Here are the Substacks You Should Read

Reviving a series

A few years back, I used to publish capsule book reviews on this Substack. I miss doing it, but the reality is my schedule has made that harder to do and The Metropolitan Review now exists, so at least I have a publication that is reviewing books, something I used to plead for from the media. In addition to the capsule reviews, I also shared a list of Substacks I was reading. I thought it was a good way to use my own list to boost other people I believed were worth your time.

Today, I am going to share with you three Substacks, in particular, I think you should subscribe to. These are not the only three. In fact, by limiting myself to three, I can guarantee this will be a multi-part series, since there are many, many Substacks worthy of the spotlight. I want to get to as many of them as I can.

The internet can be a busy place. Let me be your guide. I promise, if you subscribe to these, you won’t go wrong.

Vanessa Ogle, Comedy Distant

Vanessa Ogle, TMR’s Senior Editor and Poetry Editor, wears many hats. She’s an accomplished essayist, poet, and educator, and she writes extremely well on class issues. Today, though, I want to point you to her latest venture, her humor and satire Substack Comedy Distant. Humor writing still isn’t prevalent enough on Substack. A lot of people, including yours truly, are far too self-serious. In her fist pieces, Vanessa skewers both improv and workplace culture (“I’m replacing your badge photo with your LinkedIn photo because you actually look normal there,” the boss says to his beleaguered employee) and it’s all darkly and wickedly funny. Vanessa’s a tremendous talent and has a lot more coming at Comedy Distant, so I suggest you get on the ground floor and subscribe now. Imagine the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts, if only they were actually funny. I am very excited to see where Comedy Distant goes.

Alexander Sorondo, big reader bad grades.

Alexander Sorondo is a young novelist from Miami and the author of the excellent Cubafruit. His Substack is one of the most striking and original out there—part memoir, part literary reportage, written out in a numbered form that I’ve hardly seen anywhere else. A good portion of the Substack is dedicated to his reflections on life as a grocery store clerk, where he can bitingly funny and strikingly poignant at the same time. You may have caught him belting out his reported epics for TMR, and I just want to add that big reader bad grades is just as good, the enthralling compliment to the work he’s done for the magazine. When the new Sorondo drops, you won’t want to miss it. He’s a singular American writer.

Mo Diggs, Cross Current.

What can I say about Mo Diggs? I once called him the Brian Wilson of culture writing, the sort of guy who sees what others don’t see. If Mo is submitting to TMR—like Sorondo, he’s now a contributing writer—the mantra around HQ (a.k.a. the inside of my head) is let Mo cook. The man is ahead of the curve, and invents his own curves. My recent writing on “personality exhaustion” (a term Mo coined) and the anti-human ascendance could not have happened without Mo. A Mo essay on Substack is a cultural, political, and historical tour-de-force—few writers in America can bind together so many different threads—and it’s the kind of writing you have to sit with for many days, that marinates inside of you. Read him on the lack of modern cultural greatness or the rise of personal media, for a taste. Mo can pull you beyond the left vs. right binary while making sense of our disorienting politics. Go get on Mo’s frequency.