The Story Behind 'The Inside Story Of Leverage Research 1.0'

Life events that informed my approach to one of the biggest journalism stories of my career

But this isn’t fiction. Sometimes a story is not about anything except what it is about.

— a quote from one of my favorite essays, “The Love Of My Life” by Cheryl Strayed

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Over the last 2.5 years, I’ve been working on an in-depth investigative article about an organization called Leverage Research, which I will soon publish. This post is not that article. This post is an attempt to provide context for that article, and to answer questions that I’m frequently asked about the article.

Please understand: The post you are reading right now is not intended to explain or describe Leverage. This post is intended to answer FAQ about the process around my article about Leverage, which hopefully will be published soon (we are finishing the fact-checking process now). For some readers, it might make sense to wait until the Leverage article itself is published, and then come back and read this once you have more context. (Update, 7/1/2026: The story is now out!)

It is challenging to write about this. I’m still processing many feelings, for reasons that will become clear if you continue reading. However, due to the particular nature of this story, and in deference to the questions many people ask about this, I feel the urge to be as transparent as possible. Further questions are welcome in comments!

How I Got Involved With Leverage In The First Place

Over the last couple decades I’ve been involved in many counterculture communities, including Burning Man, co-living communities, alt sexuality, and sometimes Effective Altruism. I’ve done lots of different kinds of writing and media work over my career, including some journalism, and I’ve lived in the Bay Area since January 2013. In 2016, I had a “spiritual awakening” — I always feel pretentious calling it that, but that’s the best phrase — which shifted my cosmology, and caused me to become incredibly interested in “woo-woo” stuff.

Following that spiritual experience in 2016, I dove into spiritual practice and I inventoried nearby woo groups. In late 2016, I heard about Leverage Research, and in 2017 I received some outreach from a Leverage project. Leverage seemed interesting, but in early 2017 I was also starting a passionate long-term relationship with a man who spent his childhood in the Church of Scientology; he was sure that Leverage was bad, and it seemed clear that I’d be risking my relationship with him if I got involved with Leverage, so I kept tabs on Leverage but didn’t pursue deeper involvement. I developed a personal spiritual practice by talking to practitioners of different paths, reading books, and trying things on my own (including, but not limited to, some extended meditation). (You can read more about how I think about woo stuff in my past posts, like “Spiritual Foods”; “Spiritual Transmission And Leadership”; “What Am I Looking At?”; “A Translation Is A Betrayal”; and “Fidelity.”)

In 2019, Leverage Research restructured, and most employees left the organization. In 2020, the Covid pandemic commenced in earnest, so people moved around, and communities across the Bay Area shifted. I became friends with several new-to-me Leveragers then. Due to the pandemic, I hibernated the magazine that I’d just launched and devoted a lot of time to spiritual practice. I started observing what Leverage labeled in its internal jargon as “intention objects” — i.e., I had compelling experiences that I considered “spiritual,” sometimes accompanied by visuals — and this became a frequent conversation topic with Leveragers. (Yes, I was in therapy with an accredited therapist, and she said I was fine.) In other words, my pre-existing spiritual practice gave me unusual capacity to understand some of the weirder experiences that people had at Leverage, and their methods were also helpful to me, so I became closer to the group because of that. There’s more to say here, but I think it’s best left for a future post that can go into detail about method.

Around early 2021, various Leveragers including the founder, Geoff, began encouraging me to write about Leverage. Geoff and I briefly worked together on a project to “help ex-Leveragers tell their stories,” but nothing came of it. (I think this project was mentioned in a Leverage newsletter, but I never ended up talking to anyone other than Geoff for the project, and it was unpaid.) Everyone who happened across the Leverage story believed that it was bound to eventually attract major media attention. I was unsure I wanted to be the journalist who told the story, but as some Leveragers suggested that I was the only trustworthy writer skilled enough to do it, I tended to agree.

Why does this story matter? There’s a shared intuition among many who know the history that it’s a big deal, that it’s worth “doing the story right” — but why? I think the answer is about more than the specific people and groups who were involved.

