EI not AI

The Engelsberg Ideas app is now available to download. Entirely free to read with no ads, it features many of the world’s brightest minds.

Marco Ricci and Sebastiano Ricci’s ‘Landscape with Classical Ruins and Figures’. Credit: Jimlop collection

Can I let you into a secret? I’m increasingly unconvinced by Substack as a format. Perhaps it is odd for someone who writes here on Substack to acknowledge the shortcomings of this publishing platform, but there you go.

There is already way too much (dread word) “content” on Substack and it is difficult to make sense of it all and get it into some kind of order that is readable and understandable. There are basic problems of publishing comprehension. What is a Substack “note” for as opposed to a longer post? Is a “note” supposed to imitate social media? What is the point of writing at all if everyone has a Substack and half of it is filled with AI-inspired slop? What is the difference between following on Substack and subscribing? I don’t know the answers to those questions and I have been in the media one way and another for something approaching forty years. What the general reader is supposed to make of it I don’t know.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many great writers on here, but at a time when technology is challenging and undermining the very idea of writing and reading, those absolutely essential civilisational activities, I’m unconvinced that immersion in the swirling soup of Substack is going to help us much.

You really can’t beat a proper publication, it turns out.

And in that spirit (I always have written intros, or drop intros in old newspaper parlance, that are too long) I will get to the point.

Very much not on Substack is Engelsberg Ideas, the publication my team in London helps produce for the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit. EI launched five years ago and features writing by many of the world’s brightest minds on history, ideas, geopolitics and culture.

This week we launched the Engelsberg Ideas app.

It is free to read, providing access to excellence. It is an oasis of calm in a crazy world.

You can download it here on the App Store and here for Android.

There is no catch. The app is free to download and it carries no adverts, thanks to the support of its publisher, the Foundation I mentioned, which is based in Stockholm.

The range and quality of the writing - over essays, historical portraits, and shorter notebooks - is, without sounding boastful, astonishing.

This week, among the pieces we chose to launch the EI app is a magnificent new essay by one of Britain’s greatest historians, Sir Antony Beevor, dissecting Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1940s classic The Last Days of Hitler.

You can read it here, and then download the app and read much more like it on Engelsberg Ideas.