Subscriber Writing Roundup #1 (May 1, 2024)

First batch

With more than 300 entries, there are about twice as many as last year.

If I were to share all 300+ pieces of writing at once, choice paralysis suggests that the chance of any of them being read is small. So I’ll be sharing these links in batches of about 60 or so throughout the next few weeks.

I meant it when I said if you submitted something, I would share it (unless it was obviously unhinged or would create serious difficulties for me). If you don’t see your piece in any of the roundup posts over the next several weeks, it may have gotten lost in my inbox. I’ll do another call for subscriber writing in the future; please send it then. A few people sent more than 1 piece of writing, but to keep things fair and manageable, I am sharing only 1 link per person.

Writers all shared their preferred names, the links to their pieces, a 1 sentence description. Lots of interesting stuff here; check out someone whose writing you haven’t read before.

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Peter Rockhill, Sloe House

On the takeover of a private members' club.

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Timothy, True Privilege

A review of Troubled by Rob Henderson

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Graham Cunningham, Take Me To Your Experts

‘Misinformation experts’ are very concerned about this. I on the other hand, can think of nothing more chillingly Orwellian than the concept of a misinformation expert.

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Marcelo Hosannah, The Never-ending Habit of Starting Over

Life as the son of a second generation Brazilian diplomat.

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Marcus Morris, Where are all the dumb 'narcissists'? Narcissism and emotional intelligence

Narcissism often appears in our leaders and yet contains an intellectual preoccupation and a neglect of emotional mind and emotional intelligence.

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Evan Riggs, A Better Political Compass

I launched my Substack with an article that discuss the new evolutions in political factions and posits a new compass to understand our 21st century topography.

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Freya India, Maybe You’re Not Anxiously Attached

Maybe you don’t have anxious attachment; maybe you’re having a valid response to someone—or a valid response to the world now.

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Don Watkins, How Many Kidneys Does Sam Harris Have?

Refuting moral skeptics is not enough to provide a basis for secular morality.

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Jack Nydick, PFL: Lying, Stimulus Selection, Heteronomy

Welcome to PFL, this is a weekly newsletter that is focused on three topics. Productivity, Fitness, and Life in general. This is the newsletter that I wanted but could not find. I hope you enjoy.

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Nigel Bowen, Is the jig up with the mass migration shell game?

Australians are also turning against mass migration.

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Triangulation, Artistic Authenticity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

 Where does the intuition that AI-generated art lacks authenticity come from?

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Jessica Leigh Lebos, Can Sapelo Be Saved?

Spending a weekend a crumbling mansion on Georgia’s coast offers some lessons in false luxury, late stage capitalism and the future of the Gullah people.

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The Ivy Exile, How Broken is Academia?

With AI making plagiarism and fraud ever easier to uncover, academia faces a humiliating reckoning. 

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alfafarfar, Worthless men

One woman is worth two thousand men in genetic value

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Amirul Menjeni, Masquerading Digitalization

Simply procuring emerging tech in your org is a facade of “being digital”.

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ALTA IFLAND, How Does One Become Woke? A Tale of Two Friends

An analysis of an American phenomenon via the stories of two friends: an immigrant who grew up in a poor family in Communist Romania; and a cultural commentator from a major American publication who grew up in an upper-middle class family and studied at Berkeley with Judith Butler.

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Grant Wyeth, Our “So-Called” Problem

An exploration of the incessant use of the phrase "so-called" and what it means for our writing and civic culture

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The 8 to 5 Philosopher, How Should an Accountant Live?

Taking philosophy off the campus and seeing if it has anything to say to a garbage man with 3 kids and a mortgage.

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Mathew, They Will Be Happy

A thought-provoking tale delving into a future where personal sacrifice for environmental sustainability intertwines with familial love and societal acceptance.

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Sharvesh, Sharvenium 18.0

18^th birthday reflections

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Lisa Barrett, How words became flowers

Thoughts on the flowers - words connection: flowers having specific meanings, and receiving my daughters diagnoses motivated me to grow flowers  words

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Jimmy Nicholls, Men are likelier to be killed. We don’t mind

Men and boys in the UK face a greater risk of lethal violence than women and girls. So why do we focus on the latter?

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James Harris, I’ll see you very soon

A reflection on the past and how creativity stops us deceiving ourselves about it

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Inverteum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Although financial capital is more unequally distributed than ever, knowledge capital is more equally distributed than it has ever been.

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Meghan Nathanson, Liberation at the Hands of a Slow-Moving Text

The benefit of choosing longer reads over click-bait and discovering beauty in the process.

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Jigs Gaton, Harnessing AI for Poetic Creation & Delivery: A Case Study

An analysis of using AI as a poet consultant, and not as a scribe.

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Joel (Alcopop), Scramble thoughts on love

Thoughts on love

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Nick Jikomes, Why Are We Getting Fatter?

The dietary factors driving obesity and metabolic disease

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Barney Quick, Connectedness and the Arc of Human Advancement

The brief peak our civilization enjoyed gave us the illusion that we could facilely bounce back and forth between belonging and autonomy.

