A Public Academic

A manifesto for the next phase in my public writing

Jul 28, 2025

Three years into my graduate program I began to suspect that I was not going to be a typical academic. I was looking at the possible futures laid out in front of me, and the more I considered them, the more I lost my appetite for the options on plate.

I knew I could go into academia. I was creative enough to come up with a strong research program. A decent postdoc was within reach if I applied for enough. And then? Climb the ladder, one patient rung at a time. But when I looked at the lives my professors were living—not the older ones, comfortably tenured, but the younger ones fighting for a place in the system—I thought to myself, “Wait, if I go this route, I’m just always going to be terrified of the next review board until I’m fifty. Aren’t I?” Suddenly the academic path lost a lot of its intrinsic draw.

I supposed I could go into industry. That looked like comfortable money, and I had some ideas that, if I developed them for a couple years, could have formed the foundation for a résumé worthy of Silicon Valley. The intervening years have suggested that this would have been a good bet: Three people I knew from my graduate program now work for Google. One for Facebook. One for Microsoft. One is a consultant for Deloitte, and another for Booz Allen Hamilton. Heavyweights, all of them.

I stacked up well enough—perhaps I could have been a heavyweight as well? I had some tentative connections in the valley. The right phone calls, being included on the right email threads early enough to build the right résumé? It was possible.

The problem is—and I’m aware this is not a good look on me—I just hate Silicon Valley and I can’t suppress it. More to the point, I hated the thought of being dominated again, of having my agenda be subordinate to someone else’s for sixteen hours per day.

That’s petty, I suppose. But it will help if you understand two things about me. First, I have a horrible case of ADHD. Second, I am a very good employee in spite of that. I respond exceptionally well to hoops, whips, and treats—like a trained dolphin, or a dog. I pull out win after win because I’m terrified not to, and because I’m stubborn. And I do this in spite of being a fundamentally chaotic person.

The way I do this is… I compensate for the chaos by leveraging the final rush of fear that comes at the end of a major project—that deadline burst of panic—for all it is worth. And in doing so I drive my body into the ground with profound acts of neglect to accomplish whatever job that needs to be done. Because failure is unacceptable.

This pattern means that any deadline, or any external authority above my head, demanding results, turns into a source of profound disruption. I lose any semblance of a self outside of work—any personal endeavor, project, or hobby, anything that might make my life better, gets trashed the moment something important needs to be done.

The result is that after decades of pulling out wins for one boss after another I found my personality had been ground down to nub. And in that weird hollow place I noticed that I was dreaming daily of driving off-road into the desert on a half-tank of gas, flooring the pedal until the juice ran out and I had nothing left but a bottle of Dasani and sixty miles until the nearest road.

I wasn’t suicidal, exactly. I didn’t have a plan. But clearly I had a concept of a plan.

What I ultimately settled on (after dealing with my major mental health crisis) is an understanding that I am broken in a way that makes me unfit for more bosses. Other venues, like government, nonprofits, and so on, seemed like bad fits for that reason, in addition to a host of smaller reasons unique to each. What I wanted instead was to go through the long, laborious process of developing my capacity for agency. I didn’t trust my ability to do that if I had a boss handing out deadlines, or a tenure review on the horizon. No more hoops. I wanted to make something for myself. Something of myself. On my own.

Breaking Out of the Ivory Tower

By the time I had come around to all of these realizations, it was the fifth year of my program. And all of this speculation came to a head in a single exchange with a close friend. We were talking about futures, and he observed that in all the time he had known me, he had never seen me working toward a future I wanted. He mused idly that just once, he’d like to see me chasing a dream I wanted so badly I could taste it.

When he said that, my mind flashed instantly to a picture of myself living on the outskirts. Living near the woods. Walking. Living a life where I could travel, learn, write—a life where I had some control over the load my brain would carry on a given week. A life spent building my own thing instead of somebody else’s.

I dwelt on those images for a bit. It seemed like there was, in fact, something I wanted so bad that I could taste it. It was just devastating to my long-term financial prospects.

But it also thrilled me. I found myself joking idly with friends about doing something crazy. I was going to zag, while everyone else was zigging. If academia was a skyscraper, I said—one where everyone crowded the stairwells in their fight to get to the top—I planned to be the lunatic scaling the outside of the building using suction cups, like a gecko with a PhD.

We all knew, though, that there were no suction cups. I just wanted to leave the building. After graduation, I did. I resettled in Alaska, took my first long walkabout in Mexico. The rest is still working itself out.

