Well, it started out, strangely enough, as a fragmentary paragraph in a book review I wrote for a magazine writing class at Columbia before my father died. It was just an aside about what it was like talking to father in his hospital room to convey a certain kind of heartbreak that I look for in fiction. My professors encouraged me to expand it into its own essay, so I wrote it up to the point of the drive-through coffee shack.

And then I was motivated to finish the essay in the aftermath of my father’s death as a way to bring it a little clarity and finality. I think I started a week after getting back from California. Writing out my experiences longform usually proves the best way for me to express them in a complete way and it takes them off my mind. It’s a bit like saving them on an external drive.

And, lastly, I often wish I could give people the final draft of themselves beforehand. I gave my father what I could (he got to read what I’d written at Columbia), but this is my attempt at a final draft of what it was like to know my father.

Probably my recent favorite was Before The Storm by Rick Perlstein, about the 1964 presidential election. What really impressed me was Perlstein managed to be critical of the early conservative movement as a writer observing them from the left, while also writing about conservatives with incredible empathy and pathos (and being scathingly funny to boot).

A close second was Rise of the Warrior Cop by Radley Balko, a history of police militarization. Balko has a tremendous restraint in his prose and a wonderful, dry sense of humor, and the book is also just a staggering document.

That’s an exceedingly tough one. No answer I could give would be fair or complete. Let me just single out two who did a lot with a little:

My professor Samir Patel explained how to choose details for a story in a manner that profoundly impacted the notes I take and way I write. It also retroactively made sense of other advice I’d received over the years. And I don’t think he’d even recall doing it, because he did so offhandedly in a sentence or two, in between other pieces of wonderful advice.

Bob Baker. He was an L.A. Times editor who wrote a book called Newsthinking. The entire book is worth reading, but in one paragraph he said some writers try to cram their whole thesis into every sentence, afraid that a reader won’t bear with them to the end. That radically changed how I write and how I feel while I write. He also made journalism sound exciting, so I have him to thank for a change in aspiration.

An article I wrote about the community of collectors and enthusiasts revolving around the RMS Titanic was published by the Saturday Evening Post. Being able to hold a copy of the magazine in my hand and see the by-line for my first big publication brought me a tremendous feeling of vindication after a hard year.

Put off working on my upcoming projects. Last year felt like such a bust — a professor of mine called it ‘suspended animation’ when we last spoke -— that I started off the year really raring to make 2021 as fruitful as 2020 was fallow. And, I’m finding that I had it all backwards last year by putting things off in the hopes that I’d be in a better mood to do them later — waiting until I felt more up to a challenge before I went seeking one just left me feeling unfulfilled.

Giving myself a lot of goals to meet and projects to get off the ground before I feel ready instead is actually helping me feel significantly better.

If your listeners enjoy this essay, I hope they will take a look at two other projects in which I’m involved:

The New Junto on Medium, which is a collaboration between some friends of mine and I who are hoping to write essays on a broad range of topics.

And my personal blog, The Republic of Letters on Medium and Substack, where I’m planning to post essays relating to politics, policy, and philosophy.