Slow Variables

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Three ways to get new editions: an email the morning after each one is published, the feed, or the audio edition read aloud. All of them are yours to leave without asking anyone.

By email

The next edition, by email // one email per edition · one-click unsubscribe · nothing tracked

What's kept: your address, the date you confirmed, and nothing else — not your name, not your IP once you've confirmed, not whether you open the emails. There is no tracking pixel and no click tracking. The list is never shared, sold or lent. Unsubscribe is one click and deletes the address rather than flagging it. Unconfirmed addresses are removed after three days.

Each email is the edition in brief — the title, the argument’s opening, the week’s fast variables — with a link to the rest. Nothing else is ever sent to the list: no announcements, no “we miss you,” no surveys.

For a long time this page said there would never be a mailing list, because a list is a database and databases leak. That was the honest position and the reader-hostile one. The compromise is above: the smallest possible list, held by the publication rather than a third party, with the exits unlocked.

By feed

Everything published here appears in full — essay, fast variables, long memory, ledger — in one feed, and nobody, including us, knows who reads it:

https://slowvariables.net/feed.xml

Paste that address into any feed reader. Good ones: NetNewsWire (Mac and iPhone, free, open source), Feeder (Android, free), Feedbin or Inoreader (web), Miniflux (if you run your own). If you’d rather have the feed as email without giving us your address, Feedrabbit and Blogtrottr turn any feed into email, and you hold the relationship with them.

By ear

Each edition is also read aloud — the essay, start to finish, about ten minutes — and published the day after the text. The voice is synthetic; the words are the writer’s, and the colophon says so plainly. Play it on the edition page, or subscribe in any podcast app:

https://slowvariables.net/podcast.xml

The file is served from this domain, so no podcast host counts you. The same readings are on YouTube, with chapters, and will be listed on Spotify and Apple Podcasts once their directories catch up with the feed.

Other channels

  • Plain text. Every edition also exists as a .txt file — append index.txt to any edition address. Nothing to render, nothing to track.
  • Gemtext. Each edition is also published as .gmi for the Gemini protocol; the capsule mirror is listed on the colophon when it is live.
  • Replies. Each edition has a replies section, read by a person before anything appears. Or write to the address in the footer.

Cadence

Roughly one edition a week. Both the feed and the inbox are quiet in between; that is the point.