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Substack: five of the best from the niche newsletter platform

<span>Photograph: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images

Substack is best known as the newsletter platform that lured several well-known writers and journalists away from established news outlets this year.

Glenn Greenwald, Matthew Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan, formerly of the Intercept, Vox Media and New York Magazine respectively, have all jumped ship to sell their work directly to subscribers via the service.

Incorporating elements of Mailchimp and Patreon, Substack has variously been hailed as the future of the media industry, a home for writers who don’t want to be edited, and a place where those who have already made a name for themselves find success.

The site boasts more than 100,000 niche newsletters about every subject imaginable. Below is a small selection of some of the best, compiled from the recommendations of friends, colleagues, random tweets and my own sleuthing.

Note: not all Substacks require payment – some are free, while others offer a mix of free and paid content.

Insight

Insight is the creation of Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist and author who writes about how technology “interacts with the fabric of society” for the Atlantic and the New York Times. Her first Substack missive was an astute analysis of why the tradition of televised debates between presidential candidates in US elections is no longer fit for purpose – particularly in the era of Donald Trump – due to “cultural lag”:

Humans, our culture and institutions, carry a lot of inertia. We carry on with rituals and ways of doing things long after it’s become obvious that they do not serve the purpose for which they are intended. Strikingly, we can keep doing it all with a straight face, with pomp and circumstance, even when, in fact, the exercise borders on ridiculous. Even when some players have decided they’re no longer playing the same game.

Related: Why are public thinkers flocking to Substack? | Sean Monahan

Later instalments explore why randomised trials could not prove mask-wearing was effective in preventing Covid-19 transmission, mistrust in elections and the trade-offs in deciding how and when people are vaccinated. All of it is good.

Garbage Day

If you prefer lighter newsletter fare, Guardian Australia’s culture editor, Steph Harmon, recommends Ryan Broderick’s newsletter Garbage Day. “He does these deep dives into new memes and viral happenings, investigates the origins and evolution of old ones, and scans across all other matters of weird online ephemera, if you’re into that sort of thing, which I am, very much,” she says.

Here’s a snippet from a recent newsletter in which Broderick dives into, among other things, extremist internet communities that have begun leaving mainstream social networks such as Reddit:

r/Conspiracy is one of the oldest and biggest conspiracy theory-based subreddits on the internet. It was started in 2008 and has 1.4 million subscribers. It has gone through a lot of phases. It’s currently in the midst of another, with pro-Trump users, hardcore QAnon users, and the classic libertarian X-Files side character types all bickering about what the subreddit should stand for in a post-Trump world.

¡Hola Papi!

I know almost nothing about the ¡Hola Papi! Substack beyond a single post I came across via Twitter, but it was a post of such perfection that I am recommending it wholesale. (¡Hola Papi! says it started out as an advice column at Grindr’s LGBTQ outlet INTO in 2017 and is being turned into a memoir to be published by Simon & Schuster next year.)

The post in question is titled “Top 5 Rat Movies I Made Up” and it’s written by John Paul Brammer, who is the brains behind ¡Hola Papi!. Brammer canvasses “the nonexistent rat movies in my head based on the Rotten Tomatoes score I’m pretty sure they would have gotten if they’d been executed faithfully to my vision”. Please enjoy this excerpt:

Well I’m going to start out small with Ratz, a film that set out to be a fun, tongue-in-cheek critique on how we market products to young girls but got tampered with along the way. It’s Bratz, but instead of humans the girls are rats. Their high school is in the sewer and they love trash and shopping for little rat clothes. Unfortunately, some exec caught the idea in one of those humane rat traps and turned the movie into an earnest Hasbro marketing pitch.

More devastating still, at least for dedicated creators invested in the integrity of the rodent film movement, the marketing pitch was a runaway success and now young gay kids all want a Rat Barbie under the tree for Christmas … As you can see, the film barely matters any more because it had no real plot … Ratz is the worst rat movie I came up with last week off the top of my head, and the critics agree. 22%. Shameless cash grab that fails as a movie but succeeds in establishing a line of cute, rather subversive toys for the little kids of our future climate dystopia.

Truehoop

My friend Josh Nicholas is an NBA tragic and in the interests of branching out beyond my own narrow interests, I present you with one of his favourite Substacks: Truehoop.

Related: The best books of 2020 to support indie publishers this Christmas

“Truehoop is one of the original sports blogs, and writer Henry Abbott has seemingly met everyone,” Josh says. “Little anecdotes puncture his stories, reminding you that behind the NBA’s plays, glamour and stats are real people and some weird situations. One week it’s an exploration into a team owner’s alleged mob ties, another it’s the problem with a basketball shoe marketing machine that is largely aimed at poor communities. There has never been more incredible sports writing being published, and Truehoop itself surfaces a lot of it, but I don’t know of anyone else that so consistently shows sports isn’t just about sports.”

Here’s a small taste of The sneaker industry paradox:

Style culture – especially sneaker culture – has taken over at schools. What you wear defines who you are for many kids today. It provides a sense of not just status, but also self-worth. Nowhere is this more apparent than in communities of color. But whether it’s a $150 Jordan 7 in 1993 or a $250 Yeezy in 2018 – the price to feel good about yourself is really steep.

The average black American made $41,000 a year in 2020 before the pandemic. That’s $10,000 less than the average Hispanic American and almost $30,000 less per year than the average white American … And yet, despite the seeming economic disconnect, this is the audience to whom sneaker brands target their most expensive products and their most sophisticated marketing efforts. How do I know this? Because I’m in the room when these plans have been and are being developed.

Letters of Note

Before Letters of Note was a Substack it was a blog, a book (or two) and a live show, but the concept is the same. As writer Shaun Usher explains, it’s basically a bunch of emails in which he chats about letters. I’ve been a longtime fan because I, too, love letters. Here’s an excerpt of a letter Virginia Woolf wrote to Violet Dickinson on 28 December 1906:

I met an old man on the village green yesterday, lame and frost bitten and ruddy and white haired who told me he had had goose for dinner and ‘really thought he was the happiest old man in the world’. He looked so convinced of it and so stealthy as though happiness was not altogether respectable that I told him he was a credit to the race and upon which he shambled off to the public house, and I nearly followed.

The moral of this story is that Substack is full of great stuff and if you don’t like anything I included in my list, you could probably find something on it that you do.