When I decided to read the Jeffrey Epstein emails — all of them — I didn’t know where it was gonna go at first. And sometimes there’s a kind of voice in your head (it was thousands and thousands of emails), “Is this a good use of my time?” I’ve got little kids. I’ve got all kinds of things going on. I’ve got a book coming out that I’ve got to worry about next year.
And part of me was just like, no, just read all these emails. You don’t know where it’s going to go. Maybe it’ll be a Substack post. Maybe it’ll be a video. Who knows? But just do that. Do that.
And so I spent five or six days reading all of these emails, just one after another after another, after another. I just read them. And I read them open-endedly without knowing where it was going to go. And then at some point, I decided I was going to write about it.
And I thought this needed to be not just for people in my community here, but for a broader audience, because I wanted to reach people who don’t necessarily agree with the way I would normally frame things. And that became this piece in The New York Times.
In this environment that we live in, in this punishing time for the news, I could devote five days of my time to open-endedly reading these emails, not knowing where it was going to go, maybe not knowing that it was going to go anywhere.
I could do that because I have the support of this Ink community.
Very specifically — I’ve talked about it before — this community and people who subscribe to this newsletter create what I’ve called an infrastructure of courage. Courage is not just some feeling in your heart.
You all make it possible for me to say, “You know what, I’m going to spend five days reading all these emails.” I was able to do it because of you, because of subscribers to this newsletter who have my back and who have the back of independent journalism.
Most of what I do is for the newsletter, but you, in this case, because of your support for someone working independently, you helped make it possible for that piece to go into The New York Times — and to become the most-read piece in The New York Times — out of hundreds — for that entire day.
I could do that because I spent so much time on it. And I spent so much time on it because you all have the back of someone trying to work independently. I could only do this because of the infrastructure that you create by subscribing to the newsletter.
And that lets The Ink make an impact, beyond this newsletter. When you support us, it doesn’t just let us create more Substack posts (though we’re grateful that it does). It can actually change what appears in The New York Times, on Morning Joe, or on Democracy Now!
And that can change the national conversation.
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