New year, new monthly publication
One of the quirks of working in US-China relations is the double-renewal of the Gregorian and Lunar New Years. For a good 12 weeks or so, it’s reasonable to conclude a call saying, ok, we’ll get into this in the next year. The interstitial is also a second chance to think about future plans, with less of a sense that the moment has been missed. In that spirit, using the turn of this calendar as a marker, I commit to write here at least monthly—and to keep it brief.
Monthly: Back when this publication was U.S.–China Week, from 2015–18, the weekly rhythm was designed to keep me current and prompt distilled thinking through writing. This time, monthly will be enough.
Keep it brief: With the popularization of newsletters/the return of the blog, there is too much quality material. Reading through the excellent offerings, I see writers unleashed. The good news is we have more, better-informed voices digging and thinking than before the Twitter diaspora and the Substack hustle—maybe better than the blogosphere before tweets shrank our time horizons and attention spans. The bad news is that writers unleashed are often also writers un-edited (or LLM-edited) and undisciplined in terms of length. Brevity will take longer, but it will hopefully make things easier for readers and require me to think more clearly. My target will be 500–800 words, with a hard stop at 1,000.
While I’m making commitments, I might as well say that LLM products do not and will not touch my prose. I absolutely use them to surface source material, but just as with a search engine, the reading and characterizations—however flawed—are my own.
The first piece in fulfillment of this commitment is coming soon. For now, a very happy Year of the Horse (and 2026) to all!1
About Here It Comes
Here it Comes is written by me, Graham Webster, a lecturer and research scholar at the Stanford Program on Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance, and editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project. It is the successor to my earlier newsletter efforts U.S.–China Week and Transpacifica. Here It Comes is an exploration of the onslaught of interactions between US-China relations, technology, and climate change. The opinions expressed here are my own, and I reserve the right to change my mind.
Also, Ramadan Mubarak and happy Mardi Gras. Big day!