A welcome retreat from the chaos of the web, this year newsletters came into their own and revealed their roots in the epistolary novel
Email newsletters boomed 2015. The ubiquitous Lena Dunham even got in the game with Lenny, hiring young women writers like Doreen St Félix to produce a magazine-like specimen. Many internet addicts, including me, now subscribe to a clutch of newsletters via services like TinyLetter, the newsletter-delivery spot which bills itself as “email for people with something to say”.
It’s quite an insulting slogan, but isn’t wrong. A lot of what passes for writing on the web today is sound and fury, signifying little. Twitter users thrash about in endless conflict with one another; comments sections roil and boil with invective. Newsletters, by contrast, are quiet, private affairs. Email is not a space for performance, or a platform at all, really – it imposes at least a nominal intimacy between writer and subscriber.
Hating, as I mortally do, all long unnecessary prefaces, I shall give you good quarter in this, and use no farther apology, than to prepare you for seeing the loose part of my life, wrote with the same liberty that I led it.
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