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I initially wrote this piece before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump last weekend. It was published the morning that happened, just before it happened, but made available at the time only to paid subscribers, because I have recently adopted a gimmick whereby paid subscribers get all my articles a
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Over the past few years Taylor Swift has risen to become, apparently, the most influential celebrity in the world, and this is a great benchmark for me to use to finally admit that I am old, because Taylor Swift marks the first time in my life that the most influential
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I like Substack a lot. I don’t know what I’d be doing as a writer during the sunset of social media if I hadn’t found the last platform on the internet that links writers up with each other and with potential audiences. The true community potential of
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As though we needed some more stupid in the AI discourse, Elon Musk recently resurrected the old Woke AI fearmongering hypothetical gambit: He asked one of the leading chatbots, Google’s Gemini, whether it would be okay to misgender Caitlyn Jenner if doing so was the only way to stop
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It kind of got lost in the news cycle but it was recently, quietly, confirmed that the Dinesh D’Souza documentary 2000 Mules, which outlined the case for the 2020 political election having been rigged by the Democratic party to oust Trump, was completely fabricated. D’Souza just made that
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I had a different piece all lined up for this week but then I saw something annoying on social media that made me throw the draft on the backburner and settle into a nice cleansing rant. This works out fine anyway because the council has decided that the patch of
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You would have seen that bizarre “pronatalist” couple making social media rounds by now. If you haven’t—Malcolm and Simone Collins were profiled in a Guardian article about the so-called pronatalist movement, whose adherents are on a mission to have as many children as possible to save western civilization
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As someone who spent way too much of my precious time following Gamergate, the front of the hobbyist culture war that was fought against video game developers exactly ten years ago, I was kind of amused to stumble onto this little interaction the other day. It serves as a neat
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Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or met a Bill Maher fan. I’ve seen people agree with him about something, occasionally. Usually some other reactionary nitwit boomer like Elon Musk high-fiving him about how colleges and Pixar movies are turning all the kids trans. But he
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Another conservative hero donned his cape this week. At the University of Mississippi, which the media insists on referring to exclusively as “Ole Miss,” a black woman who was speaking as part of a planned protest event against the Gaza conflict was mobbed by frat boys who were way too
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I’ll be honest with you—when I started this thing, I thought this was going to be a funny newsletter. I’m not an expert on comedy but I did just spend the best part of a decade faking being funny and writing for a comedy website without getting
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Being an Australian, it’s probably notable that I hardly talk about Australia very much at all and go on instead about Elon Musk and cultural and political trends coming out of America. The fact is that Australian politics kind of bores me for the most part. I like that