What is a SLOG?

Slow Thought for Fast Times.

SLOW THOUGHT + BLOG = SLOG.

Slow thought. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about slowly. I think that the phrase first came to me around fifteen years ago, as the result of growing agitation with screaming heads and accelerated TV news cycles.  Then, of course, the blogosphere.  In the intervening years came slow food, slow money, and then “thinking fast and slow.”

I like rumination, cogitation, consideration, deliberation, reflection, pondering, mulling things over, zooming out, discerning patterns…you get the idea. I even eat very slowly, and my dinner companions are usually tearing their hair out with impatience staring at their empty plates, when I’ve barely begun to chew my first bite.  I enjoy long periods of silence. I like to think, read, and think some more before I write anything. I believe that slow thought leads to irreversible intellectual evolution.

After many years, I’ve decided that I want to be able to share my thinking in a blog. I’m especially interested in sharing some of the ideas I’m developing in my new book, The Summons: Our Fight for the Soul of an Information Civilization.

The problem is, I’m not the kind of thinker who is likely to blog daily. I’m too slow. My solution is to offer something a little different. Not a blog but a SLOG.  A slog is born from the union of slow thought and blogging. Slow + blog = Slog.

My promise is that while I might not post every day or even every week, the work I share here will come from a deliberate process of careful thought, and it will be connected to a larger system of ideas that have their origins in my ongoing research and reflection.  I offer slow thoughts for fast times.