Some of our best essays come from people who don’t consider themselves writers: Frank Lloyd Wright was an architect, Carl Sagan an astronomer, John Muir an environmentalist. Writing wasn’t their main income, and they didn’t write to be writerly; they wrote to make sense of their mind, their culture, and their role in it. What makes the essay the ultimate folk medium is its brevity. While it might take you 1,000 hours to write a book, you can write an essay and publish it on Substack today. The reader-to-writer pipeline is slippery. You can probably measure a culture’s health by its total number of active essay writers. When this number is high it means that we’re synchronizing across silos. When this number is low (ie: ~95% lurkers), we become alienated and warped.