Rob Reiner’s final film was a sequel to his very first film. This, obviously, was not planned. It’s a fact that will be remarked upon in history, but Reiner didn’t have the ability to foresee and plan for the end of his own career in the same
Yoel Roth, the former head of Trust and Safety at a now very dead website that used to be called Twitter, was recently made aware of something disturbing. He’d been quoted in a recently published, bestselling book, without his knowledge. This in itself isn’t a problem—if you’
Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that we’re now more than a quarter of the way through the 21st century? That it’s now actually plausible that some of you reading this will see the 22nd century? One thing I’ve been doing this year is
Here’s a banger of a tweet from Christopher Rufo, one of the aspiring Grima Wormtongues of the emerging American dictatorial theocracy: Golly gee, the Right has begun leaning into conspiracy theories, has it? Nobody could have predicted that, it’s completely unprecedented. Rufo might easily be the most bad-faith
Rob Reiner’s final film was a sequel to his very first film. This, obviously, was not planned. It’s a fact that will be remarked upon in history, but Reiner didn’t have the ability to foresee and plan for the end of his own career in the same
I can’t help but think, whenever Pete Hegseth speaks, that he is imitating somebody he saw in a movie. Of course, this isn’t surprising. This is the Ratings Administration, staffed full of television personalities and social media influencers, whose whole thing is using modern persuasion methods to get
Here’s a banger of a tweet from Christopher Rufo, one of the aspiring Grima Wormtongues of the emerging American dictatorial theocracy: Golly gee, the Right has begun leaning into conspiracy theories, has it? Nobody could have predicted that, it’s completely unprecedented. Rufo might easily be the most bad-faith
Why would Andrew Tate tweet something like this? Tate is mostly—almost exclusively—known for his misogyny. But the mistake that people make, to the extent that they can stomach knowing anything about him at all, is identifying him as some sort of pickup artist or sex guru, an antidote
I can’t help but think, whenever Pete Hegseth speaks, that he is imitating somebody he saw in a movie. Of course, this isn’t surprising. This is the Ratings Administration, staffed full of television personalities and social media influencers, whose whole thing is using modern persuasion methods to get
A few weeks ago, during some idle procrastination, I browsed through my Steam library and opened up a game that I’d actually purchased like a year ago but never got around to trying out. I’m not much of a gamer at all, although I played them when I
A little while back I posted a note on Substack, referring to arch-conservative Rod Dreher’s friendship with Vice President JD Vance and their respective attitudes toward the Nazi-adjacent groyper movement—Dreher denounces the groypers but says Vance’s attitudes toward them are “private.” They would be, of course, owing
In an eye-rolling turnaround, Republicans are suddenly whinging that there are a whole bunch of Actual Nazis in their movement. The left, of course, have been warning them about this for years, but their reaction has been to sit on their “reals over feels” high horse and say we’re
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Last week I talked about Elon Musk’s AI-generated Wikipedia knockoff, which I didn’t actually expect we’d see for some months, if at all, given the too-great likelihood that he’d be too mercurial to follow through. I thought it would be like the political party he said
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How would you write a completely unbiased encyclopedia article about the violence currently occurring in Gaza? I mean completely unbiased. I want you to bracket off and ignore every opinion you have about it whatsoever. Not taking anyone’s side. Nobody is wrong or right. Just the sterile facts. What
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As our technology has vastly overshot what resources we’re able to acquire with our meaty fingers alone, we’ve put stresses on our bodies that the slow pace of evolution hasn’t prepared us for. Or, in building our bodies for scarcity, we have been granted traits that make
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So I’m going to talk about this book again. I wasn’t going to, because my whole thing was that I could review it accurately without ever reading it. But more has come to light since it was actually released, and that is that somebody did read it. Namely,
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Of all the slogans that were thrown about during the 2024 US election I think the one that frightened the Republicans the most was Kamala Harris’ threat that “we’re not going back.” What the right wants more than anything is to go back. That’s what it is, at
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As the Trump administration continues its full and unapologetic assault on the First Amendment the usual suspects are forced to admit through gritted teeth that maybe Trump and his people aren’t the free speech absolutists they pinky-promised that they were. This has triggered so many Substack essays as the
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I’ve developed a sense of unease whenever I see a young white man with a shaved head. I know that’s not fair. Some guys look great bald. I have friends who do it. It’s not an unusual style. It’s not a square moustache or a sonnenrad
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Month nine (year 30? 50? 100?) of the Trump presidency, and already a number of books are coming out about how woke is over now thanks to the good work Trump has done to stamp it out, and given the timeline of publishing, any book that’s coming out now
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This isn’t the piece I had planned to run today, but sometimes something, uh, comes up. I’m on vacation and so I’d prepared some shorter than usual pieces and some reruns. This is a rerun, but not one I had prepared. It needs a new introduction, which
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The Eastern origins of anonymous Western online culture
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On 13th of September, British white nationalist Tommy Robinson is planning a rally in London. He’s not calling it a white nationalist rally, of course, he’s calling it a “free speech festival.” He also says they’re going to topple the government. He says it’s going to
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Through the bullet hell of bad news that has been the past couple of months, something that chilled my blood while flying deftly under the radar for most people was a couple of weeks ago when Glenn Greenwald came out in support of Nick Fuentes. I don’t have a