Hey, it's Isaac

I’ll share a secret: I do this job because I love writing.

I love politics, too. And I love hosting the podcast and I’m starting to actually enjoy shooting YouTube videos — though it took a while. I also love working on a team and being in a newsroom. But those passions are all secondary to the reason I got into journalism and sought out this career in the first place, which is a singular, top-level passion for crafting a sentence. 

Of course, part of the story of Tangle’s success is that I’m now doing less writing than I’ve done in the seven years since I started this company. I have a team of writers and editors who I now share space with in the daily newsletter. I have co-hosts on the podcasts who write, read, and riff on their own ideas on the show. I have YouTube producers and editors who have stories they want to tell. Naturally, I also have all the other things that come with leading a company: from budgeting for the year to crafting quarterly goals. Most of these things are genuinely rewarding, but they’re not writing.

That's why, today, I’m here with a fun announcement: I am bringing back my old column, A Grain of Saul.

I have a lot of reasons for doing this now. None are simpler than this: I want to write. I’m excited about doing this, which might sound insane for a guy running a newsletter that already goes out six times a week. But with the fully built-out team I mentioned above, that process is easier than it’s ever been.

I should note: I started this column in college at the University of Pittsburgh with the student newspaper The Pitt News. It was the first thing I ever wrote with my name on it. When I graduated, I launched a blog under the same name on my old website, and I wrote stories from my travels across Israel and the Middle East. When I joined a now-defunct media start-up founded by Ashton Kutcher as one of the first editorial hires, I re-launched the column again — writing a weekly article and doing a weekly Facebook live show that corresponded with it.

All told, I wrote A Grain of Saul on and off for about a decade before shelving it when I started Tangle. So I’m really excited about the prospect of reviving it now.

So, what will this be?

A Grain of Saul will take on a looser, more personal and rawer tone than what appears in Tangle, oscillating from blog-like posts to originally reported opinion pieces. Sometimes, I am going to use the space to flesh out half-baked ideas and stress test them on a very smart and critical audience; sometimes, I’ll have fully formed opinions, informed by a lot of reporting and research, and will try to convince you of them; sometimes, I’ll just share good and interesting stories I think you’ll like. 

Always, the goal will be to have something that lands in your inbox at the intersection of useful, informative, and engaging to read. I imagine it’ll be a mix of topics that don’t appear in Tangle, did appear in Tangle but other staff writers wrote about, or that are politics-adjacent rather than strictly tied to U.S. national news.

At most, I suspect this newsletter will come out once a week. It won’t flood your inbox, and it won’t create an overwhelming amount of content when there’s so much out there already. I hope it will feel akin to a musician you love randomly dropping a new single that you get to enjoy — except once every week or two.

This newsletter will be a members-only perk. So we’ll send out the first few to everyone, and then paywall subsequent editions, with the occasional free post.

This will be a part of Tangle.

To be clear: I’m not going anywhere. This newsletter is going to be a members-only perk of Tangle. It’s our first foray into adding a personality-driven product into the Tangle media ecosystem, and people will be opted into it when they sign up for our suite of newsletters. 

I’ll still be writing takes in the main newsletter every week, still hosting the Suspension of the Rules, still writing Friday editions, and generally still producing a ton of content. 

I’m really excited, and really grateful for this audience I get to keep writing to. My first edition will be coming out tomorrow, so keep your eyes out for it.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon.