With Gratitude for Substack . . .

and For Those It Shows

So already, even as I’ve been sitting here on this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day writing a Substack newsletter about how people need more than a steady diet of political news and commentary, my television has been tuned to MSNOW. While I’ve been scrolling periodically through my Substack feed reading notes and clicking on links, the voices of reporters and experts in the background have been feeding me updates and commentary about the federal government’s latest troubling moves related to Greenland, Minneapolis, and Iran. Earlier today, the attention paid to Dr. King’s legacy on “Morning Joe” was quickly leavened by reporting about Donald Trump’s recent assertion that white people were “treated very badly” during the Civil Rights Movement.

An ABC News Photo of Greenland

I have to laugh at myself for all this MSNOW quasi-listening I’ve been doing today. A while back, I wrote a blog/newsletter called “Of Horses, Peaches, Pears, and Poems: . . . Musings Place and Need of Poetic Language in Our Lives” in which I talked about the need in our lives for literary language as well as political language if our souls and spirits are to remain healthy. It’s not that the speakers of that political language are chastising us, looking down on us, or thinking we’re not up to the challenges we must rise to; it’s just that when their language hammers at us incessantly because the stakes are so high, it can demoralize and paralyze us precisely when we need to act. For sure, we need periodic breaks from it so we can stay the course. A kind of language Sabbath.

This is where Substack helps, and I will get to just how in a few paragraphs. But first, since I really am an MSNOW fan, I wanted to say a few words about how I deliberately stepped back to look at it again: I wanted to see if I was missing something before before I judged it as offering too limited a language buffet—after all, it is a news show.

With that in mind, I paid attention to its non-political coverage over the last months—to the movies, sports events, books, exhibits, plays, and musical performances and compositions that garner attention and the conversations and interviews related to them. In my opinion, did they provide enough relief from the drumbeat of that political language? Maybe for some, but not for me. As interested as I can be in many of these books, etc. featured—I’d really like to read The Rest of Our Lives—being in the know about the latest and “the best” in the literary, cinematic, artistic, theatrical, and musical realms generally doesn’t soothe my soul.

Then, one day, I saw the network miss a real opportunity to elevate other kinds of language. Frank Bruni was on “Morning Joe” discussing his article in The New York Times called “The Best Sentences of 2025,” a multi-focused collection based in part on nominations by NYT readers. And while the collection includes sentences from all kinds of categories of writing, organized under such headings as “Where Colons Meet Commas” (use-of-language-related); “Let’s Get Physical” (sports-related), and “Anchovies and Appetities” (food-related), Bruni’s interviewer asked only about the sentences about politics.

So what kind of language can soothe the soul and create hope—not that MSNOW is solely responsible for providing it? To counterbalance that abundant political language, we need the kinds of language that remind us of other aspects of ourselves and our world, of what we love and would struggle to keep, of the fact that we are not alone and don’t need to despair. That other language has to play the role that singing did during the Civil Rights Movement. And yes, music is a language.

Personally, I’ve found Substack helps. Reading passages people quote from books; reading people’s recommendations of books long available, but perhaps forgotten or previously unknown; reading new poems and older poems, some familiar to me and others often by little known poets or those writing poetry for first time—all of these can revive my spirit. (Reading recipes, too, sometimes!) So can looking at images—cartoons, photographs, paintings, drawings. I’m learning how much visual language can and should be part of that diversified language diet that I spoke about in my aforementioned newsletter/blog last May.

But it’s not just reading and looking at, for example, the collection of notes in the image above that lifts my spirits. These are, after all, things. It’s that every one of them is attached to the name of whoever posted it (Ani Artinian posted her own poem on January 3)—and who cares enough about it to have floated it out into the world.*

Why people share things on Substack, I think, varies. Some things are shared with the purpose of galvanizing or persuading; some things are shared for the purpose of spreading and creating delight; some things are shared out of appreciation for their beauty or profundity; some things are shared to shed light on the human condition; some things are shared as acts of generosity: “Do yourself a favor and read this book that you may have missed or not read for ages, when you were no doubt a somewhat different person.”

Regardless of the primary purposes behind their being shared, all of them reveal something of the interests, passions, and/or sensibilities of the persons posting—and bring those people into virtual community with those of us who are paying attention.

Frankly, I believe the people behind these posts are on the level—well, at least almost all of them. I like to think most of them are wearing their hearts on their virtual sleeves, because I am. As the “About” section of my So Already Substack page explains,

When I started So Already, I didn’t realize how much I needed a space where I could explore topics and feelings that resonated in the core of me, especially when I wasn’t sure why. Conversation with others often expands and refines my thinking and provides me with insight into the intensity of my feelings. But what I often need even more, especially at first, is to be in conversation with myself. So Already provides the time and space for that. That’s why it says on Blogger, “In So Already, I always get to be me.”

Right away, So Already provided me with the place to express myself, even if I was the only one at all interested in what I was thinking. The bonus has been all of the thoughtful content and provided by so many of you that I’ve found on Substack. Fellow Substackers, I appreciate you.

At this point, I can imagine a lot of you are rolling your eyes and laughing at me. At seventy years old, I should not be sounding like Miranda in The Tempest, even if it’s only Substack that I’m talking about—"‘O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!’" But Substack reassures me that there as so many people out there whom I will probably never meet face-to-face who aren’t the likes of Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, and Pam Bondi—people who are intent on not contributing to the world’s ample and intentionally obfuscating darkness.

This morning, I did something I don’t usually do on Substack, but that I frequently appreciate others of you doing: I posted in the Notes section of my Substack page a picture of a favorite Sylvia Plimack Mangold painting of a nighttime landscape .

I’ve been writing a poem that refers specifically to this beautiful landscape, which is more than eight feet wide and which is called “Noctural Ellipsis,” but I’m not at all certain that my poem, once completed, will merit publication here or elsewhere. Regardless of the fate of my poem, I wanted to give you the chance to enjoy this painting, if you are so inclined.

Well, it’s even later in MLK Day than it was before, and I’ve turned from MSNOW to NBC, where the Dallas Mavericks are playing the New York Knicks. The Celtics will be playing the Pistons in about an hour, and I’m primed for a large dose of basketball language. Thank you for reading—and for posting, too!

* After Dinner Conversation is the “name” of the publisher of a literary magazine of the same name.

(updated on January 20, 2026)