Dear Readers of RIDE/DRIVE,

I’m excited to announce the launch of a new online magazine that I am editing with my friend, the novelist Jordan Castro: it’s called The CLUNY Journal, and it will live right here on Substack.

It is a multidisciplinary journal featuring essays, poetry, encounters, and practical wisdom from some of the best writers of our time…

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The UK-based magazined DAZED just ran a piece this week titled “In 2024, everyone is yearning—but for what?” It’s about the Gen Z trend of talking about one’s vague “yearning”, which has become something of a meme. This was all news to me when the author of the piece, Dominique Sisley, reached out to me for comment. The article ran yesterday, with a small portion of my commentary on it included. I’m sharing the rest of what I said via email to her below. The part that is actually quoted in Dominique’s article I’ve pulled out and put in a block quote.

You’ll also notice that this newsletter has the same name, but new branding. I hope you like it. Everyone should know the joy of driving a stick shift well—I didn’t learn until I was in my late 20’s, when I learned on some icy mountain roads in Italy and then got over-confident and nearly sent me and my future wife over the side of a mountain in the backroads of Slovenia. It was a skill worth mastering, though. (Okay, let me be honest: I haven’t mastered it yet.) The effort was all worth it, though. So I’m glad the stick shift made its way into the art…

Young people on the internet are talking a lot about longing, or yearning, for something right now. Do you believe that there is something distinctly mournful about this time we’re living through, or do you think these feelings are no different from what we’ve always felt as humans?

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Dear Readers: my apologies for my hiatus. My wife Claire and I welcomed our first child, a daughter—Rome Frances Cecilia Burgis—on October 26. We’re all healthy and doing well. In the lead-up to Rome’s birth, I was completely focused on getting ready for my life to change fo…

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On November 3 this year, I’ll be hosting the first ever NOVITATE Conference at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. This year’s theme is “Be Not Conformed”.

My goal is to bring the ideas of René Girard far outside of the walls of academia and to make NOVITATE a model of what generative, interdisciplinary conversation can be. There will …

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Author Jonathan Franzen has written about his love of bird-watching for a very long time. Recently, he published this wonderful essay in the New Yorker (by far my top read from last week) on “The Problem of Nature Writing”, which is drawn from a collection titled Spark Birds.

There are many interesting things in Franzen’s essay. He compares the praise …

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The image above is one of thousands of variations of the “IQ distribution” bell curve meme, which have become popular online in the past few years to poke fun at “midwits” (people falling within one standard deviation of the mean)—and to make various observations about the ‘horseshoe’ phenomenon, in which people at opposite ends of the spectrum come to the same conclusions for entirely different reasons. (Take, for example, the idea that people on the extreme left and right of the above distribution might say “I believe in God”, but perhaps with very different justifications.)

These memes have also been used to drive discourse around what is “normie” (what falls in that middle band or two) and what is not. There has been a strange fixation on what is cool or uncool, what is normal and not normal—especially for esoteric knowledge that “few” understand, which I think probably speaks to the general gnostic turn that our society seems to have taken. A divinity doesn’t exist that can save you; but you can at least save yourself from the fate of the masses.

I find the IQ version of the bell curve meme to be distasteful and offensive—and not only because many variations of it originated in subcultures (for instance, on 4chan) where racism and disparagement of others is common, but also because they represent a scientific and deterministic worldview that is becoming very normalized. And if the meme represents what people actually think (and I think it goes), then this is a worldview that is lacking a vertical axis whereby people change according to principles that are not biologically or socially determined.

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Before I show up to speak at your conference or be on a panel, I need to know every other person who will be there, who they voted for in the past three elections, review a list of their last 10,000 tweets, and know what they think and talk about in private and in the innermost chamber of their conscience.

I’m kidding, of course. But this is not far off from the truth of most gatherings, rituals of endorsement, and many forms of association, in general—and it’s a truth that is making everyone implicit experts in game theory, so that they don’t run afoul of the reputational laws governing the minor social universes of which we are all a part.

Rare is the person who writes a book blurb unconcerned about which other people are writing blurbs for the same book and what those others have to say. I’m not just talking about managing reputational risk, lest you accidentally endorse something that someone with a muddy past endorses (yes, the ol’ neo-nazi snake that may be lurking beneath ever potential rug these days) but rather the charade that must occur as each party to the endorsement endeavor dances around the same fire pit making sure that the other faces they see are safe, are friends, are comrades, are ideologically pure.

