The Magic Hotline

We have access to Substack's inner sanctum. You're invited.

Thank you to everyone who answered this poll and left comments describing your experience with essays attached to podcasts. It seems a good 33 percent of you never saw that essay. It does indeed seem that my brother was right: For readers who use the app, essays attached to podcasts are either not immediately visible, or they’re inconvenient to read. I’ll republish the essay in question the normal way in a few minutes, and—as God is my witness!—I will never attach an essay to a podcast again.

If you missed that essay, you probably also missed these—among others:

Davos and Dementia

We're going to run Venezuela?

The Intifada, Globalized

The Mood in London

Japan, China, Fukuyama, and the Oxford Union

Rod Dreher and the Groypers

The Madman Orders Nuclear Tests

France loses another prime minister. The Middle East waits for Hamas's next move.

I’m not going to republish them all, because I assume that the 70 percent of you who have seen them wouldn’t welcome an inbox stuffed with CG retreads. But I so hope those who missed them will go back and read what you’ve missed. I’m sure you can well imagine the wailing and rending of garments when I realized how many you never even saw those. (If you were to read them now and tell me so, it would improve my morale. I can hardly begin to tell you how demoralized I was by this revelation.)

Even when I haven’t attached a full essay, I’ve almost always written extensive notes—links to relevant sources, links to related essays, timelines to help you follow along, links to other major items in the news. It never occurred to me that people who use the app wouldn’t see them. It’s maddening to think of all that labor wasted.

But at least I now know better. Had my brother not told me, I would have kept doing that forever. Also on the bright side, a miracle occurred. It seems the very person who built Substack’s podcasting app subscribes—believe it or not!—to the Cosmopolitan Globalist. He read our lamentations, and he sent me this nice message in the chat:

Hi Claire, I’m a subscriber (and a fan!) and I work for Substack. As it happens, I built a lot of the backend for podcasting support on Substack. Re. your latest post about delivery: I definitely expect those essays to be delivered.¹ Here are screen recordings of how they appear on my Android device. The app experience looks similar on my iOS device.

Do you know where your brother doesn’t see it but expects to see it? Sometimes gmail can put emails into “promotions” tabs, or stick things in spam. I don’t use those tabs in my gmail, so I’m not well-versed in how they work. There is also a separate “receive podcast emails” toggle in account settings that lets people opt out of receiving podcast emails. You can see this here:

Another possibility—which admittedly also confuses me sometimes—is that the “Subscriptions” tab in the app sometimes gets set to sort by “Priority” rather than “Recent.” If you’re not aware of that, you might check your inbox, see something from two days ago, and assume that no new posts (like your podcast posts, e.g.) have been released. If you change that sort to “Recent,” it is easier to find. Does any of that ring any bells? I’d also be happy to help him debug if that would be of use.

Sam

Who knew? I’m always surprised to discover who reads this newsletter. I know how many people receive it, but if they haven’t personally introduced themselves, I have no idea who they are.

Do please introduce yourselves, by the way: I’d love it if you used the comments or the chat room to tell me who you are, where you live, what you’d like me to write about, what’s on your mind, and what you do when you’re not reading the Cosmopolitan Globalist. I’m actually very curious: I’d love it if you did that.

In any event, your replies to my original question suggested that more than a few of you find the Substack platform confusing—and clearly, so do I. So I asked Sam whether he’d be willing to join us for a webinar on Zoom—a chance for you to share your thoughts about which features of the platform are good and which are irritating, ask questions about Substack (technical or otherwise), offer suggestions, and make the most of this newfound magic conduit to the platform’s inner sanctum.

He said he’d be happy to join us. (A good sport, too! I like that.) Shall I organize it? How many of you would be keen?

(The poll only allows me to offer five options—if “weekday, afternoon PST” is your preference, let me know in the comments.)

If there’s enough interest and a rough consensus about a convenient time, we’ll narrow it down further, and do this the next time our time preferences align with Sam’s schedule.

Let me know. And thanks, Sam!

1. If I’ve understood correctly, they’re delivered, but in a format that's annoying to read? And in a way that doesn’t draw attention to the essay; i.e., it’s not intuitively obvious that there’s more to the email than a podcast. Is that right? I find the app bewildering, but I find every app for my phone bewildering. Technologically, I remain stubbornly frozen in 2006. I deeply resent my phone and don’t use it for anything but the very occasional phone call.