I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
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Today's read: 6 minutes.
Every August, I write an email celebrating the anniversary of the first edition of Tangle.
I always start with our origin story: Six years ago, around this time, I sent my first Tangle newsletter to 13 friends and family. A week or two later, I went public with our first “official” newsletter to 130 readers. I had a simple goal: to bring the people I love and respect under one roof, despite their political differences, to consume news that they could all trust. To achieve it, I devised a basic formula of sharing views from the left, right, and center all in one place.
Today, that goal — that ethos — is still the same. And our work has never been more necessary.
Trust in legacy media is at an all-time low. Turn on cable news for 10 minutes, and you’ll see little more than sensationalism, outright conspiracy, and thunderdome-style debates that could easily have been constructive dialogue. Open X and you’ll read a cesspool of rumors, partisan bickering, virtue signaling, antisemitism, and bot activity — all with the richest man in the world thumbing the scales.
Creators on Instagram and TikTok are reducing complicated topics rich with history and nuance and debate to 30-second video clips, pivoting from topic to topic based solely on what will drive emotion, views, and exposure. Search results are now dominated by AI round-ups that regularly hallucinate and poorly filter their sources for trustworthiness or credibility. Journalistic enterprises like old-school local news and traditional print media are dying by the thousands. Even my chosen mode for mass communication — the email newsletter — is now being infiltrated by partisan hacks and grifters trying to find a new way to make a dollar.
In sum: Our information ecosystem is broken and corrupted.
There is no digital (or literal) town square for the millions of Americans who crave free dialogue and quality content. There is no meeting place for the independent-minded — no cafe, salon, or late-night diner where compatriots can test their worldviews against each other while sharing a coffee or a cigarette or a disagreement and have it end amicably. In every direction, we are consumed by performative outrage, desperation for likes and clicks and subscriptions, and business models that are dependent on little more than sensationalism and pageviews to keep the lights on. Everyone is retreating further into their corners, all while devouring post after post that rarely challenge the views they already hold.
At the center of this mess, we’re trying to build something genuinely different at Tangle for all the people who recognize how broken this system is — something audaciously human and reliably accurate, something humble, nuanced, smart, controversial, and brave. Tangle aspires to be a home for people of all political backgrounds who are willing to hear out conflicting views, even when they might offend or rub someone the wrong way. We don’t want a readership of people who subscribe to be told what they already think; we want our audience to better understand their country, themselves, and the opinions they disagree with most.
We do this primarily by leaning into viewpoint diversity, but also by walking the walk: We admit when we’re wrong, we’re transparent about everything from our business model to our hiring practices, and we make a concerted effort to platform our readers and our critics to ensure that we are treating even our own perspectives honestly.
We are not here to “build bridges” or hold hands, but to tether ourselves to reality — to the reality of what our fellow Americans actually believe, what the best arguments on the big debates of the day actually are, and what real solutions to our biggest problems may actually look like.
Over the last year, we’ve been rewarded for this work more than ever. In August of 2024, we celebrated reaching 125,000 people on our mailing list. It was a month of firsts for our team of five full-time employees: We had just broken $1 million in annual recurring revenue, I had just given my first TED Talk, and we had just hired our first intern cohort. We were eyeing an expansion of our podcast and YouTube channels and thinking about how to best deliver our coverage of the 2024 election.
Today, our mailing list is over 400,000 people. We are (imminently) going to break $4 million in annual subscription revenue. We have stood up a thriving advertising business in our podcast and newsletter. We are now thoughtfully spending that money: Our team has grown from five full-time people to 12. Some of our interns have become employees. We’ve built a podcast feed that gets hundreds of thousands of downloads a month (and are about to rebrand our Sunday podcast to “Suspension of the rules”), and we have a YouTube channel that is churning out the best video content we’ve ever created. We announced our first-ever West Coast event in Irvine, California, for this October. We hired Kmele Foster as our editor-at-large, expanded our social media and customer service operations, and doubled down on the newsletter and web content we know so many of you trust Tangle to produce.
The last year has brought remarkable personal change for me, too. My wife graduated from law school a few months after we welcomed our first child, a baby boy. For the first time, a member of the Tangle team moved to Philadelphia to work out of our headquarters (and one more is on the way). My job here at Tangle has shifted from writer and editor to writer, editor, CEO, boss, podcast host, podcast guest, and more. I don’t just write a newsletter anymore — I run a media business.
And more change is coming.
It is in this spirit that, today, I am sharing a new look for Tangle — one that reflects the rigor, maturity, and trust at the heart of what we do. We have immense gratitude for how our original branding helped to get us to where we are. We’ll always know our roots and remember where we came from; I know the knotted brain, the blue-to-red gradient, and the familiar playful typeface that friends, readers, and employees all helped create will forever shape us — but I also know that we're growing up, evolving, and improving. So we’ve decided to retire our original logo.
As a big-tent media organization, we aren't here just to earn trust from across the political spectrum. We are also here to learn from and improve upon the best of both independent and legacy media: Our new logo, colors, and typography aim to capture, at once, the boldness and personality of independent media and the editorial standards and institutional memory of legacy media. We wanted our new logo to sit at the intersection of our values, too: Curiosity, authenticity, and independence.
This new look will usher in a new era but not a new set of values or a new style of content.
We are going to keep doing what we do best — but we’ll do more of it, on more platforms. Today, I’m more assured than ever of the fundamental strength of our format and our values and how they allow us to make you all (and ourselves) smarter, better informed, and more independent thinkers. This new branding is a nod to copy-editing tradition, as well as a more minimalist embrace of our modern digital era. I hope it will allow us to better stick in the minds of audiences — new and old — and spread the word about the work we strive to do every day.
What does this mean for you? A few things.
First, going forward, you’ll want to keep an eye out for the signature Tangle loop. This icon will pop up across social media and your inbox, and it’s your signal that you’ve landed on some Tangle content.
Second, we have some incredible new merchandise available in our store if you want to rep the Tangle brand and support our work. And, of course, we’ll keep selling the “vintage” Tangle swag with our old school brain logo.
Third, if you believe in this mission and want to support our work, now is a great time to do so. If you’re not a member, becoming one is the single best way to support what we are building (and to unlock all kinds of great members-only content). You can do that here. If you are already a member, consider sharing Tangle with a friend or family member or donating to support our work.
And finally, don’t forget that we are more than just a newsletter. We have:
- A daily podcast that gives you the audio version of our newsletter each day — perfect for when you’re on the move.
- A weekly talkshow-style podcast called “Suspension of the rules” where Kmele, Ari, and I break down the biggest stories of the week. You can find it in our main podcast feed.
- A YouTube channel with fast explainers, full interviews, and the occasional whiteboard rant. You can see our latest reporting on fluoride in the water here.
- An Instagram channel with breaking news and shareable short videos.
- X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, and Facebook pages where you can share the latest editions with your friends and family.
- A Reddit community for discussion about our news coverage.
Finally, let me just say: Thank you. Thank you for all the support that got us here. Thank you for continuing to support us in the future. And thank you for believing in a new kind of political news. We wouldn’t be here and growing without your support.
Best,
Isaac & the Tangle team (Magdalena, Ari, Jon, Will, Lindsey, Audrey, Russell, Candida, Alex, Kmele, Aidan, and Bailey)
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