Freedom and Reason has surpassed 12 thousand and approaching 6.5 thousand visitors this year. Those aren’t huge numbers, but they’re not insignificant, either—far more views than anything I’ve published in an academic journal! This is the best year ever for the platform (and we another month to go). I appreciate you taking the time to visit Freedom and Reason and read my content. Thank you!
I have had requests to migrate my blog to Substack. I set up an account on Substack a while back, but never loaded any essays. Maybe I will in the future. But WordPress is working out for me right now. All my material here is free. If you subscribe, you will not be charged. A subscription means you get notified when I post content.
Why is Freedom and Reason free? I established the platform to get around paywalls, gatekeepers, and the time it takes from submission to publication. Moreover, publishers have made money from my work published in journals, encyclopedia, and edited volumes, and I have not received a penny for that work. Academics do that work for tenure and promotion (such are the arbitrary rules of bureaucracy and religion). After that, why not make one’s scholarship available to the public that pays his salary?
Teaching at a medium sized public university is a modest living, but it allows a fellow time to write and put food on the table. This exercise in public sociology is an act of giving back. Does have effect? Probably not much by itself. But in terms of a force multiplier, just look at the political landscape. It takes a multitude pulling in the same direction to alter the political landscape.
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