So I’m leaving Twitter for Lent. Sacrifices, man.
I’ve done this before, in 2020. But I only sort of did it then. I still read Twitter, I still thought in terms of Twitter. I even posted now and again, like when things got really important.
This time, I’m completely leaving Twitter until Easter. I’ll explain more in a blog post later this week, but I’ve become convinced over the last year that social media, and Twitter in particular, was really warping my ability to write, read, and think clearly. And I just need to get out for a while.
So you might call this an experiment. Or—yikes—a Lenten Act of Service.
You, however, are not completely off the hook. I will be sparing you the endless tweetstorms about presidential power and my bizarre sense of legislative humor, but my intention is to dive back into a form of thinking and writing that I haven’t done in a long time.
I’m going to write this newsletter. Perhaps daily. Like a blog.
One thing I dislike about Twitter is that it tends to incentivize people with genuine expertise to gradually morph into generalized pundits, drifting further and further from their core competencies. So you end up with people who can speak highly intelligently about—oh I don’t know—congressional procedure and separation of powers and bridge trying to offer insight into economics or psychology or engineering.
So my goal between now and Good Friday is to write, but to write about things that are actually in my wheelhouse: Congress, congressional-executives relations, and card games.
But more on that later this week. The bottom line is that you might just be finding out you still have a subscription to this newsletter, and you might want to turn it off.
Matt