Essay Club 2025: Plans and Dates
Updates: Live video chat, January essay
Hi all! This is a short post to update you all on my plans for Essay Club in 2025.
Firstly: The next Essay Club will be posted on the 19th of January, 2025. We’ll be discussing Scott Alexander’s I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup (2014), a classic work of contemporary Rationalist thought. I have quite a few subscribers who were originally referred here by Scott, so I’m sure many of you have read this one, but if you haven’t you’re in for a treat. Scott Alexander is one of the great essayists of our time, and this essay is often cited as one of his best.
Secondly: Next year I’m going to start hosting live video chats alongside each month’s Essay Club post. I may need to trial a few different times and video conferencing platforms for the first few months, but to begin with, I’ll use freeconferencecall.com (thanks Sara Dietz for the suggestion!) and will host the conversation about a day after I post the Essay Club piece. The details for the first video chat conversation are as follows…
Day/time:
January 20th, 2025; 7:30am Australian Eastern Standard Time. Remember that we Aussies live in the future, so this will still be the afternoon/night of the 19th of January for many of you. E.g.: 1:30pm in Sacramento, CA; 4:30pm in New York City; 9:30pm in London.
Access:
Via freeconferencecall.com. You may need to create an account and/or download the app (computer or smartphone) to access the call, so play around with this beforehand. You can access the call directly at the link below, but if for some reason this doesn’t work use the meeting ID mindandmythos in the app, no password needed.
Link: https://join.freeconferencecall.com/mindandmythos
You can also dial in on your phone if you like. Details at the link above.
Again, I’m not committed to this time or conferencing platform for future Essay Club conversations yet, so if you have other suggestions please leave them in the comments and I’ll consider them in future. And if you don’t want to join the live conversation, that’s okay—none of this will impact Essay Club’s usual format, so you can continue to share your thoughts and chat with each other in the comments.