Universe-Hopping Through Substack

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/universe-hopping-through-substack

RandomTweet is a service that will show you exactly that - a randomly selected tweet from the whole history of Twitter. It describes itself as “a live demo that most people on twitter are not like you.”

I feel the same way about Substack. Everyone I know reads a sample of the same set of Substacks - mine, Matt Yglesias’, maybe Freddie de Boer’s or Stuart Ritchie’s. But then I use the Discover feature on the site itself and end up in a parallel universe.

Still, I’ve been here more than a year now. Feels like I should get to know the local area, maybe meet some of the neighbors.

This is me reviewing one Substack from every category. Usually it’s the top one in the category, but sometimes it will be another if the top one is subscriber-gated or a runner-up happens to catch my eye. Starting with:

Ah, Culture. This is where you go to read about Shakespeare, post-modernism, arthouse films, and Chinese tapestries, right?

This is maybe not that kind of culture:

Saturday, just as I was finally logging off the internet after three tireless days spent tracking the Queen’s passing with sad and incessant scrolling, Ray J exploded on IG live, fuming about Kris Jenner’s latest PR stunt; a lie detector test conducted on The Late Late Show With James Corden, to prove she had no hand in leaking the infamous sex tape. The test, administered by a polygraph “expert” John Grogan, determined that Kris was in fact telling the truth.