Sari Botton on Substack: "Thank you so much for this, @Anne Helen Petersen. 🙏 You have made me feel less alone in my opposition to this platform monetizing and featuring white supremacists, and also as someone who plans to stay here anyway—because it is the only place where I can do all that I do with t…"

Thank you so much for this,

. 🙏 You have made me feel less alone in my opposition to this platform monetizing and featuring white supremacists, and also as someone who plans to stay here anyway—because it is the only place where I can do all that I do with three newsletters, two of which are magazines.

And because large, incredible communities have cropped up around

Oldster Magazine

and

Memoir Land

, but Oldster in particular, where people have come to know and trust and even rely on one another for camaraderie and comfort, and to feel less alone in the challenges and surprises and even the joys of getting older. I need to keep that wonderful community going, for my subscribers, and for me, because it is one of the most beautiful and heartening things to have come out of creating Oldster. The feeling of community there buoys my spirit.

Also, thank you for recommending and linking here to

Elizabeth Gilbert

's Oldster Magazine Questionnaire!!! I appreciate you, Anne. Happy and merry to you and yours.

💝💝💝

An independent writer like myself — and like the other writers you read and admire here on Substack — finds themselves with very few options. They can flee this platform, as we have fled Twitter, as we have fled mainstream news organizations that have opted for “both side-ism” on any number of issues including but by no means limited to fascism, as we have fled Facebook. The Nazis will follow. It has become more and more clear to me: This is no way to fight. Reading the reactions from other writers, I’m reminded that we have power in solidarity. People who’ve been here longer and have larger readership bases and more secure income — like me — have a responsibility to think about our power as whole. Frankie de la Cretaz put it this way in a Substack Note earlier this week:

Anne Helen Petersen

Dec 24, 2023

2:45 PM