Cooking Up Another Monologue | The Friday Update

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Friday Update, in which I give a little insight into what I’ve been up to for the past seven days.

I write this whilst taking a few moments out of the final editing push on the second of the "monologue" videos I've been experimenting with lately.

The idea behind the format was simple: old-school, opinion-style videos with just me, a camera, and hopefully some half-decent writing. There were a few inspirations, but my pitch to the rest of the team was that i was imagining them as somewhere between the video opinion pieces Ezra Klein (who we'll talk more about in a moment) makes for The New York Times and Hank Green's Hank's Channel stuff.

My main impetus was that I was really keen to be able to be a bit more rapid response, and to cover more topics than has been possible over the past 18 months or so. I really like the "big", documentary-style videos we make. But, they're such large productions that they take a huge amount of time to produce, and that limits how many of them we can make. And, that leaves a lot of important topics and issues which I'd love to make videos on but have to abandon.

While my intention was simply to be able to cover more topics, however, I've really been finding myself enjoying the writing of them. My "normal" videos these days are a collage of to-camera stuff, interview segments, and clips of found footage. I think it makes for really punchy stuff, but it's a very different process from when I used to simply spend somewhere between a fortnight and a month at my computer typing polemically about something I needed to say about the world.

Writing these monologues has really been helping me re-find that. I'm not sure I've quite perfected the writing of them just yet. This latest one ended up being much, much longer than intended, for instance. But I'm really excited about where they might go in the future.

This time around, we're looking at the concept of "context collapse", and how it's made all our political and cultural debates exceptionally difficult to navigate. The jumping off point? Ezra Klein's now infamous conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates.

And it should be with those of you on the Early Bits tier pretty soon!

(Also, I built some desks for our new makeshift office this week! And only had to dig one splinter out with a screwdriver!)

Thanks as ever for your generous support and I’ll look forward to updating you more next week!!