Nothing reaches this page automatically. Editors read widely, discard most of what they read, and publish only the pieces they would hand to a friend. Software helps us find candidates and keep notes; it never makes the decision and it never publishes.

We aim for a small number of strong stories each day rather than a large number of thin ones. When there is little worth your evening, we publish little.

Every story on this site is a short summary written by our editors, followed by a plain link to the original article on the publisher's own site. We do not reproduce full articles, copy paragraphs, or wrap another publication's work in our own page.

The source publication and the original author are named on every story, with the date it was first published. If you want the whole piece — and often you should — the button takes you there.

Each story carries a Freedom Score: our editors' judgment of how much a piece serves a freer, more capable life. It is scored in five parts — Pathway & Practical Value (25), Agency & Capability (20), Attainability (20), Human Flourishing (20), and Evidence & Credibility (15) — and the reasoning is printed alongside the number.

The score is an opinion, clearly labeled as one. It is not a rating of the publication that produced the article, and it is never generated without an editor reviewing and approving it.

We prefer primary reporting, named authors, and outlets with a record of correcting themselves. Claims about health, money, or safety are held to a higher bar: if a piece cannot show its evidence, we pass on it regardless of how good the story reads.

We are not a political publication. We decline stories whose main purpose is partisan advantage, outrage, or fear, and we do not run engagement bait.

We only display an image when we have affirmative permission to do so — a license we hold, an image the publisher has explicitly released, or a properly credited public source. Anything uncertain is marked for review and stays off the page. We do not generate artificial images to stand in for real events.

We take no payment for placement. There are no sponsored slots, no affiliate links, and no advertiser influence over what appears or where it appears. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page and on the story itself, before you read it.

We use software to help search and organize. We do not publish machine-written articles, machine-written summaries that no editor has read and revised, or machine-made images presented as photographs.

If we get something wrong — a misread summary, a wrong attribution, a score based on a mistake — we fix it and say so on the story. If a source publication retracts or substantially corrects a piece we linked to, we update or remove our entry.

To report an error or ask us to review a story, write to the editors through the About page.

No infinite scroll. No autoplay. No interstitial popups. No selling of subscriber information. The Half Moon Letter goes out once a week, signed by the editors, and the unsubscribe link works the first time.