How to Unsubscribe

If you don't want to receive this newsletter, I don't want to send it to you

A friend wrote to me the other day to tell me he was enjoying the newsletter, but was it really necessary for me to send it to all six of his e-mail addresses?

I hadn’t realized I was sending it to all six of his e-mail addresses. I hadn’t realized I was sending it to any of his e-mail addresses, actually. I was embarrassed. I fear there may be more of you.

I hate the thought of sending this to anyone who isn’t delighted to see my name. If that’s you, please scroll to the very bottom of this e-mail, where you’ll see a link that says, “Unsubscribe.” It looks like this:

Click it and you’ll never receive this newsletter again—unless I’m also sending it to your six other e-mail addresses, in which case, please repeat the procedure from those addresses.

The standard is delighted. If you’re not delighted to hear from me—as opposed, say, to puzzled, vexed, or politely indifferent—you shouldn’t be receiving this. This newsletter is exclusively for people who say to themselves, “I wonder what Claire’s up to these days?” Or, “I wonder what Claire has to say about the world today?” Or perhaps, “I was skeptical at first, but this newsletter is always interesting.” Or, “Claire Berlinski’s newsletter is the best thing in my life.”

If you’ve never had a thought like that, this newsletter isn’t for you. I reject you even more forcefully than you have rejected me. Unsubscribe! In the name of God, go!

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While I’m at it, let me explain the other features and buttons here. I’m only just figuring them all out myself, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t understand until now.

I use a program called Substack to send this out. It’s popular because it’s simple and user-friendly, which is why all the newsletters you receive look exactly like this. But there’s one feature that doesn’t work well. Once you’ve uploaded your mailing list (in my case, from my Google contacts) it’s so slow and cumbersome to edit that it’s effectively impossible. (I should have edited the CSV file before uploading it. I didn’t know better. That’s why there are so many duplicate e-mail addresses on the list.)

If you’d like to receive this newsletter at a different address, that’s easy. Push this button, and enter the address you’d prefer:

You don’t have to pay to subscribe—it’s free!—but you do have to pay to leave comments in the comment section. That’s not my choice: It’s the way Substack works.

Of course I’d love it if you paid. I’d also genuinely like it if you contributed to the comments, because—unsurprisingly—my mailing list is heavy on interesting people, since most of you are my friends. Many of you send me, by e-mail, excellent responses to the points I bring up in the newsletter, and I often think, “I’d like to publish this.” But that requires asking you, individually, if I can publish your email, and when I do, it takes up a lot of space. It would just be much more efficient if you decided for yourself what you wanted to share.

If you were to use the comment section instead of sending me those messages by email, the comments section here would be the most interesting forum on the Internet.

If you’re not sure whether you want to pay to do that, try it out for free. (I’ll assume from now on that if you send me a comment by e-mail, it’s not because Substack asks you to pay, but specifically because you don’t want your views more widely disseminated.)

If you do pay, however, I get money, which I could really use and would really appreciate. And actually: I could create exclusive, subscriber-only material. I’m not sure what that would involve, but send me your suggestions. Would anyone enjoy a podcast, perhaps?

This button allows you to give a free or a paid subscription to someone else. I’d really like to expand my mailing list, so if you know someone else who would be delighted to receive this newsletter, please give it to them.

This button allows you to share this post, in particular:

Whereas this one allows you to share the newsletter, in toto:

The button below lets you contribute to my GoFundMe account. I’m funded entirely by my readers. You have the power to put food on my table or starve me: I’m grateful beyond measure for every single contribution. It’s stressful, waking up every morning and wondering what it will be—a good-eating day or a bad one?—but so far I’m still here, and that’s thanks to you. I’m so grateful for that.

This button allows you to contribute on PayPal:

And here, you can become my patron on Patreon:

Finally, if you click this button, you will see a video of my cats, taken when they were kittens in Istanbul, fourteen years ago. If that doesn’t delight you, you definitely shouldn’t be receiving this newsletter.

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Later today: Macron’s big nuclear speech. Stay tuned.