Blogging the Kanakia-During Fight

One of my hobby horses recently is lamenting that Substack is almost, but not quite, resurrecting what I liked so much about the golden age of the blogosphere. As I wrote a few weeks ago:

Substack is a return, in many ways, to the spirit of the old blogosphere. What the whole thing is not, however, is something that really travels. … there’s nothing cumulative about it, no real linkages from one person to another that build on each other and ultimately take on the shape of a conversation. … as a reader it feels much more like a series of mostly parallel, occasionally intersecting tubes whose main function is to connect the writers to their subscribers rather than a network oriented toward bringing writers into connection with each other (with ancillary benefits for the readers).

The vigorous back and forth this week around Naomi Kanakia’s essay “The Function of the Little Magazines” is evidence, perhaps, that the deep discursive spirit of the blogosphere is more alive on Substack than I had cause to hope.

In brief:

• Substack eminence Naomi Kanakia publishes her essay:

• Academic eminence (and relative newbie on Substack) Simon During fires back:

  Simon DuringHow much ignorance is ok?I have just read an ambitious Substack essay by Naomi Kanakia on little magazines and their worldview which seems to have been widely read and liked. It is, however, an ignorant piece, by which I mean it seems not to know a lot of stuff it really should know in order to talk authoritatively about its topic. This doesn’t appear to matter much to anyone, …Read more13 days ago · 111 likes · 13 comments · Simon During

• This sets off a cascade of responses, the balance of which are (unsurprisingly, given who has more allies on Substack, but also because During was gratuitously dick-ish) favorable to Naomi. They include

  • John Pistelli:

    Grand Hotel AbyssWeekly Readings #241 (09/21/26-09/27/26)A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed…Read more11 days ago · 35 likes · 9 comments · John Pistelli

  • (N+1 co-founder) Marco Roth:

  • Edmund King:

    ParoxysmsWhat Is Literary Substack?A recent back-and-forth on literary Substack has thrown some interesting light on what literary Substack actually is. After Naomi Kanakia published a long review article about the contemporary American “little magazine” (n+1, Yale Review, The Drift…Read more11 days ago · 110 likes · 15 comments · Edmund King

  • Udith Dematagoda:

  • Dan Silver:

  • Jeffrey Lawrence

So this is great. Exactly what I want to see. If there’s anything missing, and I think there still is, it’s likely because a lot of the conversation and disputation is happening on Notes rather than in the main feeds of the writers, which means that it’s invisible to some of the other primary disputants and, more significantly, to most of the readers of Notes-only posters (Roth, Dematagoda, Silver, and Lawrence ).

I’m not sure about this. Open to disagreement.

Adding some more responses here:

Naomi again with her report on The Point:

Patrick Redding:

Me:

More from Jeff Lawrence:

Ross Barkan: