Critical Devotion
New ideas about modern life
The critic and the enthusiast are not opposites. The best version of each is the same person—people who have been changed by what they’re writing about and want to account for why.
I’m attracted to cultural figures at points of fracture or contradiction. I’m fascinated by sincerity under pressure or in spectacle. I’m interested in emotional seriousness and transcendence; in searchers and explorers. I know that modernity is spiritually disorienting, but I love the time that we live in. In between the critiques, you will find me to be fundamentally optimistic.
This Substack will have range: film, music, and books, as well as finance, current events, and politics. The connective tissue isn’t a subject; it’s a way of approaching one. Some things that look simple turn out to be intricate. Some things that look intricate turn out to be evasions of something simple.
Most people have strong views about how the world works and a nagging sense that finance—one of the pillars holding it up—is mostly opaque to them. I hope to close that gap.
Contemporary discourse around almost everything—from canonical albums to sports to presidential candidates—has a tendency to reward the expected response over the true one. I’ve never spent an hour straight on twitter, which I think contaminates the mind. If you do read something here that sounds like the latest viral cliché, I promise that the idea came to me organically. I’m not here to repeat what I know you have already heard. Thus, the presumptuous tagline.
When I write about politics or finance, my greatest inspiration will usually be the inadequacy of the standard binary framework. Having said that, you won’t find false equivalencies or a performance of open-mindedness. I have views, and I’ll state them. But I aspire to have my views changed; I hope to learn from the comments. I am not interested in making everyone happy, though I hope to make some people happy in ways they didn’t anticipate.
There will be moments of enthusiasm that border on the embarrassing, and moments of criticism that may seem unfair until they don’t. The register will move around. That’s intentional. The same mind that finds something genuinely moving in a forty-year-old country song can find something genuinely alarming in a modern financial instrument.
The name means what it says. Devotion without criticism is sentimentality. Criticism without devotion is a waste of everyone’s time.