Why subscribe?

I’m Jon Ward. I was a working journalist for 23 years. I wrote two books, one about growing up evangelical called Testimony, and one about a story from political history that I found lying around, unexamined and full of magic and mystery. That one’s called Camelot’s End.

Now I’m in strategic communications, but still living in D.C. and in the political mix, and still thinking about how to make American politics and culture better. That’s why this Substack exists, along with my podcast, The Long Game.

You can subscribe for free to get full access to the newsletter, podcast episodes, and website. You’ll get two e-mails a week most of the time, and usually about one podcast episode a month.

In 2024, you'll get a weekly news update on Friday. This is designed to send you into your weekend with a quick look back at what was important over the previous week. The goal is to spend concentrated, limited time thinking about the big picture, so that we can devote more of our time to what matters most to us, which is often closest to us.

Second, you’ll get a dispatch earlier in the week about my book of the month. You can see what book I'm doing each month of 2024 here.

Finally, why the name, Border Stalkers?

It's a term I borrowed from painter and author Makoto Fujimura's book Culture Care, and I reference it quite a bit in Testimony.

It's a name for people who cross boundaries between groups, between worlds. I identify as one of these types. Maybe you do too.

We are often never fully at home in one group, but we are also able to mingle and fellowship with many different types, and so we can become connective tissue between disparate factions. We put our bodies and souls on the line to keep misunderstanding from curdling into hatred, fighting against the acidic dehumanization of our time.

We may be able to translate between languages or cultures: English to Spanish, liberal to conservative, poor to rich.

The short description for this site says it aims to deliver "anti-reductionism through liminality, paradox & nuance." I like that.

We border-stalkers are liminal beings: in between so many things and people, stretched, pulled in opposite directions, joyful in the midst of the mess, delighted by the adventure of discovery, the beauty of this life.

Thanks for reading!

Jon