An image that comes to mind for me lately, when I think about this story, is Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’:

A crop of Leonardo da Vinci’s 1400s drawing, ‘Vitruvian Man,’ which he created while musing in his private notebooks. The art historian Letha Ch’ien suggests that the “Italian Renaissance artistic pursuit of the ideal, the perfect, straddled a desire to imitate nature and the acknowledgment that ideals did not exist in nature,” and concludes by saying that this drawing “presupposes, with enough effort, idealism can be achieved in human reality.”

Da Vinci drew ‘Vitruvian Man’ in a private notebook as he sought to reason through a claim he’d found in a philosophical book about Roman architecture, which was that a man with both arms extended could fit in both a circle and a square. As I was trying to remember the drawing’s history and context, I discussed this with Claude AI (you can read my conversation with Claude here); Claude notes that the idea “was attractive to Renaissance thinkers because it tied human anatomy to the geometry of the cosmos, the body as a microcosm reflecting the order of the universe.”

There are so many implicit claims in ‘Vitruvian Man,’ about symmetry and proportion, and about how parts of a human might ideally relate to each other. These are, in my most humble opinion, spiritual questions and not just aesthetic ones. A frequent question among modern humans is what, among our fearful symmetries, we might deliberately develop, or choose. What is illustration, what is creation, what is possible to make of ourselves?

At any rate: By late 2021, as a writer who many Leveragers considered friendly while being independent, I understood myself to have “the exclusive” on Leverage Research — i.e., it became clear that if I wanted to write a book, or do the story for a major magazine, then I would receive privileged access to sources and internal information. For a while I didn’t act on this, but eventually I did.

(For those who know the cast of characters: I am friends with a bunch of Leveragers, and hang out with many of them socially. My closest Leverage friend is James Dama, who eventually became a source on my story; I will also disclose our friendship in the story when it’s published. For the sake of completeness, it’s worth noting that I went on several dates with one ex-Leverager in 2021, but he was not a source on my story. I’m on good terms with that guy and he’s welcome to out himself, but I won’t publicly name him unless he names himself. His relevance to this whole thing is minimal, given that he isn’t mentioned in the article and wasn’t a source, but I felt like I should mention that we went on some dates, both to explain that he isn’t involved in the article and as an illustration of my personal closeness to the Leverage group.)

The New York Magazine Arc (Plus, A Personal Experience In The Spotlight)

In order to contextualize the next bit, I need to quickly summarize some things that happened in my personal life (regular readers will already be familiar with this). In late 2021, I fell madly in love with a famous far-right writer; we became engaged within months of meeting each other. The engagement was high-profile and was announced in Vanity Fair. Then it ended while I was pregnant. My ex-fiancé chose to escalate the matter to Family Court as soon as I gave birth, and the Family Court case documentation was public, so this meant: (a) I had a new baby, (b) I was on super bad terms with my baby daddy, (c) I was fighting a Family Court case, (d) all this was extremely public, and onlookers were fascinated (including numerous journalists). These events were traumatic in a literal, diagnosed sense: In mid-2023, a court official referred me to a therapist specializing in the Family Court system, who diagnosed me with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Some of my Leverage friends were part of my emotional support system as I dealt with this.

It was difficult for me to work during this period, for many reasons, including the fact that I had a small baby. However, this was also a financial crisis, so I was under pressure to figure it out. Somehow.

In early 2024, I heard through the grapevine that New York Magazine was seeking someone to write the Leverage story. (Another writer in the scene initially pitched NYMag on the Leverage story but then decided not to write it, so then NYMag started looking for someone else who could do it.) I had never written a major feature story for such a big magazine before, but I had the right experience to pitch them — I’ve written shorter articles for many different magazines, including prominent ones — so I pitched NYMag.

In 2024, I had multiple hopes for the Leverage story, some of which I still have. I feel — I hope — that the story uniquely illuminates broader questions of practical epistemology and personal faith, as those questions are experienced by humanity today. I also hope that the story can be emotionally helpful, both for the broad community that’s been absorbing the impact of Leverage for years, and for some Leveragers. On an abstract level, I believe there is room for improvement in how journalists handle stories with woo-woo themes, and I hope to be a small part of charting that course within the profession.

