This newsletter mirrors my blog at https://jeffreymoro.com/blog.

I haven’t kept a regular blog for several years now. There are many reasons for this, many macro, others micro. The macro ones you know about: they’re all the same reasons you’ve felt distracted, on edge, tired for much of the past few years. At least, I suspect you have. If you’re the kind of person taking the time to read a blog post (a quaint medium: I just as well might write you a letter and tie it to a pigeon), then you share with me, I would venture, some values that are hard to come by these days. An appreciation for the art of a sentence. A desire to move slower rather than faster. A stubborn attachment to the past, not to repeat it, but to understand it and its relationship to the present. And a sneaking suspicion that maybe, just maybe, it’s time to give the internet a hard reboot.

And then there are the micro reasons: an adjustment to a new job, and with it, new demands on my time and new expectations for my writing; a length of creative block; a sense of personal futility about the blog as a medium — this last one in particular weighed heavily on me, because for a long time, during graduate school, I found blogging a useful way to keep my writing muscles sharp, to circulate ideas that didn’t necessarily warrant a full elaboration into a formal piece, or simply to record — diaristically — thoughts, feelings, and experiences. And then the internet’s information ecosystem fell apart. Blogs became newsletters, locked behind yet another paywall; the social networks on which I relied to disseminate my posts became crowded out with hate and slop. Soon, many people stopped reading entirely. Writing always, to some degree, entails imagining one’s audience. It’s hard to do so when even the possibility of one seems harder than ever to reach.

Nevertheless — here we are. I am writing, and you are reading. I thank you for that, truly. I want to make this worth your while, so I want to tell you about a place: