About

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You’re welcome to get in touch: applieddivinitystudies@gmail.com
I am slow to reply these days, but do read every email.

If you’re new and unsure where to start, some popular posts are:

• How Substack Became Milquetoast
• Beware the Casual Polymath
• The Moral Foundations of Progress

Or see the posts recommended by people you may know:

• Nadia Eghbal: “one of the few good things to come out of this past year”
• Agnes Callard: “This person cracks me up.”
• Ben Kuhn: “a really good blog post”
• Tyler Cowen: “excellent and thought-provoking”
• Alex Berger: “Interesting”
• Brian Timar: “Read these posts”

More abstractly, much of my work consists of:

• Compiling data to tackle a complex question usually thought of as qualitative
• Applying tools from economics and mechanism design to issues outside their domain
• Opinionated claims against over-valued aspects of the zeitgeist

But really, I just want an outlet to express the thoughts that are personally meaningful to me.

That might sound odd, but it shouldn’t. There’s no reason to relegate complex questions to a purely intellectual domain. Consider the profile of Liu Cixin:

Liu had an epiphany about the concept of a light-year—the “terrifying distance” and “bone-chilling vastness” it implied. Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional.”

My editor is Alexey Guzey, all errors his.