Why subscribe?
Between the cracks is about the many ideas which don’t have a home within single disciplines. I’ll write about general and surprising ideas, and the equally surprising thinkers who they first occurred to.
Subscribe if you want to learn more about ideas which are surprisingly general (like nonlinearity, and opportunity cost) or generally surprising (like Benford’s Law, or the true value of friendship).
Readers FAQ:
Why 'Between the cracks'?
I'm exploring ideas which have fallen between the cracks in the rigid model of academia, with its arbitrary compartmentalisation of subjects. Knowing facts counts for little – it’s the connections you make between them that count. Between the cracks will become a collection of connections between ideas from different disciplines – if you've spotted a good one let me know.
Why else should I subscribe?
You should subscribe if you:
give a shit about how the world actually works
appreciate ideas which don't fit neatly into well-defined academic boxes
like careening through idea-space without a map, navigating only by the landmarks you find along the way
About your host:
I'm a Third Culture Kid, born on the cusp of the millenial/gen-Z divide, and I’ve been stumbling through idea mazes my whole life.
The biggest decision I ever made was picking between maths and english in high school (maths). I always wanted to study everything. I chose natural sciences at university because I couldn't devote myself to any one subject. I ended up studying a mix of theoretical physics, applied mathematics, and climate science.
It isn't enough to study diverse ideas, you must also experience them. I try to practice what I preach. To this end, I've done a lot of random shit: from machine learning at a fintech startup, to running customer services in an alpine hotel.
Right now I'm working in corporate strategy by day, and hatching plans by night.
You’ve got to explore before you can exploit. This newsletter is a vehicle to exploit some of my intellectual exploration. Maybe it’ll explore some professional exploits too.
Why this newsletter?
I want to publish more regularly, and a newsletter will force me into a groove. I've kept a blog for a year which has been great, but there's a lot of psychic friction in pushing out posts. The newsletter will be less about polished essays and more about sharing ideas, even if they're only partially baked (at best).
Blogs are nice because they're discoverable - sometimes I get emails from random people who I wouldn't have known existed if not for writing online. But my blog feels sterile. This is partially my fault: I'm reticent to publish much personal information or incomplete ideas. But it's also due to the medium itself.
I can't expect readers who discover xsrus from Google to have the background to understand every post. If I want to be understood (I do), I therefore must spend time elaborating on this background. This is great practice for clear communication, but poor practice for original thinking. I'd rather explore new ideas than explain old ones.
I'd also like to interact more with the people who read my writing (that's you, reader), and a newsletter is the best way to do this.
A newsletter still has friction associated with it – only people who are at least marginally interested in me or my writing will sign up. But this audience restriction hijacks my brain, making it easier to write more colloquially and publish more personal ideas.
Publishing a newsletter feels like talking to my friends, whereas publishing a blog post feels like giving a speech.
The more public-facing writing is, the more sanitised it will be. And the more sanitised it is, the less surprising it will be. I hope that by deliberately having worse literary hygiene than the blog, this newsletter will generally be more surprising.
I will still publish to the blog, but probably less often. The blog will become more about increasing the quality of my thinking and writing. This newsletter is a way of bootstrapping idea throughput - increasing the quantity of ideas I share with the world.
The blog will become a vehicle for persuasive essays, while this newsletter will (hopefully) become a vehicle for generative, shorter posts.
Besides the ideas, what's the point?
My motivation isn't anything like colonising mars or solving climate change (though both would be nice), but just to develop a unique worldview. I write to think.
To do anything ambitious you have to start small. Starting a blog was the first step on this road. One year on, I want to take the next step.
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