The Active Voice
Hamish McKenzie
The internet is conditioning our minds and influencing the global consciousness in ways that we are only beginning to understand – and writers are on the front lines. In The Active Voice, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie talks to great writers about how they are reckoning with the challenges of the social media moment, how they find the space for themselves to create great literature and journalism despite the noise, and how to make a living amid the economic volatility of the 2020s. read.substack.com
Michael Easter wants you to take the stairs
Michael Easter is a bestselling author, journalist, and professor whose work explores how we can leverage modern science and evolutionary wisdom to perform better and live healthier. Through his Substack, Two Percent with Michael Easter, he offers readers insights to help them ignore the noise and focus on research-backed tips for a happier, healthier life. Michael’s reach is vast: his ideas have been adopted by professional athletes, astronauts, musicians, and Fortune 500 companies, and his wor
Nate Silver on the edge
Chris here, Co-founder and CEO of Substack. I’m sharing a conversation with Nate Silver that I just published on my Substack.is a man of many talents. He’s been a baseball analyst, a blogger, a legendary election forecaster, and founder of 538. He’s worked in media at the Times, ABC, and ESPN. He’s a professional poker player, and a bestselling author. I was introduced to his work through his book The Signal and the Noise, and he has a new book coming out in August called On the Edge: The Art of
The Active Voice: E. Jean Carroll, Mary Trump and Jen Taub are bringing serialization into the mainstream
Today’s episode is guest-hosted by Sarah Fay, creative writing professor at Northwestern University, former interviewer at The Paris Review, devoted serializer, and lover of all things Substack. Her Substack Writers at Work helps creative writers use Substack to bolster their careers, including how to serialize their writing. She’s currently serializing her new memoir Cured on Substack through 2023.—Sophia Efthimiatou, Head of Writer Relations**You may recognize the names of today’s guests: Mary
The Active Voice: Taylor Lorenz still believes in the internet
Taylor Lorenz, a tech culture reporter for the Washington Post, has been both observer and participant in an internet culture that has been emerging since the early 2010s, a period of history that has seen the rise of massive social media platforms, the decay of traditional media, and the increasing power of online influencers. That culture can be delightful and enriching, and it can be savage and soul-destroying. Of course, anyone who spends much time on Twitter knows that Taylor herself has ha
The Active Voice: Richard Hanania is seeking ‘enlightened centrism’
Even among politics and media junkies, few people had heard the name Richard Hanania before 2020. But then, as the pandemic intensified online tribalism, the political scientist emerged with a provocative analysis that carried the headline “Why Is Everything Liberal?” The piece, which explores why almost every major institution in the U.S. leans left, did the rounds on Twitter, announcing Richard’s arrival as a distinctive new voice in American politics discourse. Soon enough, he followed it up
The Active Voice: Nadia Bolz-Weber is preaching to break your heart
At a dinner party Substack hosted in San Francisco last week, I found myself sitting next to Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and former publisher of the Whole Earth Review. We were talking about the capital of the world. It no longer felt that New York was it, I was telling him, though it had not been replaced by another physical city either. Rather, the world now had only one, digital, capital. If you made it there, you’d make it anywhere.He agreed, with one amendme
The Active Voice: Suleika Jaouad and Yung Pueblo are creating to live
Both Suleika Jaouad and Diego Perez, who writes as Yung Pueblo, arrived at writing through adversity. Writing became a way of life when each was faced with death, a healing mechanism that became a craft.When they met for the first time in person at our headquarters in San Francisco, they greeted each other with the enthusiasm of old friends reuniting. They fell into conversation with natural intimacy and comfort before we had a chance to press the “record” button and continued talking for anothe
The Active Voice: Ted Gioia and Mike Solana are fighting from the fringes
At first glance, Mike Solana and Ted Gioia might not seem to have much in common. Mike, the publisher of the newsletter Pirate Wires, is very much a child of the internet, a strong proponent of the tech industry and scientific progress, with a career in venture capital (working in marketing) after a brief stint in book publishing. Ted, who writes The Honest Broker and has been a guest on The Active Voice before, is one of America’s greatest music critics, founder of the Jazz Studies program at S
The Active Voice: Robert Reich is pressing the reveal key for society
I met Robert Reich in his overstuffed corner office on U.C. Berkeley’s campus, housed in what looked to me like a midcentury villa that could double as a restaurant that sells speciality bratwurst. I was shown into Reich’s office by Heather Lofthouse, his collaborator and media partner, who pointed out a mahogany armchair by the window, just past some boxes overflowing with books. It was the chair he sat in while serving in Bill Clinton’s cabinet as Secretary of Labor in the 1990s. Naturally, I
