Welcome to The Antiquarian
Because the past matters more than ever
Hello and welcome to the next iteration of my newsletter! The Lizzie Wade Weekly is now The Antiquarian, a newsletter exploring what we know about the past, how we learn it, and why it matters.
Since I started writing a newsletter in 2019, I’ve resisted giving it a defined theme and project. I wanted a place where behind-the-scenes stories from my reporting could co-exist with musings on creativity and cultural criticism I didn’t know what else to do with. When I got off Twitter, the newsletter became the primary place where I collected and reflected on my work and how I was doing it. This year, it’s been the center of the Apocalypse extended universe. But I’m starting to look beyond that book now, and ahead to new ideas. I’m figuring out how to articulate my own larger project, the themes my writing tends to circle, and the kinds of questions I want to dive into. It’s time to give that developing vision of my work a home that can grow and deepen with it.
We have entered a time in human history when imagination, creativity, and a sense of possibility are more important than ever. We will not get through what is coming without them. For me—and I hope for many of you—nothing lights up my imagination like trying to wrap my mind around the past. It’s not that the past contains the exact solutions we need for our future. (Anyone who tells you it does is probably dangerous.) It’s that thinking about the past has taught me how to think expansively about some of the biggest questions there are: Who we are, what we know, why we think we know it, and who we could become. It’s taught me that there’s always another way to see things, that learning I’m wrong can be exhilarating, and that asking new questions is so much more exciting than justifying the same old answers.
The forces of darkness gathering power around the world don’t want us to think this way. Not about the present, and certainly not about the past. They want us to keep believing the past was a boring, static, and oppressive place, so they can trap us in a boring, static, and oppressive future. And frankly, I’m furious about it. We deserve better than to have our wonder ripped away from us and replaced by poisonous lies. Our ancestors deserve better than to be flattened into caricatures and stereotypes. Everyone and everything that came before deserve better than to be treated as a predetermined story that inevitably supports the shallowest possible understanding of where we’ve ended up, without ever once asking why, or how it could have been different—or how it actually was different, in ways we are taught not to see.
The Antiquarian will be a place where we can think more interesting thoughts about the past. I want us to travel down research rabbit holes, dig into all but forgotten details, try out new stories and perspectives, and think critically about how the past is being used, in ways both nefarious and not, to construct visions of the future. It will still be a newsletter about what I’m doing, thinking, writing, reading, watching, and obsessing over, but now with a firmer framework and more thematic coherence. I’ve already been turning in this direction, so you, as a reader, might not notice much of a difference at first. But I hope that setting out down this path with reinvigorated purpose, together, will help us arrive places we never expected to find.
The logistics: The Antiquarian’s weekly Sunday letters will remain free, although I’m mulling over some additional possibilities for paid subscriptions in the future. You can now find the newsletter at theantiquarian.email, and I’m turning on comments, as an experiment. I have plenty of ideas for future letters, but I want to hear from you, too. Drop me a line with thoughts, ideas, tips, and gossip at hi@newsletter.theantiquarian.email.
I want this project to have reach, and so I’m tentatively returning to select forms of social media. You can now follow me on Bluesky and Mastodon. Are you active in archaeology, anthropology, or history communities there or elsewhere? Please share this post, and as many others as you think your followers can stand!
Thanks for being a part of my favorite thing to write every week, and thanks for joining me on this new adventure. Let’s find out what happens next ❤️
There are a lot of changes afoot in newsletter world! Substack finally seems to be reaping what it sowed, as some of its most successful writers decamp for Patreon, citing Substack’s increasingly toxic social features, insistence on turning readers into followers instead of subscribers, and oh yeah, those pesky Nazis. This, by Leah Reich, is the best thing I read about it:
How can we undo our need for virality and unsustainable success? How can we build opportunities for people to make a living without having to kill themselves doing it? Do we all have to have hundreds of thousands of subscribers? Is it success only about big numbers or is it also okay to have smaller groups of truly devoted readers and followers? I don't have the answer to this one, and I wish I did. I don't want to long for blockbuster success, because what's fundamentally most important to me is that we find a way out of this hollow, godless, bullshit Ponzi scheme, where I have to pay for the benefit of having an influencer share an affiliate link that earns them additional money in a chat room they pass off as community.
And on a related note, here’s my favorite new addition to our Day of the Dead ofrenda this year: The Journalist 💀
