by Mark R. DeLong
This month, I’m closing up the years-long run of my Substack newsletter. I’ve decided to stand up my own newsletter site, despite the hassle, the modest expense, and the loss of what Substack touts as its “network.” The decision revealed to me some of the usually enshrouded assumptions that writers make about their work and the media they choose to release it. The relationship is hardly linear; it’s not just writers cooking up work that media mechanically release to a readership. Over the years, Substack’s evolution unveiled assumptions that complicate and shift the simple linear creation-to-publication process.
I decided Substack’s emerging assumptions about writing and publishing weren’t really mine. The simple model of writers writing and then somehow publishing is too simple; it ignores useful signals that shape a writer’s creation as a piece moves toward a readership (or, as often is the case, toward the desk drawer or wastebasket), and it ignores the targeting or even creation of a readership—the key to “making a living” as a writer. Substack’s evolution as a “publishing service” is an example of how media—and particularly social media—nurture or contort writers and, in the process, shape them to fit publication processes and the readerships that those processes conjure up.
After four years, Substack and I grew apart, so I’m ending the relationship.
My initial choice to set up a “stack” was in no small measure just a way to solve an email problem. In 2022, I had few designs on literary quality, much less delusions of pursuing a life of writing. Through the Covid pandemic, it was my habit to send an email to my students every morning, a message they eventually named the “morning missive.” When I wasn’t nagging at them, which was infrequent, students found them useful and even entertaining, and for me it was a means to start a weekday in a summary of an interesting item I read, some quick take on happenings, a musing quite broadly defined, or sometimes a crabby snap at students slacking off in seminar readings. Most missives related to the theme and content of the course. Read more »
Robert Caro might well go down in history as the greatest American biographer of all time. Through two monumental biographies, one of Robert Moses – perhaps the most powerful man in New York City’s history – and the other an epic multivolume treatment of the life and times of Lyndon Johnson – perhaps the president who wielded the greatest political power of any in American history – Caro has illuminated what power and especially political power is all about, and the lengths men will go to acquire and hold on to it. Part deep psychological profiles, part grand portraits of their times, Caro has made the men and the places and times indelible. His treatment of individuals, while as complete as any that can be found, is in some sense only a lens through which one understands the world at large, but because he is such an uncontested master of his trade, he makes the man indistinguishable from the time and place, so that understanding Robert Moses through “The Power Broker” effectively means understanding New York City in the first half of the 20th century, and understanding Lyndon Johnson through “The Years of Lyndon Johnson” effectively means understanding America in the mid 20th century.
