Thank You

Experiments Continue

Hello dear readers and listeners.

It’s Friday again, and I’m grateful, as always, for your attention and subscriptions. This really is a wonderful place to work through ideas.

I just posted Stack the Week Daily for today.

I would like to continue, but with the publication of today’s stack I’m ending the daily phase of the experiment here. Producing it every day requires an enormous lift. I have Navel Gazing episodes to get out the door in the coming week, some traveling ahead and a book that requires long stretches of concentrated work.

This does not mean the end of this publication. I’ll continue to post regularly, and I’ll turn some of those posts into audio offerings available through John Dickerson’s Field Notes on Apple Podcasts and other podcast players.

I’ve experimented a lot since the first Stack the Week podcast. So, I asked ChatGPT to read everything published under Stack the Week and Stack the Week Daily since we began in April—32 entries—and tell me what it thought the project was trying to do.

Here was its conclusion:

Stack the Week helps an attentive but overwhelmed citizen maintain an accurate, humane model of the world. It reconstructs events in sequence, tests claims against consequences, connects developments into larger patterns, and preserves important facts that the daily news cycle would otherwise erase. It does so with evidentiary discipline, acknowledged uncertainty, correction, curiosity and humor.

I fed my work to a machine, and it pronounced it excellent!

I know…¹

But I’ll risk sharing the verdict in the hope that those of you who have followed these experiments will understand the stumbling spirit in which I asked.

The reason I ran this experiment is that you can aim to do something but maybe not get there. That description comes pretty close to what I was aiming for when I started.

This should exist somewhere in the world, but doing it properly— without all the flaws of the current version— would require a pretty hefty staff. If you really want to explain bond yields and valuations while making them slightly more enjoyable than a mouthful of sawdust, you would want graphics, illustrations and other modern conveniences. Maybe a single rock of ice to pour it over.

I don’t know what the fall will bring. There may be a second phase. Some of my ability to produce Stack the Week comes from focused work done in isolation. Producing it also consumes the time required for that work. I want to use my attention as intelligently as I can—and to find the form in which I can do the most useful work.

One of the most meaningful parts of this experiment has been discovering how many of you want this kind of work. That inspires me, and I’m enormously grateful, and so I’ll keep feeding off that. It’ll just show up in a different form. Shadow puppets are possible, obviously.

For my immediate future, however, I am going to join the founder of 15 Minutes Group, who has been at work in the dining room. We are going to go do pastoral dances.

Thank you again for joining for the ride. Have a wonderful weekend.

John

1. I hear the reader's objection, share it, admit the comic vanity and hope to move on briskly!