A roundup of the Substack newsletters that are worth your time
For this edition, we take a break from poring over dusty intellectual journals and dense NBER papers to highlight a group of researchers and writers who are attempting to break out of the academic ghetto. Specifically, we are featuring authors who are using a (relatively) new medium to communicate with the public: Substack.
Like the blogosphere of old, the world of Substack contains multitudes. Recent years have seen thousands of writers migrate to the platform, which enables them to create subscription newsletters that reach readers via the web and email. Substack is a great tool for fans and aficionados of all types. Whatever your hobbyhorse, you can find a Substack newsletter tailored to your precise interests.
In this roundup, we focus mainly on Vital City contributors who are using Substack to publish material that might not find a home anywhere else — not because it isn’t good enough, but because it is simply too detailed or esoteric or experimental for a mainstream outlet. In that respect, these newsletters represent some of the best of what Substack has to offer.
As always, if you have suggestions for future editions of What We’re Reading, please email us at info@vitalcitynyc.org.
According to Jeff Asher, a crime analyst based in New Orleans, the main objective of his newsletter is “to evaluate crime and policing trends while highlighting the inherent limitations of the available data.” If that’s the goal, then mission accomplished: Asher writes with refreshing honesty about what the numbers can tell us — and what they can’t. In recent months, he has been a herald of good news, highlighting improved clearance rates and a drop in the murder rate nationally.
Representative sample: “People are predisposed to use vibes rather than data to evaluate crime trends because quick access to clear information about those trends has never really been a thing in most places.”
The title of Jennifer Pahlka’s Substack is a riff on an oft-cited line from management guru Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Pahlka believes that, in government, culture eats policy for breakfast, so she uses her newsletter to highlight ways to enhance the state’s capacity to deliver services to its citizens. Pahlka, a former Obama administration official and the author of “Recoding America,” writes with real sensitivity about the challenges faced by those on the front lines of government. In particular, she tries to unpack a conundrum that has befuddled many of us in our dealings with government: “the contradiction between the dedication, smarts, and creativity of most public servants and the sometimes terrible outcomes they are associated with.”
Representative sample: “Yesterday’s modern state is today’s dysfunction. What state capacity advocates today (like me) are frustrated with is largely the legacy the Progressives left us, but that’s because we’ve let the work they did rot over time. We went back to fighting about policy issues as if the capacity to actually deliver on those policies wasn’t equally important. We want to revive the spirit and themes of the Progressive era, just updated to the needs of the day. The problem is that, as during the Progressive era, neither party today seems to care much about that capacity to deliver.”
God bless John Roman. A researcher at NORC at the University of Chicago, Roman is the rare academic who is up-front about his priors; he confesses on his Substack that he is sometimes accused of parroting “DNC talking points.” While he is primarily interested in finding ways to reduce crime without using the justice system, in External Processing he makes a good-faith effort to wrestle with truths that are sometimes inconvenient for liberals, including public concerns about disorder and the spike in homicides that took place following the pandemic. And he does so in an informal and engaging style, with the occasional music video thrown in for good measure.
Representative sample: “There are a lot of great ideas floating around out there, many generated by academic researchers and other learned folks. But, most of these ideas are relatively impenetrable to the rest of us. I support open access and open science, but being able to read high-value scholarship is only step one. Step two is making it readable.”
Ross Barkan’s Substack is mostly devoted to politics, although he also occasionally writes about books and culture. Barkan, who ran for state Senate in Brooklyn in 2018, is a particularly keen observer of the New York political scene. Political Currents is the place to find his hot takes on congestion pricing (“urbanism takes it on the chin”), Mondaire Jones’ endorsement of George Latimer (“performative leftism is not quite in vogue anymore”) and local journalism in New York City (“nonprofit outlets tend to dull prose”), among other topics.
Representative sample: “The discourse at the Republican convention was as free and open as any Robin DiAngelo struggle session. Suddenly, the Republicans were the woke scolds, the liberals returned to their old posture as the subversive joke-tellers. Try cracking wise about Trump near a Trump delegate … the Trump Right will unleash the cancel culture mobs on anyone who dares speak ill of their Dear Leader, just as the campus left might have shouted at anyone who wore the wrong costume on Halloween.”
This Substack from the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain Lehman, a “professional tough-on-crime guy,” contains lengthy musings about the perils of drug decriminalization, depolicing and the failure to regulate pornography and other vices. Liberals in particular would be well-advised to check out The Casual Fallacy — Lehman offers up something much more thoughtful and nuanced than the standard left-wing caricature of “lock ’em all up” conservatism.
Representative sample: “Opposing marijuana legalization is like being a libertarian—passé. Two in three Americans think pot should be legal, including four in five of my fellow under-30s. Even two-thirds of conservatives under 30—both ways I would describe myself—favor legalization.”
Freddie deBoer is a loose cannon in the best sense. With most pundits, you can easily predict what their angle will be on any given subject. Not so with deBoer, an avowed Marxist who is best known for his criticisms of wokeness. (See, for example, his book “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.”) Mental illness is a recurring theme on deBoer’s Substack. Contra conventional wisdom on the left, DeBoer is an advocate for some forms of involuntary commitment. De Boer’s Substack is combative, provocative, sometimes infuriating and always worth reading.
Representative sample: “Sometimes - lots of times - ‘honoring’ the ‘autonomy’ of the most vulnerable means simply letting them die in plain view of our busy little society. Many, many times, it means ignoring their daily suffering under the aegis of feel-good progressive antipathy towards government action, which is really weird when you consider that belief in good government is core to left philosophy.”
This anonymous newsletter, credited to “Joe Friday,” has been hailed for “upending” the debate about crime in Washington, D.C. There are good reasons for this: Friday posts frequently and writes clearly and persuasively about criminal justice data. He has consistently called out the city’s failure to focus the resources of the justice system on the people and neighborhoods that are most at risk of violence. And he has been a vocal critic of local police and prosecutors, citing declining enforcement of gun cases and other crimes. Even those who don’t care about D.C. would benefit from reading Friday’s deep dives into the research.
Representative sample: “The ‘deterrent value’ of the criminal justice system isn’t static; especially for the high-risk population engaged in frequent gun violence. If criminals think that police and prosecutors are more likely to catch them and be willing to prosecute, then some criminals will change their operations in order to attract less unwanted attention from law enforcement; which is why we see meaningful reductions in gun violence in studies that assess these kinds of targeted strategies. The bar for enforcement to ‘work’ isn’t to prevent every shooting (which is probably impossible) but to decrease violence over time.”