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The Arm Thing

Inauguration Day encroached with a darker cloud over it than I remembered. The last time this happened back in 2017 everyone was still numb with shock, but this time everyone was just kind of sad and afraid. That’s warranted, I believe. And when I say everyone, I mean, everyone

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The Warlord Internet

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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I Am Once Again Begging the Left Not to Get Baited Into Conspiracy Thinking

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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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