I’m taking a break starting today, at least through all of August, and likely part of September too. For paying subscribers, billing will be paused until I hit the resume button.
Your next bill date will be pushed out appropriately. If you have 12 days left on a monthly subscription right now, you’ll still have 12 days left when I resume. If you have 289 days left on an annual subscription, you’ll still have 289 days. If you’re not a paying subscriber, you won’t be able to subscribe to read paywalled archive posts until I resume publication.
Book Club Status
The book club will continue through the break. Book discussions happen in the #psychohistory channel of the Protocol Institute discord. There are also broader discussions on the world machines project, and regular calls every other Thursday, where we discuss the theory and implementation of our psychohistorical grand designs inspired by the book club. You can, of course, just stick to book-club activities.
You can find an invite code and links to individual chat threads in the on the book club page.
July was Side Quest month. I tried to read 3 books in parallel. I am 1/3 done with: Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations, Christopher Clark’s Revolutionary Spring, and David Wootton’s The Invention of Science. So I suppose I can claim to have read 1 book.
The August pick is Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett.
Part of sept I assume you mean?
(I understand that it seems customary that billing gets paused, on the other hand, it would not have been my default belief that people I subscribe to don't get days off and vacations etc. It's curious that this has grown as a "thing" that people generally do here in substack related subscriptions. How did it happen that we deny people these small amounts of money because they take a short break? I don't know. I support the people who are writing as people, and, thus, it seems sad that those being supported treat the support as if it's a work-product payment transaction/exchange)