Hey There, Dishhead

A personal message from Andrew

I think I can call you that by now.

It’s our third anniversary this month and I just wanted to thank you for subscribing to the free version of The Weekly Dish.

There are 128,000 of you now!

And we know from our stats how much you love reading the Dish. The average open rate for free newsletters in media is around 20 percent. Your rate is well over 50 percent. That’s a rare level of devotion. And Chris and I are immensely grateful.

But if you’ve been enjoying the Dish this much, why not help us keep it alive? 

I know a lot of you want to subscribe. I can’t tell you how often someone comes up to me and says they love the Dish every week, but when I ask them if they’re a paid subscriber, they blush a little, say they meant to subscribe, but never quite got around to it. And I know how you feel. It’s the kind of procrastination I’m particularly prone to.

So consider this a nudge:

The full Dish includes extra posts from me, the hugely fun window contest (here’s an example), a weekly digest of all the other Substacks worth reading, and the full, uninterrupted episodes of our weekly podcast (browse all 127 episodes here) — with no ads!

But a paid subscription has something else: a civil, lively, anonymous and edited debate between me and the readers, and the readers with themselves. Think of it as an antidote to Twitter. No grandstanding, no abuse, no screaming, but a fair selection of arguments from far left to far right, on every topic you can imagine.

Dish readers, we know, are the best on the web. They have expertise, experience, and nerve. They’re Democrats and Republicans, liberals, conservatives and leftists — a mix almost absent elsewhere. They hold me to account. And if we want to preserve that kind of open, liberal dialogue in this republic, we also need to support it.

So join us. Around a buck a week, or just $5 a month, or $50 a year — and you can cancel at any time:

With gratitude and love from the Dish team,

In Dishness,

Andrew and Chris (and Bowie the beagle)