One day I'm going to write that book. One day.
Until that day, some disparate writing is captured here for eternity...
The Idealist was a newsletter I started in 2017. I published half a dozen editions, sent mostly to friends, and it's now on indefinite hiatus. I always have vague ambitions to find the time to restart it....
It was an experiment with curation and creation instead of just consumption. It was an attempt to start a conversation around ideas from whatever diverse field is making me go hmmm at any precise moment.
You can still sign-up, or read the archive, here should you wish to. Who knows, one surprising day in the future I might spam you with some ramblings...
https://thom.substack.com/embed
Back in the golden days of music blogging, back when humans did the discovery and your RSS reader did the delivery (shakes fist at cloud), I wrote a music blog. It was started with a very simple premise - to be a guide and a filter for an overwhelming amount of new music being released to streaming platforms and to restore the focus on the music and not the hype. I posted almost every day for around 3 years and then slightly more sporadically after that. I only reviewed albums, in my humble opinion still the best way to understand an artist’s work (eventually relenting on this point by creating weekly playlists when the burden of listening, writing and posting about an album every day became too much).
Thanks to the good folks at Tumblr who included me in their Best Music Blogs section, I had a readership of around 50,000 people which was rather humbling and exciting. While the custom domain has long since lapsed, the archive of posts can still be found over on hotspotmusic.tumblr.com.
In 2017 I fulfilled a lifelong dream of publishing my own magazine called Montag. Under the highly dubious guise of branded content marketing, a few highly talented Grover colleagues and I launched a magazine reporting from the fuzzy edge between new tech and everyday life, asking when technology evolves in exponential leaps, what will we do next, and why?
It started as an online magazine and evolved into a print edition, alongside a weekly newsletter and even a podcast. We often recorded in a shed. Since I left, the magazine was decommissioned but it lives on in the form of an auto-publishing AI, rehashing all our words to create new and profound works.
Montag remains one of the most fun and rewarding things I've done at "work".
Issue 1
MONTAG Issue 1 (Final Print Edition).pdf
Issue 2
MONTAG Issue 2 (Final Print Edition).pdf
Issue 3
I (very) occasionally publish some experimental or creative writing over on Medium: