Buzzcut Begins
Introducing a newsletter of close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature
Cover Story
I posed as a travel writer for years. Socially and professionally, this was a fragile cover story. At a party in New York in 2017, not long after publishing my first actual cover story in Travel + Leisure, I was introduced to a travel public relations professional of some sort. “No kidding,” I said, shaking her hand. “I’m a travel writer.” The friend who’d introduced us quickly interjected, “Well, that’s what you want to do.” I shrunk to the size of a coin. You could’ve fit me in a coin purse. How unfair, I thought. You kill one person and you’re a murderer, but you write a few travel essays and you’re not a travel writer.
To shore up my cover I shed “travel” from my title. But “writer” carries its own risks. Most of the writing I’ve done in recent years has not been of the E.B. White-at-a-typewriter-in-a-cabin variety people picture. Serving as Senior Strategist at an independent creative agency based in Brooklyn, writing retreat has mainly meant retreating into noise-cancelling headphones in a stylish studio while I string a few words together for brands like IBM, MLS, Samsung, and ECCO.
I’ve published a few books and essays on the side to reinforce my credibility, a less impressive echo of Peter Matthiessen founding The Paris Review in 1954 as cover for spying on American expats in France for the CIA. As Matthiessen knew and all the greats know, real writing takes discipline. It requires a state of solitude at odds with my intermittently social nature, and a degree of focus at odds with our relentlessly distracting age. As such, I’ve often imagined what life would be like if I’d chosen differently. There are so many cover stories to hide behind in late capitalism. I could cultivate legal psilocybin in the Pacific Northwest. Become a #vanlife influencer. Create fintech for cartels. Animate deepfakes for the Russians. But I chose “writer.” And I’m sticking with my story.
Going Native
I moved to Richmond, Virginia the week the monuments came down in 2020. I married a beautiful Carolina girl a year later. We live with an impish brown tabby in an 1861 row house in the achingly charming Church Hill neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the church where Patrick Henry gave his “liberty or death” speech 247 years ago. Throughout my restless life, I’ve found that nothing elicits the impulse to write like enthusiasm, and nothing elicits enthusiasm like a change of scenery.
Today, the word “enthusiasm” has lost its potency, colloquially used to describe an emotional state somewhere between interest and excitement. In truth, enthusiasm is rooted in the Greek enthousiasmos, meaning “possessed by a god,” a meaning far more mysterious and beautiful. This state of possession is, I believe, a divining rod installed in humankind to indicate what’s worth our time, effort, interest, and — though it’s embarrassing to mention — faith. For me, it points to the presence of hidden gems in human language, like the expression “running amok.” Often used to admonish unruly children, “running amok” actually references a phenomenon observed by Westerners in 18th-century Malaysia in which a tribesman, believed to be possessed by an “evil tiger spirit,” killed and maimed as many unfortunate bystanders and animals as he could before being killed or restrained. Enthusiasm draws to the surface fragments of history and culture buried below, like the American Indian belief that souls travel slower than airplanes, the most convincing explanation for jet lag I’ve ever encountered. And enthusiasm underlines the glory of nature, like robins navigating south across the autumn sky by magnetoreception — the ability to sense the earth’s magnetic fields — an avian superpower some scientists believe comes from a magnetically sensitive protein embedded in birds’ eyes.
Since flying south nearly two years ago, I’ve found enthusiasm in spades, and the space to write about what possesses me. As a result, my cover story and life story have blurred, like a spy who came in from the cold, but kept his parka on. One can only live a double life for so long.
Heart’s Content
In one of the great turns of phrase in the history of science, Hungarian biochemist and Nobel Prize-winner Albert Szent-Györgyi described water as “life’s matter and matrix, mother and medium.” Enthusiasm is the matter, matrix, mother, and medium of Buzzcut, my new monthly newsletter. Subscribers will receive close-cropped commentary on travel, style, history, and nature in their inbox early on the first Sunday of every month. Each edition will feature some configuration of the following components, subject to evolve based on my ever-changing moods:
Buzzcut Reports
A comment on some subject of interest
Sonic Landscapes
A mix, echoing my old college radio show
Uncompensated Endorsement
A paean to what moves me
Roving Desk
A note from the field
Rambling Library
A selection of site-specific reading recs
Strip Mall Dining in Central Virginia
A review of local fare
Personal Pantheon
A tribute to someone inspiring
Stumbling Through the Western Canon
A reflection on Harold Bloom’s iconic list
Comfort Story
A fictional scene for meditation
Something You Should Know
A sharp fact for your cocktail party quiver
Why Buzzcut
Buzzcuts symbolize discipline. They are mandated in communities, like military units or religious orders, where group cohesion is critical. With locks shorn and scalps exposed, we lose a key signifier of individuality, becoming either equally human, or equally dehumanized, depending on the situation. Alternatively, buzzcuts can be used to assert radical individuality. Throughout history they have been claimed by agents of the counterculture, from Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky to punk pioneer Ian MacKaye. Exemplifying the buzzcut’s dual nature, warlike American grunts and pacifist Buddhist monks sported the same hairstyle during the Vietnam War, a common characteristic across a cultural no-man's-land.
A buzzcut means business. And what business do I have writing this newsletter? What are the objects of the discipline implicit in this title? Remystify the world. Pursue knowledge through the brush, and field-dress my quarry. Practice presence. Read slow. Think slow. Write slow. Homestead some unclaimed ground where those cast out from other tribes can start scratching out a new community based on knowledge, reason, and grace.
I hope you’ll join me.