Sunday thread—and a new mailbag era

How to submit your question for our new Friday column

As we hinted in Friday’s mailbag, we’re going to shake things up a little bit going forward. Instead of a weekly mailbag, we’ll be publishing a weekly “reader’s choice” column.

One of the things we like best about the mailbag is getting to hear from you, in a mostly constructive manner, what you’d like to see covered at Slow Boring. Over the last few years, you’ve asked some truly insightful questions, some of which have inspired columns beyond just the quick mailbag answers. And in that spirit, we want to make a change that will let us go a little deeper on the best reader-submitted questions. Will this mean fewer questions are answered? Yes. But we believe it’s a quantity versus quality tradeoff that will ultimately lead to better newsletters and better questions.

The new process will have two parts: a Sunday evening thread to submit questions and a Monday evening thread to vote on the three finalists.

The Sunday thread will function, essentially, in the same manner as the old Monday mailboxes: You can submit questions or topics you’d like Slow Boring to cover and engage with the suggestions from other readers that you think are most interesting. Our hope is that, because we’re ultimately only writing on one topic, we’ll get more substantive submissions and fewer jokes and questions asked in bad faith.

The Monday thread will feature a poll that includes our favorite three suggestions for subscribers to vote on over the next 24 hours. Our top-three selection process will not be scientific or transparent, but the winner of that poll — whatever is ahead at 5pm Eastern on Tuesday — will be our Friday topic.

Like the mailbag, this will be available only to paid subscribers.

So, what should we write about this week? Let us know below.