In addition, when I sold the story to NYMag, I hoped that if I did a good job then I could use that to re-establish myself professionally. This (I thought) would help me recover publicly from the scandal with my ex-fiancé and from the multi-year résumé gap. Plus, (I thought) the flexible nature of the work would give me time and space to recover privately from PTSD. In other words, on a personal level, selling the story was less about the money and more about finding my way back towards rejoining society; it felt like a chance to re-find my professional self.

I figured that even if I went slowly and took my time with it, it would take me a year to finish the story, tops. This was not how it worked out. In early 2026, two years after my initial pitch, the story was still in progress. I recently chose to pull the story from New York Magazine in order to publish it independently here on Substack.

This is an unusual decision. I’ve never heard of another writer withdrawing a major magazine story towards the end of the process, like I did here. Here are three factors that led up to this decision.

• From 2024-2026, my personal trust in the field of journalism declined quite a bit.

To be clear, I was already critical of journalism! I think a lot of people perceive me as an “insider,” but that is not how I perceive myself: I’m an outsider with numerous critiques, and I sometimes work with the journalism establishment on special projects. Having critiques is why I founded my own magazine in 2019; see also my post about my history in the “dissident right” political movement. I’ve put a ton of energy into making my own niche, wherein I stay connected to the establishment while doing my own thing.

The last couple years made me feel like an outsider in a new way, and caused me to distrust the institutions more than ever before. It wasn’t just because my personal life was covered by a number of different publications. I’m not gonna lie, though — that part was brutal. As politics shifted across the United States and more people got interested in my ex-fiancé, public interest mounted in me as well. Journalists published things about me without fact-checking them, even at well-regarded publications. Others pulled my Family Court file, or found other more obscure documentation, and texted me out of the blue about it. Some used the Court file to manipulate me into talking to them, without honoring my requests or my attempts to set boundaries. (Since I had no control over whether people pulled the file or not, and the version people got from the Court archives was unpredictably messy, I eventually began distributing a well-organized PDF of my own Family Court file to anyone who asked.)

The irony here is that I was completely willing to work with them. Nobody had to manipulate me! In fact I saw talking to journalists as a natural extension of my depolarization work, and of my efforts to make the illegible legible, which got me involved with various counterculture communities (and with my ex-fiancé) in the first place. I felt responsible for helping them get their stories right, because I think journalism is an important public good!

It’s also true that, while I became more famous after getting involved with my ex-fiancé, I already had a minor following for my writing; I’ve been a minor public figure for much of my adult life. And I have long felt that there are spiritual and interpersonal responsibilities that go along with this, so I have tried to be approachable. Over time, I dared to hope that journalists would use what they learned from my story to illuminate problems of Family Court, because Family Court is an insane disaster desperately in need of reform. Literally, any journalist could have just had a serious conversation with me, and then honored my boundaries and requests, and it would have been fine. Some journalists did this and I appreciate them. Some, however, did not.

I saw a lot of shifty behavior. I watched journalism norms get broken that I previously assumed would get people fired, but didn’t. At one point I directly observed a reporter, at a major publication, publish the name of a background source (not me, someone else) who did not give permission to have their name published. As I saw this go down, I discovered there was no accountability mechanism in place that I trusted. Then, in late 2025, the Olivia Nuzzi scandal threw questions of journalistic accountability into high relief. (Update 6/21: The original version of this post linked to a summary of the Nuzzi situation in the National Review, which I thought was not paywalled when I linked to it, but the NR summary now appears to be paywalled — paywall tech is getting trickier by the day. So, if you don’t already know that story, here is a gift link to a brief summary in the New York Times. I feel like there must be a better summary out there somewhere, specifically one that details Nuzzi’s alleged behavior on behalf of sources that she was sleeping with, which allegedly resembled “catch and kill” practices. If a better summary exists, however, I haven’t read it yet.)

This all made me question whether I want to be associated with mainstream journalism at all. Throughout all of this, I kept working on my article for NYMag, but these experiences chipped away at my motivation.

• I struggled with questions like: Was I going to hurt people unnecessarily, without meaning to? And I didn’t feel like the industry offered an answer that made sense to me.

I started out confident that I could do the Leverage story both kindly and accurately. After all, I’ve done many similar projects. But I became increasingly worried that I’d accidentally cause more unnecessary pain and trauma. This fear worsened as I saw how the media handled my personal situation. My experiences being covered by the media made me highly determined to treat Leveragers better than I felt like I was treated, while also making me highly anxious that I would fail at this task.

