Haley Nahman was having a weird time. She had spent most of the pandemic inside, shuttling around the one-bedroom apartment she shares with her partner, Avi. “Not to paint too bleak a picture, but I’ve started sitting down in the shower,” she wrote, in September, in an e-mail. “I’ve noticed that when you hug your knees to your chest and watch the water pitter-patter against your toes, drips sliding down your nose and into your mouth, it feels almost like getting caught in a warm rainstorm.” She recommended reading Ross Gay’s poem “A Small Needful Fact,” a Jacobin essay about socialism, and a profile of Miranda July in New York magazine. In October, she reflected on the long-term consequences of “collective, inexhaustible despair”; in November, she clarified that, despite sounding depressed, she was doing fine, before segueing into a two-thousand-word meditation on anxiety, which she illustrated with a photograph of her cat, Bug, a sleepy Persian. Three weeks later, she took a small dose of psychedelic mushrooms and walked around a lake. “I then proceeded to make the most colorful stoner drawing of my life, which I’m convinced healed something inside of me,” she reported, attaching a photo of herself bundled up in winter clothes, looking peaceful.
Nahman, who is thirty-one and lives in Brooklyn, sends out missives like these every Sunday, to some thirty thousand subscribers. They are the core offering of “Maybe Baby,” a weekly e-mail newsletter, of which she is the sole writer and editor. (The name, she has written, was inspired by her appreciation of uncertainty.) Just before the pandemic arrived in New York City, Nahman left her job as the features director of Man Repeller, a women’s media site, with a long-held plan to go freelance; in late March, she announced the launch of “Maybe Baby” on Instagram, where she has ninety thousand followers. “It will be a place for me to write more freely than I’ve been able, explore ideas (and feelings) I think deserve more attention, and generally connect with you all via the amazing technology of e-mail™️,” Nahman wrote, beneath a photograph of herself sitting on her bed in a red sweater, the word “Announcement” superimposed over her head, like a crown.
Nahman publishes “Maybe Baby” on Substack, a service that enables writers to draft, edit, and send e-mail newsletters to subscribers. Writers can choose whether subscriptions are free or paid; the minimum charge for paid subscriptions is five dollars a month or thirty dollars a year, and Substack takes ten per cent of all revenue. Nahman’s Sunday newsletter is free, but a paid subscription to “Maybe Baby,” which costs the minimum fee, includes access to a weekly podcast and a monthly advice column. Nahman’s writing is warm, candid, thoughtful, and gently political; she cites theorists such as Karl Marx, Jean Baudrillard, and Marshall McLuhan, offering an accessible leftist lens on everything from celebrity culture to the changing seasons. On her newsletter’s About page, Nahman explains that her goal is to make subscribers feel like they’ve just had “a long talk with a friend”—“slightly less anxious or confused about the alien hellscape that is the modern world.”
For a couple of months in 2020, “Maybe Baby” was among Substack’s top twenty-five paid publications, which the company ranked on a public leaderboard, like in a spin class. (In December, Substack introduced multiple leaderboards, split into categories such as Culture, Health, Faith, and Food & Drink.) To date, there are thousands of newsletters on Substack, and more than two hundred and fifty thousand paid subscribers. Lately, the most popular publications have included “Petition,” which offers “curated distressed investing, restructuring, and bankruptcy news/analysis” (forty-nine dollars per month); “The Corners by Nadia Bolz-Weber,” a collection of unconventional prayers, meditations, and spiritual inquiries (five dollars per month); and “ParentData,” by Emily Oster, a roughly biweekly parenting dispatch that takes a scientific, data-driven approach to topics like prenatal alcohol exposure, breast-milk freezing, and microplastics (free). “Letters from an American,” a newsletter that draws parallels between the current political situation and historical events, written by Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, consistently tops the Politics leaderboard (five dollars per month); in Business, the No. 1 newsletter is “The Bitcoin Forecast by Willy Woo”—Woo is an independent cryptocurrency researcher—which promises “a solid forecast of Bitcoin’s next price move using blockchain data” (fifty dollars per month).
People working in and around Silicon Valley tend to be early adopters of new consumer products, and so there is a glut of newsletters written by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, about venture capital and entrepreneurship. There are also newsletters dedicated to sexism in sports, witchcraft, design, cricket, bread baking, Bob Dylan concerts throughout history, “The Hudsucker Proxy,” and human-animal relationships. “David” is a bracing series on family, literature, and sexuality, ostensibly structured around historic Davids: Bowie, Foster Wallace, Hyde Pierce, Lynch, Wojnarowicz (five dollars per month). “Beauty IRL” contains essays and reporting on beauty, politics, and pop culture (seven dollars per month); “I Know a Spot” offers pithy commentary on unusual and dreamy properties listed on Zillow (free); “Foreign Bodies” focusses on immigrant and refugee communities, and the destigmatization of mental illness (five dollars per month); “Unsnackable” wanders between reviews of idiosyncratic snacks and diaristic reflections (free); “Deep Voices” is a regular, hour-long playlist accompanied by digital liner notes (free); and “Books on Cities” reviews books on cities (five dollars per month).
In its variety, the Substack corpus resembles the blogosphere. It is produced by a mix of career journalists, bloggers, specialists, novelists, hobbyists, dabblers, and white-collar professionals looking to plump up their personal brands. The company has tried to recruit high-profile writers, offering (to a select few) health-care stipends, design help, and money to hire freelance editors. In certain instances, Substack has also paid advances, often in the generous six figures, incentivizing writers to produce work without employing them. Substack writers can apply for access to a legal-defense fund, which covers up to a million dollars in legal fees on a case-by-case basis. Casey Newton, a tech journalist who has written about Silicon Valley for a decade, left the Verge in September to launch the Substack newsletter “Platformer,” a solo venture, where he analyzes news about social networks and democracy (ten dollars per month). Newton, who is a friend of mine, declined an advance but took a health-care stipend; he joked to me that his life has now been twice disrupted by the Internet—first when he was a newspaper journalist, “and the Web came along and devoured print,” and then a decade later, when “social networks came along and devoured the Web.” Substack has also recruited the former BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen and the Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, who left his staff job to write a newsletter; both were given substantial advances. Other well-known writers have started Substack newsletters without brokering deals with the company, including the rock critic Robert Christgau, whose “And It Don’t Stop” is a trove of winding essays on music, television, and science fiction (five dollars per month). After going on leave from the Times this spring, the food writer Alison Roman started “A Newsletter,” which contains recipes and breezy, bossy, self-deprecating anecdotes (five dollars per month).
When Substack launched, in 2017, the founders posted a mission statement of sorts to “Substack Blog” (free). After beginning with an anecdote about how, in 1883, the New York Sun incorporated advertisements, the post went on to detail the current state of journalism: