Facing a bleak world with hope, curiosity, and imagination.
What is Better Strangers?
Oscar Wilde wrote:
"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias."
Humanity appears to have forgotten this in recent decades, and instead has fallen into the trap of only envisioning dystopian futures, ones of climate collapse, nuclear apocalypse, and total extinction. If these are the only countries we can see, then they are the only ones we can sail towards.
Better Strangers is a publication that chooses to believe that humanity still has its best days in front of it. It doesn't do this by denying the difficult present, or by putting its faith in Messianic billionaires who promise to build utopias on other planets (even as they destroy our own). Instead, we at Better Strangers look at the present with clear eyes, and understand that to build a better world, we need to be able to imagine it first.
To this end, Better Strangers looks at historical movements that successfully affected change, at philosophies and ideas for coping with the modern moment, and at realistic utopian visions of the future.
How to follow
The best way to get Better Strangers is directly in your inbox. You can do that here:
You can also access it through the Substack app on your phone, or through the website homepage. If articles aren’t so much your thing, I also make a decent amount of video content, which I post across the following platforms:
How to support Better Strangers
If you like the work we do and want to see even more of it, there are a few ways you can do that.
Paid Subscriptions
There are three tiers which you can pay for through Substack.
Monthly — $5 a month. This is my favorite because it’s like you’re buying me a beer once a month, and it’s a steady stream of income.
Annual — $50 a year. This is for people who like savings! It’s also a nice price if you’re trying to gift someone with a subscription.
Founding Member — $150 a year. This is just spectacularly helpful, and frees us up to do a lot more.
Paid subscribers get access to some exclusive content that unpaid subscribers will never see (like short fiction!), some content which is put behind a paywall for a month (select articles), and, of course, to all of the free articles as well.
You can also donate paid subscriptions to people who can’t afford it.
For people who can’t afford paid but still want to support us
Not everyone is in a financial situation to make $5 a month work, so if you’d like to make any monthly donation through our Patreon (as low as $1 a month) we’ll give you a paid subscription.
Affiliate links
Because Better Strangers writes frequently about books, it regularly includes affiliate links to Bookshop.org. If you buy the books we recommend through these links, we get a small kickback. We use Bookshop because they support local bookshops, and we hope you choose them (or IndieBound or BetterWorldBooks) rather than Amazon!
Why the title?
Better Strangers, like all great titles, is directly stolen from Shakespeare, (see: Infinite Jest, The Sound and the Fury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, literally hundreds more). The line comes from As You Like It:
JAQUES. God buy you: let's meet as little as we can.
ORLANDO. I do desire we may be better strangers.
It’s meant as an insult, but I like it! Let’s be better strangers.
