730DC in 2021
There’s a line I’ve used in parties and interviews to express why we do 730DC: “I’m convinced that if even one person who reads our newsletter decides to turn off Netflix, get up off their couch, go outside and out onto the street — to play pickup basketball, meet a friend for dinner, attend a concert or talk or just to walk amongst other people — our newsletter has been a success for that day.”
Half our newsletter has always been dedicated to listing things to do, out in the world, with other people — exactly the kinds of things that are deadly now. So it has, at times, been hard to understand what we are doing with 730DC during lockdown.
Operating the newsletter in these conditions hasn’t been easy. The pandemic has done a serious number on local journalism, in DC and elsewhere, decimating ad revenues in an already-weakened industry; we lost a few advertisers of our own, especially last summer. Longtime local institutions, particularly in arts and culture, folded or went into hibernation. It became a challenge to find stuff to do — there are only so many Zoom activities we really want to write up!
It didn’t just hit the city. It hit us. For the first time ever, we had months where we lost readers, as young people’s relationship to a costly city became complicated. We gave up on projects when team members’ pandemic-related jobs took up their free time. (Remember classifieds?) Our networks were disrupted and friends and colleagues hurled distant from DC by the pandemic’s cascading impacts. We onboarded new team members via Google Meet, a far cry from beers at bars that no longer exist. Family members passed away, victims of a disease that didn’t exist eighteen months ago.
Sociality became antisocial, and lockdown has been long and lonely. We’ve been adamant from the very beginning that, however paradoxical it is, this — social distancing — is how we take care of one another. But of course what we really need is physical distancing, and social connection.
In that paradox I’ve found a further refinement of my old line about the purpose of 730DC. We don’t need people to be physically close to have achieved our goals. We need people to feel and be connected to their city, its communities, to one another. It’s a tagline we came up with years ago and have applied inconsistently. But we need that connection to be two-way. We need solidarity, more than ever.
I use solidarity (which is something you do!) specifically, because it means not feeling for but also working for the interests of your neighbors, particularly those most battered by COVID-19 and our dysfunctional, inequitable, and genocidal response: Black Washingtonians comprise 45% of our city by population but have suffered 75% of its deaths. That is a symptom of a society whose diseases must be torn out root and branch.
So this pandemic has further radicalized me, and how I’ll approach publishing this newsletter, in two ways that are actually one. First, cut off as we are now, I am more convinced than ever that to be human is to live together. Second, I am also persuaded that we must do better as a city to prevent, not react, to suffering; to address, not just redress, inequality; to prioritize people, not profit; that we need a change not only in degree but kind of relation with one another. That this newsletter should be a tool for conviviality, for living together, and not just in peace but active solidarity with one another.
We do have big dreams for this year. These start with our Patreon community, readers who pledge monthly donations. Right now, we have less than 2% of our readers supporting us on Patreon; research says we can get to at least 16%. We use these funds to pay writers and especially to commission original content for our blog. Last year, these pieces ran the gamut from reflections from a virtual dating show and guides to local birding to how you’re forming quarantine pods and comprehensive previews of a contentious election. (See our 2020 work collected here.) More Patreon support means more original content of a higher quality. It also means less reliance on ads and our 9-to-5 jobs — did you know no one at 730DC does this full time? Among the pieces we have in the works are an interview with an academic who studies Uber in DC; a personal essay about burnout in the nonprofit-industrial complex; an interview with a DC street photographer from the 80s; and an ode to parks as social spaces. I’m excited to share them with you in good time.
I also hope 2021 brings a return to a more normal events section in 730DC. I hope that we are able to return to sweaty basements and bars, to bleachers and Banneker and barre and that strip mall on Bladensburg. But don’t wait for a vaccine to return to one another.
Hayden Higgins
730dc co-founder
Support 730DC on Patreon here. Submit links and events for consideration here. Email us at seventhirtydc@gmail.com anytime.