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Quoc-Dien Trinh, Nostalgia, Novelty, and the Quest for the Ultimate Donut

It’s the thrill of the hunt, the process of discovery, that truly makes me feel alive, more so than the quest to find the best donuts in the land of poutine and maple syrup.

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Katherine Johnson Martinko, It's the Adults, Not the Kids!

The societal catastrophe of excessive screen time eroding real-life interactions and experiences has very little to do with kids and everything to do with the adults who raise them.

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Graeme Crawford, Supercharge Your Life With The Pain Of Rejection

Rejection from Cambridge University was the best thing that ever happened to me.

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Emilina, The 12 Hidden Metrics That Tell You if Your Life Is Going Well or Not

There are hidden metrics of a good life that often get ignored in favor of fancy cars or a new bag. These hidden metrics are more accurate and indicative that someone is doing well in life.

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Riccardo, I love you, Alexa!

Can we 'love' AI? This paper tries to really understand it.

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Joel Stein, Is human creativity fading away?

An investigation of declining creativity across a range of human domains, from school to pop culture to science and innovation.

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The Sideways Thinker, The Sideways Thinker

An essay about the topsy turvey reversals of this 'new' world.

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Andrew Pessin, Bright College Years

A quintessential campus novel, capturing how the college experience used to be (and perhaps could be again) before schools devolved into self-mockeries; "by turns smart, funny, and heart-wrenching"

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Jess Butcher, The Linkybrain Joy of Talking to Strangers

Harnessing curiosity in everyday life - combatting social polarisation in the process

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Promise Tewogbola, How to be the Wisest One in the Room: Maps, Circles, and Axioms

A discussion on three mental models that can help you cultivate practical wisdom in the real world

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Abhisek Basu (Bright Mirror), Everything is Kayfabe (And what is not, will soon be)

An essay exploring what kayfabe is, how it's ever-increasing and dominating everything and what we can do to recognize and take advantage of it

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Grace Song, On Inheriting the World: As the Youngest Leaves The Nest

As the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants and as a Muslim convert, I reflect on my own journey and what I wish for my son as he heads off to college and inherits the world.

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Holm Braeuer, Talking About Nothing

A treatise on the existence and nature of holes, including a brief statistic on our everyday intuitions regarding the ontology of holes.

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Shoni, Denise is Abu Dhabi

Denise has 16 hours to make the most of the UAE capital, where most clever people would just stay inside in the AC.

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Shah Ahmed, The Story of a Boy

A young doctor reflects on his move from the city to the country in order to cultivate the life he wants for his family.

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Sam Street, Science as Cities or Science as Corporations

Why are research teams less innovative the bigger they become, whereas the opposite is true of cities?

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Jim Grey, The best way to make money in publishing is to already be famous

Thoughts on self-publishing and building an audience, and how for the average person it's a steep uphill climb to success.

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Wren Menzie (pen name), The Narcissist You Divorce: 7 Action Steps to Divorcing a Narcissist and Rebuilding Your Life

Break free from the toxic grip of a narcissist and live the life you deserve!

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Gurjot Brar, From Ancient Rituals to Social Media; The Emergence of Self-harm Cultures

Vaishi’s essay offers us some much needed evolutionary and cultural insights into current self-harm practices.

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Katherine Kern, An Open Letter to the Supreme Court

I am not a lawyer, but I do know a thing or two about media.

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The Future Hindsight Blog, The Animus Problem

An attempt to find an explanation for rising feminism in psychoanalytic literature

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Connor Lovely, DePIN Overview

Connor provides an in-depth overview of one of crypto’s most interesting new sectors, DePIN or decentralized physical infrastructure networks, as a commissioned guest post in the #1 paid crypto Substack on the planet, BowTiedBull.

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Malik Djinadou, Don’t take advice from the successful

Stories of the successful are at best an inspiration, not an instructional map.

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The Obsolete Man, The Uncertainty Principle

The fate of a professor and the life of a prisoner show us how to navigate life’s tragedies.

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Jake Sacino, On Hard Work

Your framing of “Luxury Beliefs” (LBs) *really* struck a chord with me, especially when it comes to the LB that “hard work doesn’t matter”.

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Jonas Hummler, Did Something Good Happen?

An exploration of the concept of 'Enlightenment' and its symbolism in different pieces of literature and art.

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Jesse McEntee, Personal Essay

The role of fear plays in writing.

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Jake Talarico, Work From Home

A Short Story about working from home

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Rachael Varca, #025 "Adulting" is an Immaturity Problem

A critique that struggling with basic life skills is a failure of ego maturity, sense of competency, individuation, and lack of discipline for the current younger generations, to the detriment of their future selves.

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Christian Allred, In Defense of the Ideal Father

There can be an ideal type of father even if few or nobody fully meet its definition.

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Ty Tidwell, Fear of the Unknown

A descriptive essay extrapolating my fear of death.

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Michael Vigne, The Paradox of Being Fashionably Atypical

This is about how the pressures to be demonstrably atypical results in a loss of individualism.

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Rajesh, Headhunters, shrinks & ...a medium

But why are they called shrinks? An etymological rabbit hole.