Multiple friends told me that I wasn’t going to mess this up because I care and am paying attention. Unfortunately, caring a lot about your work, and resolving to do no harm, doesn’t necessarily mean you will succeed. So I spent a lot of time obsessing over mechanisms to balance needs of sources, communities, stories themselves.

Of course, there is an inherent tension here. Journalism idealizes telling the truth, even when the truth might be inconvenient or hurtful. I always knew that if I agreed to write the Leverage story, then there would be parts some people wouldn’t want me to tell, and that some of that would need to be told anyway. Leveragers themselves are deeply divided, at odds about which parts of the story need telling! (In my opinion, if we assume that Leveragers did psychological and spiritual work that reflects on their communities and not just their own selves — which, then, shapes their impact — and that they have transmitted their paradigmatic work more broadly, then this philosophical tension is more urgent than it may seem.)

I tried discussing this with people I knew in the journalism industry, and I spread my net to find new conversation partners, too. My former editor at NYMag, who is awesome, connected me to other journalists who have written similar stories, and they shared their experience with me. I am so grateful for this, so very grateful to everyone in the industry who gave time discussing this.

Yet I have to admit that their responses did not inspire confidence. Even a friend who attended Actual Journalism School responded to my queries like: “Yeah, I always hoped we’d discuss these ethical questions more in journalism school, but we didn’t! Weird, huh?”

It felt like, for every person I spoke to in the journalism industry, their instinct was to circle the wagons and see the journalist’s side, downplaying ethical and community concerns I increasingly worried about (not to mention my own experience as a source). The prevailing attitude seemed to be like — “yeah, sometimes sources get hurt or feel betrayed, but as a journalist you can’t spend too much time thinking about that.” So I didn’t feel like I got much practical help from my colleagues in understanding the right course. Maybe I didn’t talk to the right people, or maybe I misunderstood what they told me, but that was how it felt.

I think part of what’s going on here is that, in a way, journalists are not supposed to care overmuch about the people in a story. Indeed, a critique I have heard, of me, from other writers, about this project, is that I’m “too close to the story.” From a certain perspective, this is blatantly true! Me being friends with and highly concerned about the experience of Leveragers is, arguably, a huge red flag! On the other hand, if I were less close to the story, then my sources never would have trusted me with it in the first place, and it wouldn’t exist in its current form.

Ultimately, this is why I still want to publish it. I think the version I wrote, despite its imperfections, is not only more accurate than the rumors currently circulating about Leverage — it’s much more fair than the story another journalist would likely come up with.

I also believe that, despite my closeness to the story, I retained the ability to inhabit serious Journalism norms. The story I am about to publish is absolutely not the Leverage-approved version of the Leverage story. Some former Leveragers are already mad at me about things they know I’m going to include!

• The breakdown between me and NYMag primarily had to do with vibes.

At first, I felt confident that I’d be able to tell the Leverage story accurately but also fairly, within the frame and vibe of a mainstream New York media company. However, this was tricky from the outset. Several people told me from the beginning that they didn’t think I could pull it off. To those who doubted I could manage it: You were right! I learned a lot from how the process unfolded, however, and I’m grateful for that.

NYMag is a fine magazine. My editor there is awesome and put so much work into this project. The top-level editors seem good at their jobs (I never talked to them directly, but they sent feedback on several drafts I wrote). I have absolutely nothing bad to say about any of these folks.

With that said, there are huge framing differences between the mainstream media and the communities from which Leverage emerged. Additionally, there are many strange competitive and hostile dynamics between the two. These dynamics are largely unconscious, but they exist, and in my opinion (my editor might feel differently), this is where the breakdown occurred. I pulled the story once I started feeling like it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to publish a version with NYMag that didn’t carry a subtle hostility towards Leverage, not to mention affiliated communities in Silicon Valley — and, more importantly to me, hostility towards a core spiritual sensibility that I see in both myself and in the people the story describes.

For better and for worse, this story wouldn’t be what it is without the involvement of NYMag. There are sentences in there written by my editor, and my editor’s skilled eye for narrative structure informed the whole thing. As an example of something NYMag helped me see: I initially resisted starting the story with James, because I felt like I’m too close to James. I wrote several versions with other sources as the “main character” who introduces the story, including Emily and Nevin. Yet my editor felt that, as a character, James is the natural person to start the story with, regardless of my friendship with him, and I think my editor was right.

My eventual decision to pull this story was so hard. I wanted so badly to find a good compromise and publish the story with NYMag. My editor was understanding, which is good, and it made me feel worse. I kept asking myself: Was I defending the integrity of my work, or being an unreasonable prima donna?

To get out of the rut, I reflected on past situations where I’ve known in my heart that an editor was moving me in the wrong direction. Sometimes I’ve let editors insist on things I knew, deep down, didn’t make sense for the work, and I have always regretted it afterwards. Every single time. It was never worth it, even if I couldn’t explain why at the time.

I cried a lot during the week I decided to pull the article. I made three separate visits to meditate in a nearby woods. I felt like I was letting down both my editor and the Leveragers who wanted me to publish in a major publication rather than on Substack, which included most of my on-the-record sources. Plus, from the perspective of my career, this was a terrible choice; I might never have another chance to do a big story for an internationally famous magazine. I had to do what felt right — I’m sorry about this outcome, though.

Notes On The Journalistic Process For This Story

The story is not perfect, and it’s not what I would have written if I’d done it on my own from the start, but it works well enough. By the time I decided to pull it, I felt like it was nearly publishable, but first I wanted to get it professionally fact-checked. (When I was working with NYMag, the story never made it to fact check — I decided to pull it before that stage.)

I suspect that there are many ways the story could be improved if I were willing to do a full rework, after pulling it from NYMag, since this is no longer a normal magazine story. Maybe there are new ways I could (in art criticism parlance) interrogate the form of a magazine story by doing so. This is somewhat interesting to think about, but the plain reality is that I did not have the energy to rewrite it, again, from scratch, after a dozen drafts with NYMag, so I didn’t.

However, I did go back through the story, and add back some details that were stripped from earlier drafts because my NYMag editor didn’t feel those details would interest a general audience; word counts are ruthless at big magazines, but they are less ruthless on Substack. Details I added back into the story include methodological details and warnings (for instance, the paragraphs in Section 3 about psychotic breaks); this is because I want to be sure that people who might be inclined to see this story as a blueprint understand the risks (hi y’all, I see you). I also added back some “inside baseball” — community history that would likely be boring to, say, a random NYMag reader in Louisiana, but won’t be boring for an Effective Altruist in a coastal city or an Extremely Online poaster currently based in Lisbon and Berlin.

The two types of external review that matter most, for a story like this, are legal review and fact-checking. I’ve written previously about defamation lawfare and how it can wreck people; this is a risk I take seriously. Happily, I have a pre-existing relationship with the Substack Defender program, which generously provided me with free legal review for defamation lawsuit risks. (Thank you so much to the Defender team, and to Substack for having the Defender team in the first place. You folks are amazing.)

This leaves fact-checking. Fact-checking is a legal thing, but it is also an epistemic thing, and it’s a social thing too. The fact check phase gives article subjects some idea of what is coming while — ideally! — ensuring that all the facts mentioned are true. Fact-checking can’t protect against framing issues; it also can’t answer, like, spiritual questions or anything like that. What it does is catch errors, both minor errors made in good faith that might otherwise unfairly discredit a story, and sometimes weirder stuff, like outright lies that fooled the journalist. This is why I was determined to get this story fact-checked. After I pulled the story from NYMag, this meant I had to hire and manage the fact-checkers myself.

I’ve worked with fact-checkers before, so logistics weren’t an issue, but the money was. As I mentioned before, I’ve spent the last few years in a mounting financial crisis. Several Leveragers have offered to help me with significant amounts of money since the beginning of 2024, and obviously, I have always refused; I don’t think they meant it as a bribe, though some probably had mixed motives, but regardless, I refused the money. (The one exception is that recently, I helped Emily and Tee with a creative coaching program they developed, which came with a small amount of money. As a side note, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that I’ll have a funding relationship with Leveragers or Leverage-adjacent people in the future, because some of them are funders in my community. I can’t help being aware of this. I’ve done my best not to let it affect my judgment about the story, but I know that if certain people dislike the story then it may cost me future funding opportunities. So it goes.)

