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It’s kind of funny how the trajectory of the internet wound up following the plot of the Mad Max movies in an analogy that’s only a little bit silly. Those movies are often used as a reference for a lawless post-apocalyptic anarchy, but the story only started off
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Among the increasingly unhinged (decreasingly hinged?) antics of our friend Elon Musk lately, one recent debacle stood out from the rest: The curious and absurd case of Adrian Dittmann. For those with the good sense to have no idea what I’m talking about, for months the surprisingly robust community
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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