I Am Me Again
Prospectus for the rest of 2025 for Born Curious
Since February, I have not adhered to my one-article-per-week resolution for 2025.
Additionally, for the past several months, at the advice of a friend, I have been using a pseudonym.
Both of these facts had a common cause: since February, I have been a full-time job-seeker. As it turns out, finding employment in 2025 is quite an ordeal. The job market is terrible. I applied to 328 job postings before becoming gainfully employed again.
I want to keep my research work on Born Curious separate from my other career, so I will just leave it at that.
Now that I am gainfully employed, I see no good reason to continue using the pseudonym. I will take this opportunity to discuss a prospectus of work that I intend to publish here throughout the remainder of 2025 and to explain the reasons for using a real name in a Substack newsletter.
Prospectus
In 2025, I intend to
wrap up my (first-pass on) studies in reproductive responsibility and
start an inquiry on “Why Americans Are So Divided.”
#1 entails two analyses that leverage my weights for the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) adjusted for abortion under-reporting. The first will be on trends in unintended pregnancy from 1973 to the present. The second will be on real-world contraceptive failure rates.1 This will be capped off by an editorial (which I alluded to in my article on what makes women orgasm) about how the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s failed us, especially women, who bear the brunt of unintended pregnancy and whose pleasure the rewrite of our sexual culture seems to have ignored.
#2 sounds played out, I concede. However, I believe I have a couple of interesting new dimensions: my analysis is grounded in a Gramscian framework of cultural hegemony, and it will be empirically driven, utilizing data from the General Social Survey (GSS), American National Election Studies (ANES), and other sources.
My working hypothesis2 for #2 is that the division we see in the 21st-century United States is the result of a peak in the cultural hegemony of the ruling class mediated by the professional-managerial class. This has led to populist backlashes against the “elite,” such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Tea Party movement, and Trumpian populism.
To understand how we arrived at this point, we will take a data-driven tour through the Big Sort of the 1990s, the Big Swing among Democratic-leaning voters in the 21st century, and the emergence of a “package” of viewpoints that nowadays often come together.
Along the way, we might explore the tension between the ruling class of wealthy capitalists and their functionaries in the professional-managerial class. Sometimes the ruling class seems to “win” (e.g., John D. Rockefeller III), and sometimes the professional-managerial class runs away with things (e.g., John Ford II).
Cadence
I still intend to publish weekly. I realize my work is not the typical Substack (or, indeed, blogosphere) fare of hot takes on the new cycle or running commentary on politics, so my audience will always be limited. Still, everything I have read suggests that to create a successful Substack newsletter, you must publish regularly.
It takes me about a month, working nights and weekends, to complete an analysis. (The actual writing part goes by pretty quick, but there are many more hours of exploring the data, figuring out where I want the analysis to go, etc.) My plan, therefore, is to take each analysis I complete, break it up into four or more chunks, and release it in pieces while I work on the subsequent analysis.
Thus, there will still be a lull in output for about a month, and then, after that, I promise myself that I will release an article per week going forward.
I may also try to work in some lower-level-of-effort conceptual articles from time to time to keep the cadence up, but we shall see.
To Use Your Real Name or a Pseudonym?
Many authors who use their real name on Substack already had a career in journalism, and their name brings in subscribers. It definitely makes sense for these people to use their real names.
But what about the rest of us normies who have never been published? It might make more sense to just be PlumpTurnip877 or whatever in our online presence. The major pro to this approach is obvious: You can write what you really think without fear of repercussions in real life.
In my case, I started this newsletter using my real name, so my attempt to use a pseudonym was kind of pointless. If you searched for my name and “blog” in any major search engine over the past few months, you would get Born Curious pretty quickly. Therefore, I have pretty much self-doxed, and there is no going back.
Here are my arguments for self-doxing your writing, which might just be me post hoc rationalizing.
There is a slight chance you will get to the point that someone will want you to write something in their periodical or appear on their podcast. If you are already using your real name, then this process would be smoother than figuring out who PlumpTurnip877 is. I admit, for us nobodies, this is a very slight chance, indeed.
Using a real name and face serves as an extra reminder not to engage in negative online interactions. The pro to using a pseudonym is also a con in this regard. One reason people can be so rude online is that anonymity often encourages rudeness. At any given point in time, I see dozens of people online who I think are stupid and have nothing to contribute. The Internet lowers the barrier to scratching the itch to actually tell someone this. Using a real name and face raises the barrier a little.
Much of my writing is about conformity and the social penalties for dissent. Perhaps, then, I should criticize this phenomenon without insulation from the social penalties of dissenting, especially when the risk of any penalties is so small. My work is long and empirical. I have minimal readership. And this is Substack, which is supposed to be spicy.
The model I will build for contraceptive failure rates should also have other applications. For instance, it could be used to estimate the probability that couples successfully conceive, given various variables such as age, etc.
Yes, I realize that I was not the first to come to this hypothesis, and yes, I have Christopher Lasch on my reading list.