A change of plans

My new job, a book sprint, and a few reading recs.

Hello again! It’s been a while since I’ve written, because my plans for the past few weeks—and years—unexpectedly changed in 10 minutes of what I thought would be a totally casual Friday afternoon chat with my editor at The Week.

The upshot of that talk is I’ve accepted the position of deputy editor, which means I’ll be second-in-command in the website newsroom (the physical magazine has a separate newsroom). Because this is a fulltime job, I resigned from my foreign policy fellowship at Defense Priorities but will continue as a columnist at Christianity Today. In the new role, I’ll still be writing my own column and some shorter posts for The Week (after some initial training time), but I’ll also oversee all the other opinion columnists and freelancers as well as doing some managerial stuff.

I start this coming week and am thrilled with the opportunity. I’ve been at The Week in four roles over seven years now, quite a stretch by modern industry standards. I’ve stayed that long because, as I wrote in a memo in the process of taking this new position, I think The Week’s deliberate cultivation of real ideological difference and collegiality is an enormous strength and increasingly a rare one in American print media aiming at general, national consumption. Likewise, our ethos of presenting a coherent but deliberately limited distillation of the whole mess of the online news ecosystem has a humility and sense of the scale many of our competitors lack.

So that begins Monday. For the last 3.5 weeks, however, I’ve been in a mad sprint to finish (or nearly finish) my book before the new job begins. If you’ve noticed I’ve published almost nothing in a month, this is why. It generally goes badly when I attempt book-quality writing after a full day of work, so it was important to me to get the book done before starting the new job. I’ve juuuust about made it—one final interview for the last chapter had to be slightly delayed, but all the other chapters are ready to go. I should have a complete manuscript (!) by the end of September.

That’s a month ahead of deadline, but I don’t know yet if it will mean publication gets bumped up. I believe we’re getting close to announcing the title and publication date, with cover art following soon behind, but I’m still in the dark about all those details. I can say I’ve just spoken with the writer who agreed to do the foreword, and I’m delighted with the choice. I should be able to share that soon, too.

For now, however, I’m finally on the other side of all my research reading, so here’s another round of book recommendations for you! Also, a profile of me from my high school’s alumni mag. I seem not to be on the distribution list, as I’ve not received a copy (whoops), but my mom got one and sent me an excited, early-morning text with this snap. The interview has a bit about my career path, so it seems fitting to share it on the occasion of announcing this new job.

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Books

1. Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens, by Eric O. Jacobsen. This is a book my editor gave me—it’s also a Brazos publication, and one he thought might be relevant to my research. It was, though more for background knowledge than specific citation. What I really appreciate about Three Pieces, though, is the urbanist bent Jacobsen brings to the topic. It’s not surprising, as he’s also written two books about faith and urbanism, but the result is an incisive, unusual angle on tech-induced isolation: After the phone and television screen, the third piece of glass is the windshield of your car.

2. The Tech-Wise Family: Everyday Steps for Putting Technology in Its Proper Place, by Andy Crouch. I looked at several habit-focused books about changing our relationship to technology, and this (along with Justin Whitmel Earley’s The Common Rule, which I will undoubtedly tout in a future email) was a clear standout in the genre. Earley’s book is about daily and weekly rhythms mostly for the individual, while Crouch looks at a longer time horizon and has the shape of family life (especially involving children) in view. One of his most important ideas is arranging the physical space of your home so keeping your tech use within the limits you set is less of a battle. For me, it’s confirmed our decision not to have a TV in the living room at our new house—which admittedly started because there’s no place for it that works with the room design I want but now is undergirded by Crouch’s case for home arrangement as an aid to discipleship and self-discipline.

3. You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, by James K.A. Smith. The cover of my copy notes that 100,000 copies of this book have sold (I get a twinge of jealousy every time I see it), so if you’ve run in churchy circles in the past half-decade, there’s a strong chance you’ve read or seen or unwittingly heard a sermon inspired by this book. It’s popular and influential with good reason. Smith’s basic contention (which makes this a great prerequisite read for books like Tech-Wise and Common Rule) is that discipleship is a matter of learning by practice, and that the daily habits (or “liturgies”) of our lives “aren’t just things we do” but things that “do something to us. This means Spirit-led formation of our lives is a recalibration of the heart, a reorientation of our loves by unlearning all the tacit bearings we’ve absorbed from other cultural practices. We need to recognize how such rituals can be love-shaping practices that form and deform our desires—and then be intentional about countermeasures.”

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Look, ma!

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As always, you’re welcome to reply here—whether by email or in a comment—or you might catch me on Twitter. In theory I’m accessible on Facebook too, but I’ve gotten very lax about that account, particularly without new columns to post these past few weeks, and I might try send it to its overdue death if my publisher’s marketing team will let me…

Best,
Bonnie