I love that story. But if I’m honest with myself, the whole process started many years before graduate school, and the transformation happened slowly. I had plenty of hints early on that I was going to do something insane. I just suppressed them for years. But here are a few:

When I was 22 I found myself with no job, and with money and time to spare. So I hopped in my ‘89 Honda Accord and drove around the U.S. for months. I felt empty. And happy. I learned fire spinning and the basics of crafting. I kept the journey going from one hostel to the next until I ran out of money a few months later. When it was all done, I knew I would do it again, and often.
When I was an undergraduate, my first statistics class infuriated me. I’d struggle with a formula for hours and when I finally understood it, the underlying principle would be something like “this exact thing we did over here but we switched up the symbols to fuck with you.” Rather than deciding to leave, though, I found myself having opinions. “They did X wrong. If I wrote this book I’d do Y, and I’d change Z over here. And what the fuck were they thinking when they did K?” I wanted to do their thing, my way.
A professor once confided to me that he couldn’t stand academia. If he went into industry, he told me, he would save so much time and money that he could use the surplus from both to fund his own research on a topic he cared about. I asked him why he didn’t do just that, and he sputtered, saying “Who would do this job for free?” I thought to myself, “Ohh. I would. I absolutely would.” but kept quiet.

Probably the most telling: Shortly after I started writing on Medium I created a publication to house my essays, called Wild Academic. The story behind the title was that I would be the guy who broke out of the ivory tower and ran for the woods. A guy who took the lessons he learned there and brought them outside. A public academic.

And after leaving academia… I didn’t become that guy. I was too timid. I told myself I was working toward it. I wrote prodigiously and, of course, since I was writing what I knew about, everything connected back to academia and psychology. But I never owned the role, or picked up the mantle.

And then I joined Substack. I have now been here for a year, and over the course of that year it has become clear to me that that role—the academic outside of the tower—is pretty much the only thing I want to be, and may well be the only thing I ever wanted to be.

So with that in mind, I have decided to start pursuing that role formally. My newsletters will not change, but each of them will be folded into my new role as an academic whose primary allegiance is to the public sphere. I’ll admit that the logistics of that are daunting. At present I have no idea whether I will be successful at monetizing my new role, and no concrete plan except to exist half-in, half-out of the academic world. Clearly my skillset lends itself to academia; I find myself now conducting research with some pretty amazing institutions, and teaching classes at local colleges, and I have no intent to back away from those roles.

But to the degree that I can? I am going to be here, trying to build my thing—a new(ish) niche as a public academic. I would like to devote the rest of this article to defining that role, articulating some of its functions, and values.

These are subject to revision, but here’s my first shot at a manifesto—my first attempt to define what it means to be a public academic:

1. A public academic conducts research that is of interest to the public

There is this quaint portrait that many people have of academics which goes something like this: “An academic is someone who is dispassionately interested in pursuing the truth wherever it leads, chasing the golden thread of empiricism to the neglected corners of the labyrinth, with others, or alone if necessary.”

I like this idea, but in practice people are herd animals. If you put a bunch of academics together to pursue the golden thread of empiricism what will actually happen is a lot of them, anxious about job safety, will pick a shiny-looking luminary and chase their thread to whatever impenetrable corner of the ruins they’ve staked out. And then, the whole group of them will spend enormous amounts of time parsing ever-finer shades of meaning of the question du jour.

I will defend this practice because sometimes the question du jour is vitally important and having a group of smart people working on it in isolation, separate from the ruthless gimme results now! sentiment of the cultural mob, often allows for developing new and transformative ways of thinking about the world.

But also, this practice of turning all of academia’s incentives inward towards academia itself can produce a sort of rampant dipshittery which frustrates a lot of people both inside and outside of academia. So, it’s valuable to have a counterweight to the situation.

One great counterweight? Have serious academics whose stated job is to grapple with the big problems that are of urgent interest to the public. This involves a tradeoff—a public academic prioritizes breadth and clarity over depth and precision—but each is its own form of expertise, and each has value. In general, then, a public academic finds the big questions and figures out how to address them.

This does not always mean addressing what is going on in the news cycle. Sometimes the best thing a public academic can do is to seek out the latent questions that have not been voiced yet, surfacing them so that they can be addressed.

2. A public academic seeks funding from the public

Funding sources corrupt research. This isn’t inevitable at the individual level—most researchers preserve their integrity in terms of their research conduct. They collect their data carefully, manage it well, report it conscientiously, and deal with mistakes graciously.

I feel like I have to state this up front because I have, regrettably, met a few haters whose mental template for academic corruption is almost cartoonish. They picture a researcher who looks like a twirly-mustached villain reaching into a dataset and fiddling with numbers while muttering to themselves “teee-heee-heee! Now they’ll all become trans!” before tiptoeing back to their polycule somewhere to drink kombucha and cry in a feminine way into their GF’s boobs about how hard toxic masculinity is. And then the haters multiply this researcher by tens of thousands, and assume that’s what academia must be like.

