A few rationalist-adjacent friends have told they treat my newsletters as link posts, and largely ignore the content itself (thanks, guys). I get it, gonzo party journalism isn't everybody's cup of tea.
But most people love a good, long link post. So, I wanted to run an experiment.
I counted, and there are 48 hyperlinks in my most recent post alone, linking to all manner of content. Here's a quick sample, chosen at random:
- An excerpt from C.S. Lewis's A Preface to Paradise Lost, regarding ceremony and religious ritual,
- An analysis of the realism of Bruce Willis's acting in Die Hard's barefoot-glass scene,
- A really good yoga studio, if you happen to live in NYC,
- An obscure Chet Baker record,
- A kabbalistic Hayim Nahman Bialik poem,
- A McMansion Hell post,
- And finally, the Raven Paradox.
So, read my newsletter, linked above. But skip the content, if you wish—you're allowed to!—and go directly for the links! Pretend the title is, I dunno, September Links, or something similar. The links themselves are highlighted in an eye-searing neon green, against a black background, and white text. You can't miss them:
Some Vim wizard could probably show me how to grep
my markdown files and spit them out as a bulleted list, to published as-is. Or perhaps I can ask ChatGPT to do it. If there's enough interest, I'll give it a try with my next post.
But still, two posts, for the price of one! That's not bad...
time spent summarizing each link to establish why I should spend my time on it is too high for high-branching posts that don't have technical explanations, imo. but then, I'm the kinda gal who posts the kind of linkposts I do here, which don't seem to be your kind of linkposts at all. Nevertheless, I imagine we both suffer from this same trivial inconvenience problem trying to get people to pick from the links in order to find the ones they want to spend time with. Trying to beat search engines at their own game is hard...