The Hinternet Needs Your Support!
Plus, Living Homages to Carlo Ginzburg and Robert Thurman; Russian Persecution of Aristotelians; a Recording of JSR's Livestream with Jessica Riskin; the “American Homer”; &c.
Hinternet Funding Drive
Do you enjoy reading The Hinternet? If so, we strongly encourage you to upgrade to a paid subscription, or to give a gift subscription to a friend. We truly need your support.
The very good news is that The Hinternet has become, really in just the past year, some kind of cultural touchstone. We do wonder sometimes whether it is only the distorting effects of our digital bubble that makes it seem so to us. We are not quite so paranoid as to worry that we’ve been subject to what Sam Kriss calls “heavenbanning”, where a handful of bots cheer us on as we ignorantly pontificate before the empty bleachers, to paraphrase Erwin Schrödinger, of an indifferent cosmos. But we do often hear the words of Blaise Pascal in our collective head, chiding: “We are so vain that the esteem of five or six neighbours delights and contents us.”
When it comes down to it, there really are not all that many more superboosters of The Hinternet out there (we’d place the number closer to twenty than to the Port-Royal aphorist’s five or six), constantly engaging, actively raising our metrics, letting the world know of their love. We have at the same time multiple thousands of people of whom we can tell that they are reading, yet who constitute something like the dark matter of the Hinternet universe in that our ability to tell as much is only by theoretical inference from the available data. They show up on our instruments, as it were, but not to our senses. If you fit this category, know that we would not be displeased by a bit more engagement on your part — shares and subscriptions, as the usual pathways, but also more creative and organic ones if you can think of some.
The Hinternet is somewhat unusual in that we are at once a high-readership and a low-engagement operation, and we believe this has something to do with the maturity of our audience. It’s not cool to effuse like adolescents on TikTok. It behooves a worldly and world-weary reader, of the sort we tend to attract, to sit back and at most subtly to nod in private assent.
But in the digital landscape, we hate to have to admit it, effusion helps us. In fact it has a direct role in determining whether you will be reading more from us a year or two or five from now. If subscription churn rates continue to outpace new subscriptions the way they have been, we will at some point have no alternative but to pack up and move on to other more promising experiments. We are already very busy, as you may have noticed, with the Hinternet Foundation, which is legally and financially separate from The Hinternet, and whose financial model mostly involves big grant-seeking rather than piecemeal subscriptions. In truth we prefer the human-scale, person-to-person financial model of the publication, but if that turns out to be unviable in the coming years we really are prepared to pivot altogether to attracting the big-league mécènes, to wearing tutus while twirling sparklers to the tune of “Sussudio” (1985), if that is what they ask of us — whatever it takes, under command or market economy, by philanthropic largesse or by modest tithing, just to keep doing our creative, imaginative, and intellective thing.
What really makes us certain of our evolution into some kind of cultural point de repère are not the bare metrics, which on some measures are quite healthy, and not the celebrity shout-outs, but rather simply that people we meet in real life have begun addressing us differently. If we may boast a bit, we regularly find our reputation preceding us. When we speak with people face to face, even upon meeting them for the first time, and indeed often meeting them by chance, we find they know an awful lot more about us than we know about them. And after decades in which our most familiar social experiences involved people slipping out of conversation with us just as early as noblesse permitted, and often even earlier than that, now we find our irl interlocutors hanging on our every word. And now it is we who are tempted to abandon noblesse, and to scan prematurely for our sortie.
We are all hyperconnected now in virtual space, overrun with more metrics than we could ever find time to interpret. Yet for all that face-to-face conversation alone seems able to carry reliable news of shifting reputation, no less for us than for Jean-Jacques Rousseau, waiting impatiently in his rustic gazebo.
