One long, ridiculous year of You Are Here
A look back at a few highlights for new subscribers
It’s finally mid-September, which means we’ve arrived at the one-year anniversary of You Are Here. I truly believe it. It’s been a tremendous joy getting to write here every week or two, and I’m so looking forward to whatever the next year brings.
I would have liked to have celebrated this milestone with a massive, brand-new blockbuster post for you all, but the truth is that this one-year mark is coming at the confluence of several other (exciting, good) milestones that have needed my attention even more. I just got back from a five-day polisci conference in Philadelphia, for example; it’s the beginning of the semester, and new class preps have me bogged down; I just wrapped up the selection process for my university’s “semester-in-DC” program; and I just submitted my giant application binder for tenure and promotion (hooray!). Maybe most importantly, I’m in the final stages of a major semi-surprise project that I’m dying to share with you in a bonus post next week, so stay tuned for that.
And so, in lieu of burning myself out completely, today I’ll offer a few highlights from the past year of posts that I didn’t feature in my six-month recap back in March, including some oldies that might be interesting to newer subscribers (the number of which has doubled since then!). Thanks for bearing with me, and here’s to another year of You Are Here.
I’m a political scientist, so politics is central to how I think about place and geography, and vice versa. When I’m learning about a new community, I want to know the issues, power differences, and divisions that make it what it is; and how local politics can help resolve them. And when I’m looking at politics on the national stage, I’m always trying to remind myself (and everyone else) that local environments and cultures are hugely influential in explaining what how we vote, how we think, and how our politicians lead (or don’t).
I’ve written a lot on these intersections over the past year, but a couple stand out that I haven’t featured before. One is an article from last November that investigated how state legislatures are using — and in my view, abusing — concerns about geographic representation to overturn the will of their state’s voters when they make choices in elections on ballot initiatives and referenda. I’m not sure that this kind of “direct democracy” (in which voters weigh in directly on policy matters at the ballot box) is always a good idea to begin with. But if we’re gonna do it, we shouldn’t undermine it with bad arguments about place.
Another more recent post widened the lens to talk about the tough issue of immigration, what kind of country we want to be, and which types of people we do and don’t want to welcome. This was on my mind following the messaging coming out of the Republican National Convention, which quickly got lost in the shuffle of the tumultuous two months in politics that came after. But especially given some of the appalling racist conspiracies being spread about migrants in Springfield, Ohio during and after the presidential debate, I feel like this one, sadly, is evergreen.
But politics isn’t everything. I also dip regularly into the world of poetry on You Are Here. Poetry has plenty to say about politics, of course. But most of the folks I know who do enjoy a poem every now and then tend to find them in conversation with the natural world. This is why “Lost” by David Wagoner was the first poem I examined here, way back in September of last year.
Poetry also helps me to process complicated feelings about the overwhelming bigness of life, and our relative smallness in the universe. In this post from back in May, I wrote about the Voyager space program and its whirlwind of a year falling in and out of contact with the Earth. This mission — arguably the most successful NASA has ever launched — has a lot to teach us about touching grass, and always turning back to remember the preciousness of our “pale blue dot.”
Finally, in honor of her VMA wins and high-profile endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, I’ll end with a pair of very different posts that feature Taylor Swift from the last year, both of which also featured some poetry. The first, from February, examined the beauty of — and issues with — the monocultural moment of the Taylor/Travis relationship following the Chiefs’ Super Bowl win.
And another, from this June, was much more personal: a deep dive on Watch Hill, Rhode Island, where I spent many a summer in my childhood. It’s also where Taylor owns a beach home and has developed a good bit of personal history herself. My intertwining of our stories might have been tortured (like the tortured poet herself), but it was a fun one both to write, and to experiment with when recording the audio version of the post.
That’s a wrap on year one. I can’t thank you enough for subscribing and reading. Getting to do this has been such a balm and creative blessing. I can’t wait to see what year two brings, but I hope today’s recap has given newer readers a good idea of what they can expect. In the meantime, I hope you’ll check back in next week when I’ll be sharing a really exciting new collaborative project that I think many of you might enjoy. Cheers!
I love reading your You are Here! It is a fresh breath of sanity and insight In a crazy time. Can't wait to read next week's semi surprise!
It’s been a super year and your Substack has added to my enjoyment of it in a very positive way.