Well I’m going to start out small with Ratz, a film that set out to be a fun, tongue-in-cheek critique on how we market products to young girls but got tampered with along the way. Brammer canvasses “the nonexistent rat movies in my head based on the Rotten Tomatoes score I’m pretty sure they would have gotten if they’d been executed faithfully to my vision”. The post in question is titled “ Top 5 Rat Movies I Made Up” and it’s written by John Paul Brammer, who is the brains behind ¡Hola Papi!. (¡Hola Papi! says it started out as an advice column at Grindr’s LGBTQ outlet INTO in 2017 and is being turned into a memoir to be published by Simon & Schuster next year.) I know almost nothing about the ¡Hola Papi! Substack beyond a single post I came across via Twitter, but it was a post of such perfection that I am recommending it wholesale.
It’s currently in the midst of another, with pro-Trump users, hardcore QAnon users, and the classic libertarian X-Files side character types all bickering about what the subreddit should stand for in a post-Trump world.
It was started in 2008 and has 1.4 million subscribers. R/Conspiracy is one of the oldest and biggest conspiracy theory-based subreddits on the internet. Here’s a snippet from a recent newsletter in which Broderick dives into, among other things, extremist internet communities that have begun leaving mainstream social networks such as Reddit: “He does these deep dives into new memes and viral happenings, investigates the origins and evolution of old ones, and scans across all other matters of weird online ephemera, if you’re into that sort of thing, which I am, very much,” she says. If you prefer lighter newsletter fare, Guardian Australia’s culture editor, Steph Harmon, recommends Ryan Broderick’s newsletter Garbage Day. Later instalments explore why randomised trials could not prove mask-wearing was effective in preventing Covid-19 transmission, mistrust in elections and the trade-offs in deciding how and when people are vaccinated. Even when some players have decided they’re no longer playing the same game. Strikingly, we can keep doing it all with a straight face, with pomp and circumstance, even when, in fact, the exercise borders on ridiculous. We carry on with rituals and ways of doing things long after it’s become obvious that they do not serve the purpose for which they are intended. Humans, our culture and institutions, carry a lot of inertia. Her first Substack missive was an astute analysis of why the tradition of televised debates between presidential candidates in US elections is no longer fit for purpose – particularly in the era of Donald Trump – due to “cultural lag”: Insight is the creation of Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist and author who writes about how technology “interacts with the fabric of society” for the Atlantic and the New York Times.
#Best substack newsletters free#
Note: not all Substacks require payment – some are free, while others offer a mix of free and paid content. Below is a small selection of some of the best, compiled from the recommendations of friends, colleagues, random tweets and my own sleuthing. The site boasts more than 100,000 niche newsletters about every subject imaginable.
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