Separately, I’ve received some grants for my writing over the last couple of years, but nothing major. By the time I pulled the article from NYMag, I felt close to dire financial trouble. I was willing to pay the fact-checking costs myself if it came to that. But just in case, I asked around to see if anyone in the Bay Area community might help me pay the fact-checkers. A couple of individuals sent small amounts of money (thank you!), and then someone affiliated with the Speculation Grant at the Survival and Flourishing Fund got in touch.¹ My benefactor suggested that I request more money from SFF than I needed, partly due to all the work I’ve already done for free, and partly on the basis that I plan to make myself available to the community to answer questions about Leverage. I probably would have done that anyway, but I included it explicitly in the grant application, and the Survival and Flourishing Fund gave me way more money than I expected — $35k, to be exact. (I estimate that fact-checking and other costs will come to $15k at most.)

Surprisingly, this means that I have already made more money on the story by publishing it independently than I would have earned had I published with NYMag (which contracted to handle ancillary costs like fact-checking and then pay me $9.5k on the story’s publication). This was not the outcome I expected, but I sure am grateful for it.

The fact-checkers I hired have been working on the story for a while now. Once they are done, I will do a final review and integrate their findings, and then I’ll publish the story here on Substack. It’s hard to predict when this will happen; fact-checking is tedious and time-consuming. (Yesterday one of the fact-checkers checked my tossed-off assertion, from a random sentence late in the article, that multiple marriages emerged from Leverage, so I am confident that they are checking at the right level of detail.) After the article is published, I am planning to work with the fact-checkers to write a separate public post about their process, because I think a lot of readers will be interested.

A final note about my journalistic process on this project: I’m sure there are people reading this who don’t understand the distinctions of how journalists work with sources; and probably other readers who do understand those distinctions, but are worried that I did not work cleanly here, because I’m too close to the story. So, have some details about how I handled sourcing:

• In general, as an overall practice, I don’t consider anything “on the record” for journalism unless it is stated clearly in a recording that the person knows is being recorded. I do not play games with this, because I care about community cohesion. (This is also self-interested — I want to have friends and be invited to parties.) In the past, I’ve found that if a story needed to be told, people were willing to go on the record to tell it.

Some journalists handle this differently, generally or in specific cases, and sometimes I think this is bad, but in other cases I think they have good reasons for doing so. For instance, if you are working on an urgent and immense harm like child abuse, then in my opinion it’s reasonable to consider your subjects outside the range of standard ethics. If I came into possession of unique information about a child molester, I would certainly be willing to bend journalistic norms if I thought it would nail the guy.

• (Sidenote: Personal essays are different from journalism. I have a separate code of ethics for personal essays, which I developed over years of blogging about my personal life. If you’re curious about that, my friend Joanna Bregan recently interviewed me about how I think about this. I’ve been meaning to respond more fully to her piece, which I appreciated, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.)

• There are three basic categories for talking to journalists: “On the record,” “on background,” and “off the record.” For “on the record,” this means statements can be quoted and attributed. For “on background,” this can be murky, but it typically means that information can be used without attribution. For “off the record,” this means that the journalist can’t use the information directly for what they’re working on (but this type of information can still change the journalist’s perspective, and change a story’s vibe).

For the Leverage piece, people were willing to share a very large amount of information on the record or on background, so I had a lot of latitude in figuring out how to tell the story. Of course, as I said earlier, there are disagreements among Leveragers about which parts of the story ought to be public. This admittedly put me in a tricky role, especially given that I am in community with them. I had to make numerous judgment calls here, but at the same time, I am not publishing anything that wasn’t put in the record deliberately by someone with direct knowledge of the matter.

• I did not give anyone quote review or draft review — nobody in the story will see the story in advance. Lots of people asked for this, but it is against Serious Journalism Norms, so I didn’t give it to them. (I have some opinions about these norms, which I may describe in a future Substack post once this is all wrapped up.)

