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Hi Scholar,

According to our platform analytics, we have sent 60 Letters containing a total of 137,500 words in 2025 (make that 141,000 with this Letter). However numbers, metrics and analytics can only tell a part of a story. We decided to take a moment to reflect on what this publication has become over the last 12 months. Yet, we did not write what follows entirely ourselves: it would be impossible to accurately reflect on the journey this publication has been on without acknowledging the input from you, our readers. Every Thursday for the last year, we have thought together. Your words have moved us, inspired us and given us the courage to continue exploring the integrity of thought, the future of scholarship, and the deeper meaning of intellectual work. 

As such, the Letter that follows is a mixture of our own account, interspersed with pieces of correspondence from you. It paints a richer picture than can be captured in numbers. Do read on, it is partly written by you after all. 

(We are sorry that once again we are a few months behind on responding to all of the letters you have written in - the reading and thinking that underpins consistently writing 2,600 words of original work every week tends to take up a significant amount of time. If you are still waiting for a reply, know that it is coming.)

— Written by The Critic and The Tatler

2025 has been the second full year of The Scholarly Letter and perhaps the most developmental one so far. When we initially started writing this publication, we hardly knew what, why, and who we were writing for. As actors in the world of scholarship – The Critic as a doctoral candidate and The Tatler as a scientific publisher – all we knew was that we wanted to write about scholarship itself. This world interested us. It always had. Otherwise we would hardly have found ourselves in it.

We were both avid writers and readers but we were also finding the kind of writing we had to do for our day jobs – as a PhD candidate and a publisher – increasingly tiring and monotonous. At the same time, we were also in the habit of writing letters to each other, in the form of emails, about things we read and experienced in our day-to-day work. So, at the beginning of 2024, we decided – after much debate and disagreement – to extend these Letter-emails to a wider list of people. Thus arrived the idea of a newsletter-publication.

But as soon as we extended the scope of our recipients – that is, it was no longer for just ‘our eyes’ but rather an external ‘audience’ – we stuttered and stammered. We began to think of what ‘the audience’ would want to see and find useful. This perceived audience-gaze muffled our voices, and with it, it distorted our writing into a utility-based, how-to publication.

The beginning of our publication coincided with the mass proliferation of AI tools for research. This not only ushered in a new era of productivity culture in research more broadly, but also captured our writerly imaginations of what we thought people wanted to read about. Safe to say, there were AI tools knocking at our door, offering to pay us a fixed fee for every pair of eyeballs that saw their ad at the top of our Letter. And in the interest of honesty, we shall admit that in 2024 we agreed to run ads with some of them and were sorely tempted to run more. However, words cannot express the sense of disappointment that we felt seeing these ads in our precious publication. Introducing marketing gimmicks and cheap, sensationalist copy, when what we really wanted to do was write about the world of scholarship – as we saw it, experienced it, and wanted to reimagine it – was unbearable.

All of this, however, changed after a single, simple, surprisingly freeing realisation towards the end of 2024.