Merry Christmas!
For this newsletter, we wanted to send out an ‘alternative view of Christmas’ where we find videos of children adamantly claiming that Father Christmas exists. But there don’t appear to be many online – or perhaps I’ve just been terrible at searching towards the end of this year. Nevertheless, I wanted to wish you a very Merry Christmas, tell you all about a podcast launch next week and say thank you for your support this year!
We now have just over 1.4k newsletter subscribers, in just 6 months, which has come about almost entirely by word of mouth as well as some press. So thank you very much for spreading the word!
If you would like to give us a Christmas gift this year please tell 10 friends and family members about The Echo Chamber Club and show them how to subscribe. Here are some of our most popular and challenging newsletters that you might want to share with them.
- In favour of safe spaces
- Is the West worse than Putin?
- Inflation; could it have been triggered by something other than Brexit?
- Burundi – the unreported humanitarian crisis
We also offer notifications of newsletters via WhatsApp – here’s a reminder of how to sign up here.
Announcing The Echo Chamber Club Podcast
Next week there won’t be a newsletter, but we are going to release the first three episodes of a brand new podcast.
This podcast will interview key thinkers; philosophers, journalists, economists and politicians, about their values.
This won’t focus on political events per se, but is more of an opportunity for people to discuss what they believe in. The idea being that we can strengthen our own ideology and make the centre-ground exciting and electable again.
You may wonder why this is a subject for the podcast. For me, (very briefly) the echo-chamber is a problem because we cannot strengthen our own ideology. So the newsletter exists to steel-man opposing arguments to the liberal echo-chamber, and the podcast will help us debate what a future society should look like with our ‘centrist’ values.
I’m still waiting on approval from iTunes – so the first interviews with Claire Fox, Joshi Herrmann and Roifield Brown will be up next week. Hopefully, it’ll be something you can listen to whilst eating another pie, or getting some respite from your wonderful families. In the meantime, here’s episode 0 – a short introduction on audio-player.
Special thanks to…
Alice Revel, who has been on hand with all sorts of helpful advice; Andrew Brightwell, who went out of his way to help me attract the attention of some journalists; Stephen Barnett, who gave me the idea for many of the early newsletters; David Simpson, who listened when I was struggling with the HTML on the first landing page.
OverNightSite, for building the new website and teaching me how to use it; Henry Thwaite for designing a brand new font for The Echo Chamber Club logo.
To the newsletter contributors of 2016; Charles Orton Jones, Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, Jaz O’Hara, Shyam Sakhrani, Stuart Lyons and a pseudonym.
To the people who have helped and been interviewed for the podcast; Rebecca Huston for producing; Emanuel Doser for the music; Joshi Herrmann and Roifield Brown for giving their time and the opinions for the podcast itself; Claire Fox, who is not only on the podcast but who has introduced me to so many people who have made the ECC a success.
Thanks to the subscribers who have got so excited about the project, helped out with improving the idea, and spread the word!
And finally to my friends and family who have been so supportive this year. In particular to my mother, Salli Thwaite, who has proof-read every single newsletter and deserves an extra limoncello this Christmas.
