Thinking for us

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. They help fill the connectivity gap in Twitter’s wake, provide me with access to independent journalism, and let me keep up with friends and colleagues.

They’re also an abundant source of entertainment and scholarship, and that abundance is something of a problem. It’s a constant influx of content, volleyed through five or six different platforms, tied together with nothing more than an email address—which is why, for years now, I’ve preferred to use a reading app to manage the whole shebang. The app meant I could keep all the newsletters in their own dedicated reading experience and out of my inbox (where they would otherwise languish unread amid notifications and receipts).

Unfortunately, when I upgraded my phone last month, the reading app declined to come along for the ride. The icon squatted, undownloaded, on my new homescreen after my data transfer completed, and when I tried to download it, a message popped up: “This app is currently not available in your country or region.”

Hey. What. The hell.

Even after investigating, I still have no idea what happened. There’s no update to its (single-page) website, no message explaining its availability or what might have changed. I queried the only contact email I could find; no response. I can only conclude that the app no longer exists, and the company (presumably, some guy) ditched the site until hosting expires.

(This barely registers in the haze of 2025, but, ugh. I liked that app! It was a part of my daily routine! I resent having it yanked out from under me without warning or support! I resent losing years of my reading history! Look, I cannot fix foreign policy, but I can write 700 words about mundane irritation with product experiences.)

But now: what to do with dozens and dozens of untethered newsletter subscriptions?

The first half of the dilemma is where to read them. There are not many apps on offer for this service, and most of them work the same way as the app I just lost: by generating an app-specific email address, funneling subscriptions to the app inbox instead of one’s own. But this leaves subscriptions vulnerable to the exact problems I’m currently facing. How many companies (again, presumably, some guys) will go under or get bored or get bought out or pivot to AI or, or, or? As long as my subscriptions are routed through a third party, I don’t control them. There’s a lesson here.

The second half of the dilemma is updating the subscriptions themselves. Each newsletter platform has its own mysterious process for managing subscriptions: some let me update my destination address, while others have forced me to cancel and resubscribe; I’ve had to be particularly careful with the subscriptions I pay for. These tedious manual updates have stolen an absurd amount of my recent time—and that’s only for the newsletters that happened to have sent an issue out in the last two weeks. I’ll have to keep at it as less frequent newsletters show up, assuming I remember to check the still-working browser inbox for my defunct app. Plenty of opportunities to fall through the cracks.

Ultimately I decided not to download a new reading app, and instead reset what subscriptions I could to one of my own email addresses. I rigged up a complicated system of levers (nested labels) and pulleys (filters) to keep my inbox orderly; it’s not a good reading experience, but at least I know where the content is, and that it will stay where I put it.

It’s been a frustrating reminder of just how much work it is to manage media consumption now, and also just how much of that work we’ve (gradually, unwittingly) outsourced over the past twenty-five years. We digitized our content and gutted our media and sold out our creators and fractured our systems and it got harder and harder to read and keep track and pay attention, but we didn’t even need to because our benevolent tech lords were always ready to step in with services to fix the problems they created, and now I’m yelling at clouds about email addresses. It’s going so good!

Lightning round

• “day 5 at the communal puzzle club: the others are suspicious but they have no proof. they check my pockets before i leave but little do they know that this time i ate the pieces” [tumblr]

• I just finished playing Wytchwood and it was a captivating delight [Whitethorn Games]

• “The content strategist writes a resume (or three)“ [Ma’ayan Plaut]

• “And that’s what led me to argyling the pintafore with the quagmire instead of the hoobastank! I know, crazy.” [Annie Mueller]

• ICYMI: Click on the white star after the video ends (aw, just like the olden days of eastern eggs!) for Strong Sad’s impassioned defense of sitemaps [Homestar Runner]

• Listen to this! My good friend Dylan Wilbanks is spinning some truly chef’s kiss music over on Hollow Earth Radio [Slumgullion!]

Civic engagement round

• How to resist automated facial recognition at TSA checkpoints [Opt Out]

• “Following some of the advice in this book could land you in various sorts of trouble” [Internet Archive]

• A (really, for once) good set of tactics for managing mental health under the current despairs [Instagram]

• ”10 Commandments of Nonviolent Resistance by the Czechs and Slovaks to the Soviet Invasion of 1968” [Maciej J. Bartkowski]

• The Good Trouble Checklist [Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg]

• Help historians by volunteering to digitally transcribe documents [The Smithsonian]

May’s cause

This month, let’s donate to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), which “improves the lives of day laborers, migrants and low-wage workers. We build leadership and power among those facing injustice so they can challenge inequality and expand labor, civil and political rights for all.”

Buy my book

It feels like it’s been ages since I talked about my useful little book, Everyday Information Architecture! If you haven’t read it, I promise it’s got excellent, practical lessons about UX and working with information online, no matter your role in tech. Get it from your local bookstore!