Hi Word Suitcase readers,
Some of you may already be aware that Substack, as a company, has been behaving badly. If not, the tl;dr is that Substack has started to pay some writers big advances (as much as $250,000), but they won’t disclose which writers or how much, and as a publisher they are creepily welcoming to transphobes, some of whom are known for siccing mobs of their followers to harass trans people online (sometimes trans women in particular, one notable example of this being Graham Linehan—who is so horrible he’s permabanned from twitter—repeatedly slandering/libeling Grace Lavery with accusations of pedophilia). All of that is vile and that’s not even getting into everything. If you want more info about Substack’s fuckery, I recommend this article from Jude Doyle.
Word Suitcase is free so we’re not contributing money to Substack, but I hate that they’re behaving this way and I can’t be associated with them anymore. I don’t want to force readers to have accounts with Substack, either. So I spent a few hours this week switching this newsletter to a different service. You don’t need to do anything. Fingers crossed, I did things mostly right and this is the last email you will receive from me through Substack. Tomorrow you’ll get Word Suitcase in your inbox as usual, but it will be delivered via Mailchimp. Archived newsletters will live on my website. (The linked page does not have a GeoCities-era “under construction” gif, so you’ll just have to believe me that it’s a work in progress.)
Anyway, see you tomorrow with a real newsletter!
I was totally unaware of this! Thank you for the education and making the extra effort to move to a newsletter! ❤️