Why I'm Joining Substack

Introducing my newsletter on ABUNDANCE and the future of science, technology, and social connection

Today, I’m leaving The Atlantic after almost 17 years to devote my daily writing life to Substack. It can be convenient, for the purposes of crafting an exciting departure note, to have a dramatic exit story: an explosive fight, a sudden firing, a long-simmering grievance, a shouting match with an editor that ended with me hurling a bunch of leather-bound Thoreau volumes across the open-plan office. That is not the case here.

I’m not leaving because I don’t want to write for The Atlantic. I’m leaving because, after almost two decades at one publication, I want to write for myself. I want to know what my mind is like when I’m writing for this audience of one. And I’m leaving because something happened in the last three months that’s strengthened my conviction that sometimes it’s the things we write just for ourselves that make the deepest impression.

Maybe this all started because I forgot my winter coat. A few days before Christmas, in December 2021, as the Omicron variant was rampaging through the country, I ran out the door of my Washington, D.C., home with just my sweatshirt to grab a rapid COVID test at the local library. As I approached the building, I could see a single-file queue wrapping around the block. Rather than double back for the coat, I got in line. Minutes passed, and regret settled in: I really should have brought that jacket. More minutes passed, and regret merged with shivering and turned to spite: Two years into a pandemic, and we’re still doing this crap?

The testing shortage was the latest in a long line of pandemic scarcities. Americans were originally asked to not wear masks, because there weren’t enough to go around. Many Americans were initially told to not get booster shots, because there weren’t enough to go around. And this theme extended beyond the pandemic. Policy-manufactured scarcity was the story of housing in so many American cities. It was the story of computer chips, too. And clean energy. And ship-building. And so much more.

When the blood returned to my fingers, I got to work on a new essay summoned up from the rage of a frigid afternoon. Scarcity had been our recurring story. The antidote should be scarcity’s antonym. Americans deserved an “abundance agenda”: an approach to housing, energy, health care, immigration, and science that created policies and removed barriers that gave people more of what they needed. I wrote:

This agenda would try to take the best from several ideologies. It would harness the left’s emphasis on human welfare, but it would encourage the progressive movement to “take innovation as seriously as it takes affordability,” as Ezra Klein wrote. It would tap into libertarians’ obsession with regulation to identify places where bad rules are getting in the way of the common good. It would channel the right’s fixation with national greatness to grow the things that actually make a nation great—such as clean and safe spaces, excellent government services, fantastic living conditions, and broadly shared wealth.

In January, after The Atlantic published the essay, I heard from a lot of people. One of them was the New York Times’ Ezra Klein. We’d been talking for a while about politics and technology on the phone, and Ezra knew that I had been trying—and mostly failing—to write a book around some of these themes. He had been writing his own Times columns about the political problems of California and the need for liberals to embrace building and inventing. “Maybe we should write this book together?” he texted. Within the minute, I wrote back something very chill and extremely composed that got across the general vibe of OMFG holy shit yes.

Abundance, the book, has just turned 13 weeks old. These have been some of the best and strangest weeks of my life. Both the critical response and the political reaction have been fascinating. Developmentally, 13 weeks is the stage when newborns begin to babble and locate new objects in their field of vision. These milestones are conceptually appropriate. Critics say Abundance is a babbling mess of corporate-neoliberal gobbledygook. Meanwhile, mayors, state senators, US congresspeople, US senators, governors, and presidential hopefuls have told us that the book, and our conversations about it, gave them a useful new framework to think about an ethos of problem-solving and a vision of liberal government that values speed and outcomes. In bookstores, Abundance tends to reside in the current affairs section. But this is really a book about attention. It’s about the questions Democrats haven’t been focused on and the solutions hiding in places they might not be looking. It’s about locating new ideas in liberalism’s field of vision.

As the reception to Abundance bloomed, I realized I wanted to devote my full time as an independent writer and thinker to develop ideas in this space. I also wanted to follow the advice of my own research. Reporting for a chapter about invention, I spoke to several experts who told me the US government doesn’t make enough high-risk, high-reward bets in science. As I heard more about the benefits of risky experiments, it was hard to banish the thought that perhaps the time had come for my own leap of faith.

With this newsletter, I’m hoping to do several things:

1. Build the abundance agenda

“To have the future we want, we have to build and invent more of what we need.” That’s the thesis of Abundance. In this newsletter, I want to deepen our reporting in the book—for example, expect a lot about housing in America—and also extend the abundance ethos to other areas, such as health care, education, biotech, defense, and redistribution/welfare.

2. Cover the frontier of science and technology in a way that’s both curious and skeptical

The world is filled with problems we cannot solve without more science and technology. We don’t know how to efficiently remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. We don’t know how to cure most cancers. We don’t understand the basis of common diseases, such as Alzheimer’s.

I don’t think you can trace the most important stories in the next decade without being fascinated by the frontiers of science and technology, especially artificial intelligence, GLP-1 drugs, clean energy abundance, and biotech. I have sources across these fields. I’ll do my best to balance my enthusiasm for these topics with my skepticism that, while that tech boosterism is always easy, real progress—that is, change that reduces pain and increases agency, for the many—is always hard.

3. Go deeper into “the anti-social century”

Americans spend more time alone than any period in recorded history, as I wrote in my Atlantic cover story. Face-to-face socializing has plunged more than 20 percent in the last 20 years. Daily time spent at home has increased by 99 minutes in the same period. Coupling rates—that is, the share of folks in long-term relationships—are collapsing in the U.S. and around the world.

These trends aren’t just increasing loneliness. They’re rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity, with far-reaching consequences for our politics, economy, happiness, romantic relationships, and communities. It’s not clear to me that a world with more medicine and faster planes but fewer relationships and more solitude is a future worth building. So, I’ll be following this space very closely.

Many of these articles will be free. Many will be behind a paywall. Which raises a logical question:

WHY SUBSCRIBE?

Free subscribers will receive a weekly essay on abundance, science, technology, media, and the anti-social century. We’ll also have Q&As with my favorite people who write, talk, and think about these issues.

Paid subscribers will receive weekly original essays or videos on these topics. For now, I’m thinking about my free articles as front-porch journalism. It’s writing for mass public consumption and the edifice I want the newsletter to show the world. I’m thinking about my paid articles as back-patio journalism—the more personal, unfinished, slightly intimate, and honestly uncertain thoughts I have about abundance, politics, family, fatherhood, sports, or whatever else I’m obsessed with that day.

Perhaps most importantly, subscribers will be able to leave comments. So, if you want to talk to me through this newsletter, you should subscribe. I’d love to build a comment community that acts as an extended mind of the newsletter. My favorite writing subjects are diverse and complex, and I’ll be leaning on this community to source article suggestions, tips, critical interpretations, and corrections. Paid subscribers will have an easier time giving me feedback that I can see, which will hopefully sharpen my approach and make my commentary more accurate and interesting. Great critics make great writers.

Thanks for reading! I’ll work hard to earn your trust and subscription.

- DT