This success is bittersweet, since our shifting cultural position simply is not translating into significantly higher subscription rates, even as it is expanding our ambitions, and causing us to envision all sorts of projects to pursue at a larger scale than we have so far. The economics of Substack have changed drastically since we arrived here in 2020. Understandably, readers are much less keen on shelling out than they used to be, for, we suppose, three reasons: (1) In this economy?!; (2) It’s so easy to get more or less everything we want from the unpaywalled parts of the Substack operations we like; (3) Everything seems as if cheapened when it’s made to share space with the great glut of AI slop that did not exist six years ago.
Still, we would like to convince you that The Hinternet stands out from the standard run of operations for which these considerations apply. We’re doing something utterly sui-generis, indeed something we expect will expand far beyond Substack itself, indeed already is expanding, and will survive the AI-slop tsunami and all the vicissitudes of the terrestrial economy. But we need your support.
And now, not a threat, exactly, but only some gentle arm-twisting: we have signed up for Substack’s new “brand sponsorship” program, and for better or worse the fewer paid subscribers we have the more product placements and sponsored content we’re going to be compelled to run in the future. The truth is at least some of us here think it would be very much in the Hinternet idiom to find ourselves reflecting on some subtle problem of natural theology and then without warning to interrupt all that in order to note that Dinty Moore soups are just $3.49 on your shelves at Raley’s, and at participating Bel-Airs, and that’s a price you can’t beat. Just compare Annie’s Organic Bernie-Os at $5.89 — and smaller portions too! Are you looking for a nutritious and tasty meal that doesn’t hit you in the pocketbook? You can’t go wrong with Dinty Moore soup, from Hormel, or my name’s not JSR…. Dinty Moore: the meal that works so hard it wears flannel…
And so on. We mean, it would not be all that strange to find us doing that sort of thing anyway, just because, like Brian Wilson before us, capitalism has fried our brains and sometimes makes our art come out in the perverted form of the jingle or the pitch. So we may as well, some of us are starting to think, formalize the terms. But again, this is all just faute de mieux, and notwithstanding the eagerness of our advertising director Wes Yesman, that bow-tied little twerp, in the ideal world we would remain subscriber-only.
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We do not wish, to paraphrase Shostakovich, to let too many of our posts become epitaphs, but two towering figures have died to whom The Hinternet owes a great debt. One is Carlo Ginzburg (1939-2026). His book The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1966; English translation 1983) in particular is a masterpiece of microhistory that somehow explodes into mega-macrohistory, moving from the subtle cues of documented reports by early modern peasants about riding stalks of fennel through the night sky, to the vastest imaginable speculative reconstruction of the life-world of pre-Christian Europe. It is this work that is the true inspiration of JSR’s 2023 short story, “Francine”. Read it in Carlo Ginzburg’s memory!
The other is Robert Thurman (1941-2026), whose seminar on Tibetan Buddhist texts JSR had briefly hoped to follow at Columbia circa 1997, until he learned that these texts would be available in the original Tibetan only and that fluent reading knowledge of that language was a prerequisite. He slinked away in shame, thinking only: How could I not know Tibetan?! What’s wrong with me?! But he continued to admire the seminar’s convener immensely, and read him over the years whenever he could. JSR is grateful now for having had the opportunity to pay significant homage to his legacy, even if through the distorting lens of the imagination, in the 2026 metafictional album review of Maya Hawke’s “Maitreya Corso”. Read it in Robert Thurman’s memory!
These are not epitaphs — each was written at a moment when the person who inspired it was still with us on this plane. But what a blessing, it seems to us now, to have been touched by the living spirits of these men, and for the light they generated in their own life-projects to have illuminated at least some corners of our own very different one. We do not suspect that either of these texts landed before the eyes of its inspirer, and yet as something like a moral precept we cannot help but feel it is important to honor the elders while they are still living, nor to store up all our praise for the synchronized cascade that always comes in the wake of death — regarding which, we agree with Thurman, though as far as we know not with Ginzburg, that it is anyhow really not what it seems.
