My 60 Favorite Substacks of 2025

I am subscribed to 983 newsletters. Here is the small sliver of writers who stand out the most to me.

When I joined Substack a few years ago with a mission to use the platform as the primary home base for our book publishing company, I deliberately set out to try and read widely, to take in a broad variety of perspectives beyond my own.

This did not work very well, I soon discovered. I had cast my net too widely, and now my Substack Notes feed resembled a hellscape akin to the collection of grunts and excretions over on the world’s wealthiest man-child’s platform.

So I did a purge of the most extreme on left and right, but still continued to generally subscribe easily to see if some new writer challenged me. And from the ratio of total substacks to what I’ve found to recommend here, you can get a general quality ratio.

Few Substacks are worth subscribing to.

Of those which are, even fewer are worth opening the emails to.

And of those that do provoke an open, only a sliver of the total — just over 6%! — now make it to this stage in which the writer has made enough of a positive impression on me that I can remember them when going through the whole list, that I can recall pleasant memories of reading their publication, and now can encourage others to check them out too.

I had considered organizing this list in some coherent way by subject or perhaps breaking it up over many pieces. I had also thought it worthwhile to go through and make a few comments about various people, putting the recommendation into context.

Ultimately, I’ve decided to do none of that and just present the full list A-Z, or rather “It’s Otessa, bitch” which appears at top because a double quote mark is its name, to “What the Hell is Going on?” These two also demonstrate the ideological range of my reading list, as the former is a proud leftist and the latter a notable neoconservative. In between you’ll find a wide assortment of other stuff across a pretty wide range of subjects.

I hope you find a couple you enjoy and feel free to offer some recommendations of your own in the comments.

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