Two Milestones From 2021

Some gratitude for the year just ending, particularly for the readers of Adjacent Possible—and a small dash of optimism about the future.

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I’m writing this from our place in Marin County, just north of San Francisco — having managed to fly out here from New York a few days ago on one of the flights that wasn’t canceled because of Omicron. When I was last here, the Bay Area was still in the throes of an historic drought, and Marin in particular was facing a dire water forecast if it suffered another dry winter, with a real risk of running out of water by the end of next summer. But the first few months of the rainy season have turned out to be some of the wettest on record; the hills here are already lush and green, and our little brick terrace has a thick shag carpet of moss growing on it. It feels nice to turn the page to a new year with at least one potential catastrophe averted. Here’s hoping this becomes a continuing theme of 2022: a return to the normal rhythms of life, after a long stretch where we’ve all been exhaustingly far from equilibrium.

One exercise I like to do at the end of each calendar year is to project forward a decade or two, and speculate on what I will ultimately remember from the year that’s just passed—what will ultimately seem of enduring importance to me, as opposed to all the passing ephemera that can seem so momentous when you’re living through it but then dissipates over time. On a personal level, the year was defined for me by two of our three boys leaving for college—that’s what I’ll remember most, I suspect. But on a professional level, I think 2021 will always be associated with two long-term projects — one that had been in the works for many years and finally came to fruition, and one that is just getting started.

I had been working on and off on a book and television series about the doubling of global life expectancy—which ultimately became Extra Life—since 2017. I think I sold the book proposal in 2018, and started working in earnest on the television side of things with my collaborators at Nutopia shortly after that. The process of writing the book was relatively smooth—it was an incredibly rich field, with an endless number of stories to tell. But getting the show made was a real rollercoaster. Some of you may already know this first-hand, but the world of television and film is, for me at least, a serious challenge to navigate. You spend weeks writing treatments, prepping for pitch meetings, writing grant proposals, following up after promising phone calls—and 90% of the time, whatever angle you were pursuing ends up evaporating. People have been trying to make my book The Ghost Map into a scripted Hollywood drama (and a musical, and a documentary, and a streaming TV miniseries) for fifteen years now, and nothing has actually materialized yet. I spent three years unsuccessfully trying to get financing to make my book Wonderland as a second season of How We Got To Now. With Extra Life, I had thought a show about the critical importance of medical science and public health would be an easy sell, but we had about three different near-death experiences on the road to getting it made.

In the end, it was the pandemic itself that finally got us over the hurdle, given that we were proposing a series about the history of vaccines, epidemiology, drug trials, public health data collection—basically everything on the front page of the newspaper in the spring of 2020. With that tumultuous backstory, the fact that Extra Life finally aired on PBS and the BBC in May of 2021—accompanied by the book, and NY Times Magazine special issue, and the Pulitzer Center education materials—will always be a defining memory of this year.

A big multi-platform project like Extra Life—particularly one that involves a TV or film component—is a classic high-risk, high-reward endeavor: there’s a massive risk of all your time trying to get it made going to waste in the end, but if you do manage to thread the needle, it’s a wonderful platform with exciting creative possibilities and a significant audience of folks who aren’t previously familiar with your work.

The unpredictable nature of a project like Extra Life is one of the reasons why the second milestone from 2021 really stands out for me: launching this newsletter itself. Just yesterday, in a nice bit of timing, the 500th paid subscriber signed up for Adjacent Possible, after just two and a half months of publishing. Sometime next month, I’ll have 5,000 total subscribers, paid and unpaid. The growth of both categories has been relatively steady and predictable, and if it continues over the next year or two, it’s going to be become—purely on the financial side of things—a significant part of how I support the work I do. That seems enormously exciting to me, having that kind of direct relationship with readers; it’s something I’ve dreamed about doing for almost as long as I’ve been a writer. In many ways, it reminds me of the early days of blogging, only this time with a business model behind it. I’ve got all sorts of plans for how the newsletter platform can be expanded in 2022—including some interesting experiments with audio that I’ll be sharing news of soon. But for now, I just wanted to let you all know how grateful I am that you’ve joined me for this adventure, and how much I’m looking forward to continuing it with you in the new year and beyond.

In a way, the two kinds of projects—Extra Life and Adjacent Possible—are symbiotic: the steady, predictable income of a subscription business is going to allow me to take even bigger risks with the other projects. (Right now, I’ve got about seven different TV/film/audio projects in various stages of early exploration—and a new book in the works.) And there’s something wonderful about switching back and forth between work ultimately aimed at a mass audience of strangers, and this space where so many of you have been readers or friends for such a long time. All of which makes me wonder: when I look back on 2021 a few decades from now, will I still be writing Adjacent Possible, and will some of you still be reading it? It’s nice to imagine that kind of long-term continuity, particularly at the end of a year with so much upheaval.

Best wishes for a semi-normal 2022,

Steven

(P.S. Usually the comments section for posts is available only to paying subscribers but I’m leaving it open for this post to all subscribers — so we can all send each other good tidings for the new year, and perhaps you can let me know what you’d like to read more of in future editions of Adjacent Possible.)