When Writing Gets Personal

The double-edged sword.

Enjoying Clavel in Baltimore with my partner, who is a gift from above. My face is a little messy, but at the same time, I am experiencing joy.

Nothing New Under the Sun’s Evolution

For long-time readers, you may have noticed a number of changes to this space. I’ve been working to structure my writing into distinct newsletters, each with its own tone and rhythm.

The first is The View From Monday, which serves as a general reflection — a space to incorporate a wide range of themes, from current events to broader historical arcs and emotional undercurrents. Some of these pieces are paid, not out of exclusivity, but because they can be time-consuming to create. Our public desperately needs incentives that reinforce the act and art of building well-constructed thought pieces with adequate research and self-questioning — things that should be commonplace in civic culture, not rare.

The second newsletter is Bookish, a space for unpacking the lightbulb moments I have while reading, especially about a particular period. Currently, I’m in Gordon S. Wood’s 700-page epic on the early American republic, from the signing of the Constitution to the harrowing days of the War of 1812 and the new nationalism that emerged from it. It’s been a pleasure to write through, but also bittersweet.

As much as I respect Wood’s historical powers, his masterful research, and the beauty of his prose, I find myself struggling to connect fully. He often writes from a deep sense of American exceptionalism that I can no longer share. It's difficult to read about “the people’s government” and “liberty’s expansion” while living through a decade-long racial backlash, one fueled by centrist denial and an empowered American right-wing bent on narrowing both the electorate and the imagination. That mix has created the perfect storm for despotism to exploit constitutional weaknesses and thrive within an elite class that seems to lack moral and political creativity to confront it. The gap between Wood’s ideals and our reality can be hard to sit with — and I say that with full respect for the intellectual weight he brings.

Lastly, I added Screen Musings, a newsletter born out of my love for film history and theory. The intersection of film’s mythmaking power and the way society conceives itself still fascinates me. It’s also fun — it brings me back to a simpler time when my mom and I would watch corny Disney movies, high-concept summer blockbusters, unrealistic romantic comedies, and the occasional spy drama or period piece. Watching and sharing movies is an American pastime — more than books, and arguably more than baseball (rage in the comments if you must).

This blog started as a kind of refuge — a space where I could process the darker side of my idealism colliding with the political cynicism I saw on both sides of the spectrum. I’ve taken extended breaks from writing and had periods of intense productivity. But through it all, the audience has stayed — and continued to grow. In a country that often dismisses intellectual work and prioritizes superficiality, I’m grateful for readers and subscribers who still value rigor, curiosity, and care. Even if it’s a smaller community than other writers with bigger platforms, it's an affirmation that this perspective still has a place.

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When Ink Becomes Blood

Last week, I had a plan.

I was going to start the week by analyzing soft power as a foreign policy concept and then reflect on Network (1976) as a film that diagnoses the commodification of news media and the transformation of television into a manipulative filter for feeling the world. Then I’d pivot to Wood’s depiction of early America — a society growing more democratic, but also unmoored from social grace, where a kind of romanticized crudeness and admiration for greed and violence defined the era (and our own). The week would end with a dual film reflection on 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, analyzing how Warner Brothers’ talkies of the Great Depression served as a kind of soft power for America’s emerging continental empire. It’s a layered spectacle for a nation unraveling from within.

But something happened after I wrote about Network.
I hit a wall.

That piece brought up far more than I expected — a flood of grief, rage, and fatigue tied to the last several years. I remembered the breakdown of my family unit, the changes in my body that left me unable to do what I once could, the pandemic that made half of grad school and my first full-time research job fully virtual. I remembered what it felt like to monitor Fox News day in and day out, watching it rot the minds of people, turning them against vaccines, against reality, and into defenders of a man whose administration ended in an insurrection most of this country still refuses to reckon with.

I remembered the critical race theory panic, the bans on books, the classroom censorship, and how all of it made talking about my history more dangerous, more disorienting. I remembered how easily idiocy and mediocrity are rewarded in this country — how merit, truth, and moral clarity are often sidelined by slick branding and myopic culture war framing.

So I couldn’t write anymore.

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I’ll return this week with more articles — but I can’t promise one from each newsletter. Maybe it’ll be one, maybe two, maybe three. My writing is deeply tied to what I’ve lived through — and sometimes, that makes it hard to push through. This isn’t just analysis. It’s memory, grief, reflection, and a desire to understand what I survived.

Thank you for reading.

Thank you for staying.

And thank you for believing that this kind of work, whatever its pace, still matters.