I’ve really enjoyed 2020’s flowering of Substack writers, but I also enjoyed this criticism of the medium’s impact on thought: nintil.com/substack-milqu
One reframing: is there an adjacent model which can support book-depth thought? Or even three-month-essay-depth thought?
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But if book-depth thought is often ineffective as you suggest in transformative tools for thought, isn't this for the better? To put it another way, newsletter are books with spaced repetition and applications (writer's assumptions are restated and applied to new problems).
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It’s a good question. “Book-depth” is a modifier on “thought.” I don’t think that thought has ton be (or even should be) presented in that medium. The distinction isn’t about word count: if you can serialize book-depth thought in newsletter form, all power to you! But hard to do.
Seems to me that a thoughtful sequence of posts is not a serialized book, but a sequence of stepping stones from one problem to the next - ideally making prior posts obsolete along the way.
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The depth is in the line of thought that persists over time, not in each individual post.