All blogs go to heaven. Some come back from the dead.

Maybe God was like, “You have too many awesome posts left in you. Get back in there.” Maybe the rent was too high or it was crowded; maybe the co-op rejected your application. Maybe your book-length commentary on the later work of 2 Live Crew didn’t get posthumously picked up by that East Coast publisher, the one with the free bottled water, and you were steamed. Maybe you finished graduate school and decided this was more fun than a whole lot of academic life. Maybe you like the idea of running a website despite having no knowledge of basic coding or visual design or marketing.

My “maybe” is somewhere in there toward the end. In June of 2012, I finished a PhD in English; soon thereafter I remembered that keeping TGR updated was one of the most pleasurable aspects of my entire grad-school tour. That said, I don’t plan for this iteration of the Reader to be a solo job.

In the short term, The General Reader will be entirely online, and a small group of authors will produce it. It won’t have any sort of mission statement, genre affiliation, or well-defined lump of topical concerns, beyond the general aegis of Arts and Culture. And I mean generous: if you ever thought, “Man, wish there was a place to read about American literature, mid-shelf wines, rap music, sports, climate change, US and world politics & current affairs, yoga pants, gardening, urban planning, lyric poetry, YouTube comics, furniture, exercise regimes, Calvin and Hobbes, and midcentury film,” a crew of over-educated, plaid-shirted amateur genies just rolled up at your front door. No big deal. We do this for free.

Tell your friends.