Why we should blog

This text by JA Westernberg is, for me, the best I've read about blogging so far. It doesn't even have to be limited to blogging; it could also cover other forms of websites.

These two paragraphs in particular resonated with me:

The blog, at its best (a best I aspire one day to reach) is Montaigne's direct descendant. It's a form that allows for intellectual exploration without demanding premature certainty. You can write a post working through an idea, acknowledge in the post itself that you're not sure where you'll end up, and invite readers to think alongside you. You can return to the topic weeks later with updated thoughts. The format accommodates the actual texture of thinking, which is messy and recursive and full of wrong turns.

Social media flattens all of this into statements: Everything you post is implicitly a declaration. Even if you add caveats, the format strips them away. What travels is the hot take, the dunked-on screenshot, the increasingly-shitty meme, the version of your argument that fits in a shareable image with the source cropped out.

The first paragraph resonates with me so much because it perfectly encapsulates the direction I want to take parts of my page 2026: thinking aloud.

This requires a certain amount of courage. Courage to embrace incompleteness and to not polish every post until it shines flawlessly.

I also learned that the term "essay" comes from the French word "essai," which can be translated as "attempts" or "tests."

Well, you should really read it yourself!

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins

In 1751, Denis Diderot began publishing his Encyclopédie, a project that would eventually span 28 volumes and take more than two decades to complete. The French government banned it twice. The Catholic Church condemned it, Diderot's collabo…