What Substack Is

Many years ago I was talking to a magazine writer about a news story I was working on, and he asked me this: “Who are your characters?” That’s the MFA in Creative Nonfiction approach, in which journalism is storytelling and narrative construction. Remember that Sabrina Rubin Erdely wrote her discredited story about a gang rape at a University of Virginia frat house only after “pre-interviewing” women at four other universities — and rejecting their rape stories as too dull for magazine journalism. You’re struggling to believe this, but here it is in the Washington Post:

Magazine writer Sabrina Rubin Erdely knew she wanted to write about sexual assaults at an elite university. What she didn’t know was which university.

So, for six weeks starting in June, Erdely interviewed students from across the country. She talked to people at Harvard, Yale, Princeton and her alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. None of those schools felt quite right.

“None of these schools felt quite right.” Their campus rapes just lacked a certain something, a certain narrative edge. Here, watch Erdely say herself that she shops around for the sexiest victims:

“It’s almost like they’re doing tryouts.”

That, among other things, is what professional journalism has become, even as Erdely has destroyed her place in it.

Now, Emily Oster’s “amnesty” piece in The Atlantic instantly produced a tsunami of responses, on Substack and elsewhere, including roughly 7,032 of them from me. (And counting. Sorry!) But what fascinates me is that I read my tenth or twelfth Emily Oster response this morning, and got something new from it. Someone showed up a dozen writers into a thing, and said something fresh and serious and interesting that taught me something and gave me a new perspective. (And then, ten minutes later, it happened again.)

What struck me about the freshness and uniqueness of the many Oster responses I read was the — here comes a word the mainstream news media loves but doesn’t practice — diversity of the perspective. Some people writing on Substack showed up to the Oster essay with what’s obviously an academic background and a whole lot of reading in the social science literature, writing knowingly about an econ professor. Some people showed up with backgrounds in big organizations and institutional politics. And so on, in what’s pretty clearly a varied mix of professors and practitioners, people watching dispassionately from the sidelines and people who are reporting on the game from the field. Some of the responses strike me as distinctly gendered — I just sounded like one of the cool kids! — and reflective of the particular way women listen to women.

A small army of people showed up at the thing from different places, and saw different pieces; many perspectives among writers gave many perspectives to readers. Compare this to the uniformity of voice in the “news,” where the obvious imperative is to serve the Narrative of the Day.

So imagine the last two-plus years without alternatives, without Substack and other ways to speak around the increasingly tedious gatekeepers. Imagine all of this under the firm control of the Trust and Safety Council and the Disinformation Governance Board. Picture vaccine mandates and lockdowns and mask mandates and school closures plus the “guardrails around our discourse” that all the serious insiders keep saying that we need so urgently.

And then say a quiet prayer of gratitude for a real diversity of voices, speaking freely.