Writing to rebuild America

I’m going back to the basics.

I never thought I’d be blogging again, but here I am. Thanks in part to Asha Dornfest’s call to action to rebuild America through writing — a popular idea lately thanks to the missteps of our favorite social media platforms — I’ve taken up my digital pen again.

I’ve also been going back to the basics in terms of ideas. In college at Baylor, I took an interdisciplinary study course through philosophy, economics, politics, history, and rhetoric, and ever since I’ve been fascinated by how ideas and cultures interact. So as 2018 came to an end, I started studying again, trying not to take any of my assumptions about how the world works at face value. The undefinable, interesting, often frustrating merger of disciplines has always fascinated me to my core.

And maybe that’s exactly what we need right now: to re-learn why we believe what we believe in an era of mass uncertainty.

At least, it’s what I need.

Geek out with me here as I lay out what I’ve learned and what I will learn in 2019.

PS, I don’t believe all calls to return to personal websites are founded in fundamental truths about social behavior. Yes, sharing our lives online was part of what drew some of us to blog in the first place, but addiction to the real-time feedback of social media, the curated news cycles, and the convenience of seeing all of our friends’ updates in one place will be extremely hard to disrupt. More on that later.

For now, we write on.