One of my favorite things about Tangle is our audience.

During the first few years of writing this newsletter, it became apparent to me that our readers were a resource. They had such different life experiences, knowledge, and insights that we could tap into. From the start, I’ve made a habit of regularly publishing reader feedback, dedicating newsletters to criticism, or just engaging in lengthy email exchanges with readers who would push back on my writing and then teach me about their understandings of the world or experiences they had. 

But over time, I wanted to formalize the relationship a bit, and we came up with the idea of publishing reader essays. These are stories written by our readers, edited by the Tangle team, and published as part of our members-only Sunday newsletter (which also includes comics, recaps, recommendations, reader feedback, and other assorted goods from the internet). We just have one requirement: To be considered for publication, the essay must be grounded in a personal experience.

We’ve built the Tangle collection of reader essays slowly, one reader essay a week. But as The Sunday approaches its third birthday, they’ve added up. We now have a robust archive of reader writing, spanning all manner of stories and topics. And over the years, we’ve published a lot of great essays. We realized recently that we probably haven’t given all these essays the exposure they deserve (since we rarely promote them outside the Sunday newsletter), so today we decided to do that. Our editorial team wrestled over our 10 favorite essays, put the list together, offered some brief descriptions, and linked out to them for your reading pleasure.

I hope you enjoy and — of course — if you want to contribute a reader essay to our Sunday edition, please know that you can always pitch a piece by filling out this form. 

Note: If you are already a paid member, you’ll need to be logged into the website to read the essays in full. If you are not yet a paid member, you’ll need to subscribe to unlock them.

The essays.

Going dumb was the smartest thing I’ve done.

If you wanted to go “dumb,” could you? Kansas Citian Cristin Marker confronted that question in 2023 after noticing that she couldn’t peel herself away from her phone, even on vacation to a place with minimal cell service. Her subsequent decision to move from a smartphone to a “dumb” one brought several challenges, but also some valuable life lessons and an improved relationship with technology. She writes about the key takeaways she learned and advises how to navigate the challenges of going dumb. 

All the pretty hot dogs.

Hot Dog Hysteria at Centennial Field in Burlington, Vermont, may be just one of a number of gimmicky ballpark promotions in America; but it’s the gimmicky promotion for Carl Crawford’s local team, the Vermont Lake Monsters, and he argues that 25-cent dog days are special. Carl peppers in some local baseball lore and throws salt on other cheap giveaway days in this well seasoned summer classic about baseball, hot dogs, and the beauty of community spaces.

Witness.

Alyson Dutch lost her home in the Palisades Fire at the start of 2025. While processing the devastation, she also witnessed firsthand the efforts of rescue and recovery workers tasked with the grueling work of clearing the disaster area. Here, she offers an ode to civil services and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers crew that helped her begin her personal rebuilding process. 

From the border of identity, politics, and medicine. 

In this seminal Tangle reader essay, a physician, writing anonymously, discusses the challenging topic of gender dysphoria and transgender care, detailing how both sides of the political spectrum sidestep scientific findings when debating the issue. The piece is grounded in the author’s own complicated identity, which subverts expectations in ways that will surprise you.

Terrorphobia.

What do Orb-weaver spiders and the Transportation Security Administration have in common? You’ll have to read software engineer John Randolph’s essay to find out. His piece makes the case for a bold public policy change that might catch you off guard at first, but it gradually takes hold as John weaves his argumentative web. 

Protests and purity tests at Pomona.

The 2023 and 2024 academic years were periods of upheaval, as students on campuses across the United States protested the war in Gaza, sometimes taking extreme measures to express their displeasure with their school’s response. At Pomona College in Southern California, hundreds of student protesters took over one of the school’s main academic buildings on the first anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attacks, vandalizing the building and keeping at least one professor from accessing their office. Kendall White, a sophomore student-journalist, was in the building chronicling the incident. What she couldn’t know then was that her reporting would kick off a campus controversy of its own. 

An American abroad, and in Japan — 50 years.

Writer and Tangle reader Karen Hill Anton was born in New York — but for the past 50 years, she’s lived in rural Japan with her husband and children. Karen chronicles her life abroad in anecdotal snippets, from her husband’s time in a strict dojo, to the fox that nibbled on a pie on her windowsill, to John Denver’s visit to her isolated farmhouse. Along the way, she observes how Japan went from being a mysterious but beautiful country to becoming her home.

Seattle Public Schools is making a huge mistake.

In 2023, the Seattle Public Schools system announced it was making a “change” to its advanced learning programs — in reality, it was doing away with them completely. An anonymous middle school teacher wrote in to criticize the district’s decision, saying it was taking the easy way out of solving an equity concern. Rather than help the most struggling students rise up, she argued the district was opting instead to try to create equitable outcomes by removing options for its highest achievers. 

The forgotten unforgotten.

When Amy Liu Longacre learned that her unborn child had anencephaly, a universally fatal condition, she faced an excruciating choice: abort the baby, the medical recommendation, or carry her child to term, at which point it would die within a few days. Amy, now a mother of three, wrestled with that choice, her longstanding pro-life convictions, and her faith. The piece offers up many questions to grapple with, while giving readers a look into one couple’s harrowing — and often, beautiful — experience expecting their first child.

I am free, you are wage-slaves.

In this illustrated essay, award-winning comic artist Veronica Post shares her response to a Friday edition we published in December 2025 by guest author A.M. Hickman, who recounted his years as a homeless “drifter.” Post’s piece reflects on her own time as a drifter, blending humor, introspection, and philosophy to scrutinize Hickman’s ideas. It’s one of the most distinctive pieces we’ve ever published.

Finally, an update.

If this list excluded your personal favorite reader essay, we hope you’ll share that piece in the comments. And once you’re in the comments section, you may notice some changes.

After a lot of demand from our readers, and after a lot of work with (and mostly by) our publication platform, Ghost, we’re thrilled to announce several new commenting features! Comment replies now nest more easily, helping you keep track of conversations. You can also now downvote comments that you think violate our commenting guidelines.