Five Years of Further Up
A walk down memory lane
When this Substack turned five in April, I was too busy with Life Stuff to mark the anniversary properly, but I made a note to circle back and do so at a better time. With summer waning and some other writing deadlines looming, now is that time.
I wasn’t even writing under my own name yet when I first launched Further Up. Most of you weren’t following me then, but a few were and still fondly remember the Pseudonym Years. I wasn’t famous or anything, but on a small freelancer scale, my writing had succeeded much more, much faster than I’d expected it to. I made the jump to Substack because all the cool kids were doing it, and it felt like a way to blend the best of a blog and a newsletter. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
That fall, I chose to uncloak my identity, in slightly cringe and grandiose fashion. I simply didn’t want to compartmentalize myself anymore. And at the time, I believed I saw my future in classical Christian school teaching, where the kind of writing I do wouldn’t affect my job security. It turned out that God had other plans. Five years later, I find myself doing what I once assumed was impossible: Doing nothing but writing, for money.
Now that it’s 2026, and everyone and his uncle has a Substack, I’ve read some pieces about its sustainability as a business model. Different writers are trying different tactics to keep afloat. Someone observed that there’s a lot of pressure on the Substacker to turn himself into a product, by figuring out the formula his readers like and then churning out as much Content according to that formula as possible. With an increasingly flooded market and readers’ pennies increasingly stretched, some see this as the only economically viable option. Some might be tempted to do this with a little (or a lot) of help from AI. Recently, Substack rolled out an AI detector that will help readers sift the real deal from the slop, which is much appreciated by those of us who actually write our stuff like humans.
Meanwhile I, never blessed with marketing skill, have simply continued to do what I’ve always done: Write whatever I feel like about whatever I’m thinking in a given week. Sometimes it’s a Current Thing, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes I’ve allowed the Current Thing to pass me by altogether. And for some reason, people have continued to pay me for this. I’ve thanked you before. I now thank you again. Your support has been financially life-changing for me. For my part, I’ve always tried to keep my price reasonable, recognizing that people have numerous options for where to spend their subscriber dollars, and that as one lonely Substacker I can’t possibly compete with magazines that produce multiple articles a day.
In that spirit, and in honor of my 5th anniversary, I’m doing a flash sale: For one week, readers can get an annual subscription for a MERE, a TRIFLING $30. This is 50% off what you’d pay if you gave me $5 a month for a year. If you’re a new reader, or you’ve been dipping in for a while at the free tier, consider this your incentive to upgrade. Also, even though marketing people will yell at me that I shouldn’t say this, I’m going to say it anyway: To my long-time readers who’ve been around since the beginning or close to it, and who locked themselves into what my annual rate was at the time, you should know that Substack will keep renewing you at that rate even if I’ve lowered it in the meantime. You might prefer to unsubscribe and resubscribe at the current lower rate, especially during a sale. I pass this information along as a thank you for your years of loyal support.
Now for the meat of this post: If you’re newer and not sure yet what you’re getting into, I’ve gone through my archives year by year and pulled 60-ish (!) pieces that represent some of the best of my work. I’m offering roughly half as free samples and keeping back the other half to (hopefully) tempt you.
This exercise has been rewarding for me. I’ve stumbled onto pieces that I’d entirely forgotten about, and on re-reading them I’ve been pleasantly surprised that they hold up. I’d like to think I’m more or less the same writer I was five years ago in the ways that matter. I wish I could say this for some other writers and pundits I’ve liked. I never want it to be said of me that I change my opinions with the weather.
With my ADD, I’m constantly topic-hopping from politics to religion to philosophy to history to arts and culture and the movies to whatever else. Despite this, I’ve found it interesting to trace recurring thematic threads. In particular, I can see that my work has always had a strong undercurrent of melancholy. I see the world with what Thomas Sowell sometimes called “the tragic vision,” sometimes the “constrained vision.” I write often about problems to which no Solution exists. I write about suffering people with no easy remedy for their suffering, including Christians. I write about addiction, mental illness, poverty, war, murder.
You may ask, how did I grow a Substack like that? I’ll tell you: I don’t know. Maybe because I try to write about things I love as much as I write about things I hate. And even when I write about things I hate, I write with love.
Occasionally, someone has unsubscribed because something I wrote made them uncomfortable. It’s never my goal to shock readers pointlessly, but I can’t please everyone, and with the many highly sensitive topics I tackle, I’m bound to offend someone. Occasionally, I’ve broken another marketing rule and posted something that’s not as “right-coded” as my “brand” would lead people to expect. Whatever the issue was, I can assure you I was trying to reflect honestly about what I saw. If I can continue doing that well, I can continue to call myself a writer.
