Friday Catch-Up—I'm Hiring
And other news, personal and professional.
Dear Readers:
I was up until midnight last night (yes, on Thanksgiving) turning around copy-editing queries and fact-checks for my upcoming book, The One and the Ninety-Nine. Some of the fact-checks were painful, like the time I remembered going back to my basement apartment in Astoria, Queens, on the N train, and feeling a certain way as it “rumbled over the Queensboro bridge” (“The N train doesn’t go over the Queensboro bridge,” my lifelong New Yorker fact-checker reminded me bluntly).
I’ve poured both my mind and my heart into this one, and I hope you enjoy it when it hits shelves next year: June 16, 2026. I’ll be publishing a lot more here related to its central themes in the coming months. Until then, some news:
I’m Hiring!
I’m hiring for several different positions. The one I am expediting, though, and the one with the broadest reach—because the position can be totally remote, and it’s part-time—is Content Strategist. It’s a position that requires: 1) being intimately familiar with my writing and general ideas, and spirit; 2) diligently combing through books, including my own (and others that I engage with), extracting important things and communicating them in digestible ways, without falling prey to the content game.
The role runs between now and the end of August, with the possibility of extending beyond that. The compensation is $4,000/month.
For someone who wants to learn, do research, read deeply, engage, and practice the skill of translating complex ideas into accessible invitations, I can’t think of many better positions for a person who either wants to write books or learn how to communicate ideas. The position January 2 at the latest, possibly sooner.
Other positions I’m hiring for include Director of Operations, Director of Communications, Part-Time Editor for
, Grant Writer, and others.You can learn more about all of them, and/or apply, here.
The Cluny Institute
I’ve dedicated a very large portion of my time this past year to getting the newly founded Cluny Institute off the ground. Cluny is, among other things, a way to operationalize and put into concrete action much of what I’ve been writing about for the past 5 years—but it’s also a network of artists, writers, entrepreneurs, thinkers, clergy, and generally thoughtful, good people, who are dissatisfied with the fragmented, siloed state of discourse and life.
What started as a response to the question “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem, have to do with Silicon Valley?” has blossomed to include at least a couple of other places—Florence, Hollywood, and perhaps even Berlin (the last being a surprising addition, given to me by Stripe CEO Patrick Collison over lunch at Stripe’s HQ in SF when he asked me what the next city was and I threw the question back at him. To be fair, his answer was “Germany”, given the way that it has influenced American universities and ways of thinking in the West, particularly as it pertains to ‘order’; but for shorthand, I’m going to call this Berlin.)
But having reflected on that conversation with Patrick for two weeks now, I’m convinced the best answer is Calcutta. There can really be no movement that touches the human heart and elevates the mind without intimate contact with the poor, with suffering, with the realities of human life that we so often wish to hide. That is where every intellectual program that seeks to “form the elites” goes wrong: first of all, nobody even knows what an “elite” is anymore; but second, and more importantly, it very quickly becomes sterile, smug, and detached.
While there are no definitive plans at Cluny for how to move more strongly into this area of course, I suspect that the answer is not simply building a version of a monastery for the laity, but first buying or building a house big enough to support those who seek or need refuge, and to orient more of our work around them.
Having spent my fair share of time in the echelons of the powerful, I’ve become more convinced by the day that Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin had it right all along—and that they were on to something that only needs to have new life breathed into it in the circumstances in which we find ourselves today. If I can play some small part in that, I will.
Personal News
My wife and I are expecting our second child in January, and our two-year-old may be the only one more excited than us. She slaps Claire’s belly almost daily yelling, “Come ooooouuuuut!”
My dad—who as many of you know by now is battling Alzheimer’s disease—continues to hang in there, and has even maintained his sense of humor. My relationship with him, and the incredibly complex situation I’ve faced the past four years, features very heavily in The One and the Ninety-Nine, which turned into a vulnerable book weaving personal memoir with ideas in a way that I certainly did not foresee when I set out to write it.
On this Thanksgiving, I am grateful to each and every one of you who has sent me kind notes or supported my work in any way, which has lifted me up at times when I truly needed it. Nobody can convince me that this isn’t the most interesting and thoughtful community of readers in the world. (Which is all the more reason why I want to start some kind of matchmaking service—perhaps not romantic, but professional—so that more of you can get to know one another. Of course, one way to do that is to attend the various events that I’m organizing, like the Zoë Conference in CA—through Cluny—next year, but I do hope to make a kind of ‘interactive job board’ in 2026 to facilitate more interaction.)
That’s it, for now. More from me as soon as I turn in this book on Sunday night.
Yours,
Luke