ATX Writing Club: Welcome to 2026!
Big plans, new events, and pick five with ATX Writing Club member.....Anu Pandey!
Good morning, y’all!
This is Zac, and I’m the host of ATX Writing Club.
If you’re new around here, welcome! We’re a group of more than 215 writers in Austin, Texas who meet up each week to (you guessed it) write. Everything we do is in person. No Zoom calls, online classes, or WhatsApp groups. Ever. That’s a promise.
We also do some other fun things aside from writing. As you’ll see as you scroll down the page, we gather for book clubs, workshops, dinner discussions, magazine launches, and all kinds of fun things that get you out of the house and into the world.
If you’re interested in becoming a member of ATX Writing Club and unlocking a whole bunch of ways to connect with other creatives in Austin, you can join our Spring 2026 waitlist here.
Aside from that, I’m happy you’re here and hope to see you soon!
—Zac
Upcoming Events
🍷 01/09 - The Table of Contents: Retrospective Once a month at The Rosedale Society we host a dinner discussion for our members. This one will focus on reviewing the past year and setting clear direction for what comes next. We will examine our creative and professional output, how we used our time, and what changes we can make to get closer to our professional goals. This event is for members of The Rosedale Society.
✍️ 01/17 - Members Writing Session If you want to be a part of our dedicated inner-circle of writers, this one’s for you. Expect to meet about 60 writers of all experience levels here. Some are traditionally published authors. Others work in media, or write for magazines, and still others are doodlers and daydreamers trying to get back in touch with their creative side. You must be a member to join.
📚 01/21 - Book Club: Lonesome Dove As a writer, it’s a given that you should be reading a lot. But you can’t just read like everyone else—it can’t just be a passive leisure. You need to read like a writer. That’s why we have a book club. This month we’re discussing Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Spots are limited.
🔥 01/23 - Magazine Launch: Sobremesa Vol. 5 Come celebrate ATX Writing Club member Katie Rice as she launches Volume 5 of Sobremesa, her Austin-based magazine exploring food, art, and writing. Join us for drinks, conversation, and community while supporting a local artist. Stay awhile, meet fellow members, and pick up a copy before they sell out. This event is open to the public
💵 01/27 - How to Make Money With Newsletters Hosted by Ethan Brooks, this practical session is for writers planning to start or restart a newsletter in 2026. We will cover how newsletters make money, what builds a valuable audience, and how to get started without overthinking it. Expect clear frameworks, industry expertise, and time for direct Q&A.This event is open to the public
Member of the week: Anu Pandey!
The observant among you may have noticed this is the second time Anu has been featured as our Member of the Week, and that’s because she’s one of my favorite people.
Anu is also the unofficial Minister of Culture at The Rosedale Society (although if I keep unofficially calling her that, it might actually become a thing). That’s because she’s one of the most thoughtful and measured people I know when it comes to the architecture of groups and the shaping of culture. Not only that, but Anu was voted Contributor of the Year at The Rosedale Society by a jury of her peers.
So without further ado, here’s Anu…
What is a question worth asking?
What is lost when society becomes too comfortable?
We have a society that wants quick fixes and accomplishments without putting in the hard work or developing discipline, leading to the overall erosion of merit in institutions. We have also become highly comfortable as technology has eliminated the friction from the lives of the professional class, in particular. This structural condition begins at the micro level and spreads throughout our social world, so we’ve decided that catering to the least common denominator is preferable to confronting the ways the least disciplined person in the room drags everyone else down.
The conversation about the collapse of truth in public life avoids the question of comfort. The tendency to preserve emotional consensus and harmony at all costs, in the name of keeping everyone comfortable, is the root cause.
As a woman, I’ve observed that women in particular resist becoming intellectually uncomfortable for long enough to examine whether we are actually victims or falling prey to a narrative that tells us we lack agency in shaping our lives. I don’t feel like a victim of men, but the narrative once functioned to preserve my comfort and self-concept. I was self-deceiving in the name of preserving friendships and falsifying my preferences to belong to my professional class, a female-dominated social context. Merely writing these sentences feels radioactive because we refuse to talk about it.
What is a concept worth understanding?
A concept we ought to understand is that almost every broken system in our culture comes from the refusal to acknowledge incentives and tradeoffs. We work hard to preserve our own moral innocence, believing that neither we nor our social circle is acting blindly in response to the system’s incentive structure. This denial is particularly common among professionals and creatives because we like to think of ourselves as enlightened. However, this self-concept prevents us from examining how we and everyone around us are driven by the incentive structure of the social systems in which we live.
All decisions, individual or social, involve tradeoffs. You cannot optimize for both belonging and truth seeking in professional or creative class spaces, regardless of what individuals want in a group. Professional-class social spaces incentivize maximizing safety and belonging, but the trade-off is that we cannot be honest with each other, nor can we test truth claims in a group. And if groups are unwilling to falsify their truth claims, they become closed to new information. This is what I call epistemic closure — the prohibition of considering phenomena outside a narrow frame allowed by the group, which preserves safety and belonging at the expense of truth. Whatever fosters social cohesion becomes truth without our realizing that we’ve built our identities on false ideas about how the world works. I’ve lived in a variety of work environments and institutions, and this is the through line. The longer we refuse to self-examine, the worse the correction will be later on.
What is a book worth reading?
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death was published in 1985. He argues that technological advances in communication change the nature of truth itself. He observed that the transition of American society from a print-dominated culture to a television-dominated culture has changed the parameters of truth, that the media has an epistemology. He built on Marshall McLuhan’s adage ‘the medium is the message’ by observing that the medium has its own format for truth claims, which limits what can be claimed.
With the dominance of a visual medium, television rewarded performance rather than deep thought. This has intensified in the smartphone age, in which we are constantly performing and surrounded by marketing. It’s so total that we’ve stopped noticing that a handful of marketing companies are the bulk of our GDP and try to generate desire in us 24/7. It feels like there is no shared reality in our society precisely because the technology we’re glued to precludes it. We’re always talking about one political tribe or another falling prey to ‘disinformation,’ but what if the medium itself incentivizes falsity for all people in how we understand reality?
What is an activity worth doing?
Build something that doesn’t rely on social permission. True empowerment for me has come from building an intellectual space outside my professional identity, so I no longer fear job loss. I gathered skills outside jobs and across disparate roles, which now serve me better than if I had stayed in a single lane, as people expected. I threw out the script, and I encourage everyone to ask themselves what script they’re still living by. I see most people living to ensure social belonging, which is very often a trap.
What is a newsletter worth subscribing to?
Rob Henderson’s Newsletter teaches me something new every week. He is a scholar of psychology but isn’t inside academic institutions, so he writes what they cannot: with honesty about social incentives, competitive strategies, and status games. Once you see the incentives embedded in our social world, you can’t go back, and Henderson illuminated several for me. His concept of luxury beliefs has high explanatory power for the current cultural divide.
What is a video worth watching?
Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky debating human nature is a foundational one for anyone interested in why things feel unmoored from reality. If this is too dry, I encourage you to watch any debate between people who genuinely disagree. This is rare because our conversations about difficult topics usually happen between people who agree or aren’t very far apart. True debate requires discomfort and areas of disagreement.
—Anu Pandey
p.s. Anu Pandey is a Founding Member of The Rosedale Society, and the co-host of our new event Symposium Series. The structure of these discussion is a combination of literary analysis, with deep questions and truth seeking. The first one will be held on February 8th! Join the waitlist here → Symposium Series: 1984, fiction or nonfiction