers were not more likely to steal than whites.’” In this two-part essay, I chase this claim down across two layers of sources and wind up extremely put out by what I find.

10. The Problem With Academic Lying

In the essay that inspired my writing about the Drunk Mormon Hypothesis, spun up again for a larger audience, I dig into another academic lie: the claim in an abstract of a paper that religious conservatism is associated with a higher divorce rate than alternatives.

11. Joseph Smith: America’s Mythologist

I propose that Joseph Smith be seen as neither prophet nor conman, but rather a storyteller adept at making the mundane become extraordinary and pulling people into the grand narrative of his life.

12. The Eagle Can Befriend the Owl

What are your duties when you befriend a sometimes-bad person? I propose: it is reasonable to befriend people who hurt others, even others close to you, so long as your interactions with them make neither you nor them worse—but you cannot be blind to the harm when you do so.

13. How Lying About My Childhood Could Get Me Sympathy

Given my position as a gay ex-Mormon, it would be trivial for me to frame my childhood in a way that made progressives view it with great sympathy, but to do so would be a lie. The attention ecosystem means that stories like mine, broadly happy ones where virtually every Mormon in my life has treated me with love and respect, fall through the cracks in favor of more painful ones.

14. The Missing Axis of Excellence

“With Liberty and Justice for all,” we wrote, and in so doing defined the contours of our politics. The American right frames its quest as one for liberty; the left as one for justice. Increasingly, I find myself drawn to emphasize a third political framing: excellence. This remains a half-formed thought, but one that is key to understanding my own politics.

15. How I fell prey to confirmation bias in reporting a story

It is easy to avoid skepticism when you hear something you like. When digging into a story about banning American Bully XL dogs in Britain, I found myself so caught up in one framing of the story that I neglected to apply my own standards of scrutiny. Here, I examine what happened and why.

16. Social Justice Progressivism is the first time many have encountered a truly vital religion

Christianity died twice: once at Westphalia, and again with the rise of Darwin. The separation of church and state is not natural, nor the separation of church and science. Over time, Christianity has been forced to reckon with earthly powers that demand it yield its narrative to them, maturing into a faith compatible with modern liberalism. New religions recognize no such boundaries, though, and as social justice progressivism rises, it un-self-consciously seeks to assert itself in domains traditional religions have grown used to retreating from.

Shorter Links

17. AI Art will never, ever go away

18. Truths you cannot speak if you teach at Harvard

19. How my squadron commander reacted to “It’s okay to be white” posters

20. Lore recap: My backstory in abbreviated form

21. The tension between the institutionalist and the Trump-populist wings of Mormon culture

22. The pathologies of ideologies depend on their doctrines

Threads (Twitter login recommended)

23. Fursona non grata: Frustration at being cold-shouldered in some corners of the internet

24. Power in unapologetic demands for excellence

25. Why I engage with people who have repellent ideas

26. On market failures in realistic fursuit procurement

---

Little of this is a result of anything systematic. I have dozens of serious essays in my backlog, some I have intended to write for years. Much of my writing comes almost unbidden, springing up in moments where I abruptly find myself with something to say that second, in whichever location I find myself in. Most of the time, it comes from a conviction that someone is wrong on the internet, which is why so much of it happens in conversational spaces.

My deep dives have proven to be the most rewarding and impactful of my writing, and I would like to pursue them in a more regular capacity. They also take substantially more time, effort, and focus than anything else I do, and they are almost impossible to fit within my schedule when I have both law school and podcast production work on my plate. I’m in the process of evaluating how I can spend more time on my effortful writing.

Regardless, I hope you enjoy this slice of my recent work, and I appreciate those walking along with me as I feel out what works on this site and elsewhere. I wrote my first “book,” The Lisard Who Lost It’s Tail, almost as soon as I could pick up a pen, and moved on to The Chronicles of Naria as soon as I touched a keyboard. Since then, I have pursued writing more consistently than all else, always dreaming of doing so professionally. I appreciate all who give me a chance to think in public. Thanks for reading.