The Substacks I Actually Read, Part 1

Worthy Reads for June 2023

One of the things I like about Substack is that it’s ruder than I am.

Personally, I always assume that if just pipe down and write good things, people are going to find it, read it, subscribe to it, and—eventually—spontaneously decide to give me money for it. This is how the Marketplace of Ideas works, and I mustn’t try to be pushy about it. I’m a Minnesotan! Around these parts, the idea of suggesting, out loud, that you yourself have done a good thing is a dreadful breach of propriety. Even when someone else tells you that you did good, you’re supposed to reject their praise until the third offer! That’s Minnesota law!

I faithfully followed this philosophy of blogging for a decade on my old Wordpress. I had a single, unobtrusive Google ad as my sole source of revenue, and a single, unobtrusive email subscription link at the bottom. I wrote some good stuff, some bad stuff, and one stuff that went viral once, which led to one of my favorite followups. After ten years writing, I had a grand total of 12 email subscribers and $50.56 in Google ad revenue—which I was never able to access, because Google doesn’t pay out in increments of less than $100.

When I moved to Substack, it was mostly because Wordpress sucked, partly for the footnote tool,¹ and a little because I thought people might spontaneously have the idea to pay me directly. I soon learned that Substack doesn’t believe in spontaneity! Substack is rude! It sends you to a subscription splash panel if you tab away for too long. It drops a pop-up ad into the first or second article you read. It won’t even let me publish an article without a reminder to add at least two subscription prompts! (Oh, speaking of:)

Turns out, a little rudeness goes a long way.

In just a year and a half, De Civitate has found its way into the inboxes of well over a hundred readers. About 10% of you are paying $4 a month (or more; thanks, you-know-who-you-are) out of the pure goodness of your heart, although I try to make it worth your while with Worthy Reads. To be clear: that means there are more people paying for De Civ today than there were reading the blog when it was on WordPress. (I’m writing a lot more as a result, too.) That’s very good news for me, and, since you’re still here, I assume it’s turned out to be good news for you as well.

But Substack can be a little too rude. When I heard that it was sending all my subscribers notifications and sometimes emails about my use of Substack Notes (without my consent), I was mortified, and I immediately stopped using Notes. You signed up for a newsletter, not a half-baked social network. Substack keeps wanting me to email De Civitate’s paying subscribers about the free gift subscriptions they’re entitled to give away, which, yeah, I’d love them to hook more people on De Civ, but these specific guys are already paying to read this blog, so aren’t they the last people I should be bothering about promoting the blog?

Last, but not least, every time I subscribe to a new Substack—every. single. time—Substack “helpfully” offers to send an email to every De Civitate subscriber announcing that I have subscribed and recommending that you do, too. No! Even if all my subscriptions were good (they are not), you don’t need a weekly notification about what I happen to be reading!

Yet I thought there was a germ of an idea there.

This post is an edition of Worthy Reads, but with a twist: it’s not articles, it’s Substacks. Not just the Substacks I’m subscribed to. These are the Substacks I actually read, with an explanation of why I read them. These are the stacks that hit my inbox and get queued straight into Voice Aloud Reader on my phone so I can listen to them in my car (recited in robotic monotone at 2.25x speed) on the way to the grocery store at 11:18 PM.

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With that unusually long prologue, let’s get started! As usual, half of Worthy Reads is open to all, and the second half is paywalled.

(More shocking Substack tricks unveiled: the long preview is a mercenary tactic to persuade you that the stuff below the paywall is worth cash money.)

Before the paywall, I’ll write a little bit about each of the stacks I’m publicly subscribed to.

Below the paywall, I’ll talk about the stacks that I don’t show on my public profile, including the SCANDALOUS Substacks I read. But that’s for the people who think I’m worth $5 a month! (Or $4.16 on the annual plan.)

These aren’t in any particular order. As always, retweets are not endorsements.

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Ed Whelan’s Confirmation Tales:

Ed Whelan’s Confirmation Tales is probably the least surprising entry on this list. When I was in preschool, Whelan was a staffer for former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Sen. Hatch was the Republican ranking member on the Judiciary Committee and a frequent source of frustration for social conservatives. Whelan (now known as the longtime judicial correspondent at National Review) had an insider’s view of some of the confirmation battles during the Clinton years. He sheds light on what, to me, has always been a mysterious time.

This is not Whelan’s angle [UPDATE: yes it is, see below], but, for me, the mystery of the 1990s has always been: why did the overwhelming majority of Republicans vote for Bill Clinton’s Supreme Court nominations (Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer)? Already begun, the judicial wars had: the Great Borking was in the 1980s, and the so-called “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas was in 1991. There was no cease-fire on the horizon, and, indeed, Democrats escalated the Senate judicial wars almost the instant they had the votes to do so, with the 2003 filibuster of Miguel Estrada and, soon enough, Senator Obama’s attempted filibuster of Justice Alito. So why did Senate Republicans knuckle under?

It certainly wasn’t the case that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was more impressive, or less partisan, than Sam Alito; and partisan symmetry tells me that it wasn’t just because Republicans were more generous of spirit or more stupid about “norms.” Yet Ginsburg’s confirmation vote was 96-3. Why?

Whelan’s newsletter gives insight into the tactical decisions that drove the Senate Republican caucus in these years, and I, obviously, read every word.

