Gratitude

It goes beyond Thanksgiving

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.—a perfect occasion for me to pause and thank everyone who has read and subscribed to this newsletter since I launched it in early August. Special thanks go to those of you — you know who you are — who have made pledges of financial support. I’m honored and flattered, and delighted and inspired, by the steady growth of this little coterie or community or — to borrow Kurt Vonnegut’s fine coinage — karass.

Not yet a subscriber? Let’s take care of that right now.

I’m also grateful for all the Substackers whose writing I’ve enjoyed, engaged with, and been enlightened by. Back in September I wrote about some of my favorite newsletters; here are a few more.

Rusty’s Electric Dreams is the creation of

Rusty Blazenhoff

, one of the most creative and productive people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting. Now that she’s relocated to the Pacific Northwest I count on her newsletter to remind me of what an amazing resource she is. What’s R.E.D. about? Well, someone described it as “the New Yorker for the weirdos.” Someone else called it “a unique smorgasbord of the fun, weird, and strangely engaging.” Yes, it’s weird! In the very best and kindest way.

English in Progress comes out every other week and focuses on language change, neologisms, and world Englishes; it’s written in plain English so you don’t have to be a fancy-pants linguist to grok the content.

Heddwen

, the author, is half-Dutch and half-English; when she’s not writing the newsletter she works as a Dutch-to-English translator.

The Bluestocking

is written by UK-based Helen Lewis, whose writing for The Atlantic I’ve admired for a long time. On Substack Helen writes about history, psychology, feminism, and media, “and sometimes I can’t help myself writing about the culture wars.” Her headlines tend to be opaque—e.g., ”The Bluestocking Vol. 295”—so I recommend you just jump in and swim around.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

doubtless needs no introduction, except perhaps to say that if you know him only for his basketball achievements you’ll be mightily impressed by the range of his interests and the acuity of his writing. A recent newsletter, for example, covered House Speaker Mike Johnson’s disdain for the separation of church and state, the Beatles’ “last” song, and “Elon Musk gets his antisemitism on.”

And finally, every year at this time I recall the Thanksgiving column published for many years by my longtime friend Jon Carroll when he was on the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle (and repeated even after he retired). He called it a “A Song of Thanks, a Grat Etude,” and it celebrated “the moments of grace that have gotten us through when all seemed lost.” Here is a gift link to the full column.

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Are you thankful for anything in these dark times? Reading anything good? Leave a comment and let us know.