Recommendations

Some other Substack publications I enjoy

I have hesitated over how to provide recommendations to other Substack publications.

The Substack platform has an automated system for doing that, in which new subscribers to publications like this one are immediately encouraged to subscribe to the writer’s list of recommended publications. That is fine for those who are already familiar with the platform and how it works.

If one doesn’t know the platform, though — Substack is the platform that you are reading these essays on — all of that can be confusing. So I have held off on adding any titles to my automated list.

At the same time, there is such wonderful writing on Substack! I’d love to share with you some of the publications that I subscribe to and enjoy in case you want to explore them yourself.

My compromise is to skip the automated system and instead put here a few of the many excellent Substack publications that I have come across. I’ll probably rotate the list from time to time, as there are too many to put all at once,

The recommendations are a little lower on this page. If you’re a writer on Substack yourself, please feel free to skip to that bit. For everyone else, I’ll explain a little first how Substack works: what it means to subscribe to a Substack publication, the difference between subscribing to a publication and ”following” a writer in the Substack app, and finally how to to access a publication without either subscribing or following.

— Subscribing to a Substack publication. When you subscribe, you are signing up to receive each new article in your email (or in the Substack app if you are using that).

Some publications are free to subscribe to and read; others have a paid system where you pay a monthly or an annual subscription fee to read some or all of the contents.

Some Substack publications also have community/discussion aspects that are limited to subscribers or specifically to paying subscribers.

When you subscribe to a Substack publication, your email address is shared with the person whose publication it is. And as of now, at least, the same applies to some information about your activities on the publication, such as which articles you’ve opened.

— ”Following” a writer in the Substack app. If you use the Substack app, you can also ”follow” a writer there. That’s a bit like following them on Twitter or Instagram, I think (I don’t use those, so I’m not really sure). But in any event, it’s not like subscribing: you don’t get their articles in your email or in your feed on the app,and they don’t see your email address or (as of now, anyway) information about your activities on their publication.

However, you do see some of the social-media-like posts that they do on Substack Notes, which often includes notification that they or another writer has a new piece out. (If you subscribe to someone’s Substack publication, you automatically ”follow” them in Substack Notes as well.)

— Accessing a Substack publication without either subscribing to it or following the writer on the app. All of the Substack publication homepages can be explored without needing to subscribe first. How many of the articles on the homepage you can open will depend on how much, if any, is behind a paid-subscription paywall, but you can usually get a pretty good sense of the writing without subscribing first.

Hope any of that was helpful, and happy reading!

(Click on the publication’s name below to explore first without subscribing — ignore the “type your email” bit.)

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