For this installment of Indie Reads, we asked Independent staff and contributors to write about some of their favorite Substack email newsletters. The mix we received includes a running invitation from an Outer Cape poet to “go deeper,” perspectives on Jewish identity, reportage on anti-trans legislation and criminal justice, and reasons why you should be paying more attention to perfume.
The Beinart Notebook
peterbeinart.substack.com
Peter Beinart is always on the lookout for people who hate his ideas. It’s not that this progressive journalist who writes about Israel and Palestine wants to attack his critics on social media. Quite the opposite. Beinart’s latest newsletter features a conversation with a New York University professor who assailed his new book, Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning, as “deeply duplicitous.” Beinart responded by saying he was “deeply grateful” for her critique and invited her to invite his 74,000 subscribers to read it.
To say this kind of editorial openness and conciliation is a rarity in the current media landscape is a colossal understatement, but it’s part of what makes Beinart’s perspective unique. An editor of Jewish Currents and contributor to the New York Times opinion pages, he has long questioned the merits of liberal Zionism and Israel’s ability to claim status as the Middle East’s sole democracy.
While conceding that any solution to the never-ending political stalemate in Israel and the occupied territories is far off, Beinart favors a bi-national, single-state solution, a position that places him well outside both conservative and liberal mainstreams. That alone makes his Substack worth reading; it’s full of ideas and perspectives that don’t get much attention elsewhere. —Katy Abel
Erin in the Morning
erininthemorning.com
I was mailing a package at the South Wellfleet Post Office recently when I overheard two gents talking about what they had been reading.
I chimed in with a few of my own thoughts. One of the gents asked if I read “Heather.”
Of course I read “Heather,” I said. I appreciated his shorthand for Letters from an American historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack newsletter.
I’ve participated in many such conversations since Trump took office. Major news outlets have curbed editorial independence and cut staff, making it even harder to find sharp reporting and analysis.
So, I hunch over my phone at breakfast trying to decide which Substacks to read from among the many experts I admire: Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, Constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe, Yale historian Timothy Snyder, abortion rights activist Jessica Valenti, and epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina.
While many of these writers have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, I turn to less well known journalist, speaker, and activist Erin Reed, a transgender woman who writes Erin in the Morning. Most of her posts document anti-trans bills, laws, directives, and regulations at the state and federal levels. She’s covered the ways the Dept. of Health and Human Services demands that hospitals end care for trans youth; California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to host anti-trans extremist Charlie Kirk on his podcast; and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chair’s statement that her top priority is to erase a host of laws protecting transgender people.
Reed also makes sure to pick up even the smallest victories. For example, she recently reported a decision by 29 Republican state legislators to join Democrats to kill two discriminatory bills in Montana.
“Wherever you find me,” Reed writes, “know this: I am here so that we all can achieve liberation and a better future. Let’s do that together.” —Cathy Corman
The Watch
radleybalko.substack.com
Radley Balko, an award-winning criminal justice reporter, launched his Substack the same day that he was laid off in 2022 from the Washington Post, where he had worked as an opinion blogger for nine years. “The Opinion leadership has made it increasingly difficult to do the reporting and in-depth analysis I was hired to do — in favor of short, hot takes,” he said at the time.
The result was The Watch, a criminal justice-focused newsletter where Balko has since broken national and state-level stories on wrongful convictions, indigent defense, and the new White House’s plans for mass deportation, all without sacrificing that “hot take” sensibility. Balko supplements his reported articles with occasional Q&As, reader mailbags, and other asides, which is itself a good argument for email newsletters as a form.
The Watch is the rare Substack that reflects on and even republishes criticism of the author’s own writing: in 2023, for instance, Balko wrote a lengthy, thoughtful response to two critics of his New York Times op-ed that had considered why crime had dropped in a Minneapolis suburb after more than half the police department quit.
