Welcome to the Eclectic Enquiries!
Greetings and salutations.
In future you will find all sorts of interesting articles here.
As of right now, I just recently launched this site. I’ve called it the Eclectic Enquiries because this describes what I do; that is to say, I am interested in all sorts of topics and I don’t like to conform to fashionable advice. If you read blogs that deal with building successful sites, you’ll find that it is best to choose a small niche and hammer that until the cows come home.
This makes sense as far as it goes. If you’re interested in building computers, you might not be amused to find articles on the minutiae of knitting. That’s reasonable. However, I refuse to exclusively write about one topic, say, language learning.
I certainly like learning languages, and I have spent a lot of time researching how to do it best. I can tell people how to do it, and I like helping people with their language learning. If you’ve found this page, you’ve probably also found my rather long guide on how to learn any language without shortcuts, hacks or any self-defeating cheating.
That doesn’t mean I only like to write about learning languages – especially not in an ultra-small niche à la Language Learning for Stay-At-Home Mothers With Two Children Who Also Enjoy Playing Chess; or Language Learning for Busy Architects: Build Your Inner Language World Now! Perish the thought! I recoil at the mere notion of such new-agey drivel.
If that’s you too, stay. That will make at least 15 of us. Then, if you like to read about history and philosophy, if you’re interested in psychology and cultural developments, if you like to think and to discuss ideas, in a word: If you are interested to learn about human nature and culture, please do stay as well. So we can do it together. (You could start here and here)
We can also make it a success, despite or even because of the eclectic nature of the thing. I think it is clear that people are smarter and more capable of serious enquiries than the main-stream media would suggest. Short-form television spectacles have now been surpassed by long-from discussions.
Douglas Murray incidentally said that the BBC sometimes ask him (and probably others) to help book big names since they now often fail to do so themselves. If the BBC had asked you to come on 20 years ago, you would have been foolish (read: insane) not to go. Today, there is The Joe Rogan Experience. You don’t like the hurried drivel on CNN or Fox, well, there’s Vox and the Daily Wire.
What I want to do here is to write about interesting topics and ideas that roughly fit the field I marked above. We’ll see where it goes exactly, but I can tell you this much: It will often involve long articles rather than short ones. Although there is a place for the latter as well.
What I like most about his brave new world we’re building, is that at least now everything can be as long as it needs to be. If you can sensibly say it in 300 words, well then that’s good. If you need 8,500 words, that’s good too. Both long-from audio and video, and long-form writing have been very successful in recent times.
Many a savvy media person thought a few decades ago that newspapers would now wither and die, and since attention spans get shorter and shorter, people would now only be interested in three-minute exchanges between seven talking heads screaming at each other.
Luckily for humanity, this isn’t true. We have now television series that can be as long as they need to be, with every episode being a different length because we have Netflix and co. We can have three-hour discussions because we have podcasts. We can read serious, well-written, entertaining long-from articles on Blogs and in Online-Magazines, like over at the most excellent New Criterion. There are serious and excellent sites that discuss ideas and help spread them more widely, like the Academy of Ideas.
I suspect that people like places where they can find different topics. Think of popular sites like Wait But Why, or indeed of our friend Mr Lloyd.
If one were to look for the most perfect human embodiment of “eclectic” content, one would have to find Lindybeige.
With your help, I’ll make the Eclectic Enquiries one of these places.
So – to wrap up, since even this little welcome note is turning into a longish essay – this all should explain the name; although admittedly I chose “Enquiries” mainly because it isn’t easy to come up with a good name, and also it is an alliteration, which is always a plus. Now, you might argue that I still haven’t achieved the former; after all, it doesn’t necessarily roll off the tongue.
But then again, as Gyles Brandreth likes to say: A slight inclination of the cranium is as adequate as a spasmodic movement of one optic to an equine quadruped utterly devoid of any visual capacity…
It might not be reasonable to ask you to stick around already. Consider this though: You can later tell your grandchildren that you were there right from the beginning. So please subscribe:
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