Stratechery, Import AI, Quanta and 47 more, each checked for a recent issue before it made the list. Who it suits, what it costs, how often.
Most "best newsletters" lists are copied from other lists. That is why half the entries you find are dead: a newsletter can sit online for three years with a working homepage, a subscribe button and no issue since 2024. So this list was built the boring way. I opened every candidate, found its archive, and read the date on the latest issue. If there was no issue in the last three months, it did not make the fifty, no matter how famous the author.
This replaces the 35-newsletter list I published in 2023. Of those 35, three are confirmed dead or dormant and only 8 earned a place here. That attrition rate is the whole argument for redoing the exercise rather than adding a "2026" to the old title.