In another post, after saying he “couldn’t bear to subscribe” to his local Gannett paper in Nashville, he supplied a list of lesser-known, high-quality local and national news outlets that deserve subscriptions from his readers. Recently, his detailed immigration reporting and Q&As with attorneys have become essential reads for me, especially in figuring out how to communicate what the White House is doing to our immigration system without losing an audience in the details. —Tyler Jager
Fumes
miccaeli.substack.com
In his 2008 encyclopedia of perfume, physicist and polymath Luca Turin quotes an unnamed publicist at a fragrance company saying that “writing about perfume is like dancing about architecture” — the point being, presumably, that trying to describe one creative form in the language of another is an exercise in futility. Turin’s own sharp writing is evidence of how misguided that observation is, as does that of a handful of other writers including his partner and co-author Tania Sanchez and former New York Times “Scent Notes” columnist Chandler Burr. It turns out that perfume is very much worth writing about after all.
Miccaeli, the mononymous Australian author of my current favorite scent-focused Substack, also belies the notion that perfume is too frivolous for serious discussion. Her consistently engaging posts explore subjects ranging from olfactive chemistry to the phenomenon of celebrity perfumes and the relation of scent to things like fashion, status, economics, and death.
If you’re unfamiliar with perfume discourse — a concept you might not have realized was a thing before reading this sentence — Miccaeli’s recently republished article on the development and release of Le Lion, a marquee fragrance by the storied house of Chanel, is a good place to start. Incorporating a broad range of social and historical topics — from Coco Chanel’s Nazi proclivities and corporate damage control to Middle Eastern perfumery traditions — it’s one of the best pieces of olfactory history and journalism I’ve ever had the pleasure to read.
I come to Miccaeli’s Substack as a fellow perfume collector and obsessive, but even someone who doesn’t know the difference between a chypre and a fougère need only read a few pieces from her archive to understand why Turin calls perfume “the most portable form of intelligence.” —John D’Addario
notes on bewilderment
nickflynnprojects.substack.com
A widely published poet and recipient of numerous grants and awards, Nick Flynn is best known for the memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), which was adapted into the film Being Flynn (2014), starring Robert De Niro as his father.
Last month, Flynn began posting weekly essays on his Substack, locating himself in a specific time and place: Provincetown, where he lived on a houseboat anchored in the bay and first identified himself as a poet.
One of Flynn’s early posts describes a feeling of bewilderment: “It starts with waking up, no land in sight. It starts with a foghorn, but from ship or lighthouse, impossible to know. Are we drifting toward or away? It starts on a foggy morning, the fog so thick it is unclear which direction is shore and which is open ocean — either way, it’s okay, the not-knowing.”
Flynn often provides an exercise for readers who respond to the lyricism of his writing, an invitation to go deeper. “Every few years,” he writes in another post, “I was able to sit with the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh for week-long retreats.” Mindful breathing accompanied ordinary activities, like washing his hands. In Flynn’s meditation exercise, writers sit with a page inscribed with their previous work and lean into the “not-knowing” to capture something of the “wild energy” of the open ocean. —Susan Rand Brown
A Cape Cod Voice
sethrolbein.substack.com
Seth Rolbein has done just about everything a Cape Cod journalist and activist could do: worked as a reporter and documentary filmmaker for public radio and television, edited the Cape Codder when it was still an actual newspaper, started a highly regarded Cape-wide news magazine, the Cape Cod Voice, served as Cape and Islands state Sen. Dan Wolf’s chief of staff and senior adviser, and headed the Fisheries Trust of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance. He has lived here since the 1970s, and he knows more of the inner workings of Cape Cod’s politics, economics, and social strengths and ills than just about anyone.
Rolbein poured his heart into the Voice, which lasted for seven years in the 2000s, and its demise was a bitter pill for him. He has now resurrected it as a weekly Substack newsletter, and it’s well worth reading for anyone who cares about the Cape’s history, its present struggles, and its future.
His portfolio of topics is exceedingly broad. Recent installments have looked at the growth of cynicism about local government, the Cape Cod real estate market, a musical journey to Cuba, the loss of public radio station WCAI’s home in Woods Hole, and Rolbein’s poodle, America. Right now, he is two-thirds of the way through a fascinating three-part history of the dumping of radioactive and hazardous waste in the ocean between Provincetown and Gloucester.
Rolbein says he has just under 2,000 subscribers, most of them free right now, but his audience is growing, with 50 to 60 new people signing up each month. His voice deserves to be heard. —Edward Miller