Now, to be fair this type of caricature is not the norm. Most people's understanding of corruption spans a much more reasonable range of mental models. But I'd like to propose a view on corruption which I think is less common but much more powerful, which is: Funding corrupts research at the level of the career trajectory.

The idea is simple—the network of funders available to academic constitutes a market. Researchers have to sell their skills on the market by tailoring their questions to the sensibilities of funders, and many questions go unasked since there is no market for them. This effect compounds, and many researchers find themselves stuck in a cycle of pursuing questions that secure funding rather than questions that are useful to the public, which in turn “corrupts” their career, since their record of past studies influences the types of grants they are able to secure in the future.

There's an entire essay to be written on this topic alone, but for now I'll settle on this: It is probably not possible to fix this problem since any proposed fix will simply create a new market that comes bundled with its own set of issues. However, if you represent an interest group—like, say, the public—you can get representation in academia by getting into the market yourself.

From a professional perspective, then, this project is a way of testing the waters to see if there is a market for a public academic and to get a sense of what that might look like. Is this a viable path? How will it alter my career trajectory? I'd like to find out.

3. A public academic reports directly to the public

I mentioned that it is possible to write an entire essay on academic funding, and in the same way, it is also possible to write an entire essay on academic writing. The current state of the industry is that academic writing is a heinous, corpulent, masturbatory affair that has been created and perpetuated by tens of thousands of academics who all compulsively speak bloated engfish1 prose to each other while somehow also being very frustrated that they are not allowed to speak normal English.

Periodically a good writer rises above the fray. When they do they are antagonized by reviewers who all insist that they “tone it down,” driving them to write pop psychology books instead, where they attain enough prestige and money that academia can no longer afford to antagonize them. At that point academia keeps them around as awkward quasi-celebrities, basking in the attention they bring to the field, while badmouthing their research behind their backs and insisting that they are hacks who only attained their station because of their writing chops instead of their skills at experimental design.

To my knowledge only Stephen Pinker has managed to escape this trap. He’s good people. Chill guy. Much sageness. Would recommend.

One of the things about this experiment that attracts me the most is the opportunity to invert that incentive system. A public academic might write for journals and academic audiences, sometimes. But mostly they are responsible for reporting their findings—whether literature review, or experimental results—directly to the public. This means that their writing needs to be tailored to reach the public; a requirement which favors clear and compelling writing, confidence (tempered by humility), pathos (tempered by honesty), and above all…

The ability to simplify.

I don’t mean this in a patronizing way. Some academics think simplifying means something like “Oh we have to be less technical and precise so we can explain ourselves to the plebs,” but really, simplicity means something more like “You need to stop this weird linguistic human centipede thing you’ve got going on and come talk with normal adults like normal people.”

This means using simple and compelling language in place of jargon. It means simplifying analytics, keeping the complexity of statistics down to the minimum required to answer the question. It means reporting with an appropriately contextualized story in mind so that readers can contemplate how results fit into the bigger picture instead of wading through layers of ambiguity.

And, most importantly? It involves explaining yourself clearly to an audience that is capable of eviscerating you in real time.

It’s a good way to keep a researcher on their toes.

Concluding thoughts

There are more aspects to being a public academic that I am still working on articulating. Here’s a few:

A public academic is responsible for translating academia—both its accumulated knowledge and its operations—for the general public.
A public academic is responsible for representing the public’s interests to academia, where possible.
And a public academic should act as a bridge to academia—its methods and insights—for members of the public who are interested in using it to develop their own ideas.

Clearly, then, I need to write a more formal and complete manifesto. But I would like to talk just a little bit, here at the end, about what this whole project—this attempt to create a niche for myself as a public academic—means for the future.

I have spoken with some authors on Substack whose knowledge and experience I trust and they have suggested to me that the best way to approach a project like the one I am doing is to embrace the concept of seasons.

Seasons have a beginning and an ending. Seasons have a unifying theme. Seasons let people know what is coming and also reassures them that it is finite. Seasons have an arc, and a story.

In the research world, the closest equivalent to a season is a research project, and my intent is to advance through research one project at a time. As I pursue a project, different pieces will wind up in different publications—my analyses and large-scale conclusions will wind up being featured in Exploration Phase, while research notes, thoughts, and curios will wind up in my main blog, Moonshots. Where relevant, I will also continue to publish in Psychology for Writers, for those of you who are here for advice on how to build your own writing habit.

I have already decided on the first research project. I’m not going to share it, just yet—I’d like to spend some more time contemplating my direction before I start talking about it. But it’s a big topic, and one that is a persistent source of agitation for many people. I’ll introduce it soon, and hopefully within the next few weeks I will be able to start the first official season of Exploration Phase.

Peace to all of you. If you’re interested in talking, drop me a comment or send me a DM. And if this idea resonates with you, I’d love to hear your suggestions for future research projects.