The case against the algorithm that already knows what you'll read next.
For a decade we built recommendation engines to flatter our tastes. Now they have flattened them — and the cost is a public sphere that cannot remember how to disagree.
From the Editors
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What a Contrapuntist essay actually is.
We started this publication in March 2019 because we were tired of essays that agreed with the first three things we had already read that morning. A Contrapuntist essay is the opposite: a long, sourced, footnoted argument for the position you almost certainly do not hold — written for the smart, curious reader who can recognise a good case even when it cuts against their priors.
Every piece we publish is built to make you stop scrolling, reconsider an assumption, and want to share it before lunch. We do not run sponsored content, native ads, or programmatic banners. We do not publish AI-generated copy. We do not pay contributors by the click. We are funded entirely by reader memberships, and we publish two newsletters a week — a free one on Tuesdays for the public, and a paid members-only one on Fridays for the readers who keep the lights on.
If that arrangement sounds like something you would like to be part of — as a reader, a writer, or both — the button below is the front door.
Miriam Halberg
Co-founder & Editor
Devon Quist
Co-founder & Editor
The Latest Essays
Six fresh arguments against the consensus.
Drawn from 312 issues across 14 verticals. Updated every Tuesday and Friday.
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01
Technology
The algorithm that already knows what you'll read next.
Recommendation engines did not flatten culture in a single blow. They did it one comfortable recommendation at a time — and the cost is a public sphere that has forgotten how to disagree.
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02
Economics
The four-day workweek is a confession of managerial failure.
Shorter weeks do not liberate workers. They reward the firms whose work was already meaningless, and quietly punish the ones whose work still has to be done.
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03
Culture
Against the cult of the museum blockbuster.
When every institution races to mount the same three-blockbuster-a-year exhibition, the permanent collection slowly becomes the storage room nobody visits.
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04
Politics
The meritocracy is a story we tell the winners.
Defenders of meritocracy keep losing the empirical debate and winning the rhetorical one. The reasons are more interesting than the usual suspects suggest.
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05
Ideas
Every productivity app is a quiet confession of failure.
We do not need another way to organize our tasks. We need fewer tasks — and the courage to admit which ones we are pretending to do.
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06
Media
Why the newsletter has become the last adult room on the internet.
Subscriptions restored attention, but they also restored something subtler: the writer's responsibility to finish a thought before the reader is asked to do something.
The Roster
Four writers, four beats, one argument.
A small, deliberate group of 34 regular contributors. Here are four whose work you may want to follow.
Miriam Halberg
Co-founder · Media & InstitutionsFormer policy analyst turned editor. Writes on how institutions talk to themselves, and why they have stopped listening to anyone else.
Read 41 essays
Devon Quist
Co-founder · Technology & CultureFormer literary critic turned publisher. Writes on what software is doing to the people who use it, and what it has stopped doing for them.
Read 38 essays
Priya Vance
Economics & LabourEx-management consultant turned critic of management. Writes on what work is, what it has become, and what it would take to make it human again.
Read 27 essays
Idris Calloway
Politics & Public PhilosophyA former speechwriter who now writes the opposite of what he used to draft. Specializes in arguments the political class would rather not have.
Read 22 essays
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— The Editors, from the mastheadThe point of this publication is not to be right. The point is to be worth disagreeing with — to argue the case so carefully that a smart reader on the other side has to sharpen their own position before they can answer it.
Cited By
Where the work has been quoted.
Forty-seven citations across the press since launch, in outlets we have admired for longer than we have been writing.
- The Atlantic 9 citations
- Wired 7 citations
- Bloomberg Opinion 6 citations
- The New York Times Opinion 5 citations
- The Guardian Long Reads 4 citations
- Pessimists Archive Featured 2021
- Feedspot Top 50, 2022–24
- Substack Leaderboard № 12 for Culture
Citations counted since the publication's launch in March 2019. Editor's essays syndicated to 19 partner outlets, reaching an additional 1.2 million monthly readers.