I should probably explain myself.

My name is Adam Clermont. I am a solicitor in Hong Kong. White-collar defense, cross-border criminal matters, media law, national security work. I wear shorts in a jurisdiction where barristers still wear horsehair wigs. I have a French name that is not French. I grew up in Adams, Massachusetts, a town of about 8,000 people wedged into the northern Berkshires, where the main employer closed before I was old enough to work there and the bars outnumbered the churches only if you counted the ones that didn’t have signs.

I moved to Hong Kong over a decade ago. I stayed. I married a woman from here. I built a practice. I learned how to order dim sum without pointing, how to stand on the correct side of the escalator, and how to read a city that reveals itself slowly, in layers, to people willing to pay attention.

The name.

The Central-Mid-Levels Escalator is the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world. It runs about 800 meters through the middle of Hong Kong Island, connecting the business district at the bottom to the residential neighborhoods above. Every morning it carries people downhill to work. Every afternoon it reverses and carries them back up. It passes through wet markets and luxury boutiques, dai pai dongs and wine bars, temples and construction sites. It crosses streets where bankers in suits step off at the same level as grandmothers hauling groceries in rolling carts. It is not glamorous. It is not fast. It does not announce itself. It just moves, steadily, through every layer of the city, and if you stand on it long enough you see everything.

That is what I am trying to do here.

I started writing on LinkedIn, of all places. The professional networking platform. The place where people post about synergy and quarterly earnings and the ten lessons they learned from getting fired. I walked into it the way a man walks into a room that happens to have the lights on, sat down, and began filling it with things that did not belong there. The writing grew. The audience grew. And eventually it became clear that the work needed its own home, a place that was not someone else’s platform, not subject to someone else’s algorithm, not wedged between a motivational quote about hustle and a recruiter’s hot take on AI.

So now there is theescalatorhk.com. Same writing. Same voice. A permanent address.

What you will find here is not one thing. It is many things, because I am interested in many things, and the only editorial rule I follow is that the thing must be true and it must be worth your time.

I write about geopolitics. I write about fire safety. I write about the legal architecture of the Taiwan question, about what happens when a bar exam runs on Wi-Fi and 645 people watch their careers buffer in a convention center in Yakima, about why the Strait of Hormuz might be the most valuable asset in American strategic planning rather than the nightmare everyone pretends it is. I write about insurance subrogation after mass casualties, about how legal awards are purchased and marketed to a public that doesn’t know the difference between a trophy and a receipt, about what Jim Casey built in a basement below a Seattle saloon and what happened to it after the index funds arrived.

I also write about my wife.

Ruth is a native Hong Konger. She once navigated me to an apartment complex in Springfield, Massachusetts because the street was called Federal Ct. and she believed, with total conviction, that it was the federal court. She once wore an American flag T-shirt to the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam because she thought they were a Gucci outlet. She once threw a clove cigarette out the front window of my car at highway speed and the cigarette, defying every known law of physics, curved backward through the rear window and set my back seat on fire. She is the love of my life and the single greatest source of chaos I have ever encountered outside of a natural disaster, and she appears in these stories because she is in my life, and my life is what I write about.

I write about my friends. About Trevor, who is a doctor, who once pulled into the valet line at a Walt Disney World resort in a Chrysler K-car wagon that looked like it had been driven there from a salvage yard, and handed the valet his keys with the words “don’t scratch it.” About the people I grew up with in Adams, who are still, thirty years later, the funniest and strangest and most loyal people I know, and who show up in my writing because small-town friends are not interchangeable with any other kind of friend and I refuse to let them disappear.

I write about food that the universe forces me to eat because I made a joke at the wrong table. I write about a horse in Kazakhstan and a duck tongue in China and a pigeon at a wedding that arrived the exact moment I said its name out loud. I write about Hong Kong, not the Hong Kong of headlines, but the Hong Kong of minibuses and wet markets and the particular quality of light on Duddell Street at dusk when the gas lamps come on and look exactly like the lamps on Park Street in Adams, which is a coincidence too important to leave behind.

None of this fits into a single category. That is the point. The escalator does not serve one floor. It passes through all of them. The man riding it does not stop being a lawyer when he writes about a pigeon, and he does not stop being a man from Adams when he writes about maritime chokepoints. The escalator carries everything at once, moving steadily, refusing to choose between the serious and the absurd, because life does not make you choose and I see no reason why writing should.

I do not extract lessons. I do not offer ten takeaways. I do not write thought leadership, a phrase that has always sounded to me like something a man in a vest says before he tries to sell you a course. I write stories and arguments, as long as they need to be, and people read them, and some of those people leave comments that say “this is me” or “I knew a road like that” or “my town had a Trevor,” and every one of those comments is a plank in something I am building.

I live in Hong Kong. I am from Adams. I am a lawyer who does not write about law. I am a husband whose wife is a weather system. I am an American abroad who thinks about chokepoints and minibuses and the fact that five hours from my apartment there are a dozen entirely different worlds. I have been building an archive of the things that matter to me, one piece at a time, on someone else’s platform. Now it has a home.

That is what The Escalator is. It moves through every layer. It does not stop. It does not explain itself to the people standing still beside it. It just carries what it carries, steadily, uphill.

Start anywhere. The stories do not require order. They only require that you are willing to read more than a headline, which already puts you in a minority worth writing for.

Welcome.