What this has done to our culture of ideas and of art—both the creation of and the consumption of (and of course the two things go hand-in-hand)—is nothing short of cultural anorexia and bulimia, which puts people into a psychological state that is difficult to escape.

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First, can we all just confess: what’s a book you like to talk about but have never read? I have many. One is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Sure, I’ve tried to read it—I’ve read many parts of it, even—but I haven’t even come close to having “read” it. Yet that has never stopped me from talking about it.

I love to talk about books I haven’t read. There…

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The matrix below is from Peter Thiel’s bestselling book Zero to One. It describes different stances that a person can take about the future.

• Indefinite Pessimism: “An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it.” Your typical Doomer.

• Indefinite Optimism: The future will be better than the past, but the indefinite optimism doesn’t know how, exactly. He might buy Index Funds, or go all in on ‘progress’, however loosely defined that term may be.

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Today…

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I taught a course last semester that incorporated a 3-week virtual reality lab into the curriculum. My undergrad students received Meta Quest II VR headsets and immersed themselves in a VR experience of their choice, as long as it met a few criteria: they needed to find it engaging and educational; the experience needed to make implicit claims about the…

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Recently I came across a project named GripTape, based in NYC, that gives 14-19 year old students the opportunity to learn something they want to learn, and take full responsibility for the entire experience, from start to finish.

Accepted students take part in a 10-week challenge under the guidance of a “Champion” (whom they meet with weekly), and they…

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"Just following up here” is always a dreaded email to receive. No one likes it. It may be slightly better than “per my last email”, but not by much.

The question I’d like to pose today, though, is simply this: when can the follow-up be particularly useful and effective? When is it necessary? And most importantly: what is your philosophy of the follow-up…

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Podcasts are not like normal conversations.

I was stunned when I mentioned on Twitter a couple of months ago that most conversations that I am lucky enough to have in my backyard over a beer with friends (or new acquaintances) are far better than any conversation I’ve ever had on a podcast.

Maybe I’m just a bad podcaster. But I suspect there’s more going…

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I once read a book on contemplative prayer that had me convinced, by the end, that I was a contemplative.

The passive reception of information is dangerous. It can give us the illusion that we know something—or worse, that we’re already doing something—when we haven’t even begun.

We also don’t usually realize the ways in which books change us, or chang…

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The texts.com tool is a gem of a find by Andrew Wilkinson. I wish I’d known about this app a lot sooner. (See his tweet about it, below.)

It’s funny that there is now a multi-billion dollar industry of apps and products that simply attempt to help us simplify our lives (yes, the double ‘simple’ is intentional there)…and often fail to do so…

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This is the place to share your “No” porn—and I’m also going to submit a challenge to you.

I recently submitted an essay that I know is one of the most important things I’ve ever written…to at least 20 different outlets—and I have received 20 straight no’s.

There may be some complex reasons for that (including political ones), but I’ve gotten to the poin…

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Many people know that Jeff Bezos banned powerpoint presentations at Amazon; not many truly know why: he read this paper by Edward R. Tufte (and you should too). PowerPoint—or rather the culture that spawned it—may truly be evil.

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I’ve never done this before, but I ran across an article this week on family/emotional systems that I feel is so important that I’m dedicating this newsletter simply to sharing it. It has everything to do with the theme of RIDE/DRIVE. It concerns the emotional systems embedded in families and other systems, and how people can begin to slide over into th…

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Do you know how much of what you've read has been written by someone other than the person whose name is on the work? You can’t, really. But I can tell you this: it’s a lot higher than you might think. Publishing kayfabe is real.

(For those who don’t know: kayfabe is a word that originated in professional wrestling to describe the portrayal of fake staged relationships or competition/rivalries as real; another way to think of kayfabe is “the protection of industry secrets”—in the world of professional wrestling, nobody is supposed to know quite what is real and what is not, or how these things are decided.)

I’ve learned more about the ghost-writing industry in the past few years than I ever wanted to know. When I signed a contract to write Wanting, I wasn’t prepared for the first question several people casually asked me:

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