The Archive 2017–2021 gathers a selection of columns originally published during those years, now preserved as part of Boomer With a View: The Library.
These pieces were mostly written in response to events as they unfolded—political, cultural, and personal. Some are tightly focused on the moment in which they were written; others continue to feel relevant and resonant. The entries included here are those I believe still hold value, either as records of that period or as reflections that speak beyond it.
On Substack, only a small number of these archived columns are presented as samples. They are meant to give readers a sense of the earlier voice and concerns that inform the current work, without overwhelming the publication’s focus on new writing.
The full archive lives on the website, boomerwithaview.net, where all of the columns I have chosen to preserve are “shelved” together in one place. There, they can be read as a body of work—documenting a particular stretch of time and providing context for the Memoir Project and related writing that followed.
These archived pieces are not being revised or rewritten. They remain as they were originally published, reflecting the voice, perspective, and urgency of their moment. Read on their own, they stand as a record. Read alongside the memoir and AI Field Notes, they also offer a point of comparison: a pre-AI baseline against which changes in form, method, and process can be observed.