Singal-Minded Is Going On A Break
I could use your feedback in the meantime
After this post goes up, I’m going to put Singal-Minded to sleep for roughly a month and a half. If you’re a paying subscriber, you don’t have to do anything — you won’t get charged while the newsletter is dormant. (I am finishing up one piece for The Dispatch that you will receive, as always, a day after it goes up.)
I’m partly doing this because I’m entering (another) period of book crunch and need to devote as much of my brain as possible to that during a chunk of this summer. I’m quite excited for this book but I really, really need to finish it so I can move on.
That’s not my only motivation, though. A pause like this also provides an opportunity to reboot Singal-Minded, and to improve its quality.
I’ve been writing this newsletter since 2019. I’m proud of Singal-Minded, not to mention eternally grateful that it has built up the audience it has. But, in large part because my attention is perpetually divided between this and other projects, it’s not as strong a newsletter as it could be.
I plan to reboot Singal-Minded with a slightly different focus, with a more consistent publication schedule, and with other features that will, I think, help it to stand out in an ever-more-competitive Substack landscape. I’ve already taken a first step on this front: I’ve hired an assistant editor who I will formally introduce when I return. He and I have been brainstorming how to make Singal-Minded 2.0 as strong as possible, and he’s going to be doing a lot of tinkering between now and then. At some point before the relaunch, I’m also going to solicit input from my subscribers about what they want to see (or don’t want to see) in this newsletter going forward. So please keep an eye out for that email.
In the meantime, I’m curious to hear any off-the-cuff thoughts you might have about this here publication. Paid and free subscribers alike are welcome to shoot me a note at singalminded@gmail.com.
That’s it! Again, if you’re paying for Singal-Minded you don’t have to do anything — your billing will pick back up when I relaunch the newsletter. New paid subscriptions will be closed in the meantime.
Thank you so much for reading. There’s a lot of good stuff to come.
Questions? Comments? Offers to preorder 15,000 copies of my book? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com.
My favorite pieces are your critiques of researchers and other science journalists who are either doing shoddy work or overclaiming based on the available evidence. Ideally this could be tied into a thoughtful epistemology. How do we know when evidence is sufficient to strongly support a claim? What is a good evidentiary threshold? What makes for a good empirical test of a theory or hypothesis? How do we know when we've reached a point when something is settled and no longer needs rigorous debate?
>At some point before the relaunch, I’m also going to solicit input from my subscribers about what they want to see (or don’t want to see)
most of the value i get from this substack is you rolling up your sleeves and dissecting the studies behind stories in the news (doesn't have to be gender stuff) and stress-testing the claims made by the people who publish the study.
i strongly feel that researchers have mal-incentives around their scientific endeavors, and that these mal-incentives distort the conclusions about what the research actual says (or does not say).
so if you're looking to maintain or increase subscriptions, a possible method for doing so is to apply your talent for "deconstructing research narratives" more broadly to other topics in the news.