Legal disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed on this site are those of P.W. Coulson and/or the bylined author. They do not represent the views or opinions of people, institutions, or organizations with which the author may or may not be associated in a personal, professional, or educational capacity. Seriously.
Just to give a sense of where I’m coming from
It’s been said that nobody starts a blog (or, I guess, a Substack) without wanting to share it. But I don’t intend to promote myself here: I have no instinct for self-promotion, and every time I’ve actively tried to promote myself I’ve ended up having a massive guilt attack over how badly I must have annoyed everyone.
Thus, rather than personal brand-building, my intention here is to force myself to be more careful in my writing by offering it, at least hypothetically, for public consumption. For the time being, I won’t have anything behind a paywall. If you particularly liked something I wrote and want to send me a couple bucks, my Venmo is [at]PW-Coulson. If you really, really need to contact me and it’s a genuine emergency (e.g., legal trouble), use pwcoulson at substack dot com.
This is really all you need to know, and you can stop reading here if you’d like. On the other hand, if you really, really want to know why I started this:
I used to have a private blog. I started it in the late spring of 2020, when I was unemployed and miserable and angry all the time. I needed a place to get things out of my head, and the private blog served that purpose well. But on a private blog you are answerable only to yourself. It doesn’t matter if you write something lazy or careless or incoherent, unless you’re the type of person who’d lose sleep over whether one of your diary entries had a misplaced modifier. I am not.
“Semi-public writings” means writings—I don’t want to call these things “essays” or “articles,” nor do I want to call them “posts,” so the awkward “writings” will have to do—that I could, hypothetically, be held to answer for. By not actively promoting Semi-Public Writings, and by using a slight pseudonym (I don’t go by “P.W.” in real life), I’ve avoided linking myself inextricably with my writings. But there’s just enough of a connection that someone who knows me in real life could see something I’ve written here, know that I wrote it, and then ask me about it in person. My goal is to write things that are polished and coherent enough that the obvious questions—e.g. “What the fuck did you mean by that?”—will answer themselves.
I will stick mostly to topics that I already know a little bit about. I won’t, for example, discuss epidemiology, geopolitics, or options trading, to name three things that everyone (including me!) has pretended to understand within the past few years. I’ll try to avoid saying too much that is unoriginal or derivative or hot-take-y, which, if I’m being honest, means I probably won’t write about politics. The discourse tends to move so quickly that whatever opinion on a specific political issue I might have will have already been articulated, in much better terms, by someone else. If I do end up writing about something that was a subject of a flurry of Discourse, it will probably be a few weeks or months after the fact.
(On the other hand, nothing on here is intended to be academic writing. Though I will often rely on academic sources [e.g. journal articles], I won’t be trying to situate myself in an existing academic conversation.)
