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Which Substacks fascinate, intrigue, and challenge your views?
I have been (without paying attention) been reading more and more articles/op-eds etc from substack, usually linked from reddit or as of late, from here on Tildes. I decided to sign up and create an account for myself and found the list of suggested substacks to subscribe to fairly run-of-the-mill and not very enticing.
So, what are your favourite substacks? Which substacks raise topics new to you, challenge your perspectives, captures your attention for longer than intended?
I feel like most Substack writers have a shtick and they stick with it and that makes it hard to recommend them to people. I've been following a few writers there that fits your criteria, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend them to anyone because they view everything from the same lens that garnered them subscriptions, which makes them intellectually less stimulating.
Here are some exceptions:
Freddie deBoer is an interesting fellow that often writes about cultural stuff, including protest movements from an old school leftist perspective. He also writes about mental health, of which he greatly suffers from, which I appreciate.
Astral Codex Ten, formerly known as Slate Star Codex, has always been a writer that intrigued me but I kept at an arms length because of the cult and community around it. However, since he moved on to Substack, he wrote about a couple of subjects that I'm deeply familiar with in a way I've not seen any Western writer has, so if he writes about a subject that intrigues me, I usually read it.
The Present Age with Parker Molloy is pretty good. She writes about culture in a way that I often agree with but she writes from a perspective I rarely consider.
I stopped following Freddie a while ago because I noticed he was writing about the social justice culture war stuff too often and it was getting boring. I don’t even think his heart was especially in it after a while but the engagement was too good on that crap to give it up. I think at one point he even said as much in a tweet that his articles criticizing Wokeness get tons more hits than anything else he can do.
But skimming the headlines now it seems like he’s spread out a bit more so I might resubscribe to his feed. I don’t know if he just got bored with that stuff or if the social justice/wokie movements power feels less hegemonic in the circles he travels in now than it did a couple of years ago (anecdotally that seems to track in my experience, the rougher edges have sanded down a decent bit) and it’s not as easy to just farm clicks with yet another culture war topic as it used to be.
Yep, pretty much what I did as well. I get where he's coming from and I mostly agree with what he's written on the subject but he was writing too many articles that basically said the same thing. His writing can be erratic too, but I chalk that up to his mental issues, which he's been devastatingly honest about.
I don't remember reading an article of his that explicitly criticizes the "woke culture" but he certainly has a problem with the way some people interpret it. What I think to be the bottom line of his argument is, "protests and striving to be decent to one another through language and other means are good and should continue, but that alone is not enough because it has not resulted in any meaningful, political change", which I don't think anyone can deny.
As for the recent drought of articles on the subject, I suspect you're right, but also, he has a book coming out so he may have wanted to write about something else while working on the book. The feed will likely have some sections from the book soon, as it appears to be coming out in September.
Can you elaborate?
He has a loud, alt-right adjacent so called rationalist followers who think anything can and should be debated in the marketplace of ideas. Coincidentally, those debates often end up being about curtailing the rights of minority groups in some way.
A lot of that got spun off. There were "culture war" topics that attempted to quarantine them, but that wasn't enough, so it became a separate subreddit, and later left Reddit entirely.
I haven't seen it in the comments recently. (Though, I haven't read the substack lately because I got distracted.)
I spend the past few hours reading through some of Scott's archives and his readers' comments. You're right; his posts are interesting. I didn't, however, see discussions about, as you say, curtailing minorities' rights; the tone reads more like reddit-tier "intellectuals" who like to name-drop biases and statistical theories than alt-right cultists. Perhaps I need to spend more time in this community to understand what you're insinuating.
No, you're right but in my understanding and interpretation, alt-right adjacent so called rationalists have a big overlap with reddit-tier intellectuals. Scott Alexander is just a proxy they can associate themselves with so they feel smarter than they are.
I'm not saying his audience is full of privileged teenagers who think they know better than anybody, but I am saying they used to be the loud bunch, especially at the height of Trump, MeToo and other similar events. I don't pay attention to the comment section anymore, so I don't know if they're still interested in doing mental gymnastics over people's rights just to have a debate, but I'll take your word for it if that isn't the case now.
Those who wish to discuss "taboo" topics and their opinions seem to have migrated to The Motte.
There's a group of self described "grey tribe" members which you can loosely think of as enlightened-centrist, libertarians. They're frequently associated with the tech intelligentsia of Silicon Valley. Many of those grey tribe "rationalists" have split towards the far right (Elon Musk) or adopted other extreme ideas like neo-feudalism (Peter Thiel).
I'm not a fan of Substack's pricing model. Love supporting the writers, but does anyone else remember the days when writers syndicated their work to newspapers or magazines, and you could purchase a curated selection of good writing for a single price?
There are very, very few Substacks consistently good enough to justify a $50+ annual fee for a single author's work. The only one we're currently subscribing to is Adam Tooze's Chartbook. Tooze is responsible for popularization of the term "polycrisis", and worth reading whenever you have the opportunity. His newsletter is richly fact-based, thoughtful in opinionating, and useful for understanding the deeper layers of economic policy.
That's a good point! I created my account just today so I have not had time to explore it yet! It's a curious model, as you mention, in comparison to how newspapers and magazines work. There is something to it, my guess is that writers get roughly the same amount of money, and most people spend probably the same amount they would on a traditional subscription, only that most people actually get access to much less content. The ones who benefit from this system are the few who basically only want to subscribe to one writer - the equivalent of paying a fraction but only being allowed to read one article, which of course doesn't work for traditional print media.
Been a fan of Dynomight but just sub to the newsletter so I don't really participate in the substack part. He writes a lot on the border of tech and philosophy and I generally find his essays thought provoking.
That sounds right up my alley! Thanks a lot for the suggestion, will check it out!
The Discourse Lounge has articles by Darrell Owens, who is a young housing activist who also knows a lot about transit. He mostly writes about what's happening in the SF Bay area and California. I like his articles because they go into depth and seem pretty level-headed.
Desystemize is a rather philosophical blog with articles criticizing systemic thinking. You might think of it as anti-reductionist. An article I rather liked was Chasing the Treasure Fox, which uses Skyrim to talk about how we create probabilistic mental models that are different from how things really work. There's a connection to AI at the end.
Construction Physics has articles about how things get built, the economic forces that influence how construction is done, and how construction changed over history. It also has in-depth articles about the history of energy, including solar and nuclear energy.
I will definitely check this one out! Thanks!
I really like Noahpinion for his takes on China and other international politics from the perspective of an American economist who deeply supports social policy.
More controversially, Slow Boring provides a lot of insightful discussion of US politics. The author cofounded Vox Media with Ezra Klein, so he has a unique perspective on the US media landscape. Just don't seek him out on Twitter.