S Peter Davis

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Civil War MAGA: Why They're Fighting

Well, the most predictable thing ever has begun happening—the self-driven implosion of the Trump administration. Everyone knew it, I knew it, the only question was how many months it would be into Trump’s second term before the cracks started showing.  The answer, beating everyone’s most pessimistic estimates,

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Real Time True Crime: The Unsatisfying and Often Damaging Outcomes of Internet Sleuthing

Within an hour of Luigi Mangione’s name being released, the whole world was scouring his biography. What people found didn’t make the kind of sense they thought it would.  A wealthy heir to an Italian-American real estate fortune, Mangione looked up to figures as diverse as Sam Harris,

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Jester's Privilege: A 2024 Year in Review

As the sun completes another orbit around the Earth in this upside down and backward reality I find myself reaching a milestone in writing this column, or newsletter, or whatever you want to call it. For a full calendar year I’ve managed to crank out an entire essay every

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Being a Writer Means Learning to Survive Platform Collapse

Late December is the time of year, I think, when people have the least interest in reading newsletters and I have the least time to write them, so let’s see out the year on a more personal note than usual.  I’ve gained a lot of subscribers this year

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Meet America's Terrifying Line of Defense Against the Next Pandemic

Hard as it may be t believe, the most frightening thing about Trump’s second term isn’t Donald Trump. Shit, I don’t even know if he cracks the top five most frightening things. If history is going to repeat itself in the next four years then the sequel

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The Hard Problem of Social Media: Run Rabbit Run

Well hello again, December. This is the one year anniversary of the most popular thing I’ve ever written on the Substack platform and it was about how that platform is going to be in trouble if it didn’t figure out what it wanted to be: Now we’re

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Fire Sale at the End of History

America may not have come to terms with it yet, but you’ve just witnessed the most spectacular and consequential episode of Mythbusters in history, and Adam and Jamie weren’t even there to guide us through it. To explain: One of the most important things that the United States

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Meet the Real Elites

The pains of this election come in waves like the plagues of Egypt. After the initial shock and horror died down, next comes the insufferable smugness of the pro-Trump independent journalists. If you spend any time on social media platforms amidst the protruding skeletal frame of legacy media’s beached

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Relax - America Will Probably Just Collapse Now

Well, not “relax,” but you’ll see what I mean.  So America just overwhelmingly voted for a guy who admires Hitler. That’s not great! When Hitler, the actual one, was voted into Germany’s government he neither had a history of praising Hitler (maybe technically) nor got anywhere near

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The Silicon Valley Insurrection: Take Back the Internet

First of all, some news: This column and newsletter are now also being mirrored on Ghost, a rival service to Substack. Many Substack users will remember Ghost as one of the major alternatives that several big-name writers such as Ed Zitron and Platformer moved to earlier in the year out

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Well, Here We Are Again, Yanks: A Foreigner's Perspective on What You're About to Do

All right, America, here we are again. I guess we’re fucking doing this. It’s October 2016 again and it’s back to coin-flip odds between sanity and madness. I often find myself hoping that my talking about American politics so much doesn’t count as foreign election interference

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The Betrayal of Carl Sagan and the Rebirth of Cecil Rhodes

“To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.” — Cecil Rhodes, from his last