2021
Free
American Tragedy: My first piece set the tone for what this Stack would become in the years ahead by being a piece of extended wrestling with a thorny topic, in this case police shootings. This was spring of 2021, George Floyd’s death was still a festering wound, and the air was full of Takes on each new violent encounter between the police and the public. I found myself uneasily in the middle.
Death of a Conservative: I wrote this on the first anniversary of my friend Mike Adams’ suicide. A few people have been remembering Mike recently in the wake of the Jason Arday scandal. Arday was a young academic fabulist who killed himself when his grift was exposed. Because he was black, some have blamed this on the media and asserted that a white academic would never be pushed out of a job this way. I’m glad to see that Mike’s story isn’t forgotten. Attention must be paid.
The Veteran Who Made Me a Journalist: This piece tells the story of my old neighbor, Jim, who was a reconnaissance pilot in World War II and started sharing his memories when I was 11. It is still one of the best things I’ve ever written.
Gram: A tribute to my grandmother, who died that year.
God’s Firebrand: An Interview With Hatun Tash: Still using my pen name at the time, I recorded this interview for a piece at The Spectator. It was one of my great privileges as a writer to encounter Hatun and tell her story.
Dopesick: A while before writing this I got into an unexpected Twitter clash with Caitlin Flanagan, a writer I’ve long admired. She came at me very harshly, and it was disappointing. Not long afterwards, she withdrew from Twitter after confessing that she was addicted to the app. So I wrote this in sympathy, from one addict to another. (I don’t think she ever saw it.)
It’s a Sin (Part I): In London this summer, I had a lovely chat with a long-time Australian reader. Among the things in my archive that had really made an impression him, he singled out this series about homosexuality. He has no personal investment, as it were, but he’s known gay men and like me has a heart for their misery, self-inflicted as it is. For whatever reason this is a thorny topic that’s drawn out some of my best writing over the years.
Paid
The Life You Save: A story about a friend of mine in the Gardaí (the Irish police force). One night, he encountered a fire, but there were no firemen. I was quite proud of this piece, and still am.
The Parable of the Two Pandemics: Among many things that shouldn’t be memory holed about the COVID pandemic is the rank bigotry we saw toward the unvaccinated. Here I drew that out, then did some provocative reflection on the similar and dissimilar roles of stigma in COVID and AIDS.
Clear as Glass: On the fall and redemption of Stephen Glass, a journalist who was disgraced for plagiarism and spent the rest of his life trying to make it right. Have tissues ready.
Say Not the Day is Done: On depression and suicide.
The Song of the Saints: On Shusaku Endo’s Silence (and Scorsese’s adaptation). The novel made me angry, the film less so, and here I try to figure out why.
Only the Trying: On my lifelong collection of hero stories, including tragic ones.
2022
Free
The Mother’s Mother’s Tale: The miraculously providential story of my mother’s birth and adoption. I’ve sometimes thought I should have saved this piece and tried to shop it around as a magazine feature somewhere. Maybe it would have found more of an audience. But maybe it’s better this way.
The Hustler, the Cop, and the Sparrow: A story about a forgotten Chicago street ministry and the lost boys it served. Based on a memoir that feels like it could be a TV series, if we still remembered how to tell stories in which the Church does good things.
Letters From War: On my quest to uncover the lost letters of a Scottish Great War chaplain. Life intervened and pushed my project to republish them to the back burner, but I vow to finish what I started one day soon.
Sucker: On the early days of the Russia-Ukraine war and the precise moment when I realized who Tucker Carlson was.
There Are No Solutions: On the Uvalde mass shooting, mass shootings in general, and unpreventable tragedies in general.
ChatBot Didn’t Write This Essay: Dispatches from the early days of ChatGPT, which intersected with my last days as a high school teacher. In hindsight, prophetic.
Paid
The Sum of All Fears: On AI, creepypasta, and demons. Written when the character of “Loab” was going viral in the discourse about emerging AI text-to-image tech. If that rings no bells, click at your peril!
No Continuing City: On that time I saw a homeless guy strung out in front of a Chick-fil-A in New York.
The Softly Spoken Magic: On taking a field trip with my then-students to a planetarium show, where I listened to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon straight through for the first time.
For Sale: One Body: On America’s richest digital prostitute.
Take Me Home: On To Kill a Mockingbird and how Boo Radley finds his manhood.
