Touch paper

Announcing the launch of The Substack Post, a place for culture

“Eight Shadow Figures,” Utagawa Hiroshige, c. 1842, shared by Celine Nguyen

When someone has spent so much time on social media that their grip on reality has loosened, they are often implored to “touch grass”—get offline, go outside, smell the roses. It’s meant as a reminder that there’s a living, breathing world right there that can restore their health, if only they would venture out to it.

There should be a similar saying for people who have overindulged in disposable online content, reminding them to reconnect with the world of art and culture. “Touch paper,” perhaps. Hold vinyl. Flip playbills. Browse shelves.

The internet has solved the problem of boredom, inundating us with abundant entertainment, letting us scroll to the end of the universe, never bereft of content. And that’s the problem. We’re so busy consuming that we risk losing sight of what truly nourishes us. Our social media diets are making us cultural slovens, overstuffed with the digital equivalent of candy and fried chicken.

Allow us, please, to mount a gentle resistance.

We’re relaunching what was until yesterday called Substack Reads. This publication is now called The Substack Post. Its purpose is to help you connect with and appreciate great culture in all its forms: writing, film, imagery, video, audio, and in-person experiences. We want to hold up great art and culture to say: behold this beauty!

Substack Reads was a good name with a good mission, focused on surfacing great writing by great writers. But as a name, The Substack Post captures more. Why settle for a double entendre when you can have a triple? It refers to the posts that land in your inbox, waiting to be savored. It nods at publishing predecessors like the Washington Post and the New York Post, which themselves evoke the historical gathering place for news. And it embraces the online post—an artifact that spans formats, from words to images to video. Call it post-modern, if you like.

We live in a fraught time for culture. The economic models that once supported journalism, performance, art, and community are eroding. Our attention is hijacked by forces that amplify the ugliest sides of humanity, rather than reflecting what makes our shared time together on Earth so extraordinary. Artificial intelligence churns out slop, political discourse is reduced to memes, and hard-edged ideologies threaten the arts’ financial lifelines. All this, and Married at First Sight is still on television.

The Substack Post is a place for what’s beautiful in this world, a showcase for the genius of the human mind and its ceaseless creativity. Here, we’ll reflect the wild, weird, and wonderful waves unleashed when independent spirits flourish, supported by a community of people who value culture enough to invest time and money in it.

Though it’s digital, The Substack Post is here to remind you of the pure pleasure of touching paper—of engaging with culture that feels intentional, lasting, and real. The texture of the experience is what truly matters: the friction that slows your pace, the substance that commands your attention, the evident care that rewards your focus. This texture can exist in any medium that respects your intelligence and values your time. The Substack Post will highlight the best work published on this platform, serving as a portal to the heart, an underground passageway to the soul, a speakeasy for the sublime. And now that we’ve committed to the metaphor, who knows—maybe one day we’ll even bring you a print edition.

So please, join us as we salute the most important people in the world: the people who value culture, who treasure the soul connection, who fall at the feet of the transcendent, who understand the perfect pause, who crave more than a reel, who thrill to a lover’s kiss from centuries ago, who are dying to hear what you have to say, who share this platform and recognize it as a stage, and a garden, and an armchair by the fireplace, and a fortress for meaning.

Let us all tap on that little heart. Let us all be active readers. Let us all take up the Post.