Hello. Welcome. What's all this then?

This is my newsletter, By Brian R Alexander. You may be saying to yourself, "The last thing the world needs is another newsletter." I've said this to myself many times. Yet here I am. So you deserve to know why, especially since I'll start charging for this thing once I'm sure I know how all this works. (Meanwhile, please forgive any clunkiness, bugs, weirdness you encounter. I am known among my friends as "Mr. Analog," so I'm no digital bro. But I'll learn.)

I am a writer. I'm the author of seven books, and decades worth of newspaper and magazine articles, and essays. My most recent book, The Mayor, will come out later this year, assuming we're not all drafted to fight a war over Greenland. You can learn more about me here, on my website. Some stories for The Atlantic, where I have been a contributing writer, are over here. Some for Outside, here. MIT Technology Review, over here. And here are some from Wired, where I was a contributing editor.

I want to keep writing, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to get the kind of writing I want to do, on the topics I want to write about, placed in existing publications. Writing, you see, is not just what I do for a living, it is my way of interacting with the world, of building a life, and, in my small way, of trying to make the world a better place. I long ago discovered what most journalists eventually discover: that the story you think is GOING TO CHANGE EVERYTHING! usually doesn't. But, sometimes, modest change does happen. I once got a bogus dietary supplement company shut down, for example, though there are still plenty of companies selling bogus dietary supplements. My goal, with everything I write, is to inform, entertain, to tell the truth as best as I can determine it and to help readers understand a little more. In my case – and this brings me to why this newsletter, and why now – I want to help Americans understand their nation, the often obscured forces that shape it, and the people and communities acted upon by those forces. Inequality is a big theme. Community is a big theme. This is what I do in my books.

Mostly, I do this by looking at the small thing, the small place, the small people. The small can tell us an awful lot about the big. I believe we don't spend enough time on the small. I believe that's one of the things, among many, wrong with Big Shot Media these days.

(There was going to be a photo here. I couldn't make it work. See "digital bro," above. I swear, as I get the hang of this, there will be photos. Anyway...)

A man at a bookstore event once told me that I was his favorite writer.

"Thank you," I said. "But, really? I mean, Mark Twain? Faulkner? Asimov? Gay Talese?" I named a few more current non-fiction writers, too, all much more famous than I.

"Well, OK," he said. "But you write about poor people better than anybody I know."

For a long moment I couldn't say anything. I was a little choked up. He'd just made everything I try to do, and the difficulty in trying to do it, seem worthwhile. I want to give a voice to people we don't hear from often enough.

If this newsletter finds any subscribers, I plan to travel, talk to people, report and bring all that to you. Sometimes I'll use history as a launch pad to talk about today. Along the way I will try to make it obvious when you are seeing opinion and when you are seeing journalism. Just so you know, I think we have far too many pundits and far too few great reporters. I'm not a fan of the punditry-industrial complex. I am not a fan of cable TV "news."

My goal is to put out something meaty every week, along with a shorter item or two.

This newsletter won't be all heavy all the time, though. Once in awhile, I'll have some fun. Today, for example, I surfed with a baby dolphin. Not deliberately, mind you. Sometimes dolphins surf, and they don't care if there are human surfers on the same wave, because every wave is their wave if they want it to be. Sometimes I might tell you about things like that. Sometimes I'll resurrect material from my career, things that didn't make it into the story, for instance. Sometimes it'll be a little weird. I want to use my freedom. I might review a book I've read, or talk about a movie, especially if they relate to the main theme here. Don't worry, most of the time, these sorts of things will run free of charge.

You won't see a lot of ranting about Donald Trump here. In case you want to know where I stand before you engage with this any further, Donald Trump is an unrepentant criminal, a sociopath, and the worst thing to happen to the country I love in my lifetime. He is destructive to the people I care about, the people I write about, and so while you will see some Trump-related stuff here, we already have all-Trump, all-the-time and me writing about Trump, for the sake of writing about Trump isn't going to add much that you don't already know.

What I think I can add to your reading life is insight about your country and the people in it, and how we got the way we are. I hope you'll join me.

Thanks. Let's go.