I’ve decided to start a newsletter/blog called The Deleted Scenes (folks call them “newsletters,” but I’ll be treating it more like a blog). I’m introducing it for free, but will be adding paid subscriptions, at the lowest price level, soon.
I’d been holding off on this, partly because I’m not sure how many paid subscribers I can get at this point, and partly because I was concerned about using up material which could be placed at established publications (or wherever I end up next.) However, the many messages and reactions I’ve gotten since leaving The American Conservative, and the amount of encouragement from my audience, have convinced me to give it a go. Plus, I’ve done some thinking and have concluded that this can be a space for me to develop a parallel and complementary, not competing, body of work.
There’s a whole lot of material that’s left over from or goes into writing web features, much of it quite interesting. There just isn’t room to fit in everything in a 1,200-word column, and it isn’t possible to turn every insight or idea into its own full-length article. There are also a lot of quirky things I share in the form of unwieldy Twitter threads, which, with a little more work and thought, could become proper blog posts. There’s also all the material I read and react to, and would like to comment on, but just don’t have a place to do that. And so I envision The Deleted Scenes as a space to share the thought processes that go into my feature work, and the pieces that don’t quite fit into it, but are by no means “leftover” or inferior. I’m also envisioning being very active in the comments section, and in general taking a more conversational tone here. (For example, some quick posts might consist of questions for discussion.)
Topics will include my bread-and-butter issues of urbanism (including but not limited to land use, sprawl, commercial architecture, the built environment, housing, and small towns), plus musings on design, old technology, cultural and economic history, and more. Food and cooking, video games, old consumer products, and other assorted topics may end up here. I might link to posts at Labelscar or write about videos from Techmoan. I tend to come at these things as a layman, and see bigger stories in them rather than analyze them technically or in terms of policy wonkery. Here are a couple of examples of the kinds of points I illustrate: Modern cassette players are a microcosm of modern global manufacturing. An old fast-food outlet transformed into something else is a layer in the archaeology of the highway. The gradually increasing size and product range of dollar stores represents an evolutionary recapitulation of century-old retail currents.
This is idiosyncratic stuff, maybe niche stuff, but nobody else is really doing it, and enough people have told me they value it that I’ll believe them!
Please sign up and consider subscribing when I add paid subscriptions. As with a blog, I’ll be posting likely at irregular times, but often (at absolute minimum a couple of times a week). Actually, I expect that writing in this format will build on itself. Thank you for reading, and for your support.