Sometime in the fall of 2020, shortly after she departed The New York Times, I had a brief conversation with Bari Weiss. She was in an entrepreneurial mood, making calls and soliciting opinions, and I told her that I thought there was a potential market for a new general-interest publication that was politically independent, competitive with The Atlantic and The New Yorker, free from the ideological strictures of wokeness and the loyalty tests of MAGA.
“Yes, yes,” she told me, as though this was already apparent to her. “But I’m going to start with a Substack.”
Hmmm, I thought. A Substack? Probably won’t hear much more about that.
Now here I am, six years later, about to start a column for a thriving general-interest magazine with a remarkable cast of writers and an independent perspective on the world. And it’s a privilege to be here.
When Bari and I had our conversation, I had just published a book entitled The Decadent Society, which argued that Western civilization had slipped into an age of repetition, drift, and uncomfortable stagnation.
Because God likes to amuse Himself at my expense, the book appeared just as the Covid-19 pandemic swept across the world and the artificial intelligence revolution began in earnest. The decadent patterns I had described in that book haven’t disappeared: Human beings are still having ever-fewer children, political futility still grips the United States and Europe, superhero sequels still bestride the movie box office. But they coexist with more hopeful and more apocalyptic trends—with technological breakthroughs and signs of artistic and religious and political ferment, but also with growing extremism, mounting fears of human obsolescence, and dark post-human trends.
My hope is that my writing here will help make sense of all these developments, in a landscape where both cultural renaissance and total dystopia seem more plausible than they did when The Free Press was just an interesting media idea.
This is not my day job. I am a newly minted correspondent for 60 Minutes, where the goal is to ask probing questions, not sling political hot takes. If all goes well, this column will complement that work, staying a little bit above the partisan fray while giving readers useful frameworks (or, sometimes, truly eccentric frameworks) through which to understand our strange-and-getting-stranger century.
I think that aspiration is in keeping with the larger mission of The Free Press: an independent-minded vantage point on a world that defies simplistic categories, tidy ideological expectations, and easy certainty about what is normal and plausible and real.
I look forward to exploring all this complexity with you every week in these pages.
Ross Douthat’s weekly column in The Free Press will be available to paid subscribers only. Sign up today:
