About

What It Is

Syntopikon is a collection of conversations with cool people who do cool things. Software, art, writing, music – whatever it is, I’m interested in it. I’ve interviewed people whose books I’ve enjoyed, whose reviews I’ve enjoyed, whose blogs I’ve enjoyed, whose writing I’ve enjoyed, whose apps I use (and enjoy using), and more. As a maker myself, I’m interested in how people get their work done, why they do what they do, and how that’s similar & different to how others work.

The name is borrowed from Mortimer J. Adler, a philosopher and author. He wrote one of my favorite books, the aptly titled How to Read a Book. I highly recommend it: it’s often available for $10-12 on Amazon, but you can get it at your local library; Libby can help you find one.

In it, he outlines four stages of reading. The fourth is syntopical reading, where you broaden your knowledge by reading multiple books on a subject, compare ideas, and synthesize the different perspectives. That’s something akin to what I’m doing here. Why’d I go with a “k” over a “c”, though? Simple: the “k” looks cooler.

Colophon

I originally had the idea for Syntopikon several years ago. The gist was: interview cool people doing cool things. I had a lot of fun running the site, but there was a lot of friction. I was using Ghost for hosting it, and cross-posting to Substack. Ghost is decent enough, but working in a CMS and then remembering to get it up on another platform was annoying. I do not like friction if I can avoid it. So, the site languished.

Until now, that is. I wanted to reup the site and start interviewing people again. But, there could absolutely be no CMS. I already do a lot of writing in Obsidian, which lets me write Markdown. That’s how I wanted it to be here. So the site was rebuilt with Hugo. I had to decide between this and other static site generators like Astro, but I appreciated that I didn’t need to manage any dependencies with Hugo, so it won out.

The site is a folder of plain Markdown rendered to static HTML. I push the site to GitHub when I want to publish, and I deploy it on Cloudflare Pages. Some fairies do the work in between, or so I imagine. While it took longer to get set up than Ghost did, it’s a much nicer experience overall. I do the writing itself in Zed.

Say hello

If you’re making something of your own, or just want to say hi or something, drop me a line. You can reach me at hello@syntopikon.com. If you notice any typos or such, feel free to reach out. Zed doesn’t have autocorrect or spellcheck, which is nice on one hand, and terrifying on the other.

Okay, but who are you?

My name’s Yuvraj Singh (but please, call me Raj) and I’m just a regular guy from the Bay Area. I published My Fellow Americans with Oxford University Press in 2024; it’s an anthology of the Presidential inaugural addresses, supplemented with more than 60 essays from leading scholars and historians. I also run a YouTube channel with more than 41,000 subscribers.