You open Instagram. A reel plays. Someone’s dancing in a kitchen. Then a dog. Then a guy explaining how to “build wealth” in 60 seconds. Then another reel. And another. You put your phone down 40 minutes later feeling like you just ate a full bag of chips and somehow still feel empty.
We’ve all been there.
There’s nothing wrong with short videos. It’s fun, it’s fast, and sometimes you genuinely need to see a golden retriever trip over its own paws. But somewhere between the algorithm and the autoplay, a lot of us quietly stopped reading. Stopped sitting with an idea long enough to actually feel something about it.
Substack brought some of that back. It’s a platform where writers send newsletters directly to your inbox, no ads interrupting mid-sentence, no comment section trying to start a fight, no metric telling the writer to make it snappier. Just writing. Long, honest, sometimes meandering writing that actually goes somewhere.
Here are four Substacks worth your time.
1. Heather Cox Richardson Letters from an American
If you’ve ever wanted to understand what’s happening in American politics but got exhausted by cable news screaming at you, Richardson is a relief.
She’s a historian at Boston College, and every night she writes a newsletter that puts the day’s news into historical context. Not in a dry, textbook way. More like here’s what happened today, and here’s why it connects to something that happened in 1868, and suddenly the present makes a little more sense.
What makes her writing feel human is that she doesn’t pretend to be neutral in a way that’s actually dishonest. She’s clear about her perspective but backs everything with sourced history. She’s been writing this newsletter almost every single day since 2019, which is itself a kind of discipline that commands respect.
Over a million people subscribe. It’s one of the most widely read newsletters on the platform. And once you start reading her, you’ll probably understand why.
2. Anne Helen Petersen Culture Study
Anne Helen Petersen used to write at BuzzFeed News back when that outlet was doing genuinely serious journalism. Now she runs Culture Study, which is exactly what the name sounds like: a newsletter about culture.
But not in the celebrity gossip sense. More like why are so many people in their 30s exhausted all the time? Why does the concept of a “good job” feel so hollow now? Why do we feel guilty taking vacations?
Her essays are long. Properly long. The kind of long where you look up and realize it’s been 25 minutes and you’ve been completely absorbed. She writes about burnout, remote work, class, the way American culture expects people to perform productivity constantly, and what it costs.
She also does interviews and community threads where readers respond to each other. It feels less like a newsletter and more like a slow, thoughtful conversation.
3. Russ Roberts The Substack of Russ Roberts (EconTalk)
If you’ve ever listened to EconTalk Roberts’ long-running economics podcast you already know his style. He’s not trying to win an argument. He’s genuinely trying to understand something.
His Substack extends that same energy into writing. He thinks out loud about economics, philosophy, what it means to live well, how we handle uncertainty, and the limits of what data can actually tell us. He’s careful, he’s honest about what he doesn’t know, and he has a rare quality in public intellectual life: he changes his mind.
In a media environment that rewards confidence and punishes nuance, Roberts is genuinely refreshing. He’s not performing with certainty. He’s just thinking, and he’s inviting you to think alongside him.
4. Tressie McMillan Cottom tressiemc
Tressie McMillan Cottom is a sociologist, a MacArthur Fellow, and one of the sharpest cultural critics writing right now. Her Substack is worth reading for the sentences alone.
She writes about race, technology, higher education, and the ways power shapes everyday life but she does it without jargon, without the academic distance that makes a lot of sociology writing hard to access. She’s funny in a dry, precise way. Her observations land like something you’ve always half-known but never had the words for.
She doesn’t post every day. But when she does, it’s worth stopping what you’re doing.
None of these writers are trying to go viral. None of them have a hook in the first three seconds designed to prevent you from scrolling away. They’re just writing with care, with depth, with a point of view they’ve actually thought about.
Reading them won’t give you the dopamine hit of a perfectly timed reel. But they’ll give you something that takes longer to build and longer to fade: the feeling that you actually spent time with an idea. That you learned something. That somebody said something true and you got to sit with it.
The reels will keep coming. But your inbox doesn’t have to look like your feed.
These four are a good place to start.
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