Substack Has Revived the Serial Novel

What is the point of the novel in 2026? Is it still a useful narrative form in the age of scrolling shortform videos while Netflix plays in the background? Putting video to one side, why read a self-contained story on a page when text-based narrative can be encountered in so many other formats and contexts? We now have podcast comment sections, social-media feuds, retweets and pile-ons, all-lowercase personal essays about romantic liaisons, pithy jokes plastered above cruel memes, conspiratorial greentexts on 4chan, and deeply unsettling Reddit confessionals.