Last post! Merging with TFOS newsletter next week

I've recently decided to redo my Tools for Online Speech newsletter a bit. Previously it's been targeted at people who have signed up for one of my products and are thus familiar with some of my work already. I'm now slowly trying to make it more accessible to people who've never heard of me before.

I've been enjoying the groove I've had going with this newsletter for the past month or so. As I was thinking about how to structure the TFOS newsletter, I thought it'd work nicely to throw in a "Recommendations" section where I share things I read in the past week, as I've been doing in this newsletter. You can see an example in yesterday's post (the Recommendations section is near the bottom, albeit without commentary because I was short on time).

I'm also going to be writing more essays, which was the original purpose of this newsletter from long ago 🙂. So it feels like a good fit to merge this list into the TFOS newsletter. As such, this will be the last email you'll get from "Jacob O'Bryant's Newsletter"; next week, the sender name will be "Tools for Online Speech."

And a personal announcement: my second daughter was born last week. Here's a short video!

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The Three Arguments (Both Are True). A fun read from someone I met on the internet.

What we learned from the January 6 hearings (Tangle). Succinct (and seemingly fair IMO, not that I watched any of the hearings myself) summaries of the hearings from earlier this year. This was published in July, so it doesn't cover any more recent hearings (I... think there was another hearing recently?).

On Short Bursts of Impossible Stress and Depression Caused by Nothing (Resident Contrarian). Another post from one of my internet friends!

If you’re capitalizing every word of your headlines, you’re missing out (Charlie Meyerson). I have never done this consistently one way or the other. I converted all the titles in my archive to lower-case so at least they would be consistent!

Quasi-experiments and Education (Samstack). A critique of the methodology used in Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education. I'm a big not-fan of formal education, so although I haven't read Caplan's book, I'm sure I would like it. All the more reason to pay attention to a post like this!

Notes On Karl Popper (Nabeel Qureshi). I like a little philosophy every now and then, in measured doses.

Newsletter Economics in 2022 (The Diff). "The value of a newsletter as a media product scales roughly with the subscriber base, but the value of potential connections within that subscriber base will scale superlinearly."

See you next week!