My name is James Horton. In 2021 I got my PhD from a well-respected university on the west coast. After years of fighting my way through academia to get a degree I got right to the end and then, after all that fighting...

I wanted to leave and do my own thing.

I still consider myself an academic. I work as a freelancer, leveraging my academic skills to make enough money to get by, and I write and travel as well. I don't consider my degree wasted; the time I spent in academia left me with several gifts which I consider immeasurable.

During my time as an academic I became a disciplined writer. I built a deep knowledge of the social sciences and, more importantly, a deep knowledge about how to search and study scientific reports. I learned statistics, and coding, and how to take a messy world and use numbers to mark it and explore it and understand it better.

And now? I can't stop writing about all of the cool stuff that I learned. Follow me on Medium and you'll get a full dose of it.

I'm an academic but you should treat my writing as personal writing; it is informed by my history and knowledge, but it is not an authoritative representation of the social sciences. I keep 'PhD' in my title because I am deeply grateful for the training I have received, and because it is a personally meaningful accomplishment.

For now, I write for fun, and for the joy of exploring the ideas that I have come to love so much. If I ever put on my PhD cap and write with the full weight of my discipline, you'll know--because I will tell you so, right at the front of my article.

James Horton, PhD.