In press — and an event!
Technically published, and I'd love to hear what you think
A few weeks ago, I found out my paper was live — not because the journal had told me, but because I’d written a small script to check their website for changes.
You can read it here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-06669-3
I ran this script manually every morning, expecting it to return nothing for further weeks or months. The process had taken almost exactly two years from start to finish. It was first outlined in March 2024, submitted on 18 April 2025, accepted on 29 January 2026, and published on 13 March 2026. For many new friends, I’ve been working on this paper the whole time that I’ve known them.
But on 15th of March (the Ides!) when I ran the script,1 I got some output on the terminal — and was excited to read the title of our paper. I opened it in a browser and saw what you can see now at that link. I excitedly clicked the “Download PDF” link and then…
I felt disappointed.
I was looking at our submitted manuscript, an unadorned and unofficial-looking Word document. We had written it in Google docs, using Zotero for references, even though I’d been tempted for a few days to convert it all LaTeX, to make it look better. Plus we’d seen the uncorrected proofs beforehand, on Nature’s letterhead, which looks much more official. My coauthor assures me this doesn’t matter to academics, but to me it still feels a bit unfinished.
I’d also expected to have a few more last minute edits on the paper. We’d spent so much time trying to accommodate the five peer reviews we’d received back, and worried so much about length, that we’d not been as effusive as I’d have liked about some of the wonderful references we cite. When we resubmitted in December, I had guessed — wrongly as it turns out — that it would require another round of reviews. Instead, in January, the most critical reviewer, who had sent us 4,422 words worth of detailed feedback, had done a 180 and was now extremely positive. The editor notified us that it had been accepted in January.
The next step was to correct the proofs. Luckily, re-reading the uncorrected proofs, having passed peer review, despite my misgivings about not being able to do another round of revisions, Isabela and I were both extremely happy with the paper. We were even happier with it than we’d been in December, when we’d been ruthlessly cutting passages to get the length down. In the proofs, there were only about two true issues — one of which came from the journal changing our British spelling to American (by “analyses” we meant multiple instances of analysis, which they’d corrected to “analyzes”). The other issues (dozens of places where the citations were not properly linked to the bibliography) are not an issue in the manuscript you can now download.
And so, on that March morning, with neither fanfare nor notification from the journal, Neither/Nor was out in the world. Its full title is “Neither/Nor: a pragmatic philosophy for oscillating between conceptual and experiential knowledge” and it’s in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature, 2026). It was up!
And I felt vulnerable.
I think this was because of the two ways in which it felt unfinished — the unofficial letterhead and the feeling that I’d just wanted to add a few more references to certain passages (we’d been afraid that it was already too long to be accepted). And now the public could read this paper. I felt inexplicably worried that people would attack us for it. Maybe I can chalk that up to the fact that 15 of March was the day that Caesar was assassinated, 2,070 years ago. Whatever it was, it’s because of this feeling of vulnerability that I hadn’t yet posted anything here to you, Dear Reader, though I did put the link on Substack notes.
What’s in the paper?
The short version: we argue that neither theory nor practice alone is sufficient for flourishing — in personal life or in scientific inquiry — and that the real skill is learning to oscillate deliberately between them. We call the unconscious preference for abstract concepts over lived experience “latent Platonism,” and trace it through figures who explicitly rejected essentialism but arguably smuggled it back in. The paper draws on ancient skepticism, Buddhist philosophy, modern pragmatism, and cognitive science, and opens with a concrete example: managing my Type I diabetes, which requires constant negotiation between abstract formulas and what my body is actually telling me.
It’s technically still “in press” — meaning the accepted manuscript is live and citable, but the final typeset version hasn’t yet been assigned to a journal issue. Despite my theoretical discomfort about this, in practice this changes nothing: the paper is peer-reviewed, open access, and fully readable right now.
Would you like to read and discuss it?
My coauthor Isabela is visiting London from Toronto, and a group of us are getting together to discuss the paper over drinks. This came about largely through my Saturday writing group, First Few Books — which my friend Pen co-hosts with me at Sam’s Café in Primrose Hill. Thanks especially to Salman, Bobby, Ross, and Harry for encouragement along the way, and to Bobby in particular for repeatedly asking that we do an event like this.
The event is at the Cittie of Yorke, 22 High Holborn, on Thursday 2 April, 6–10pm.
Please do RSVP — it helps enormously with planning, and we want to make sure there’s room for everyone.
Please RSVP here →
I can highly recommend Isabela’s most recent piece, on Gen Z, which you can find on her Substack:
I’ll write more about the ideas in the paper soon. For now, I’m just glad it’s out.
Best,
Bryan
Congratulations, Bryan! Looking forward to reading and discussing.