The Active Voice: Ethan Strauss is jumping off a high diving board
When he’s about to hit publish on a take that he knows will catch some heat, Ethan Strauss feels like he is about to step off a high diving board. He’s scared, but he knows he will do it anyway. “That, to me, feels good,” he says. “The entirety of the process and that particular catharsis feels good.” Ethan writes about the intersection of sport and culture—especially when it comes to the NBA—on House of Strauss, where he also hosts a cult-favorite podcast. He made his name in sports media throu
The Active Voice: Alison Roman is bored of Instagram
Alison Roman is enjoying being an “elder millennial” and not feeling the pressure of being on TikTok or even doing all that much on Instagram, the platform that helped make her reputation (although she did meet her boyfriend when he slid into her DMs). “I do furniture shopping on Instagram,” she says, describing what she calls her fraught relationship with the app. “That’s what I use it for.”The queen of viral recipes is no longer as known for #TheCookies or #TheStew as she is for simply being a
The Active Voice: Patti Smith loves being alive
I met Patti Smith at Electric Lady Studios, the studio in New York’s Greenwich Village opened by Jimi Hendrix a few weeks before he died, and she immediately walked me down to the basement level to show me the original murals—psychedelic, space-themed—that Hendrix had commissioned for the walls. She had first seen them in 1970, at the studio’s opening, when, before she was a well-known artist and the “godmother of punk rock,” she bumped into Hendrix on the staircase. “He stopped and talked to me
The Active Voice: Emily Oster is okay with taking heat from the mob
When Emily Oster wrote an article for The Atlantic to suggest an amnesty in the pandemic wars, she received a shockingly sharp rebuke from those who weren’t ready to forgive. On the left, there were people who felt that the unvaccinated jeopardized untold lives; on the right, there were people still furious about the way they were treated for not going along with the lockdowns. But by that time, social media cancellations were a familiar ritual for Emily, who had already upset some souls with ar
The Active Voice: Etgar Keret is thinking weird thoughts
Etgar Keret’s parents, both of whom survived the Holocaust, gave him the gift of imagination, a garden he has been watering with stories since he was a child. His father crouched in a hole in the ground for more than 600 days to escape the Nazis in Belarus, getting through the time by telling himself stories of a parallel universe in which everything was the same except for one detail (like that there were still Nazis who chased Jews, but when they caught them they would give them sweets). Etgar
The Active Voice: Heather Havrilesky finds life romantic, even when it’s terrible
Heather Havrilesky’s writing career has spanned the life of the internet, starting with the satirical site Suck.com, moving through Salon, The Awl, and New York Magazine, and ending up on Substack, where she publishes two much-loved newsletters: Ask Polly and Ask Molly. Heather has mastered the art of reinvention, bending with the winds of the web, as news sites have variously chased SEO, blogging, Facebook traffic, and the rest. She settled on an approach that has worked for her: doubling down
The Active Voice: Paul Kingsnorth is happiest on the margins
In the 1990s, the English writer Paul Kingsnorth was a radical environmental activist, taking part in road blockades and protesting at WTO summits. Today he calls himself a “recovering environmentalist” and doesn’t believe people can do all that much to halt the march of the markets and technology. For instance, he thinks of climate change as a predicament to be endured, not a problem to be solved. His focus instead is on making sense of this revolutionary time we are living through and finding
The Active Voice: Jessica DeFino is revealing the real face of the beauty industry (and it’s not pretty)
Jessica DeFino’s face literally had to peel off before she gave up on beauty products and turned a critical eye on the beauty industry. As a journalist covering the industry, she had been inundated with free beauty products, which she enthusiastically accepted. Then she developed dermatitis and had a bad reaction to the steroids she was prescribed to treat it.“My skin started peeling off of my face in chunks,” she says. “For months, my skin was just oozing red. I couldn’t put makeup on. I couldn
The Active Voice: Ted Gioia takes the long view
Ted Gioia, the great music and cultural critic, has never lived in New York and it has cost him. He knows he is completely out of touch. “I didn’t make the relationships, I didn’t have editors opening doors for me,” he says. “Things were harder for me at every step along the way because I wasn’t at those cocktail parties.” But not being in New York has its upsides. Perhaps most importantly: it has helped Ted retain the mindset of an independent outsider, less vulnerable to the groupthink that ca
The Active Voice: Rayne Fisher-Quann wants your attention
