Building a Philosophy Weekly Template That Actually Works
I spent about three weeks trying to get a weekly philosophy round-up to feel coherent instead of like a list of random article links someone pasted together. The result was a Template For Philosophy Weekly that I've refined enough to use consistently, and it does what it needs to without turning into a chore every Sunday evening. The template divides into six sections. First is an editorial note, which is where you put two or three sentences about what you found interesting this cycle. Second is "New Papers," which you format with the author, title, journal or arXiv link, and a one-sentence summary of the actual argument. Third is "Books and Monographs," same treatment but with slightly more room since book-length arguments tend to resist single-sentence distillation. Fourth is "Podcasts and Interviews," fifth is "Events and Calls for Papers," and sixth is a brief roundup of long-form essays or blog posts that don't fit the academic paper category but still matter. The format for each entry is: Author. Title. Source. One-sentence takeaway. That's it. Everything else gets filtered out. People fill in metadata like DOI numbers and formatting citations in Chicago style, and that slows everything down until the newsletter never gets published. Skip the citations. Link to the paper directly. If someone wants the full reference, they'll click through.
How It Actually Feels in Practice
Here's the thing nobody tells you about weekly philosophy newsletters: the curation problem is worse than you think. You might spend forty-five minutes scrolling through PhilPapers, the London Review of Books, recent issues of Journal of Philosophy and Nous, and whatever shows up on r/philosophy, and end up with eight entries that are either too technical for your audience or too light to matter. This happened to me in week four. I had three pieces on formal semantics, two on ancient philosophy, and a third on bioethics. It read like a shopping cart someone hadn't organized. The workaround was simple but I didn't think of it for another week. Instead of treating the template as a collection bucket, I started picking a thread each week. Something a single topic or question could tie everything together. One week it was AI and moral status. Another week it was philosophy of perception. The entries still covered different subfields, but the framing thread made it feel intentional instead of accidental. The template didn't change. My approach to selecting content did.
Technical Setup
I build the template in Markdown, export to HTML, and push it through Substack. The initial setup took about ninety minutes. After that, a well-practiced weekly run-through takes roughly twenty to thirty minutes. The bottleneck is always the same: finding enough material that passes your quality threshold. If you're pulling from PhilPapers alerts set to your subfield, you save maybe fifteen minutes per week compared to doing manual searches. Not much, but consistent. If you use Google Scholar alerts, they arrive as raw text. I wrote a small script that parses the output and formats each result into the template structure automatically. It handles author names, titles, and source links. You still have to write the one-sentence takeaway for each entry by hand. Nothing automates that part unless you want to run them through an LLM, which works okay for neutral papers but produces predictable fluff when the work is controversial or heavily argued.
Get the Full Details
Counter-Intuitive Detail Most People Miss
Beginners tend to prioritize comprehensiveness. They want to cover every paper that came out in analytic philosophy that week. This is a bad instinct. A weekly philosophy newsletter with twelve entries reads heavier and less useful than one with five or six. Your audience has a attention budget. Most subscribers will skim. If you give them too many options, the signal degrades across the board. Six well-considered entries beats twelve mediocre ones. Period. Another thing: the editorial note matters more than you'd expect. It's the only section people actually read start to finish. Everything else is a link list. If you make that opening section generic, people treat the whole thing as disposable. Write something specific. Mention a disagreement you noticed between two papers. Reference a question that came up in comments last week. Make it feel like a person wrote it, because that's the only reason anyone will keep reading after month two.
Limitations
This template doesn't handle non-English work well. If you want to include translations or continental philosophy published in French or German, the one-sentence summary format collapses under its own weight. You'll need a separate section with more space, or you need to accept that those papers won't get the coverage they deserve. I dropped continental work for six months because I couldn't make the format work, and the newsletter felt narrower as a result. That's a real tradeoff. The format also struggles with book reviews. A book deserves more than a sentence. The template has a books section, but entries there tend to be thin. I solved this by switching to a monthly deep-dive review within the same newsletter, leaving the weekly template for shorter form content. That adds a scheduling complexity but keeps the quality honest. If your goal is a comprehensive index of everything published, use PhilPapers or the PhilArchive feed instead. This template is built for curation, not coverage. Those are different things, and conflating them is why most philosophy newsletters die within a few months.
You can adapt this Template For Philosophy Weekly to any platform that accepts basic HTML. Substack, Beehiiv, or a simple WordPress page all work. The structure is what matters, not the delivery method.
