Article Club is 2 years old. I’m grateful.

Thank you for building this kind, thoughtful reading community.

Thank you, everyone, for another great month at Article Club.

Sunday’s discussion was another wonderful one. I appreciate author Nicholas Casey, facilitator Lauri, and participants Bonnie, Elise, Summer, Marcus, Susan, Peter, Jennifer, and Wes for making our conversation deep and thoughtful.

Like last year, we’re going to take December off for rest and reflection. I look forward to seeing you all in January, when we head into Year 3 of Article Club.

Until then, I want to thank you for making our reading community kind and generous.

Can you believe it’s been two years already? I still remember when this whole thing got started. In November 2019, after months of rumination, and plenty of false starts, I announced the launch of a “three-month experiment” in community reading. Here’s the original post and podcast episode:

Introducing Article Club!

Since then, we’ve grown to hundreds of subscribers, read and annotated 22 articles, interviewed 21 authors (still not giving up on Caitlin Flanagan!), and held 22 discussions. We’ve welcomed bestselling authors and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters and Kirkus Prize-winning writers. We’ve had readers join our discussions from Brazil and Nigeria and Brooklyn and Boston and Oakland and Vancouver and New Orleans and Chicago and Skokie and Cleveland and Salt Lake City – and more. We’ve marveled at how quickly strangers build meaningful connections through dialogue.

I’m very grateful. After all, I love to read, and I believe in the power of reading in community – especially now, when it’s much easier to click than it is to read, when it’s much easier to be distracted than to be focused, when it’s much easier to be mad at someone than to listen to them, to have a real conversation with them.

To all of you — thank you. Please feel free to reach out by sharing a comment or hitting reply. Most importantly, have a restful month and a joyful holiday. I look forward to seeing what’s in store for us in the new year!