The First Edition of a Very Public Experiment.
Season's Greetings, everybody!
Thanks very much for signing up for my mailing list. I’m thrilled to start exploring a medium that seems well-suited for the type of work I’ve always dreamed of creating.
Longform writing has long been a passion of mine. But only after my Jesus is King listening party write-up received a bit of buzz a few months ago did I seriously consider that there might exist a group of people - other than the grading T.A.’s hired by my college professors - who would voluntarily read my writing on a regular basis.
I hardly expect smooth sailing, and can’t even say for sure what this will look like a few months from now, but here’s what you can generally expect every time you get a new email from me:
Carefully-crafted write-ups that promise to be engaging, accessible, user-friendly, informative, and (hopefully) a little bit funny
Something in each piece that enhances your knowledge and/or appreciation of one or more of the following areas:
music, comedy, writing, advertising, social media, basketball, Kanye West
Exploration into formats like song/book recommendations, reviews of albums and comedy specials, and interviews with thoughtful people who do interesting things
Advice on how to get a girl to like youthe occasional technology-related workflow shortcut1Bill Simmons-esque mailbags, where I’ll publicly answer the compelling questions I hope to receive from YOU lot, if that’s the sort of engagement we end up building here.
...Sounds pretty neat, right? Presently, I don’t know of anyone else doing this type of thing (for free, at least). But as a big fan of folks like Simmons, Ben Falk, and Kirk Hamilton, I’m inspired to create the intersection of their spaces myself - or at least until one of them hires me ;).
So thanks in advance to all of you for accompanying me on this journey from day one. I’m eager to see where this goes from here. My gut tells me this is the start of something awesome.
Lastly - a special thank you to the people who commented nice things on my reddit post a few months ago. I reached out to the dozen or so commenters who indicated they read the entire 10-page write-up, as I wanted to personally invite each of them to be a part of this mailing list. The idea that my thoughts have the potential to strike a chord with a complete stranger is the single biggest motivation behind this project. I’m pretty sure every single one of them subscribed, so thanks again. One final shout-out to reddit user /u/Shaunosaurus, for keeping me humble:
A part of me wants to counter /u/Shaunosaurus by arguing that actually, it’s fairly impressive for a single person to convincingly portray an entire high school, but that’s neither here nor there…
Yeah, yeah... enough babbling Mr. Kanye Man,
where’s the C O N T E N T ? !
Since the majority of you only know my writing from the aforementioned Jesus Is King stuff (and if you missed my thoughts on the album itself, HERE is a link to that), I thought it would make sense to officially start this off with a piece on the new Jesus Is Born album, which was just released on Christmas Day by the Sunday Service Choir.
I’m excited to send out that deep-dive sometime next week, and am hopeful you’ll have it in your inbox by Thursday, Jan. 2, or as my grandpa calls it – “Jesus’ Bris”.
In conclusion, the incongruence of a hitherto non-homogeneous collective will hereafter be obfuscated under the guise of humanitarian slogans, and I will discover which one of you stole all the reusable drinking straws from my gluten-free cafeteria.
Sincerely,
A Pretentious High School Who Just Learned How to Write an Exposition Essay
(a.k.a. David Zucker)
Like how to do that fancy strikethrough! (Mac Users - Command-Shift-X on a Google Doc)