Thinking in public: A conversation with Tom Jesson

Tom Jesson is a physiotherapist, and self-employed researcher and writer based in Houston Texas, who I’ve wanted to speak to for a while. While I’ve always known Tom to be a thoughtful and careful writer, evident in his work that’s been published and shared widely in physiotherapy circles, I’ve not really thought much about how he goes about doing that work, which is the topic of my latest YouTube video.

In this conversation, Tom describes his shift from clinician to independent researcher, how his audience shapes his information gathering, synthesis, and writing, as well as the tools and services he uses. He also introduced me to a new writer (Nadia Eghbal), and convinced me of the value of writing clear, thoughtful, long-form essays on challenging topics. Tom reminded me that most ‘news’ is actually entertainment and that we’d be better off focusing our attention elsewhere (on family and friends, for example). And we briefly mention Andy Matuschak, the 80000 hours podcast, and the concept of research debt. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and look forward to catching up again with Tom soon.

Side note: Up until quite recently, my Thinking in public project has focused on my own practices related to knowledge work, which was an interesting diversion from the kinds of things I typically write about, but not a big part of how I think about scholarship.

And then sometime last year I recorded a conversation with Ben Gordon, where we demonstrated a way to use Obsidian for a kind-of shared thinking and writing project. I enjoyed this so much that I immediately recorded a conversation with Dave Nicholls, on academic workflow. Unfortunately, my inexperience with this format meant that I’m still struggling to rescue the audio content of that conversation (huge apologies to Dave, who was so generous in sharing his time and experience). I’ll have that video uploaded as soon as possible.