I can’t imagine what it must be like to grow up on social media, especially as someone who says things in public—to try to figure out who you are as an adult while living under the panoptic gaze of TikTok and Instagram, or to have one’s intellectual identity shaped by the performative shoutysphere of Twitter. I’m old enough to have missed all that, but Rayne Fisher-Quann, a 21-year-old Canadian writer who has built a large presence on social media and a cult-favorite Substack called Internet Pri
The Active Voice: Joshi Herrmann knows the difference between bullshit and media gold
You’ll have to forgive my self-indulgence in this conversation, because I’ve gone deep with Joshi Herrmann—not a celebrity name or a celebrated author, I hope he won’t be offended by me saying—about a bunch of things that scratch my particular interests in media: local news, New York media-startup scandals circa 2016, subscriptions versus ads, venture capital, and canceled Netflix comedians. Joshi is the founder of a fledgling media empire anchored by The Mill, a local news publication covering
The Active Voice: Doomberg is willing to make some big calls
Doomberg, the top-earning finance publication on Substack, is led by a cartoon chicken that previously worked in heavy industry. Okay, so it wasn’t the chicken that worked in heavy industry—but its anonymous creators, with a background in hard sciences and energy, did. They chose the green chicken as their publication’s logo because they want it to be instantly recognizable on Twitter, which they use as their main marketing channel (it is, after all, the bird app). The plucky avian also fits wit
The Active Voice: Chris Hedges stands with whatever side is being crushed
Chris Hedges is surprisingly cheery for someone who has, by his own admission, “a dark view of human nature.” When we met for this conversation at Substack’s office in San Francisco, he was full of smiles and good humor—at least during the times we weren’t discussing death and destruction. He had just come from the gym, a habit that borders on a fixation for him, since he works out as a way to deal with the trauma from years of covering war in some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones: t
The Active Voice: Cheryl Strayed might be whispering your name into a candle
Did you know that a votive candle is one of those short, squat candles that people use for prayer or, like, to put on their outside stairs when they’re hosting a fancy party? I did not. But “votive” is the word I blurted out when Cheryl Strayed was trying to describe the type of tall candle she lit as a way to psychically summon Reese Witherspoon. A decade ago, Strayed was waiting to hear whether or not the actor was interested in taking the lead role in the movie adaptation of Wild, her best-se
The Active Voice: Glenn Loury doesn’t want to be told what to think
Among many notable things, Glenn Loury has been the first African American economics professor to get tenure at Harvard, an author and essayist, a firebrand on race issues from both the left and the right, and, in one dark chapter of his life, a cocaine addict who led a secret life on the streets.Now in his 70s and a professor at Brown University, Loury leads a semi-retired life, publishing video conversations with fellow academics and intellectuals for an audience of tens of thousands on his Su
The Active Voice: Samantha Irby will make you rethink your toilet
I was hoping to meet Samantha Irby in person, since podcast interviews are more fun that way and she is a fun person, but she is obstinately committed to Kalamazoo, the small Michigan city plonked equidistant from three Great Lakes. This podcast has not yet reached the point where I can justify the expense of a Courtyard Marriott in Kalamazoo for one interview. So, Zoom it was. Kalamazoo looms so large in Samantha’s bio that it has become part of her brand. She doesn’t care for the literary cool
The Active Voice: Jessica Reed Kraus goes where gossip reporters fear to tread
No one covered the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trial in quite the way that Jessica Reed Kraus did on Instagram and Substack, taking her readers into the courtroom, behind the scenes, and into some of the most salacious details of the actors’ personal lives. Near the start of the pandemic, the relatively unknown writer and influencer had pivoted from writing about home renovations and her four children in Orange County to something that she felt could bring people together in more civil conversations
The Active Voice: George Saunders thinks you should watch your mind
A couple of days after I interviewed George Saunders for the first episode of this podcast, I caught up on some of his recent posts on Story Club, his writing-focused Substack. In “A Lost Speech, Found,” he wrote about rediscovering the script for a graduation speech he had given many years ago. The speech would earn him a reputation as “The Kindness Guy.” “If the question ‘How should I live’ can be answered: ‘Live so as to minimize your regrets,’” he had said in that speech, “then I have to te
Introducing The Active Voice, a new podcast about writing and the internet
Welcome to The Active Voice, a new podcast with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie about how great writers reckon with the only thing in the last 17,000 years to challenge the technological supremacy of writing: the internet. Through these conversations, we’ll explore how the world’s most important stories are told in a time when social media has come to dominate our minds and attention. Today, we start with George Saunders, one of America’s greatest living writers (and author of the wonderful