Notes on Notes, notes on Finland and other things
Welcome, new subscribers! The launch of Substack Notes, Substack’s new competitor to Twitter, has brought in quite a few of you. Thank you for signing up. I’m cautiously optimistic about the Notes platform. In the short-term I expect it will be better than Twitter, in part because that’s a low bar lately, and also because of selection effects: the existing Substack userbase tends toward smart readers and writers. Their absence on Twitter is already palpable, as if some of the most interesting posters have been raptured away to a better place, leaving Elon’s site to the dogs (or the doge).
For now at least, Notes has the energy of a new network without the toxicity of Twitter, so I’m enjoying giving it a shot. Longer term, I’m less enthused about the existence of yet another Twitter clone. On Twitter you retweet a post, on Mastodon you boost it, on Truth Social you reTruth it, and on Substack Notes you “restack” it. On the frontend these services are all basically the same, distinguished mainly by the characteristics of their users. Notes is obviously better than Truth Social and Twitter in that regard, but otherwise there’s not a whole lot to differentiate it from what’s become a standard social media format. (Notes seems like it might have a better algorithm, but this might also just reflect the higher quality of content provided by its early adopters. We’ll see if that degrades over time.)
After curiously anticipating the launch of Notes since its announcement last week, actually using it thus feels a bit underwhelming to me. Fellow Substack writer Arnold Kling isn’t sold on it either:
But I do not think that the subscription/advertising dichotomy is as powerful as the Substack honchos make it out to be. I think that the bad incentives in Twitter are baked into the short form of Tweets. If I am correct, then Substack Notes will turn out to be noisy at best and a sewer at worst.
I think that longer-form writing is better than tweets. Short-form writing consists of “takes” that are rapid-fire. You are rewarded for fast reaction time. So you don’t think long-term. You say things you later regret, because you spoke too soon. You speak in a loud, nasty voice, because you are animated by what makes you angry. You get energized by the Current Thing and ignore more important subjects that are not hot at the moment.
I’m not quite as pessimistic as Kling. Just by virtue of having a better, smaller userbase, Notes could remain a better version of Twitter (which basically means feeling like Twitter ten years ago). And that would be a good and useful thing to accomplish! But like Kling, I’m more interested in getting back to the golden age of blogging than to the golden age of Twitter, which means doing less discourse on social media and more longer form writing. Substack’s core newsletter product thus adds way more value to me than Notes does.
I’m biased, of course, since I’m working on a new platform designed for the purpose of sharing longer form writing rather than getting into tweet-length debates. We’re finishing a few fixes to our new Seabird mobile app, at which point we’ll be opening our currently small private beta to more users. I’ll be posting updates about that soon. Sign up here if you want to be among the first to check it out.
Recent writing
My most recent piece is a review of Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi’s excellent new book on the history of libertarian ideas, The Individualists. It’s a very timely book given current divides in the liberty movement, and Matt and John are the right people to inspire libertarians to take it in the right direction. I’ve been active with various libertarian institutions for twenty years and I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Read it!
I also reviewed magician Penn Jillette’s immensely fun new novel Random. It’s a comedic romp through the underbelly of Las Vegas that also explores the seductive idea of leaving one’s decisions to a roll of the dice. Read that review here.
For Reason, I looked into how the prohibition of flavored tobacco and nicotine products is going in Massachusetts. Answer: not very well! I also went on a bit of a rant about the incompetence of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products.
For more on these topic, pick up my new book The New Prohibition: The Dangerous Politics of Tobacco Control. I’ve done a few interviews about the book: with Christopher Snowdon in England, with the folks at the Consumer Advocates for Smoke-free Alternatives Association, and with radio host John Oakley in Toronto (Apple, Spotify).
On a lighter note, Brett Adams and I did a print interview with Willamette Week about our cocktail book Raising the Bar. Read that for a discussion of our approach to home bartending and a couple recipes from the book.
Dealer’s choices, Finland edition
To travel: Why not Helsinki? I made the off-piste decision to book a trip there in January. It was cold and dark, but also lots of fun. I wrote up some recommendations there for my old timey weblog.
To read: My Finnish novel pick for the trip was Johanna Sinisalo’s Troll: A Love Story. It’s a delightfully weird story set in a Finland in which trolls are real — not in a magical sense, but in a natural science one. The novel treats the creatures as cryptids that just happen to actually exist and be difficult to study, drawing on some genuine historical texts as sources. It opens with a Finn finding a wounded troll outside his apartment and bringing it inside. From there it gets stranger, and eventually all hell breaks loose.
To drink: Aquavit, of course! Finland actually isn’t known for aquavit as much as the other Nordic countries are, but the Helsinki Distilling Company is making a nice contemporary one. I brought it back home, where I’d also just received a fresh bottle of sherry, the 1730 amontillado from Alvaro Domecq S.L. Throw in a bottle of Cynar and it was obvious what I should make: Robert Hess’s neoclassic Trident cocktail.
The Trident is basically a Negroni with every ingredient swapped with one that’s slightly more nerdy: aquavit for gin, Cynar for Campari, sherry for vermouth. It’s dry, savory, nutty, and bittersweet. It’s a fun spirit-forward cocktail, and if you’re wondering what to do with a bottle of aquavit or sherry (never a problem at my place), you should give it a try.
1 oz aquavit
1 oz dry sherry
1 oz Cynar
2 dashes peach bitters
lemon peel, for garnish
Stir with ice, strain into a chilled coupe, express the lemon peel over the drink, and enjoy.