10 decisions from after the molt
New website, new reading club starting June 15th, new everything?
The first month of parenthood is a time of maximum shock and novelty, the beautiful and alien stuff, but it’s not until 3-5 months later, when you and your spouse go back to work, that you have to fully molt out of your pre-parent exoskeleton and into the new shell of your life. Most plans get derailed. Focus time comes in unpredictable bursts—I try to wake up at 4:30 AM and it’s mostly futile—but there’s ample space for reading and reflection. Naturally I find myself rethinking the goals, cadence, and infrastructure of my writing practice.
A few thoughts and decisions:
Keep the main thing the main thing. Essay Architecture feels most alive for me when I’m excited about my own essays outside of the project (ie: writing about total eclipses, techno-selectivism, the Grateful Dead—rather than craft and curation). Both halves should work in unison. I’ve been writing online for almost 6 years now, but the last 2.5 years have been a move towards convergence. As the project matured, my own writing felt scattered and neglected. May was a chance to consider how my personal writing can flourish as I continue building out the pattern language.
Time to centralize my writing archive. I have a million words scattered across Drafts, Notion, Drive, and Substack. My full backlog is neither searchable nor presentable. I could put it all on Substack, but (1) the CMS is a pain at scale—you can only click into posts one by one—and (2) Substack now feels more like a fleeting social network than a place to guide others through a deep archive. I’m in the process of moving all my writing into a single folder on my desktop (“/michael-dean-k/writing/”). Using Obsidian, Claude Code, Github, and Netlify, I can edit easily, automate the operations, and build a site of my own.
michaeldeank.com is live. You may notice the rebrand. At first glance this may be misread as “michael dank dot com,” but I added the K because my last name starts with a K—Dean is my middle name, my last name is long and Greek—and if you search “Michael Dean” on Google you’re met with a shirtless influencer (not me).
Substack is still the home of Essay Architecture. All the writing around my main project stays here: the meta-essays, the textbook, the deconstructions. There’s just another 50-80% of my writing that now has it’s own home.
I can publish 14x the output with loosened constraints. So far in 2026 I published 8,310 words across 5 essays to this email list. In the month of May alone, I published 23,000 words to my website across 38 essays. The average one is half the length (600 words) but the topics are far wider. How is this possible? I find myself less concerned to stay on topic, oblivious to metrics—I have no analytics set up—and so it’s like writing with the release valve opened. Whenever I have an hour or two, I sit down, start something, and publish it. The quality is variable, but inevitably and unpredictably, a few good ones sneak through.
I’ll curate my favorite personal essays in a newsletter (like this). A few I liked from the last month:
Thoughts on Project Hail Mary around heroism vs. scientific realism;
A reaction to day one of the Long Island Rail Road strike;
Some Notes on the permanent underclass (subtitle: “the technological mutation from serfs to hippies”);
A response to Tocqueville called The Semantic Press, about publishing, AI, democracy, and overcoming self-censorship.
Inline discussion: You can highlight anything on my site and leave a thought inline. No accounts are required, just leave your email (hidden) and name (real or pseudonymous). To prevent spam and trolls, all comments require approval before going public.
Reading syllabus: I put together a big list of what I’d like to read in the next 2-3 years (will share later, it goes beyond just classic essays). My site has a library which syncs all my Kindle highlights. The point isn’t to hoard excerpts, but to use them as prompts to write my own essays in response. Here are 6 responses to Montaigne’s Essais.
More “secret architecture of great essays”: This whole project started with me drawing diagrams of essays. I’ve done less of this as I’ve focused on textbook, software, and anthologies—all attempts to formalize the pattern language. That was all worth it, but now I need a forcing function so I can be thinking visually more frequently. Here’s a diagram of the Threads pattern within “The Fourth State of Matter” that I never posted; I should be sharing stuff like this regularly, and so in order to do that…
I’m starting an essay reading club next week: An essay club is like a book club but without the homework. Since they’re short, we can read them on a Zoom call together, jump into breakouts, and then talk it through as a group. I’ve mapped out twelve classics to read this summer, and will be presenting diagrams for each. We run these on Mondays at 7pm ET as part of Essay Club, an annual membership which also includes weekly feedback calls (on Fridays), a monthly deadline, free uploads through the Essay Architecture app, the full textbook, and a community portal for us to coordinate async.
Join us on Monday, June 15th at 7pm ET for a free workshop to kickoff the summer syllabus. Open to everyone. We’ll cover essays, patterns, analytical reading, and end on a Q&A. Even if you don’t intend to join Essay Club, you’ll leave with the full syllabus, some anthology recommendations, and a plan for the summer.
