Reading Habits: Why I took a decade-old digital newsletter offline.

I've been professionally reviewing and recommending books for roughly fifteen years. Reading Habits—the newsletter about books and life that I've carried from one platform to another—has been a consistent labor of love throughout that time. But I, like many, have become increasingly disillusioned regarding the state of media, culture, and technology, and especially the center of that triple Venn diagram.

I thought my career as a cultural critic on digital platforms would always be in that overlap, but at some point throughout the three years of applying for jobs within it, I realized I didn’t want one anymore, anyway. The CEOs and angel investors and billionaires eliminated most of them; they’ve drained the jobs that remain of passion and humanity.

I’m mourning these losses, but I’m also riled up. There are so few opportunities to reject what’s being pushed on us as inevitability, but I refuse to contribute to the expansion of AI—to let it steal my words just so others can identify my voice as the machine's. (See: the many em-dashes on this very page!) I'm worried about the loss of ephemera, physical records of our existence. I’m mad that being a professional artist of any medium increasingly means being exploited. I’m angry that so many media platforms removed ownership through the promise of convenience. I want to create, own, and leave behind something real—something you, too, can own.

So Reading Habits is now offline, and I couldn’t be more excited.