A Pause to Refresh

And a few notes on the state of the stack

One morning, when I woke from troubled dreams, I found myself transformed into an … influencer. [/end Franz Kafka]

I’m taking a semi-break. I won’t do a full post today, just offer a note on where things stand with this Substack.

When I left the New York Times I wasn’t looking for a new job, but I also didn’t want to go silent. I reactivated this newsletter as a way to stay in the discourse, weighing in on and, I hoped, influencing for the better the way some issues were discussed.

As it turns out, however, Substack has become a job — a full-time job for two people, because Robin Wells, my wife and textbook co-author, is deeply involved in researching and editing. That’s fine. What am I going to do, spend my days golfing? (I don’t play golf.) I should, however, take more breaks, which I am sort of doing today.

Along the way, the newsletter has become a tool for informing as well as influencing, with subscribers telling me that they read this Substack to find out what’s going on — which is great. But influence is still my main goal. How’s it going?

At the time I’m writing this, I have >500K subscribers — 528,842, but who’s counting? Weekday posts, which are free, typically get around 500K views. So people are reading what I write.

Substack also has bestseller lists, which as I understand it are based on paid subscribers. Here’s the top of the US politics list:

Two points about that list. First, I sometimes encounter people accusing Substack of being a right-wing tool. Not in terms of the content people read! Except for Bari Weiss’s Free Press, the top 10 are all center-left or never-Trumper.

Second, aside from Heather Cox Richardson, who is in a class of her own, every newsletter above me is a group effort with multiple contributors (and all of them do excellent work!). So being #7 is great.

But what about influence?

One group definitely thinks I have influence: scam artists. YouTube channels pretending to be me, some using AI to produce videos I never recorded, keep popping up. Lately a new impostor channel seems to appear every week.

I have a real YouTube channel, which I intend to populate with more material soon. In fact, here’s a first stab at a short video reacting to events:

As for affecting the discourse, that can be a subtle matter. I’m always gratified to see a theme I’ve emphasized here show up elsewhere a few days or weeks later. Usually there’s no attribution, which is OK — we’re not talking about academic literature — and I can never be 100% sure that I made a difference. But some ideas seem to have migrated from this Substack into general discussion. For example, the point that the US-EU productivity gap is largely driven by a handful of tech clusters, which I believe was novel when I made it, is now raised all the time.

So I guess I’ve become an influencer. And I’ll be trying out new things in addition to YouTube. Coming soon: podcasting!

Does all of this make the world better? All I or anyone else can do is try.

MUSICAL CODA