October saw party conference season finish in the UK, the death of Colin Powell, legal conflict between Poland and the EU, and the murder of a sitting British MP.

But elsewhere — especially in the expanding digital ecosystem of Substack — writers and journalists less tethered to the news cycle have been following their own interests, and producing superb work. Over the course of the month, UnHerd staff collected some of the best new writing.

1. Anthony Fauci Has Been Abusing Animals for 40 Years

Journalist and filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse investigated Dr Anthony Fauci and The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s long history of experimenting on animals. Estimates of the number of animals experimented on each year in the United States range from the tens of millions, to over a 100 million, most of them paid for with tax revenues. The NIH, run by Fauci since 1984, spends more than $40 billion a year on medical experiments.

Does cancellation work? Author Freddie deBoer, who has some experience of being hounded, suggests that those who think it doesn’t have it all wrong:

2. First Comes Love. Then Comes Sterilization

Over at Bari Weiss’ Common Sense, Suzie Weiss wrote about the young women in America who never want to have children. The essay is full of extraordinary stories of women like Isabel, 28, an anti-natalist who lives in southwestern Texas and has just been approved for a laparoscopic bilateral salpingectomy — the removal of her fallopian tubes.

3. Walking America: Buffalo

Chris Arnade walked through Buffalo, and found an American city beginning a tentative recovery from deindustrialisation. N.S. Lyons wrote about the strange return of gnosticism. Ian Leslie wondered why we instinctively avoid thinking about sex and gender.

4. Pessimism as a spur to action

James Meadway wrote about the era of ‘cheap things’ coming to an end. Why has the price of coffee, milk, sugar, wheat, oats and orange juice shot up 63% since 2019? Extreme weather conditions. Economists and governments, Meadway argues, are being far too optimistic about the future.

5. Our Anger Problem Is Making Me Angry

How did America become so angry? Author Matt Labash charted the emotional temperature of the United States by writing about his father. Stoic, cool, and ex-military, Labash’s dad never seemed upset or surprised by anything:

His father wasn’t an outlier. “Roughly half a decade or so ago, I started noticing that everyone began to believe that their political opinions were the most interesting things about them.” Of course the truth, as Labash sadly notes, is “usually exactly the opposite.”