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We do not ordinarily use this space to call attention to causes in the news, but our personal connection to this one compels us to make an exception. As you may know, the Russian Aristotle scholar Svetlana Mesyats is under house arrest in Moscow. The outlandish claims against her purport that she misused public funds that had been intended to go towards a new translation into Russian of Aristotle’s works. Yet it seems at least part of the actual reason for her persecution, as we trace it back to the ideological camp motivated by the ideas of Aleksandr Dugin, has to do not with any failure to complete the work on Aristotle, but with the choice to work on Aristotle in the first place.
The longer we study Russian culture and politics, the harder we find it to ignore the longue-durée nature of certain of its recurring themes. Aristotle had arrived in Russia mostly through the establishment of the Moscow Slavic-Greek-Latin Academy in 1685. This new institution was modeled on, and borrowed significantly from the faculty and student body of, the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, established in 1615, and transferred to Russian control after the 1667 Treaty of Andrusovo. The Kyiv school had been established in the period of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which in the early 17th century underwent significant advances in educational modernization as a result of its decision to allow the Jesuits to build new institutions within its boundaries and to import its significantly Aristotle-centered curricula. The Moscow academy sought a sort of compromise, a hybridism of traditions, but the sharp difference between the intellectual legacies that had been imported by foreign agents, which in this case means Latin Catholic traditions, and the ones that were thought to develop in continuity with the Greek antiquity via Byzantium, was never entirely forgotten.
It seems that in periods of rebounding nationalist fervor in Russia, the distinction between “imported” and “native”, between things that are импортные and things that are наши, inevitably rebounds, and can extend beyond such everyday matters as consumer spending habits all the way to millennia-old intellectual traditions. JSR covers quite a bit of this story in his forthcoming Polyglot Empire: Leibniz, Russia, and the Discovery of Natural Language (Princeton University Press, 2027), and you can be sure you’ll be hearing more about it here in the coming months and years.
None of this matters of course for Svetlana’s immediate circumstances. We would have hesitated to speak at all of them, on the presumption that it could hardly help, in the eyes of the Russian officials, to have cosmopolitan humanists like us coming to her defense. But a friend even closer to her case than we are has assured us that it is in fact in Svetlana’s interest to amplify her distress signal. There is a change.org petition that you can sign, for whatever that’s worth. Otherwise, if you are in any sort of position to raise awareness of her situation, please do so. Otherwise, Держись, Светлана!
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For those of you who missed our recent livestream with Jessica Riskin on her wonderful new book, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary New Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (Penguin Random House, 2026), we are very happy to be able to share the recorded version here:
If you enjoy the discussion, please be sure to order the book. We could not possibly cover all its rich details in the course of a single conversation!
If you are the author of a recent book of comparable excellence, or the representative of such an author, we are keen on doing more such dialogues in the future. Please e-mail us at editor@the-hinternet.com to inquire.
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Please also register for the Hinternet Foundation Summit, taking place this November 23, at the Gaîté Lyrique in Paris. We have only about 25 general admission seats left, after which we are going to close online registration. So register now if you intend to come!
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A number of our friends showed up in a forum in Plough to give, one after the other, consistently wrong responses to the question, “Who is America’s Homer?” The answer is not Robert Frost, nor Walt Whitman, nor anything of the sort. If we understand Homer, as we must, to be the unknown quasi-mythical figure standing at the beginning of a long oral tradition, then obviously the American Homer must surely be some unknown TB-stricken bard who once made the nights pass more agreeably in the work camps with his tales of Paul Bunyan or John Henry the Steel-Driving Man.
For more on oral tradition as the true literature of America, and on its suppression and marginalization over the past half-century, read our own JSR here.
Also, read and relish our own Associate Editor Sam Jennings’ new project, You Go to My Head, a Substack publication dedicated entirely to the sort of hyper-intelligent music criticism that had been for so long missing.
—Hélène Le Goff, Quimper