Good sample post:

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s “Inexorable Zero” of Black Employees

UPDATE: Whelan reached out on Twitter to mention that yes, actually, shedding light on this mystery is exactly something he’s trying to do, and he even said so explicitly early on. I had forgotten this, and didn’t want to put my words in his mouth, but… actually, shedding light on the mystery of the 1990s is 100% part of his angle:

Why Orrin Hatch Was Eager to Help Bill Clinton

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Good Reason:

I don’t know who Andre Cooper is, but he writes good. He won me over with his initial post, “Nate Silver’s Finest Hour,” a searingly correct but extremely unfashionable defense of Nate Silver’s 2016 election projections (and a lament for the online culture that subsequently spurned Silver). I was sincerely jealous I hadn’t written it. I could have! I was there, I knew this stuff! Nate Silver’s single comment about me sits atop my About page! But Andre Cooper, whoever he is, beat me to it, and did a fine job of it.

But, lest you think Good Reason is just another politics blog, he goes and writes this off-beat piece on corporate buzzwords as his followup:

On Corpspeak

I thought I’d read everything on Good Reason, but I just now saw there’s two posts on *faints, swoons* how housing is a consumption good, not an investment good, which is another post I’ve wanted to write for years and now I’ve got two tabs open for Andre Cooper’s take. Whoever he is!

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Freddie DeBoer:

Every right-winger has that one leftist they really feel like they vibe with. Like, here’s this lefty, and he almost gets it! But not quite. Never quite. Matthew Yglesias is a big one with a lot of people, Matt Taibbi has recently been winning conservatives’ “strange new respect,” and Bari Weiss may be the star of the genre. Freddie deBoer has been in this mix for years

FdB is a communist, thus my opponent, and probably a bad guy if he ever gets into power. Most conservatives enjoy reading him for his critiques of the modern “woke” social justice movement, and, sure, we all love re-reading “Planet of Cops” and his razing of the modern media establishment.

There’s more to be had from FdB than vicarious jollies from watching him roast media mandarins, though. That’s where he gets his clicks, sure… but I think his main writing, on education, is pretty incisive. That’s saying something, because there’s very few people opposed to school choice (a self-evident good, in my view) whose writing on education remains coherent past the first paragraph, much less “incisive.”

Perhaps even more importantly, some of DeBoer’s writing on SJWs applies to the Right, too. Take this good sample post, arguing that the progressivism is decaying because it sacrifices concrete objectives for performative gestures:

We're All Just Having Fun Here

This is all true, but consider the Right. Faced with a 2024 primary choice between:

• a politician who methodically accomplished a devastatingly effective, successful, and popular right-wing agenda while turning a swing state into a red lighthouse, and

• a former president who failed to accomplish much of anything while in office except send mean tweets, a man so unpopular he lost both the electoral college and—by an even wider margin!—the popular vote to effing Joe Biden…

…the GOP primary base currently seems inclined to support the second guy. They seem to want the mean tweets. Indeed, they seem to want mean tweets more than they want the presidency!

Just like the SJWs.

Partisan symmetry, man. It’s a trip.

FdB also has the best subscription setup I’ve seen on Substack. He’s somehow parceled his materials out into categories, and readers can choose which categories to subscribe to. I subscribe to his weekly digest post, because he writes so much, so fast, that it would overwhelm my inbox otherwise.

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Papyrus Rampant:

The newest addition to my gotta-read-it list, I found Papyrus Rampant just this week, thanks to a comment thread here on De Civitate. Author Evan Triangle² roped me in by doing what I believed impossible: he found an important letter about the original Star Trek that I hadn’t read.

(It was an exchange between Gene Roddenberry and Isaac Asimov regarding science on television and the Kirk-Spock dynamic. Asimov’s advice is strangely good for someone who was rather bad at putting characters first in his own novels. Sorry, Hari Seldon!)

Mr. Triangle turned out to have other intelligent thoughts about science fiction—the kind of intelligent thoughts you can’t get from the Tor Books Newsletter anymore, if you know what I mean—including a piece on parallel universes that makes a nice accidental companion to my Spider-Man: No Exit review: he suggests a possible escape hatch that could save parallel-worlds stories from deterministic nihilism… if only any professional writers of parallel-worlds stories weren’t determinist nihilists. A post that somehow managed to wrest some sympathy from me for Stephen A. Douglas, of all people (I am Lincoln’s man, through and through), sealed the deal, and now I subscribe.

Good Sample Post:

Golden Age science fiction

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Bonus: I also subscribe to four dead Substacks, in hopes they will one day revive. I’ll scatter these “deadstacks” across both parts of this article.

The best covid blog I was reading for a while was Lessons from the Crisis. It was doing a good job pointing out what was wrong (even deranged) in the official narrative, but without going full Red Pill and embracing all the equal-but-opposite derangements. In my view, it’s still worth reading today, starting with this interpretation of why the narrative on masks actually shifted abruptly in Spring 2020. Alas, the stack ended mid-lesson:

The "noble lie" on masks probably wasn't a lie

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Here, at last, the paywall drops. If you want to see the other substacks I actually read, including the SCANDALOUS ones, you’ll have to subscribe to the paid list now, perhaps using this handy button:

(Full disclosure: there’s only one scandalous stack below the paywall this month and one scandalous stack next month—and only the former is actually NSFW. I’m just talking up the SCANDALOUS ones because I really want you to give me $5.00, and I’m not sure the one about how great abortion is or the one about the partisan foot fetishists will do the trick.)

(Oh, actually, I guess that last one is a teensy bit scandalous, too.)