Columbia Grads
To those Michiganders who are perusing this blog and wondering, the answer is yes. I am that Will Thomas. Regarding my fundamental inability to update my own blog, I respond: shaddup.
A Blog Falling In The Woods
Alright, let’s start with the obvious. I’m not expecting a lot of readers. I’m sure I’d love to be the next Matthew Yglesias, but not enough to work on cultivating an audience. I’m thinking a dozen, tops.
So then, what is the point? I mean, why not keep a private journal or spend my time fighting crime or something useful? Is a blog a blog if it doesn’t have any readers?
I think so, because the potential of interaction exists. Unlike a personal log, I’m displaying this content for anyone to read. And even if very few people actually discover it, that potentiality carries the same risk/reward of public exposure.
True, I may reasonably expect that content posted in a more public forum will attract more scrutiny, but even there it is logically possible, however improbable, that my writing will never be discovered. Likewise, even if I expect that no one will read this, it is logically possible that someone beyond the standard porn-spammer will encounter this and meet it with a profound “meh.” This forum is public in principle, so it is a blog in practice.
Bored yet?
Beginning School, Beginning A Blog
Perhaps it is the organizer in me, but I have an irresistible (that’s too strong a word) urge to lay out in detail precisely what I intend to accomplish with a new project. Thus, a manifesto of sorts is born for this blog. I can only promise that I support what I say, and that what I intend to do here will very likely change soon (but I’ll be in full support of those changes as well).
This blog is intended in large part to detail my return to academia. Here’s the background. I am a former philosophy major from Columbia University. I’ve spent the past two plus years working as a political journalist for Talking Points Memo and the Huffington Post. And in one week, I’ll be a student again, pursuing a PhD in philosophy as well as a law degree at the University of Michigan. As some of my future colleagues have asked: “Why?”
Thus, the blog. On the one hand, this is a place to exercise questions of philosophy, as well as indulge my lapses into political analysis (covering an election is kind of like being a day trader, so I’m hoping that my distance from the coverage will provide some more interesting perspective). But it also serves to track my journey from a young and flexible medium into one of the oldest — and arguably stalest — traditions in Western thought. In doing so, I hope to leverage the intellectual and technological tricks I have picked from years working on the Web — (i.e.- ADHD and Wikis).
I’ll be the first to admit: I find the idea of going back to school daunting, and I’m pretty sure that I don’t know a thing about the current world of philosophy. I’m hoping at some point that will be an asset, but right now I’m trying not to embarrass myself.
Starting again
I’m trying to get this thing up and running again. Stay tuned.
