I've finally named this newsletter

RIP James Briggs' Substack

I started this Substack four months ago with a completely wrong notion of how I would use it and uncertainty over whether I would keep up with it in any form.

I’ve reached a couple conclusions since then: I like doing it and I want to define what this is a little better. So, I’ve finally named my newsletter: Between the Motion.

Why Between the Motion?

Photo by Matteo Scanferla on Unsplash

Between the Motion comes from a T.S. Eliot poem, “The Hollow Men”:

“Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow”

If that seems overly pretentious, well, let me also offer a key pragmatic reason why I chose Between the Motion: The URL was available!

Really, though, I like the name a lot, which is rare for me. I’m bad at naming things and I generally don’t like other people’s ideas.

I settled on this one after two days of back-and-forth with Claude, an AI chatbot. This name immediately resonated and I stopped thinking about other options (after looking up the URL, that is).

Between the Motion fits the vision I keep landing on for this newsletter: an exploration of the tensions, complexities and, well, dreariness, of life through the lenses of politics, business, parenting and spirituality.

We’re living in a moment of maximum chaos. Much like in 1925, when Eliot published the above stanza, “hollow men” are mired in paralysis while “stuffed men” peddle artificial meaning.

I want this newsletter to occupy the space between, earnestly seeking truth while acknowledging there are no easy answers.

The market for earnestness

I launched this newsletter a few days after President Trump’s election last year. As I’ve reflected on where I might offer value, I see earnestness as a starting point.

It feels like nihilism is winning as the dominant framework for American life. Trump, for example, determined during his first term that the presidency didn’t afford him the power to suppress elite institutions, so he’s set to work on a second-term project of burning them down.

Conservative leaders working alongside Trump are herding people along with this project not by appealing to any particular values, but by surrendering their values altogether and adopting a posture of performative trolling.

Amoralism is ascendant. The antidotes are sincerity, integrity and dignity.

Those qualities are, in part, what I hope to bring here. But there is often a gap between my intentions and the things I do. That is the gap Eliot wrote about. We all live in it, to some extent.

We don’t have to settle there. We have the ability to keep trying, to keep doing better, to keep seeking meaning.

Some housekeeping

A rebrand offers an opportunity to reconsider the cadence of the newsletter.

I’m open to continuing to write the Saturday newsletter in more or less the same form as I’ve been doing so far, while also adding some deeper standalone pieces along the way. The Saturday newsletter is easy and enjoyable to write and I’m happy to keep doing it.

But, if I’m being honest, my ideas aren’t always good and there’s a case to be made for trying to write fewer, better newsletters, as well as breaking from the format I’ve been using so far. I’m very open to feedback on this. I don’t want to clutter your inbox with crap.

This remains a side project and an experiment for me (and, of course, free). Your feedback so far has motivated me to put more thought and effort into it and try to turn it into something that might appeal to even more people.

Thank you for your support — I plan to keep doing this for as long as you keep reading it.