Announcing Liberal Currents Live and Headwaters

This week we will be launching a new live show, Liberal Currents Live. It will stream every Thursday at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time for roughly 90 minutes. It will be available to the public. However, those who are active in our Discord server—meaning Community Subscribers and above who have redeemed their invitations—will have their questions prioritized.

In April of last year, we launched The Editors’ Chat. We had only recently started doing podcasts at all; Neon Liberalism started in November of 2024, and Half the Answer began the following March. We wanted to do more for our subscribers, so The Editors’ Chat was conceived as a subscriber-only podcast, one that included something we’d never done before: a livestream, where we took questions from subscribers.

Sixteen episodes later we’ve gained a great deal more experience in the world of video and audio. We’ve been refining our approach overall as we go, especially after our successful fundraiser.

One refinement we will be making is to sunset The Editors’ Chat, which occurred monthly and only for a select audience, and instead move more fully into streaming with Liberal Currents Live. 

At the beginning of the year we laid out a basic plan for how we would use people’s donations to build the publication. We promised to produce The Reconstruction Papers in print, and we did. We promised to “do a lot more video in 2026 in general.” Liberal Currents Live is going to be an important addition to that project. But we have also done a great deal more, putting out a lot of content on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok every week, steadily growing our reach on those platforms.

We also discussed a particular cadence for articles and essays, and that frankly fell apart upon contact with reality. We do at minimum four a week but we often do more, sometimes reaching every day of the week, sometimes doubling up on the same days. There’s a variety of reasons for that, which I will not bore you with. I attempted to manage the burden on people’s inboxes by having a separate “extra writing” newsletter one could unsubscribe from, but that division began to feel rather arbitrary.

So instead, if you want to minimize the number of emails you receive from us, you can now subscribe to Headwaters, a summary of our week. You’ll get a roundup of everything we published, from articles and essays, to podcast episodes and editor’s notes, as well as a spotlight on some of the videos we put out and a handful of links from other publications.

If you wish to take advantage of this, click here to go to your account page. Click “Manage” in the emails section and either pick which specific emails you do not wish to get, or unsubscribe from all and then resubscribe to Weekly Roundup.

We will continue to make adjustments as we learn from the various things we have tried, as we hear back from our own community (about, for example, getting too many emails), and as new opportunities arise.

To our readers, subscribers, and donors: thank you for making all of this possible. I hope you find both of these additions valuable. We will keep striving to improve.