Notable posts
Two ways a post can stand out. It can do far better than its own publication usually does, which finds writing that travelled beyond its regular readers. Or it can draw more engagement than almost anything else in the corpus, which finds what the platform as a whole responded to. The two lists overlap less than you might expect. Posts are linked, never reproduced.
A publication's norm is the mean of its other newsletter and podcast posts dated 2024 or later, from its public archive, leaving the post itself out. Restacked Notes are excluded from the norm. Counts are as of the crawl (late September to early October 2026; posts added in the 2026-10-13 update carry counts from that date), so recent posts have had less time to accumulate them. Posts in publications with fewer than ten other posts have no norm and appear only in the second list.
Each post against its publication's norm
One dot per relevant post with at least one
Posts that beat their publication's norm
Most engagement overall
Reactions, restacks and comments are Substack's public counts. They favour large publications and older posts, which is why the first list exists. Whether a post is relevant, and its codes, are machine-assigned with human spot checks; see Methods.