This essay was one of our earlier posts. I would not say it went “viral” on Substack itself, but it did off of Substack and was viewed tens of thousands of times. The massacre in Israel had just happened, and one of the commenters on one of our previous (unrelated) posts mentioned that she lived in Israel and a little bit about her family’s story. I responded to her in the comments by asking, “Do you want to write about this?” She did, submitted this essay to me within a few days. I lightly edited it and posted. From this post, as a brand new publication, we got lots of new free and paid subscribers. I learned from this that — no matter what your niche is (ours is writing about midlife) — readers respond to topics that are a powerful part of the current cultural/political moment.