Introducing...

In which the writer unpacks this, his side project – a rough-cut record of a marathon drive across backroad America, and a book trying to keep up

By the end of 2025, I’ll have driven 50,000 miles around the United States in service of a book. Provisionally titled No Swimming at the Holiday Inn, that book is a work of nonfiction noir that’s been pacing the walls of my head for half a decade. The story follows a backroad trawl through underbelly America, stopping at motels that – by virtue of where they are and who uses them – hold up a mirror to where the country is now and where it might be going.

The book has structure – chapters, themes – but also a door policy. This Substack is its unruly kin – a second cousin with an ankle monitor, perhaps – and far less discriminating. It’s a refuge for the incoherent, the open-ended, the unprovable: gas station epiphanies, Waffle House philosophy, socioeconomic autopsies scratched into diner formica. Call them field notes – raw dispatches from the frontlines of a country that’s threatening to eat itself.

While the book will be as political as any writing by a human being ought to be, much of what it covers isn’t unique to Trump’s time in power. Its roots run deeper. The rot is older than one man’s daily dose of theatre and threat.

This Substack, though, is tuned to the immediate. It will serve as a record of the current administration’s first year – the mood, the movement, the fallout. A running archive. Live recordings from the set of This American Carnage, season two.

I’ll be posting regularly before I’m Stateside too. Background noise to the book: cultural weather, political talking points, things I’m reading, watching, thinking about. None of it neat, less of it tidy – but most of it relevant.