Deep Dive Season 2025: A Reader's Roadmap to What's Coming
Every Wednesday we take a Deep Dive into culture, history, and literature. Here is your Reader's Roadmap of What's Coming on the Burning Archive in 2025.
In Saturday’s post The Burning Archive Program for 2025: Slow Reads, World History Deep Dives, Modernism's Greatest Year, and Live Calls with Angels of History, I outlined my schedule for the year.
I will be following a broad model of making a book or other content recommendation each week on Saturday for all subscribers. I will write brackets of posts on the USA, China, India, Europe, Modern Literature and Russia.
Each bracket will be for eight weeks, with the Saturday post leading into the Wednesday ‘Deep Dive’.
The Wednesday deep dive will riff on the theme raised by my Saturday book recommendation.
I will write 1,000 to 1,500 words on Saturday, and 2,000 to 3,000 on Wednesday.
There may be the occasional deviations from that plan—if big events or ideas demand attention. However, that is what you can expect from me in 2025.
What to expect from the Wednesday Deep Dive
So how will my deep dive for paid subscribers offer more to you than my Saturday post?
The Saturday post will briefly summarise one key book and show its value to readers. I will highlight how this book can shift your perspective on the changing world. But the deep dive will go further. It will provide:
Reflections on a deeper theme prompted by Saturday’s book recommendation
Personal, broader social and cultural responses to the theme raised by the book
More references, source material and other historical perspectives.
If the Saturday book interests readers, then the Wednesday post is a chance to dive deeper (provided, of course, that you upgrade your subscription from free to paid).
I am following this model in this post today. Although this summer holiday ‘Deep Dive’ is shorter than 2,000 words.
Below the paywall you can:
Preview what you can expect to read in my deep dives
Take a sneak peek at the books and themes of my USA bracket
Comment on books and themes you want me to write about.
Do also check out my Notes series that features the best quotes from Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History. As I explained in my mini audiobook on Monday this essay has long inspired how I write history in the Burning Archive.
And do check out my Slow Reads program, commencing in February with Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob.
And just a reminder that I have curated and indexed all my content on the 121 Nobel Prizes for Literature specially for paid subscribers at the Nobel Archive page. And set up a new History Guides page.