The five Substack articles I enjoyed the most in 2025
Postcard #37
Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.
Thoughts, tools, and treats
Here are my five favorite Substack posts from 2025. You can read the 2024 edition here.
How Art Lost Its Way by William Deresiewicz
If you read just one article from this list, read this piece about the heyday of New York dance criticism, its magazines, and the culture of seriousness that went with it. Whoever wants to understand the fracture that runs through our time, and whoever wants to understand what engaging with art might mean, should read this text.
How to Confront Highbrow Misinformation by Dan Williams
Yes, prestigious knowledge-producing institutions can be wrong. No, that doesn’t mean they need to be destroyed. For a convincing take on highbrow misinformation, read this piece.
You should quit social media for good by G. Elliott Morris
Research-backed, nuanced, and crystal clear: the last text you’ll ever need to read on social media, and the simplest path to a deeper life.
talk is cheap by Jasmine Sun
Jasmine’s analysis of the post-literate society and the oral culture revival convinced me so much that I quoted from it in an article for a scholarly journal.
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog by Henrik Karlsson
There’s so much advice about writing on Substack... Yet you need to know little more than these brief 15 points.
Noteworthy
„For me, politics, identity politics, was only necessary to get past it. The point of politics was to be free of politics (...). After a point of some basic equal norms, we’re done. We have some compromises to make over practical questions that come up and the world changes, but we’re done. And in fact, the goal is to have a politics that doesn’t matter that much. In other words, the goal is, for me anyway, the expansion as much as possible of the spaces in which people can be fully themselves, flourish as themselves, which is not a political. Politics distorts everyone (...) You have to have it, but you have to keep it in its place. That’s, I guess, my liberal position (...) and it may not be the most inspiring common cause, because it isn’t. Liberalism is not as exciting as making a whole new world. It’s not as exciting as making everyone moral. It’s not as exciting as making everyone noble.“
—Andrew Sullivan in conversation with Johann Hari
A mystery link leading into the unknown
„Lets make...“
As always – and here’s to a wonderful new year,
Dirk
P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.