The New Yorker piece on the flood of new fiction is good, but I feel the same about policy articles. Most blogs should be a tweet, most articles a blog post, and most books a blog post. And still there would be too much to read.
I have many policy preferences (all of which are, I assure you, the inevitable logical consequence of whatever is leading the news cycle today), and yet I am reluctant to add to the flood.
I mean, “democratic innovation person favours democratic innovation”, “European social democrat favours greater European solidarity”, “person worried about climate change thinks we should do more on climate change”
“Extracted from my forthcoming book, Democratic European innovation for a fair climate change transition (590pp, €100).” Not only have you read it all before, you don’t even have time to read it.
And, I will not lie, I often put an article in the “skip” pile because I know the position of the person who wrote it and I assume it’s just arguing that position based on some current news hook.
And yet … I feel like if I *don’t* put something out there, I’m not contributing to the debate on the issues I care about, and I don’t have time to do something really beautiful or crafted that I would be proud of as a piece of writing…
It’s Publish or Perish: Policy DLC pack. Unanswerable I suppose, unless I start doing policy interventions as freeform dance expression.
Originally posted as a thread of 7 tweets on Twitter on 26 October 2021. View the original thread.