Subscriber Mailbag - Your Questions (7/21/24)

We haven’t done a mailbag in a while, as the growing readership simply made the sheer amount of questions too overwhelming to answer in full. But you can thank reader The Moose for giving me an idea for a new bicameral version that we’ll test out.

I’ve researched how other accounts with large followings handle mailbags: some pick the top few most popular/upvoted questions, others pick random questions they prefer to answer, and others still just quickly answer the questions in the comments section as a direct response. I’ve decided a combination of all three is the most efficiently workable and could give a chance for everyone to get their voices heard.

So here’s what I’ll do: First, I’ll take the 5 questions with the most “likes” to answer in the usual longer format. Then I’ll pick another additional 5 on my own—just based on what I believe to be most noteworthy, interesting, or pertinent to current events, or whose answers could be most illuminating to the readership. So this will be 10 total longer format answers.

But then, I will also answer the remainder of the questions directly in the comments section—however, they will be quick answers that may be as short as a sentence or two. But at least everyone is guaranteed to have their question answered in one way or another.

If this new format works, then we could potentially bring back the mailbag as a regular addition again.

For newer readers just joining us, a reminder of the rules:

The mailbag is my perk for paid subscribers, so if you’d like to ask a question, you’ll have to sign up to a monthly or yearly paid pledge here as the comments section will be paywalled on this article:

• Please remember to ask only one question per person, otherwise I’ll be forced to choose.

• I don’t mind topics that may seem unrelated or random, but for the longer format 5 that I choose to answer, I may favor questions more relevant to ongoing global events.

• Since people have wasted their questions on this before: I won’t answer personal questions about myself.

• Remember to Like the question(s) you’d personally like to see answered, especially if you don’t ask one yourself. The 5 questions with the most “likes” will be chosen first. Ties for 5th place will be settled at random—or I’ll choose which to answer arbitrarily.

• I know sometimes the mailbag comments section breaks out into discussions that have their own separate long-running comments threads. Eligible questions must be only for the main comment—anything asked in the threads will be ignored as that just gets too complicated. If you want to ask an eligible question, please submit it as its own standalone comment and don’t reply it into a thread.

• To those questions I’ll be answering directly in the comments, please note this will happen after a few days, since I’ll have to first allow the ‘votes’ to accumulate and see which questions get chosen for the longer format.

• I’ll probably give it 2-3 days and then tally up the likes and begin answering them.

In case I’m not able to get the comments sorted by likes/popularity (it’s a little complicated in Substack), you can manually sort them by finding this pulldown menu at the top of the comments section and clicking “top first”:

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Lastly, since these informal transmissions are perfect for small updates, there’s one thing I wanted to mention:

It’s just a heads up that I will be rolling out some potential redesigns and branding updates to the newsletter soon. It’s nothing too major or anything that will affect the content, but simply a sprucing up to refine things a bit. It likely won’t be drastic but may include new headers, logo(s), a rewritten “about” section, etc. The biggest change may simply be a name change to the newsletter space, currently presented as Garden of Knowledge, which was always meant to be a temporary stand-in I dashed off and didn’t give much thought to. I’d prefer it to be something a little more meaningful as regards the actual content here. This is particularly the case since we’ve been moving up the rankings at the leaderboard, and all the other big ticket accounts have snazzy, well-defined brand presentations.

But I mention this only so that you don’t get worried and think that the newsletter is veering off in some unannounced direction or something like that, if you happen to see some changes soon. The content will remain the same, but we’ll merely throw on a fresh coat of paint on the peeling facade.

So, without further ado, let’s have your questions—and remember: hit “Like” for your favorites which you’d like to see answered.

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