Volume VIII · The About Issue
About Emily Davinci
A writer's account of the desk, the refusals, and the eight years of weekly essays that followed — read on this page, then wander the archive at your own pace.
A single desk, since 2017
How this began
I started this publication on a Tuesday in January 2017, in a one-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, with a Substack account and a paragraph that no editor would have bought. The paragraph was about the way a friend of mine described her work — as if she were translating something rather than doing it — and it ran to 1,800 words. I sent it to nineteen people. Eleven opened it. One replied.
Eight years later, that paragraph is the first essay in an archive of 612 weekly issues. Every one of them was written by me, on a Wednesday morning, and sent out on a Friday. There has been no hiatus, no guest month, no AI assist, no pivot to video. The publication has remained a single-author essay series on culture, work, attention, and the inner life of modern ambition — long-form prose, between roughly 2,400 and 4,800 words, read on average for eleven minutes and forty seconds per visitor.
I write about what I am trying to understand: the strange new vocabulary of ambition, why attention feels like a contested resource, what it means to do meaningful work inside institutions that are not built for it, and the slow, private texture of a life lived mostly in one's own head. The essays do not argue for a position. They sit with a question long enough that the question becomes a room, and the reader can walk around inside it.
The readership grew quietly. 184,000 subscribers receive each issue as of this spring — a figure that surprises me every time I read it, because the publication has never advertised, never run a referral program, and never once asked a publicist to pitch a single piece. Of those, around 6,200 readers in 41 countries pay for membership, at a median tenure of 2.3 years; the rest read free, which is by design. Students at verified universities read free unconditionally — about 14,800 of them a year, funded by paying members who chose to pay a little more.
I have one collaborator and three contractors. That is the whole operation. We work from a small suite on Cooper Square in New York, and from a converted print-shop in Lisbon where the audio narrations are recorded. If you have written to me and I have taken a long time to reply, that is why. I read everything; I simply cannot answer everything.
— Emily Davinci, New York, March 2025
An independence record
Four offers, declined
Between 2019 and 2023, four separate media groups made formal acquisition offers for this publication. Each was declined, in writing, on a Tuesday. The brief notes below are the only public record of why.
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No. 01
The first letter
A well-known New York magazine, three years into the publication's life, offered to absorb the newsletter into their culture vertical in exchange for a salary, an editor, and a syndication contract. I declined because the publication was two and a half years old, had 4,200 subscribers, and I had not yet written anything I would want to see behind someone else's logo.
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No. 02
The platform pivot
A large independent-platform group, flush with a Series B, offered a full buyout and a four-year non-compete. The argument was scale: the essays would reach more readers, the audio would be produced faster, the archive would be sold as a book. I declined because the offer came with a clause that I would not be permitted to publish outside the platform for the term. The publication had just crossed 11,000 subscribers; I wanted it to belong to itself.
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No. 03
The bundle
A London-based media house offered to acquire the publication alongside three other independent newsletters, bundle them under a single editorial director, and license the archive to universities. The financial terms were generous. I declined because the bundle required shared advertising infrastructure, and the publication has never carried a single paid advertisement in its eight years. That felt like the wrong door to open.
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No. 04
The last letter
A publicly traded American publisher, working through a small intermediary, offered a number large enough that I sat with the letter for two weeks before answering. I declined because the answer to should this be sold? had stopped being a financial question for me several years earlier. The publication is not an asset I am waiting to exit. It is the work.
No further offers have been entertained. None are expected to be.
Who does the work
The desk
Four people work on this publication full-time; three more record the audio editions under contract. The list below is the entire masthead. We are deliberately small.
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Emily DavinciWriter & EditorAuthor of every essay since No. 1, January 2017. Sets the editorial direction. Reads every member letter.
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Maren HolstManaging EditorEdits each essay for structure and rhythm; runs the production schedule; oversees the quarterly print zine.
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Tomás LinharesAudio Lead, LisbonRecords and masters the weekly audio edition; manages the studio and the contracted narrator roster.
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Iris BellamyMembership & OperationsRuns the membership program and the student-tier verification process; answers most member correspondence.
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Contracted NarratorsThree Voice Actors · Brooklyn & LisbonA small rotation of professional voice actors who record alternate narration tracks and the long-form audio editions.
As cited by Reuters Institute & the Verge Press Index
Emily Davinci is one of the rare independent publications that has answered the question of sustainable solo writing with a record, not a slogan — eight years of consistent weekly essays, no advertising, no outside capital, and a paid readership that has grown every year since founding.
Begin with Essay No. 612, or open the eight-year archive at random — both doors are the same door.
Emily Davinci