Weekly Review, 12-24-23

12-24-23

Remy Bazerque

wrote an interesting piece on finding things to read and finding readers on Substack. Among other things, he said, "Substack’s core designs basically bury newcomers. When you open the app and go ‘explore,’ the leader boards make sure to funnel everything to the top 10 accounts in each category." I definitely feel that. It was much easier finding a community of, say, environmental historians on Twitter a few years ago than it is on Substack today. OTOH, Twitter just pointed to things outside itself, while Substack contains the content I’m seeking. So if they can improve my ability to find it (and be found) I may end up well ahead.

12-22-23

Andrew Smith

wrote a post on Quipus that was brief but interesting. There's a YouTube video on the topic that I've saved to watch later -- haven't got to it yet, but it sounds like people are making progress understanding the types of information that could be stored and communicated using these devices.

Ruairí Nolan

explained why his posts have dried up a bit lately. I totally understand how jarring a career change can be! I do hope that if able, he'll continue in some way to publish on Irish radicalism and especially on the United Irishmen. This is a selfish hope, of course, because it will inform my own interest in transatlantic radicalism. It sounds like the time off has reinvigorated his interest in posting, so I’m looking forward to seeing more.

I upgraded to a paid subscription of

Jillian Hess

’s Noted in order to read a post about Ben Frankilin. This comes at a time when I'm finding myself gradually canceling subscriptions to Substacks that are focused on contemporary news issues such as the various wars currently raging, or even the global assaults on free speech. This is not because I'm not concerned or don't have opinions on these issues. But I have work to do and reading people's arguments on one side or the other of who is to blame does not seem to be helping me get it done. Especially when in many cases it seems to me that people are just expressing their opinions for the sake of generating views, rather than because they have something new to contribute. Sherman Alexie apparently said something recently, along the lines of, "is this really what we want to spend our time discussing?" The implication was, I suspect, that a lot of the people who are making such a big issue of a dozen or so Nazis on Substack may be more interested in using the issue to amplify their own voices than anything else. In any case, I hope Substack remains a place where people can find and post the writing that interests them, and ignore what does not.

12-21-23

Naomi Kanakia

said some interesting things about cutting ourselves some slack and also about the Great Books. She also cited a book I hadn't heard of, which I grabbed a copy of, on Kindle. I’ve read most of it and it’s a bit mean-spirited but it did remind me that a historian I knew when I was in grad school,

Tim Lacy

, wrote a book about Adler and the Great Books years ago. I asked my library to “ILL” me a copy.

12-17-23 Andrew at

Goatfury Writes

posted some thoughts about what makes something a book. Beautiful photo of the Trinity College Library in Dublin. Personally, I find it interesting that the ebooks I make in Pressbooks are in some ways much more like scrolls. It take some thought to decide how to organize chapters and sections to get the effect I want. But there's something to be said for being deliberate and not just accepting the organizational structures that previous technologies afforded.

Henry Oliver

did a "Year in Review" post for the Common Reader. It mentions a bunch of things I want to look into. Funny, how one thing leads to another.

In a post about the recent "Nazis on Substack" bruhaha,

Mike Hind

suggested we might want to take the wind out of this argument by simply ignoring it and getting on with what we want to read and write on Substack. I agree; I had already unsubscribed from the blow-hard who wrote the original attack. Seems like kind of a d##k move to go ahead and get thousands of subscribers on Substack and then try to break it for everybody else.

12-16-23

Jason Steinhauer

posted about the Netherlands and claimed the Dutch are the second largest ag. producers in the world after the US. I responded: "I’m not sure what this means? I thought the world’s 5 leading agricultural producers (in value produced in 2020) were China ($912 billion), India ($433b), The US ($378b), Brazil ($254b), and Indonesia ($103b). I did see a Washington Post article that said the Dutch were the second largest exporter of ag. products in 2022 after the US. But there’s a big difference between production and export, which probably deserves exploration." I can’t find the original post now, but I think both points are relevant.