Ira Cogan

Greetings. I’m Ira. I’m originally from Queens and currently reside in Brooklyn, New York with my wife and our dog.

By day I'm a freight elevator operator in a commercial building in Manhattan and by night I'm occasionally a floor manager at a bar in Brooklyn. I didn’t come here to write about that though. That stuff is to pay the bills so I can do stuff like this.

So, why a blog? Because I like the medium and I don’t think it’s dead. I often miss the internet before things like infinite scroll or like buttons existed, and something like that does still exist in places, you just have to find them.

This space is mostly for personal updates, social commentary, links, photo journals, and the occasional long form essay.

or...

Ira Cogan is a self-described blogger from New York City.

-Ira

Contact: ira at iracogan dot com

Mastodon: https colon //social.vivaldi.net/ at IraCogan

P.S. A couple more things, I’d call this part an FAQ but zero people have asked me about this stuff so it isn’t really an FAQ.. but it’s my blog… so there… I mean here:

Why no comments section?

I don’t have the inclination to moderate something like that, but if you read something here you feel compelled to say something about with others, there are plenty of other places you can do that. And if you feel compelled to say something to me about it, my contact information isn’t hard to find.

I might do a comments section someday, I don’t know. There's a slew of issues about it but the one that's important to me right now is the way people interact with comment sections and message boards has changed a lot over the last couple of decades. When people comment on something, there's an interactivity that can be interesting and fun to participate in and to read, and sometimes it can put people on to different perspectives that they might not otherwise have. My problem with that is people are letting the comment threads do the thinking about and analysis of the thing they just consumed instead of doing the thinking about and analysis of the thing themselves. The same way pundits on the news “analysis” shows are doing the thinking about the topic for the people watching or listening. And like, I’m not judging this stuff. I do it too. I just don't think it's the best use of my time, or yours.

Why no mailing list?

That I’m more likely to do at some point. I just don’t want my name to pop up in your mailbox with every little thing I share here and then messages from me become something you file away with all the other noise in your life. Like, if you’re reading something from me it means you’re visiting me here or are (probably) otherwise being deliberate about it. It’s like, the email mechanism on here, I think it’s an automated thing that would email you every new post and I'd have to figure out how to selectively send things so I don’t hit your inbox every time I have a thought.

Either that, or I would have to make this thing more formal and I don’t want to do that right now. Like, I might do that, but not today.

This should go without saying but apparently it doesn’t these days

I don't use “AI” to assist with writing. I'm stating this because lately, I've seen a growing number of well-known publications cranking out stuff that wouldn't even get past me if I was editing or factchecking it. Sites that used to seem reputable to me are starting to look like content farms and that bums me out. There's this proliferation of crap masquerading as human expression all over the place. Thus, this statement.

CYA

Some posts may have edits or revisions later on for typos and grammar and the like and those changes I may not indicate, but I’ll indicate if I make a revision that alters the thing in some major way. Unless I forget to. As a for instance, I just don’t want someone to share something from me and then it turns out later that the thing is significantly different enough from what they intended to share that they feel misled. I don’t see that happening, like, it’s super unlikely, but I just wanted to put that in writing.

Ohh you’re still here! Nice!

Thanks for reading all the way to the end and ttyl

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This page was last updated on May 28, 2026.