An essential part of Tangle is engaging with readers — through live events, email exchanges, and now in social channels like Reddit and our new texting platform, Subtext. One of the things we’ve done since the beginning is answer a reader question in our main newsletter. Over time, we’ve gotten more questions than we can answer — but many of the questions that haven’t made it into the daily newsletter or podcast are still worth answering. 

So every now and then, we devote a members-only Friday edition to getting to our backlog of reader questions. A lot of these allow us to get into more detail and cover ground we might not cover in the daily newsletter, so we love the opportunity to dig in and go deep. Today, the entire Tangle editorial team is answering questions on everything from whether we’ve started to lean more left, to how we spot AI-produced content, to what has actually happened to DOGE. It’s a wide-ranging, jam-packed, fun edition. Enjoy!

Q: As a politically divided household, we gladly joined Tangle and encouraged other couples like ourselves to join. My spouse and others in our group are no longer reading “our take” as they feel your organization has become significantly more left-leaning in this evaluation section. When we started, that was not as evident. Why are you becoming so much more left-leaning in your “our take” comments? I assume your right-leaning readership has dwindled as a result. Has it? 

Those of us who love our right-leaning spouses have connected and encouraged the use of Tangle but we are bummed that our spouses feel their side is no longer considered fairly and supported. I know that no organization can meet all needs but your offering was so exciting, and a hope for divided couples at one point in time. Why can’t “our take” be two responses — one more left-leaning and one more right-leaning...? Maybe never but wouldn’t it be amazing if we found some issues that we actually could not tell the difference?

— Jacques from Edina, MN

Senior Editor Will Kaback: We take this feedback very seriously; in fact, it’s probably the issue we discuss most frequently as a staff. Not specifically that we’ve swung to the left, but comments from readers on both sides of the political spectrum that we’ve strayed from our mission and become more overtly biased than they remember. 

We haven’t seen evidence of a significant loss of conservative and independent readers, but a qualitative assessment of audience members’ reasons for unsubscribing shows a tilt towards the complaint that we lean left. A more powerful trend is that we have been adding a disproportionate number of left-leaning readers as we’ve grown. As we’ve written about before, we attribute this in large part to our 2024 feature in This American Life, which attracts more of a left-leaning audience. 

We probably are accused of left-leaning bias because our editorials often take a critical stance on President Trump’s actions. These criticisms are often much more moderate than those you’d find in outlets like MS NOW or The Atlantic, but they’re criticisms nonetheless. One change we’ve implemented with this in mind — and to highlight the ideological diversity within our staff — is the addition of staff dissents, which allow us to model constructive disagreement and offer more than one perspective in the “My take” section. As we wrote in March, we’ll continue leaning into this new feature. 

With that said, I would push back on a few suggestions in your question. First, the context of the political moment definitely matters — and criticism isn’t the same as ideology. Criticisms of the president don’t inherently come from a left or liberal point of view. As we show almost daily in “What the right is saying,” plenty of conservative commentators take issue with a variety of Trump’s policies. Separately, when President Biden was in office, we were often accused of being “too right” because, like most good political writers, we were taking a critical eye to the people in power. Now the reverse is true with a Republican in office. At the risk of speaking for him, I think our Executive Editor Isaac Saul (who still writes the “My take” section more frequently than any writer on staff) has been feeling increasingly frustrated with President Trump, so that feeling might be impacting your impression of Tangle as a whole. 

Second, the notion that Tangle has moved left is not backed up by independent media-bias evaluators. AdFontes still rates us as “middle,” with high marks for reliable analysis; AllSides rates us as “center”; and Media Bias/Fact Check rates us as “least biased.” In fact, in AllSides’s most recent review of our content in July 2025, they shifted us slightly to the right. These evaluations aren’t the be-all and end-all, but I think they offer a buffer against the idea that we’ve become “significantly more left leaning.” 

Third, I’d encourage you (and all readers) not to think of the “My take” as the final word on a story. Remember: We offer three arguments each from the left and right before our own, and our perspective is meant to be just one of seven for you to consider. While it is the longest section of the newsletter, Tangle’s take is intended to be a conversation starter and, hopefully, a model of how to consider complex topics in an intellectually curious manner. That’s why we end every “My take” with a note of encouragement to write in with criticism, feedback, and competing ideas if you disagree. 

We’ve carved out the “My take” section as a space to be completely transparent about how that day’s writer is feeling and thinking about the issues we cover, and we wouldn’t soften or alter our analysis in the name of balance or nonpartisanship. So while we take this feedback seriously — and have developed some creative solutions to address it, like the staff dissent — our priority is still sharing our honest opinions.

Q: Your article on Friday talks about how politics is on track to become less outwardly volatile and toxic, and more kind and honest. Also, as hard as it is to imagine, we will have a post-Trump era where things have (hopefully) calmed down quite a bit. 

If/when this comes to pass, are you concerned that Tangle, thriving under the current political turbulence and tension, will have a subscriber and viewership plateau or slump as the political atmosphere shifts toward calm stability and decency?

— D. A. K. from Providence, RI

Executive Editor Isaac Saul: I don’t worry about it, no. And I’ll tell you why. 

First, I have no idea how that hypothetical future world would impact us. Right now, we lose a lot of readers because the world is so divided that it’s hard for a mission like ours to reach people who believe people who disagree with them are their literal enemies. The two top reasons readers unsubscribe every day are because 1) they are offended by something we wrote, or 2) they are fatigued by the news. I could see a world where a more decent, less partisan era of politics helps improve those problems, not worsen them. A decency wave in politics could be good for Tangle’s bottom line — maybe it would mean more people participating in the dialogue and more people reading Tangle. 

Second, I generally operate under the view that Tangle’s business model will survive all manner of political trends. The largest threats to us are technological (like AI summarizing your entire inbox), not political. We have a good product that people use and learn from; we’re affordable, we’re unique, and we’re adding value to people’s lives. With that as our formula, I think a less partisan, more decent political takeover wouldn’t be the kind of thing that hurt us — even if it did reduce some engagement and attention toward national politics. 

Q: After reading this line of yours, “One of the obvious hallmarks of AI-generated text is its formulaic nature. It’s not X, it’s Y. And it isn’t just A, it’s B,” I started noticing that formula on multiple Substack articles by different authors.

Then, the other hallmarks of LLM writing started appearing that I can’t quite put my finger on. When you suspect an article is written by an LLM, what are the telltale signs you look for?

— David from Milwaukee, WI