The Rainbow in the Basement: On finding bits of treasure among the belongings of neighbors I never knew.
2023
Free
The Garden at the End of the Universe: I try to write Passion Week reflections every year, and some years they come out better than others. I think this is my best Easter essay. With affectionate hat tip to Douglas Adams.
The Hope of the World: Ditto for my Christmas essays. (I wrote this one about Meet John Doe and how it functions as an allegory for how the West lost its faith.)
The Watermelon: On a Saturday at a community kitchen in Lansing, and the people I met there.
Letters of a Christian Homosexual: On a forgotten anonymous memoir that has since been misappropriated but deserves to be read and admired for what it actually was.
All the Single Ladies: On unchosen female singleness.
While Rachel Weeps: On October 7th.
Paid
Frog and Toad Aren’t Gay: On how Arnold Lobel touched my childhood, and how not to read him.
Healing Streams: On Lonnie Frisbee, Aimee Semple McPherson, and the tragic archetype of the charismatic faith healer.
The State of Not Knowing: On the October 7 attacks, the silence of God, and the paradox of prayer.
Of Boys and Men: On…boys and men, and the movie Master and Commander.
Of Men and Angels: On…men and angels. (And truth and useful fiction.)
Shane MacGowan’s Vision of the Street: On the death, poetry, and weirdly compassionate genius of Shane MacGowan.
2024
Free
Francis Collins is Not Sorry Enough: This piece really did numbers. It was one of my angriest pieces. I’m not sorry. Francis Collins should be, though.
The Passion of Jordan Peterson: Another all-time top post, on what Jordan Peterson meant to people in his prime as a lecturer and why he is remembered with love.
What I Saw at the Planned Parenthood: On a very poorly planned Planned Parenthood protest, the young woman who started it, and the mob that met us there.
The Case of the Four Gospels (Part I): First in a series people have enjoyed about the historicity of the gospels. Featured in Ross Douthat’s New York Times column. Find the other parts here.
Unjust War (or, How I Never Learned to Love the Bomb): This is one of those posts my more right-leaning readers probably didn’t love, in which I explain my opposition to the nuclear bomb (while also working through sticky, inexact parallels to the Gaza War).
No Country for Old Conservatives: A lament for conservatism past.
Paid
How My Grandfather Destroyed the West: A sort of companion piece to “The Mother’s Mother’s Tale,” in which I tell the story of the man I was fortunate never to call “grandfather,” even though technically he was.
The Best a Man Can Get: On American masculinity and the Olympic triumph of our men’s gymnastics team.
A Full Eclipse Day in the Neighborhood: On watching the solar eclipse with friends in a sleepy Ohio town.
Death Be Not Proud: On the death of one of those friends from cancer, stirred together with thoughts on John Gunther’s classic memoir about watching his son die of a brain tumor.
The Just Shall Live: On the “sudden death” of Alexei Navalny.
The Old Man and the Cello: On the 35th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, telling the beautiful musical story of Mstislav Rostropovich.
2025
Free
Reasonable Faith Strikes Back: On the religious vibe shift and why it’s necessary to unite faith and reason if we are to progress beyond vibes.
N. T. Wright and The Inner Ring: Another popular post, on the Protestant elite class and N. T. Wright’s casual soft endorsement of abortion.
Je Suis Charlie: On the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Optimizing Ourselves to Death: On Ross Douthat’s encounter with a gene editing tech entrepreneur, and the movie Gattaca.
Feynman and the Bomb: I’m also a poet, and you didn’t know it! On the 80th anniversary of the bomb. Also published at Poems for Persons of Interest, whose editors recently told me they’ve nominated this for a “Best of the Net” award.
Though My Sadness is Unbounded: A Thanksgiving reflection with notes on a Thanksgiving sonnet. Includes pictures of pretty leaves.
Paid
Straight to the Heart: On David Lynch’s death, a tribute to his best film, The Straight Story.
Day of Days: On the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
AI Art is Stupid: Continuing to poke at the facade of AI tech, I compare the results of some prompts with the ingenious creations of a barely verbal autistic cartoonist.
Meme-ing Ourselves to Death: Gad, did I really rip off Neil Postman for two post titles? Oh well, it’s a good template. Here I talk about what is lost when everything becomes a meme.
Reenchanted Evangelism: On the YouTube evangelist Bryce Crawford, somewhat echoing my piece on charismatic faith healing but now in a Gen Z key.
Christianity is Not Cool: On why, vibe shift or no vibe shift, Christians will always need to be content with never being the coolest kids at the table.
As always, thank you all for reading.