Hitting pause for a month!
A brief programming note.
Dear subscribers,
I hope everyone had an excellent Christmas and New Year! I’m afraid I am starting the year with some news – neither good nor bad. Exactly neutral news.
Specifically, I’ve made the decision to pause my paid newsletter for exactly one month, starting today.
The reason is intensely boring. Nothing life-changing is happening. I have neither difficult personal circumstances nor have I been offered a peerage.1 But over the last year I’ve slightly over-committed to another work project that I haven’t been able to spend enough time on. It has been gnawing away at me, and now I need to get it finished.
The challenge with running a newsletter is that it is – correctly – my number one priority. I want to ensure I’m producing a good product and giving subscribers enough value. That requires a constant stream of blazing hot takes.2 So it means that everything else is at risk of falling by the wayside.
So for the next month, subscriptions will be paused while I get that other project finished.
The good news is that existing paid subscribers will not lose out – your subscription will be extended by a month. So if your subscription was due to renew in January, it will now renew in February when I’m back to normal. You don’t have to do anything – it should all happen automatically on Substack.
The other good news is that The Abundance Agenda podcast will continue (though, excitingly, with a new name). That’s because it’s a more easily managed time commitment. Martin and I will be back in your ears as planned on the 12th of January.
And I am going to reserve the right to publish in January if there’s something that really, really demands my opinion. I may also have a guest post or two in the meantime.
But other than that, I’ll speak to you properly, at slightly punishing essay-length again, in February.
James
PS: If you haven’t had a chance to read my weirdly personal New Year’s piece, published yesterday, check it out. Mercifully, lots of people seem to be able to relate to it!
I am open to offers here, and am more than willing to revise many of the mean things I’ve previously said about the House of Lords, if need be.
The biggest challenge with the long, sprawling essays I write is that the time and difficulty scales geometrically as the word-count scales arithmetically. This means that writing 2500 words, as I typically do, isn’t twice has hard as writing 1000 – it’s many more times trickier. I know what you’re thinking and I agree – forget the nurses and the soldiers – I’m the real hero here.