I'm delighted to say that I've been awarded a second Emergent Ventures grant, to write a book about reading great literature.
My working title is: The Common Reader's Quest
Here are some early thoughts.
Some guides like The Western Canon that describe the books and writers, and some like How to Read Literature Like a Professor gives a simple overview of some critical ideas (like irony and symbolism). My aim is different.
I want to introduce the authors and works while explicating some key critic…
It’s crazy that Substack doesn’t have a price for a la carte posts. Like, if you really want to see just one. $1 would make sense for almost all pubs (that’s high, but fine occassionally). Even $2? (kinda crazy, but okay). It’s a new line of income for writers and a way for readers to see that one thing. Plus… it’s already go our payment information. Why not?
Corollary: sex workers are heroes, but their patrons are mysoginists, losers or both
So I liked this post a lot, and I guess I will trust Venkatesh Rao that the most important philosophers are the ones you disagree with in a challenging way.
I've long been a kneejerk technophile who finds his skepticism about technology growing by the day, so I found myself nodding along with much of what Crawford had to say.
But he really…
Problem: quickly gets to be expensive if you like several writers
Other problems: Many writers would like to offer discretionary pricing in order to take advantage of demand elasticity.
Solution: Allow writers to opt-in to some kind of amorphous group discount.
Say… if you sub 10 pubs that have opted-in, get a 20% discount on all of them.
Advantage: this encourages more subscriptions, gets writers more readers and more readers who are paying something
Disadvantage: Might cause near term revenue slump but I suspect long term it would be great for everyone