I’m working on a book proposal right now. I do this from time to time, but I’ve never gotten very far. I think book proposals are like relationships. They fizzle when things aren’t quite right. I’m in the honeymoon stage of this book proposal relationship, and things are flowing. My goal is to finish it by Friday of next week, and then send it out to people.

Since this book would seem to fall into the dreaded “self-help” section of the book store, I went to Barnes and Noble yesterday to check out other books in that category. It’s a rather huge section that includes everything from celebrity guides to losing weight to guides on how to be successful without any effort.

Lumped in with the books in the self-help section was Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. I don’t know much about Peterson, other than he is hated by a lot of people that I follow on Twitter. I guess he’s a conservative, but I don’t know much more than that. Because his book was 40 percent off and seemed be less badly written than other books on that table, I bought it. I’ll skim it today.

Bari Weiss wrote an article that also blew up some steam on Twitter yesterday, called “Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.”

Along with Peterson, other thinkers represent the new Intellectual Dark Web or the IDW, Weiss explains.

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

These thinkers are making serious cash by saying controversial things, I guess. Weiss champions them as heroes who are fighting the good fight against political correctness.

The other big news yesterday was that Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, came out with a new blockbuster video, “This is America.” I watched it. I can only watch it once, despite the great dancing. Commentary here and here and here.

Today’s ideas are angry, divisive, lucrative, polarizing, violent. In some ways, I’m intrigued, because it’s all new and I like new things. But it’s also a little frightening, I suppose.

UPDATE: Read Henry Farrell on the IDW. Also interesting.