The first essay always lives at the intersection of “what’s worth saying” and “what won’t take forever to write,” and that intersection is smaller than it looks. So this is a placeholder, on purpose. The real first essay can wait until I’ve earned it.

I’ve kept a list, for a few years now, of essays I’ve meant to write. Most of them never made it past the second paragraph. The ones that did make it through were almost never the ones at the top of the list — they were the ones that wouldn’t leave me alone.

What I’m slowly learning is that the topic isn’t really the input. The input is the unease. An essay is something I write to find out what I think about a thing, and the things I think I have something to say about usually don’t yield much. The things that nag me, that I keep coming back to in conversation, that I want someone to disagree with so I can find out what I actually believe — those are the ones.

So this site is partly a commitment device. By having a place that has the shape of an essay site, I’m hoping to make it slightly more embarrassing to leave the place empty. We’ll see if that works.

More to come.