Omnes una manet nox
Welcome to Unedited by Mehreen Kasana.
The bulk of media writing that reaches you — the reader — undergoes ideological incisions and injections. Post-publication, these reports rarely reflect the reporter’s most honest — if uncomfortable — thoughts. Often we are writing opinions so as to signal tribal affinities and convictions to each other, inadvertently or deliberately making the grounds for debate much more confined. Much more precarious and punitive.
Before I became a journalist in 2010, I was an irreverent blogger with hundreds of thousands of readers who — much like myself — enjoyed heterodoxy, observing rapidly changing times with a mix of curiosity, compassion, and criticism. I mention "hundreds of thousands" not to boast but to be moved by that massive crowd’s rational ability to convene over diverging, if even hostile, perspectives and never once threaten ostracization in the face of disagreement. People who did not seek rhetorical prostration at all times; people who were not socially incentivized to hang, draw, and quarter those from the out-group.
In May, I officially resigned from my media job and attempted to find those readers again from well over a decade ago. My unscripted observations will fall under Unedited but most importantly, this newsletter is my attempt to find that audience from my past. Some of these people label themselves “politically homeless” nowadays, you might have noticed. I don’t blame them. I won’t promise an abode to stay. I certainly no longer believe in safe spaces as they have, inter alia, sanctioned the punitory nature of our current and attenuated social relations.
But I will offer my uncensored observations about culture specifically and life generally sans the institutional sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. Be it idle musings, interviews with intriguing people (especially outcasts), or an earnest monograph, I am excited to return to personal writing without those incisions and injections.
And I look forward to resuming that correspondence with you. It’s been so long.