Newsletter (News from Your Favorite Italian)

Hello sweet people! I just created a substack (following is my first post). For the sake of simplicity, I'll also publish here any newsletter I create through substack, so you don't need to sign up there. But if you already have a substack account, you might as well subscribe so you get notifications directly into your email. In any case, here we go! If you have any questions, please let me know. 

I don’t like newsletters. In an era of social media and podcasts I find them redundant. And even if it turns out that they aren’t, they reek of self-importance. But I have been yelled at by every manager, agent, and quite a few listeners about what a dumb ass I am for not having a newsletter. Also, my hatred of newsletters may be just a silly personal prejudice. After all, there are quite a few writers, musicians, etc. whose work I like to follow. And newsletters may be a good way to do just that. A year since I left any paywalls, I still regularly receive messages from people who didn’t know History on Fire was freely available again. Clearly, had I had a newsletter this problem would have never existed. Hence, here we are.

In all fairness, I’m a creature of habit and hate trying new things, so there’s a pretty decent chance that months from now I’ll see the newsletter as a brilliant tool for communicating and keeping in touch with people who are interested in my work. After all, when I was first introduced to podcasts, I thought nothing of them and was firmly convinced I’d never host one. So, in light of my awful track record in assessing the potential of new tools, let’s give newsletters a try.

I promise I won’t spam you with too many messages, and will only write if I have something more or less meaningful to share. As of right now, the plan is to share:

- Podcast news (History on Fire, Drunken Taoist, and possibly more coming up), news about writing (I’d like to get back to writing books) and other projects

- Writings about life, the universe and everything else: anything from cooking to history, from martial arts to philosophy.

My current plan is to keep the newsletter 100% free for the foreseeable future. For people who want to support my work, I will place on Substack for paid subscribers all the content that I have on Patreon (ad-free episodes of History on Fire, bonus mini episodes of HOF, etc.) So, if you are a paid subscriber on one platform, you don’t need to support me on both. But either way, this newsletter will remain free. So, if you’d like to subscribe just to access the newsletter and some of my writings, you don’t need to pay anything. Thank you so much for caring about my work!