I'm Back

Re-booting Social Studies

Hi, hopefully you still remember who I am. At one point you signed up for this Substack, but I’ve had it on ice for about a year and a half while I collaborated with Michael Shellenberger on Public.

Now I’m bringing it back.

For a long time now, I’ve been planning to write a book about social disorder: street addiction, untreated mental illness, and crime. My time at Public has been great, but I’m stepping aside from it so that I can do the research the book requires. I also happen to have a baby coming any day now, so this seemed to be the right time to make that pivot. My colleagues over there are sad to see me go, but they get it.

While I work on the book, I want to continue writing and publishing, so I’m bringing this Substack back from the dead. I don’t have a specific plan for what I’ll be writing here, beyond continuing with many of the topics I wrote about before putting this site on pause, probably with more original reporting on the street addiction crisis in the Bay Area and beyond, and also probably with more video content. I’m actually very happy not to have a specific plan. For me, Social Studies has always been a place where I could tinker with new ideas and experiment with different kinds of writing and reporting instead of finding a formula. I’m very excited to get back to that.

For those of you who were paying subscribers to Social Studies, I have now unpaused billing, so you’ll start getting charged again. This is your heads-up on that, in case you’ve changed your mind about me or your financial situation is different. Naturally, you should cancel your subscription if you no longer think it’s worth it.

But I hope that most of you will stick around and that some of you who are currently signed up for free emails might consider supporting the project as a paid subscriber. Obviously, the more bag I bring in from this Substack, the more time I can spend making it excellent.

Very excited to get back into it.