The Active Voice

Chris here, Co-founder and CEO of Substack. I’m sharing a conversation with Nate Silver that I just published on my Substack.

is a man of many talents. He’s been a baseball analyst, a blogger, a legendary election forecaster, and founder of 538. He’s worked in media at the Times, ABC, and ESPN. He’s a professional poker player, and a bestselling author. I was introduced to his work through his book The Signal and the Noise, and he h...

Today’s episode is guest-hosted by Sarah Fay, creative writing professor at Northwestern University, former interviewer at The Paris Review, devoted serializer, and lover of all things Substack. Her Substack Writers at Work helps creative writers use Substack to bolster their careers, including how to serialize their writing. She’s currently serializing her new memoir Cured on Substack through 2023.

—Sophia Efthimiatou, Head of Writ...

Taylor Lorenz, a tech culture reporter for the Washington Post, has been both observer and participant in an internet culture that has been emerging since the early 2010s, a period of history that has seen the rise of massive social media platforms, the decay of traditional media, and the increasing power of online influencers. That culture can be delightful and enriching, and it can be savage and soul-destroying. 

Of course, anyone...

At a dinner party Substack hosted in San Francisco last week, I found myself sitting next to Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and former publisher of the Whole Earth Review. We were talking about the capital of the world. It no longer felt that New York was it, I was telling him, though it had not been replaced by another physical city either. Rather, the world now had only one, digital, capital. If you ...

Both Suleika Jaouad and Diego Perez, who writes as Yung Pueblo, arrived at writing through adversity. Writing became a way of life when each was faced with death, a healing mechanism that became a craft.

When they met for the first time in person at our headquarters in San Francisco, they greeted each other with the enthusiasm of old friends reuniting. They fell into conversation with natural intimacy and comfort before we had a cha...

At first glance, Mike Solana and Ted Gioia might not seem to have much in common. Mike, the publisher of the newsletter Pirate Wires, is very much a child of the internet, a strong proponent of the tech industry and scientific progress, with a career in venture capital (working in marketing) after a brief stint in book publishing. Ted, who writes The Honest Broker and has been a guest on The Active Voice before, is one of America’s...

I met Robert Reich in his overstuffed corner office on U.C. Berkeley’s campus, housed in what looked to me like a midcentury villa that could double as a restaurant that sells speciality bratwurst. I was shown into Reich’s office by Heather Lofthouse, his collaborator and media partner, who pointed out a mahogany armchair by the window, just past some boxes overflowing with books. It was the chair he sat in while serving in Bill Cl...

When he’s about to hit publish on a take that he knows will catch some heat, Ethan Strauss feels like he is about to step off a high diving board. He’s scared, but he knows he will do it anyway. 

“That, to me, feels good,” he says. “The entirety of the process and that particular catharsis feels good.” 

Ethan writes about the intersection of sport and culture—especially when it comes to the NBA—on House of Strauss, where he also host...

Alison Roman is enjoying being an “elder millennial” and not feeling the pressure of being on TikTok or even doing all that much on Instagram, the platform that helped make her reputation (although she did meet her boyfriend when he slid into her DMs). “I do furniture shopping on Instagram,” she says, describing what she calls her fraught relationship with the app. “That’s what I use it for.”

The queen of viral recipes is no longer ...

I met Patti Smith at Electric Lady Studios, the studio in New York’s Greenwich Village opened by Jimi Hendrix a few weeks before he died, and she immediately walked me down to the basement level to show me the original murals—psychedelic, space-themed—that Hendrix had commissioned for the walls. She had first seen them in 1970, at the studio’s opening, when, before she was a well-known artist and the “godmother of punk rock,” she b...

When Emily Oster wrote an article for The Atlantic to suggest an amnesty in the pandemic wars, she received a shockingly sharp rebuke from those who weren’t ready to forgive. On the left, there were people who felt that the unvaccinated jeopardized untold lives; on the right, there were people still furious about the way they were treated for not going along with the lockdowns. But by that time, social media cancellations were a fa...

Etgar Keret’s parents, both of whom survived the Holocaust, gave him the gift of imagination, a garden he has been watering with stories since he was a child. His father crouched in a hole in the ground for more than 600 days to escape the Nazis in Belarus, getting through the time by telling himself stories of a parallel universe in which everything was the same except for one detail (like that there were still Nazis who chased Je...

Heather Havrilesky’s writing career has spanned the life of the internet, starting with the satirical site Suck.com, moving through Salon, The Awl, and New York Magazine, and ending up on Substack, where she publishes two much-loved newsletters: Ask Polly and Ask Molly. 

Heather has mastered the art of reinvention, bending with the winds of the web, as news sites have variously chased SEO, blogging, Facebook traffic, and the rest. S...

In the 1990s, the English writer Paul Kingsnorth was a radical environmental activist, taking part in road blockades and protesting at WTO summits. Today he calls himself a “recovering environmentalist” and doesn’t believe people can do all that much to halt the march of the markets and technology. For instance, he thinks of climate change as a predicament to be endured, not a problem to be solved. His focus instead is on making se...

Jessica DeFino’s face literally had to peel off before she gave up on beauty products and turned a critical eye on the beauty industry. As a journalist covering the industry, she had been inundated with free beauty products, which she enthusiastically accepted. Then she developed dermatitis and had a bad reaction to the steroids she was prescribed to treat it.

“My skin started peeling off of my face in chunks,” she says. “For months...

Ted Gioia, the great music and cultural critic, has never lived in New York and it has cost him. He knows he is completely out of touch. “I didn’t make the relationships, I didn’t have editors opening doors for me,” he says. “Things were harder for me at every step along the way because I wasn’t at those cocktail parties.” 

But not being in New York has its upsides. Perhaps most importantly: it has helped Ted retain the mindset of a...

I can’t imagine what it must be like to grow up on social media, especially as someone who says things in public—to try to figure out who you are as an adult while living under the panoptic gaze of TikTok and Instagram, or to have one’s intellectual identity shaped by the performative shoutysphere of Twitter. I’m old enough to have missed all that, but Rayne Fisher-Quann, a 21-year-old Canadian writer who has built a large presence...

You’ll have to forgive my self-indulgence in this conversation, because I’ve gone deep with Joshi Herrmann—not a celebrity name or a celebrated author, I hope he won’t be offended by me saying—about a bunch of things that scratch my particular interests in media: local news, New York media-startup scandals circa 2016, subscriptions versus ads, venture capital, and canceled Netflix comedians. 

Joshi is the founder of a fledgling medi...

Doomberg, the top-earning finance publication on Substack, is led by a cartoon chicken that previously worked in heavy industry. Okay, so it wasn’t the chicken that worked in heavy industry—but its anonymous creators, with a background in hard sciences and energy, did. They chose the green chicken as their publication’s logo because they want it to be instantly recognizable on Twitter, which they use as their main marketing channel...