About The End of Safety

Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one identity, the end of safety.

-James Baldwin, “Faulkner and Desegregation”

My name is Adam Gurri. I founded Liberal Currents and am the Editor-in-Chief there. I am an otherwise boring, ordinary person with a boring, ordinary day job, with a much more interesting wife and two young boys. Writing for pleasure is something I have done for as long as I can remember—not to say that I was able to write very well for most of that period. My own contributions to Liberal Currents, while not unenjoyable to write, are fairly mission driven. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished there, and even more proud of the other contributors we on the editorial side have supported and published there, but there are many other kinds of writing which I enjoy. Until now I have by and large indulged in writings of this sort at my personal blog.

Some of those writings were quite well received, and I began to wonder if I ought to try a bit harder to turn it into something.

I have long thought that writers who had to produce every single week to a formula tended to be ruined by the arrangement; those who were capable of flourishing rather than withering have been very few and very far between. Yet I wondered whether this had more to do with the nature of their confinement rather than with the regularity. Writing is, in the end, a craft, and craftsmen hone their skills through their frequent use. Is it possible that the contemporary column writer develops poor habits simply because of the nature of the thing they are asked to write over and over? Imagine a carpenter who is rewarded for nothing but shoddy work; would they ultimately lose any ability they once had to produce work of the first rate?

The End of Safety is something of a challenge to myself: write something every week, all year, and do it in a way that refines my skills as a writer rather than blunts them. To that end, the focus will be entirely on the quality of the writing. The ideas, or the statements, that I set out to make may be quite simple, even basic and obvious. But so long as what I write is enjoyable to read, I will have succeeded.

I do not expect to make my fortune off of this. Instead, it is my hope that, while doing something I love, I can help provide another source of funding for Liberal Currents beyond what we manage through Patreon. For that reason, paid subscribers will receive not only my weekly writings but the Liberal Currents newsletter that goes out to patrons every other month, and other Patreon benefits like an invitation to our Discord. Liberal Currents Patreon patrons will likewise be offered access to the subscriber-only posts here. Incidentally, this means that if you want to sign up for $3 rather than $5 per month, you can do so through the Patreon; Substack simply does not allow anything less than $5. If you subscribe at the Founding Member level you’ll also get access to the $12/month Patreon benefits.

I have left a sampling of my writing as free posts to help you decide whether or not this is something you might be interested in. Below are some essays I have written before launching The End of Safety:

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The ordinary thoughts of an ordinary writer

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Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Liberal Currents