What is this website all about?

Best to just read this.

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When do we launch?

Our official launch is September 22, 2020. Until then we will be busy preparing content, enlisting contributors, signing up pre-launch subscribers, getting some social media stuff setup (sigh, it’s a fact of modern life I’m told), and keeping you informed of our progress with occasional emails.

No polemical politics??

You may have noticed I never once mentioned politics in my description of The Zookeeper. There’s a reason for that.

If I had the wit, wisdom, and charity of Will Rogers, I might reconsider this stance. (I’d also be so popular I wouldn’t have time for this project!) Rogers supported FDR and his New Deal, but he was also able to joke about it:

Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago.

If someone wrote that joke today it wouldn’t necessarily be a wrong observation, but you can be sure it would be a controversial one in some quarters. We all either intentionally or accidentally find ourselves in those quarters from time to time and they can be entertaining, confirming, infuriating, intoxicating, maddening, and all the other feelings found on the extremes of the emotional rainbow. In this quarter, we want to focus on aesthetics, and as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, great art and literature requires balance in all of its dimensions (when I write my essay on Aesthetic Balance, I’ll link to it here).

The prohibition on polemical politics wouldn’t exclude a balanced essay on the history of political humor or a short story about Will Rogers, and in fact I would welcome contributor submissions on either of those topics or similar ones.

I hope this clarifies our position.

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