Introducing Washington Babylon 2.0 on Substack

Plus, some personal news: Between 2014 and 2021, I experienced a rather epic and undiagnosed bipolar meltdown, which is highly relevant to the story that follows.

Rihanna: A disturbingly brilliant song about mental illness. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Now that I’ve finally begun posting stories on this page, I want to briefly lay out my general plan for Washington Babylon 2.0 on Substack and explain how it will be very different, and far superior on balance, than Washington Babylon 1.0, by which I mean the website of that name I ran between 2015 and 2021. I also want to encourage you to sign up for the Substack model, as a paid subscriber if you’re able to.

You can do either by scrolling down a short distance below in this story or going to to the very bottom and submitting your email in either of the two boxes where indicated. I’ll be posting some free content, but only paid subscribers – at rates of $7 monthly, $77 annually, and $177 for founding members, which gets you two years, some soon-to-be announced additional benefits, and my eternal gratitude – will be able to read all new stories and older ones in the archives. 

As to the old vs. new Washington Babylon, I have extremely fond memories of the now defunct website, RIP, but it was a classic example of a very good idea – a political tabloid that mocked and exposed the DC elite – that was very badly implemented. The primary reason for the poor implementation is an interesting story in itself, but I’ll be telling that tale at great length later this year in the excellent new bimonthly newspaper County Highway, so I’ll provide only a quick rundown here.

In late-2014, about eight months before I inaugurated the Washington Babylon website, I experienced the first signs of a rare case of late onset bipolar disorder that wasn’t diagnosed, and I remained entirely unaware of, for almost seven years. I was relatively lucky in that I was much more often manic – and let me tell you, there’s no legal or illegal drug in the world that can compete with the high of bipolar mania – than I was depressed, but the up cycles were more consequential, in a bad way, in terms of work, among other things.

When I was depressed, I could barely get out of bed so the Washington Babylon website went dark. When I was manic, I was exuberant, overflowing with energy, and generally highly functional, but frequently did and said incredibly stupid things. As a result, I burned a lot of personal and professional bridges during the period.

The way mania played out in regard to the website was that my judgment was frequently impaired and I made extraordinarily poor decisions, including a general inclination towards being wildly and unrealistically ambitious. In combination, the outcome was that I expanded the site’s priorities far beyond Washington and international affairs, and decided to cover music, movies, sports, travel, and everything in between. 

Washington Babylon ran some great stories about those topics, but completely lost sight of its original purpose and focus. Meanwhile, I spent so much time editing stories by other writers I wasn’t able to write much of anything myself. When I did find time, there wasn’t nearly enough to work on the type of major investigations I like best, so I knocked out short items that were more in the nature of op-ed pieces, albeit frequently bizarre ones, which are not my forte. 

I’ll bring this personal interlude to a close, other than to add a few fast points:

First, I feel obliged to say,  I haven't experienced a bipolar cycle of up or down in almost two years, and believe it’s a thing of the past, as do those closest to me. 

Second, I’m not embarrassed about what happened nor do I feel awkward talking about it. Bipolar picked me, I didn’t pick it, and some people surely handled it better than I did, but others certainly did worse.

Third, and relatedly, if you’re a hater and want to use this information to mock me, don’t bother. It’s highly unlikely I care what you think, and in the event I do, I beat myself up for a long time about all the stupid things I did during my bipolar meltdown, but I came to terms with that a long while back. 

That’s not to say I’ve exonerated myself of blame for all the stupid things I did, but I’m not embarrassed about them either, nor would I say I entirely regret my personal experience with bipolar disorder, if only because what would be the point? I can’t rewrite history and some very positive things happened in my life between 2014 and 2021 and they might well not have happened if I hadn’t been bipolar. Furthermore, much to the contrary of Groucho Marx when he joked he’d never want to belong to a club that would have him as a member, many of my favorite writers, musicians, and artists were bipolar (and know I understand why), so I don’t mind having been temporarily accepted into their club, though I never want to be part of it again.

Ye: Yeah, I know, but as a musician he’s a God and he wrote these insightful words, which are apropos here: “I hate being Bi-Polar. It's awesome.” Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Fourth and lastly, I don’t mean to say I have no regrets about some – and indeed many – of the specific things I did when I was manic, especially ones that hurt people I love the most, and in too many cases brought an end to long, close friendships and equally long, close professional relationships. I’ve written so many apologies after I was diagnosed I’ve lost track of who I sent them to and who I didn’t. 

Some of the apologies were accepted and others weren’t, and I can’t say I blame most of the people in the latter category because I probably wouldn’t have forgiven me either if I was in their place given my idiotic behavior, crazy or not. I finally gave up apologizing (with a few exceptions) because it ultimately became utterly exhausting. 

But to get back to the direct subject I referred to in the headline above this story – sorry, it’s hard to write succinctly about my bipolar era – my broad goal with Washington Babylon 2.0 is to avoid the mistakes I made during the earlier iteration, which shouldn’t be hard since I’m no longer in the grip of mania. As go the lyrics to “Disturbia,” Rihanna’s incredible song about mental illness, “It’s a thief in the night to come and grab you/It can creep up inside you and consume you/A disease of the mind, it can control you/It’s too close for comfort.”

So, the focus here going forward is going to be quality, not quantity. The plan is to post an average of 2.5 stories a week, and only one if time or other constraints dictate otherwise, rather than needlessly rush out a stream of inferior material.

The content won’t be purely lengthy investigative pieces, which wouldn’t be possible to do properly even at a much slower pace, but a large share of it will be. A good chunk of that, by necessity, will be relatively short stories in the area of 1,000 words or less. I’ll run major investigations in multipart installments, as I’m doing currently with the inaugural series, “The Secret History of the 116 Club, the Inner Sanctum of the US Political Aristocracy.” 

In short, Washington Babylon on Substack will be primarily focused on national and international affairs, and tilt heavily towards investigative reporting, as was the original plan for the website model. I’ll be publishing stories by other reporters but not often, because I learned the hard way before that’s not a great idea, no matter how good the writers, given my limited financial and human resources.

Thanks in advance to all current and future readers, I’m grateful to all of you, paid and unpaid subscribers alike. For those who are able to offer financial support, contributions of any size will be sincerely appreciated and will help make the new Washington Babylon bigger and better by helping me spend more time here and less chasing magazine assignments and other sources of income.

Meanwhile, look for Installment III of the 116 Club series tomorrow or Friday. There will at least one more installment on the 116 next week, at least one more a little further down the road that still needs some additional research, and a lot more on other topics coming soon. There are a couple of stories nearing completion that I’m particularly excited about, but don’t want to spoil the surprise for readers or the subjects of the investigations. The latter will learn about what those stories are about before readers do, because I’ll be contacting them prior to publication, but the wait won’t be long for either group.