My 2022 on Substack... and my plan for 2023
A few thoughts about my transition to... what is this, anyway? A newsletter?!
Dear friends, relatives, colleagues, and others who will deny any connection to me if I am ever cancelled:
At the end of 2021, I was teaching at the Fletcher School, writing Spoiler Alerts for the Washington Post, and tweeting at the usual disconcerting rate. A lot has happened since then! I’m still teaching at Fletcher but everything else has been — and forgive me for using the word but it seems apropos — disrupted.
Drezner’s World has only been around for a few months, but the close of the calendar year seems like a suitable moment to take that stock of how it’s been going and how it is going to go.
On how it’s been going: Drezner’s World is on pace for 3,000 subscribers before the end of 2022. The number of paying subscribers is approaching 250. I think that’s pretty good all things considering! And by “all things considering” I mean a couple of things:
The decision to launch Drezner’s World just after being informed that the newsletter bubble had popped;
The attempt to promote Drezner’s World just before Twitter — the primary social media platform to advertise this thing — came under new and increasingly bizarre management;
Day job responsibilities weighing me down a bit over the last six weeks;
I’m just starting to figure out what Drezner’s World should be doing.
Let me elaborate on that last item, because it points the way forward.
I have been opining for a public audience for more than twenty years now in one form or another. That writing can be divided into two phases. When I had my eponymous blog (and during most of my years at Foreign Policy), I was blogging. That usually consisted of an excerpt from a mainstream media story or a scholarly article and then my riff on it — or perhaps a reaction to everyone else’s reaction to the story du jour. Those were quick and easy to dash off — back in the day there might have been two to three of those per day.
The second phase of my public writing began toward the end of my time at Foreign Policy and accelerated with Spoiler Alerts at the Washington Post. This was the column phase. I was framing my themes. There were metaphors! There was an awareness on my part that anything less than 650 words was not a real column (also, there were copyeditors who saved my bacon a lot). These took more effort. I began writing them earlier in the day. They were individually better columns, but they took more time to craft.
When I moved to Substack I was not entirely sure what I wanted to do with it beyond “have an outlet where I can opine.” I am pleased with some of the things I have written: my optimistic posts about the state of the country, the state of American political polarization, and the importance of the happy Republican bloc. On the international relations side of the equation, I am feeling confident about my dismissals of technopolarity in general and Elon Musk in particular. Of course, I still got plenty of stuff wrong: contra my expectations, it is possible that Jonathan Chait might actually be right about Trump, for example.
If I’m being honest, however, I have had some difficulty figuring out which of my two styles to use here: my old-school blogging voice or my more polished WaPo voice. I think the answer going forward will be a combination of these two styles of writing: quick hits for everyone and somewhat more column-y posts for everyone, and a tranche of columns for subscribers only.
At least, that is the expected plan. If 2022 should teach us anything, it is that expectations do not always turn into reality. For now, however, thanks to all of you for hopping along for the ride.
Developing in 2023...
You pen great opening lines. The one on your About page had me instantly laughing out loud. I'm listening, and trying to learn from that. I wish you great luck with your substack adventure, but suspect you probably don't need it.
This seems the appropriate place to cast my one little vote on what I'd hope you might focus on here. Fair warning, the topics I prefer tend to be audience killers. This may raise the question, is your blog for intellectual inquiry, or is it a business?
There is a HUGE amount of attention being given to the day to day headlines all over substack and beyond. What I hope to be reading more of is a wider perspective. Some examples...
EXAMPLE: Sooner or later some conflict like the war in Ukraine is going to spin out of control, and then it won't matter who won in Ukraine, because everyone on every side will lose. How do we escape this pattern?
EXAMPLE: I'm all for gun control, more the merrier, but if we got rid of all guns violent men would then just turn their attention to other means of chaos, like arson, poisoning the water supply, driving their cars in to crowds etc.
Whether the chaos is local or on the global stage, how do we shift our attention from the day to day details of particular circumstances to the source of almost all human chaos, violent men? When do we get around to focusing on the actual problem??
Dan, I've been a follower since 2008 (your old FP reading list--great, BTW--on your blog. You were also the first person I saw point out FiveThirtyEight, way back then), and was flat-out psyched that you started this. You, Heather Cox Richardson and Tim Snyder are on my must-read list. Wish you the greatest of success with this.