At the Center of Things

Over the last year, I have noticed that, absent a few publications at a very particular moment, my writing on Substack will go further. I don’t measure this in terms of page views or “likes” or anything like that; my assessment is more anecdotal and, to me, truer. An essay on Substack, by virtue of being tethered to an email list of people who have signed up ahead of time, is guaranteed to generate a conversation of some kind. This conversation can vary in size and intensity but it invariably exists, whether you’ve got an email list of 30 subscribers, 300, 3,000, or something much larger. The email retains its intimacy. With virality of the written word dead on virtually every other platform—Elon Musk has throttled linked articles on Twitter/X, and the Mark Zuckerberg-owned Instagram and Threads are no friendlier to writers—Substack is the de facto choice for anyone who is not merely interested in sharing photos and memes. And it is, increasingly, a more meaningful outlet for the median writer if the goal is reaching a living, breathing audience and establishing, immediately, a place in someone else’s consciousness.