Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

I’m not entirely sure why I chose today to re-open this blog after five-plus years of silence. Lord knows there have been many times when I’ve toyed with the idea of popping back up on these august pages, but I could never quite work up the gumption to do so. This morning, though, I realized I’d probably have a spare hour or two between my last interview and picking up Kid Two from school. And what better way to pass the time than by re-connecting with you, dear Microkhan readers, whose ranks can surely be counted on one hand at this point in the time.

So, you might ask, what have I been up to since I last published some of my undercooked thoughts in this blessed space? Well, let’s begin with my most recent doings, and then work our way backwards. And once we get through the boilerplate, I’ll let you know what to expect in the weeks and months to come. (Spoiler: Mostly me using Microkhan as a public scratch paper, a way to work through the zillion ideas bouncing around my head in the hopes of stumbling into my next batch of major projects.)

First off, I’d like to direct you to a story that I started working on back in 2012, but which only saw the light of day this spring. It’s the tale of a bizarre kidnapping and its decades-long aftermath, and it might just be the endeavor I grew to care most about since I abandoned this blog. Even though it’s now out in the world and I’m supposed to move on, it still occupies a huge chunk of my thoughts every day. I’m haunted by what it taught me about the incoherence of evil.

While working on that Atlantic story at a turtle’s pace, I also churned out several Wired pieces that I consider pretty darn solid. (I churned out some forgettable dreck, too, but let’s never speak of my failures again.) My primary beat over there has become malfeasance that occurs on the edges of the digital realm, which is how I ended up writing about the rise and fall of the Xbox Underground; the first swatting to ever result in a death; the mysterious disappearance of a troubled Ohio programmer; and a mammoth cheating scandal in the world of mid-stakes poker. Most recently, I veered away from the sinister by profiling the man who transformed how bowling balls are made—though that story is by no means free of tragic twists.

Per the usual, I have a bunch of projects cooking at the moment: a Wired story that has sunk its hooks into my heart, a TV series that is ever-so-slowly coming to fruition, a screenplay gig that’s allowed me to learn a ton about the art of perseverance. But I’ve also had to endure a bevy of disappointments, which is the frustrating norm in this line of work. Suffice to say that I’m no stranger to the experience of taking a joyous step forward, only to get thwacked back two paces by the hand of circumstance. Books have fallen through, adaptations have disintegrated, stories that I love have withered on the vine. And yet perhaps unwisely, I keep peeling myself off the canvas.

My chief reason for being here now is to scribble my way toward new horizons. I’ve found that it’s difficult for me to think through problems unless I’m tossing words onto the page. For the past five years, those pages have been in the many steno notebooks I keep lying around my office. But that approach hasn’t yielded much in the way of positive results, so I thought What the heck? Why not do this rumination in semi-public?

Yeah, sure, the smart move would’ve been to come to this realization two years ago and then launched an early Substack. But I clearly missed the boat on that, and I’m not sure the unwritten conventions of Twitter (which I still adore to some degree) jibe with what I need at the moment. And so here I am, back to occasional Microkhan-ing for the entertainment and edification of the masses.

More from me at some point in the not-too-distant future. Take care of yourselves, treasured comrades. And if anyone knows of a good, non-lethal way to get rid of a portly groundhog, please advise—I’m currently having problems with such a creature, and he/she is proving far craftier than I’d anticipated.