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In 1948 George Orwell, Eric Arthur Blair, wrote a political satire about a dystopian future, and to show that it was the future he swapped the last two digits of the current year around. It’s a really good book. It’s the best book I’ve ever wanted to
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As the Republican primaries continue to go pretty much exactly as anyone who has been paying attention suspected they would, America (and, kicking and screaming along with the cultural hegemony, the rest of the western world) has started preparing for the inevitable Biden/Trump rematch. This time, Biden is fighting
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Most countries have some sort of national day—one day on the calendar when it’s customary to just celebrate the fact that a particular piece of dirt has a particular name. Maybe it’s the day some treaty was signed, or some battle won. Often it’s an excuse
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Back in the mid 2000s the comedy writer and my former boss Jason Pargin, then writing under the pseudonym David Wong, wrote one of the essays he wound up being best known for—because we are, all of us, cursed to have our early work remain our most notable forever.
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Elon Musk has always been a little off about race. But that comes with the package of being an “anti-woke” crusader. Just because he has the brain and social acumen of a 17 year old gamer doesn’t necessarily mean he burns crosses on the weekend. However, Musk being funny
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“Free speech” is the hot topic for modern social media. It has been for a while but never with so much emphasis and fury as since Elon Musk’s hostile acquisition of Twitter to force it to stop moderating content. Substack has similarly come out to announce that they will
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I still don’t understand an awful lot about crypto. This is starting to become difficult to admit, because I’m beginning to feel like my late grandmother, God rest her soul, who could not figure out how the TV remote control worked and was eventually left completely lost when
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I’m only half kidding. Maybe not even half. Ten years ago I wrote and self-published a book about the etymology of conspiracy theories and related culture. You can still buy it, if you like. There’s three reviews and only one of them says it’s shit. Back then,
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Recently Substack, the platform that hosts my newsletter, was in the news again for, unfortunately, the same reason it’s usually in the news: The Nazi problem. More specifically, it hosts, and consequently profits from, an alarmingly high number of outright (or should I say altright, womp womp) white supremacists,
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The most important rule of newsletters – make sure your readers know what to expect, every time. Be consistent. Don’t go off doing something completely left field and different. You will alienate readers and confuse your subscribers. – every newsletter advice guide I'm going to the supermarket to buy
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Here’s the most important thing you need to know about any geopolitical or internal business conflict, anywhere in the world: Absolutely nobody involved has any incentive whatsoever to tell you the truth about what’s going on. Zero. That’s the quick answer to why your guys say everything—
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I still remember the magic of Christmas Day as a child—waking up to a glittering tree towering over piles of colourful boxes. The tree was plastic and it got shit everywhere, the fronds broke off and stuck in the carpet, the cheap glittery baubles rubbed off on everything, but