One of the few advantages of getting older is that you slowly learn to tell the same from the similar. At first everything looks like repetition, an eternal return; little by little you begin to notice the differences between things that merely resemble each other. Blogging is a good example.

In my social circle in the early 2000s, even an e-mail address was rare. I first came into contact with the internet in those years, thanks to the stupendous infrastructure at Unicamp, just as a number of fascinating blogs were springing up.

Today, with the rise of Substack and its cousins, blogging seems to be back. But the new era is quite different from the first. Today’s blogs are mostly career extensions, one more channel of professional communication. In the first era, blogs were a hobby: people wrote about their interests, professional or not, on subjects more varied and in registers less formal.

In an old-fashioned way, I intend to use the free side of this site as a repository for my interests. Emmanuel Carrère says in V13 (great book!) that psychoanalysts define a writer as someone who relies only on their own desire. Unfortunately, I am not a writer, but here I want to rely only on my desire. I don’t know where this is going; a kind of stream of consciousness, perhaps.

Sometimes I will write in Portuguese, sometimes in English. With luck there will be literature and cinema, a little history, some economics, and whatever else comes up. I’ll figure it out as I go.

To be honest, I don’t expect readers. This is a repository for my own interests, and they will hardly appeal to anyone else. But if a few interlocutors turn up to chat about shared obsessions, it will be fun.

And it will be slow, very slow. This is a hobby, and these days I unfortunately have little time for my passions, so posts will be sparse and irregular. If you’re still interested in following along, you’re welcome.

There ought to be a word for the difference: bloggy, blogging as a hobby; blogeer, the blog as a career. This site intends to stay firmly on the bloggy side.

The architecture is simple, and each section tells you how to read it. Publications and Presentations are the formal side: what I produce as a researcher at Ipea. Essays are pieces I consider finished; they may be about economics, books, film, or any other obsession, but they leave here revised. Notes are the opposite: fragments, ideas in progress, commented readings. Thinking under construction, published under construction.

Writing lives here in two languages. Research tends to come out in English; literature, in Portuguese. Each post carries a category (en or pt) saying which.

Under the hood, the site is built with Quarto, written in plain text files and versioned in git. Equations, charts, and code live naturally alongside prose; for someone who researches and writes, it is hard to ask for more.