The Sunday Dispatch · Est. 2019 · Brooklyn, NY
Every Sunday morning, the editor's note lands in your inbox with one essay, one advice column, one reader dispatch, and one small permission slip to stop pretending you're fine. No performance. No pep talks. Just the truth, beautifully written, with a 96,400-person reading group attached.
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A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Hi — I'm Lena. I started this publication in a Brooklyn apartment in February 2019 because I was exhausted by the gap between how adulthood looked on Instagram and how it actually felt from the inside. Six years later, we're a reader-funded magazine with a 7-person masthead, two licensed therapists on retainer, and 96,400 weekly readers across four regional editions. But the Sunday newsletter is still the heart of it.
Each issue is built like a small magazine. The opener is an original essay — usually between 1,200 and 2,400 words, always by a human, always edited by one of us personally. Think of it as the long-form Sunday read you'd actually forward to a friend. Then there's The Cursed Couch, our advice column co-written with a licensed therapist, where real readers send in the questions they're too embarrassed to ask their group chat. After that, a short Dispatch from one of our 22 contributing essayists in your region — a paragraph about what's happening in their actual life this week. And finally, a closing note from me, which is usually about one small thing I got wrong and what I learned from it.
We don't sell you anything. There are no display ads, ever — that's been our policy since day one, when I accidentally shipped the site with ad-blocker rules pre-installed and we just never turned them off. We're funded by 14,200 paying subscribers and a small annual print zine. The newsletter is and will always be free, because the point isn't to gatekeep honesty behind a paywall.
If you're tired of wellness newsletters that begin every paragraph with "As a busy millennial mom…" and end every paragraph with a discount code, this is the other thing. Pull up a chair. The kettle's on.
— Lena Vos, Editor-in-Chief
Brooklyn, NY · Issue No. 247
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ISSUE NO. 246 · LAST SUNDAY
Every Sunday, the email opens with this four-part spread. Roughly 14 minutes of reading. One cup of coffee, minimum.
THE OPENER ESSAY · 2,140 WORDS
Six years of freelance spreadsheets, three therapists, one divorce, and a spreadsheet I built at 2 a.m. that I'm not ready to publish. A reckoning with the math of performing success when the savings account says otherwise.
THE CURSED COUCH · ADVICE COLUMN
On envy that doesn't make you a bad person, the difference between jealousy and grief, and why you're allowed to skip the shower. With Dr. Marisol Han, LMFT, our resident therapist on retainer.
DISPATCH · BROOKLYN EDITION
A 280-word field note from the L train at 7:42 a.m., where someone else's toddler handed me a plastic dinosaur and I cried on the platform like a person who needed to cry on a platform.
FROM THE COMMUNITY · 412 REPLIES
Every issue ends with one question. Readers reply on Substack, in the Discord (48,000 members), and occasionally by postcard. We pick the best three for next week's issue. Last week: "I'm not tired, I'm resting my eyes," submitted by a mother of two in Walthamstow.
PICK YOUR EDITION
Each regional edition adds one local Dispatch and one city-specific advice column at the end of the issue. You can switch any time from your account page, and we ship in six languages through our volunteer Cursed Translators network.
Don't see your city? Pick "Everywhere Else" — we ship the general edition, translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Japanese by the volunteer Cursed Translators network.
THE BUSINESS, IN CASE YOU'RE WONDERING
"The Sunday email I actually open. I read it in bed with the cat on my chest and then I feel four percent less doomed."
— Aoife K., paying subscriber since Issue 31
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