Hello everyone, I have an important update to share.
The Upheaval has now reached the point where it makes sense to begin adding paid subscriber features as the community here continues to grow. Starting today, you can subscribe to receive:
Full access to all posts moving forward, including subscriber only essays
Exclusive interviews and other bonus content
Access to reader threads, which will become a subscriber-only forum
And more to come!
Pricing will be $6/month or $55/year. There is also a special, purely voluntary Founding Patron option, which gains you all of the above plus my undying gratitude. For those who aren’t ready to subscribe yet, some content will remain outside the paywall.
But as a big thanks to all of you who have helped me grow The Upheaval from an audience of literally zero to thousands of readers in just over six months, the first 500 of you that subscribe within the next week will get 20% off for life. If you also choose an annual subscription that adds up to a discount of nearly 40% off 12 months at the full rate.
I do need to be clear about one thing, however. The advice that one consistently receives about writing on Substack is to publish at least once a week. But my experience of when I’ve tried to force myself to rush to get out content for the sake of delivering content has not been positive. Not only have I found that this leads to inferior writing, but it also encourages quick-takes based on the latest drama in the news cycle. That’s the kind of thing I’d really like to avoid writing too much of here – and that I suspect many of you (like myself) already find yourselves reading enough of elsewhere.
I started The Upheaval to think deeply about the nature of the revolutions upending our world while also rediscovering the joy of independent writing, and my goal here remains to produce well-considered and thought-provoking original writing with an ambitiously global scope. So what that means is that, with the exception of recurring reader threads, my official publication schedule is going to be: “when it’s done.”
That said, I do aim to make sure you are well-supplied with plenty of interesting content, and can assure you that I have far more ideas for new essays and reviews than I have time left for in the next year. Here’s a preview of just some of the upcoming pieces I’m excited about:
Part 3 of the series on China’s and our upheaval
Gnostics, Anti-Gnostics, and our Reality War
On the Comfort of Reading History in Trying Times
Lessons From the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Complex Systems and Civilizational Decay
Do Young People Realize Their Chances of Living Through WWIII?
What we Should Probably Learn From the “General Crisis” of the 17th Century
2,500 Years of Chinese Wisdom on Living Under Shitty Governments
The Elite Legitimation Crisis, Populist Revival, and the French Elections
The Taiping Rebellion, the Thirty Years War, and Today
The Paradox of Counter-Cultural Conservatism
What We’d Gain From Recovering Renaissance Humanism
What Jordan Peterson, Confucius, and John Adams Have in Common
Plus several interviews and reviews of very intriguing forthcoming books
But, ultimately, the only way I’m going to have time to write all this and more is to spend less time on my day jobs – and to do that I need to take a leap of faith and count on your support. So please, if you’ve enjoyed joining me on this exploration so far, go ahead and subscribe today!