• One semi-unusual thing I did was share recordings of sessions with subjects. For example, I have sixteen recorded one-on-one interviews with Geoff Anders for the Leverage article; I offered to send these recordings to Geoff, and he accepted the offer, so Geoff also has those sixteen recordings. To me, it is intuitive that journalists should be willing to share recordings if they are being honest with sources. (Indeed, in my personal life, I’ve asked journalists to share recordings of our sessions with me, and I’ve sometimes taken my own recordings of sessions with journalists.) However, some journalists will object if a source asks for this.

Overall, this process taught me a lot about how to take a journalistic role seriously while also being serious about community. Maybe in the future I’ll have more intelligent things to say about this. Right now, I’m just looking forward to publishing this thing, finally, which will hopefully let all of my relevant relationships settle into a more natural place. I never expected this project to take so long!

Final Notes

I’m so glad that this process is almost over, and I’m so curious about how people will interpret the article. My idealistic hope has always been that this story will help heal community members, while offering society a fascinating parable.

I’ve been thinking about a piece of writing that lives rent-free in my head, this quote, from a Cheryl Strayed personal essay: “But this isn’t fiction. Sometimes a story is not about anything except what it is about.” I often turn this quote over in my mind. What, after all, is any story about? And yet she is saying something important. The quote occurs in a passage wherein she observes a symbolic event in the material world, a symbol that points in a painful direction she doesn’t want to see. What is remarkable about her essay is that this symbolic moment, which feels so awful and pointless as it is unfolding, somehow becomes beautiful, somehow gains power, somehow helps bring closure, as it is shared.

Meanwhile, here is some personal news, relevant because of how my personal situation affects my work: A few weeks ago, my ex-fiancé suddenly offered me a settlement of our Family Court case, which I gratefully accepted. It’s possible that this settlement can still fall apart, but we now have an increasingly large pile of signed paperwork, and every day it seems less likely that hostilities between us will resume. To me, this is a true miracle. (I have some sense of the behind-the-scenes elements that led up to my ex-fiancé’s decision. Regardless, this is a miracle to me.) This event has both personal and professional implications — I have new breathing room, and I can imagine different options for my future.

It’s wild that both these situations, which shaped my life so much over the last few years, seem to be reaching a natural transformation at the same time. Sometimes life is like that.

So, what do I work on next? People are already asking! (If you are sitting there wondering, “Hey, should I offer Lydia her dream job that she doesn’t know about yet?” then now is a great time to get in touch!)

Ever since I published Issue One of my print magazine, people have asked when I’ll do another one. I would like to, finally, do an Issue Two. I’ve intermittently tried to get the money for Issue Two several times, and it hasn’t worked out, but if I can raise the money this year, then I’ll make the Leverage story part of Issue Two, in print. (This means we get to hire a professional illustrator for the Leverage story, and you have to admit that this would be cool.) If you are the sort of person able to make large tax-deductible donations, then you can donate to my magazine here.

Meanwhile, I do plan to continue writing on Substack. I have some specific future posts percolating already. You can subscribe here.

Thank you for reading.

Update, 7/1/2026: The story is now out!

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I copyedited this post with the help of Claude AI. If you catch any copyediting errors, please let me know!* You can see my copyediting conversation with Claude here. Otherwise, AI was not involved in writing this post (aside from the conversation about ‘Vitruvian Man’).

Update, soon after publication: I just corrected a typo, which happened because I made a correction based on Claude’s list of errors and then didn’t catch a problem that resulted from the correction. The moral of the story is, always do the post-correction re-review at the same level of detail as the initial review, even when it seems tedious…

Update, 6/22: For some reason, I felt the need to go back into the text of this post and explicitly link to William Blake’s 1794 poem “The Tyger” in the line where I mentioned fearful symmetries.

1. Update, 7/8: Due to the fact that I accepted funding from the Speculation Grant, some people are now claiming that this story was funded by Jaan Tallinn, who was also one of the funders at Leverage. So, I want to clarify what happened here. The Survival and Flourishing Fund is funded by Jaan’s money, but the person who reached out to me from the Speculation Grant was not Jaan, and I have never interacted with Jaan as far as I know. The Speculation Grant is a sub-program of SFF, but it is neither overseen nor administered by Jaan, or at least I was told that it isn’t. Thus: A person can make a literally true claim that the story was funded by Jaan, especially if that person’s agenda is to discredit me; but when I accepted the money, I did not take it from Jaan, and I was told that Jaan was not involved.