Your second point there gets to my biggest pet peeve in discussions of the formation of opinion among the electorate: It infantilizes the vast majority of people. All the power is in elite hands (hence D obsession with "messaging") and also absolves almost everyone of moral responsibility.

having seen so many of these pieces over the last 5-8 years and knowing what i know about the demographics of most editors and publishers at elite outlets it’s hard for me not to see this as a barely sublimated generational war between boomers/gen-x vs millennials/gen-z about Whose Fault This Is

this is also just factually and historically incorrect.

this is, in full, the only part of the piece that attempts to support the bold claim that the entire piece is built on. one paragraph that restates the premise as if reciting scripture. that’s it.

The MAGA project is in a very real sense about undoing the 14th Amendment. newrepublic.com/article/2084...

My last couple of novels some reviewers seemed very disappointed not to find anything problematic. You also see this in reviews that gleefully point out tropes or ways the author broke whatever “how to write” rule is hot this year.

a chunk of the audience wants the author to embarrass themselves. most won’t admit this but it’s true. for a segment of readers giving time to reading is interpreted as a kind of submission and they demand the writer display some kind of weakness in return as if it were a tithe.

Liberal Currents has quietly become one of the few outlets taking male supremacy seriously, either as a foundation of Trumpist fascism or as a system of oppression in its own right.

“i read my boyfriend’s AI chat logs about me and then we broke up” thoughtcatalog is back baby. but this time it costs $8 per month.

Male supremacists Joel Webbon and Wesley Todd want women to “shut up.” I wrote about this and the abuser politics on the right. www.liberalcurrents.com/abuser-polit...

“Bob’s Burgers” voice actor and comedian Eugene Mirman suffered serious injuries after crashing his car into a toll plaza and being pulled from the fiery wreckage by a state trooper assigned to protect the governor of New Hampshire.

i wonder how many tens of millions of americans right now have no idea we're at war with iran

J.K. Simmons is so damn good.

unusually good writing for this latest episode of invincible

They’ve even given up on the fiction that there is a Process, let alone we should Trust in it

incredibly normal basketball team. so glad i’m a fan. loving this. no complaints. just endless joy.

Yeah, the film implies his conversion was related to these father figure issues whereas IRL he was introduced to the NOI via his siblings who were already members

Its true that there are issues being papered over (mostly around certain goods like education and healthcare that sufferer from baumol cost disease), but its also false that real wages "have been declining for decades" fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES12...

it’s also that cheap consumer goods have papered over a lot of other significant economic problems over the past fifty years sure, real wages have been declining for decades, but look how cheap this big TV is

can't believe I'm typing this but I actually think Boomers need to talk about the '70s and early '80s *a lot more* (it just doesn't have to be the way they usually do it, which is "you don't even realize how lucky you have it")

I mean even late Millennials like myself (‘96) were spared the worst of the Great Recession in the job market. Really we entered the market at the prime of the economy under Trump 1, then some got laid off during COVID and got the super dole for awhile

Only millennials really experienced the employment problems of the great recession. Zoomers are like boomers where they are shallow perpetrators of stolen valor. Boomers think they did WW2 and the CRA and Zoomers think they experienced 9/11 and the great recession.

Cheap Ubers and low-cost delivery was truly the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy

The median American is 39 is a stat that needs to go around more

I remember stats going around during Biden about why people were more upset now than people were in the 70s/80s about inflation and like the obvious answer is we re-wrote macroeconomics so that we wouldn’t experience it again and then like three more generations were born in the interval

On a given day, I think about how disorienting it is to have been born into the neolib era of the American empire, know literally no other reality, and have it come apart on you. And I think about the people dumber than me, less naval gazey, and how disorienting it must be for them too

Scott "Everyman Soybean Farmer" Bessent, btw. www.politico.com/news/2025/03...

i think we can explain a lot of the polling re economy if we remember that many or even most americans don’t have firm memories of the 70s and early 80s, think low inflation is their birthright, and will likely eventually realize this is the new normal but only after multiple failed presidencies

when people put the watermelon emoji on their dating profile are they telling me they oppose a genocide or are they telling me they think the term “spiritually israeli” is useful when discussing something they don’t like? the eternal unpleasant question.

If you were wondering how the class field trip went

In this week's 26 Episodes, @emilystjams.bsky.social on what Deadwood has to say about the soul of America

here’s how i would frame my point in a way most likely not to piss bluesky off (he said, tempting the gods): we focus too much on individuals who we say are being bad and not nearly enough on the systems & institutions that make it difficult - especially if you’re not privileged - to be good.

I also feel like the way they talk about this stuff pulls us away from the very real and urgent conversation that needs to happen regarding ethical and unethical newsroom uses.

In an ep of "The Dick Van Dyke Show" (circa 1965) at a party a society lady tells Rob Petrie "I don't own a television machine". In a 1980s book on American class structure I read that middle & lower class people would showcase a TV when they got one, but upper classes would hide them in cabinets.

iirc, that's the percentage of print newspaper staffers, not journalists total

I feel like people are making this weird assumption that journos who delegate to AI won't read or edit what it puts out before posting it and ... I dunno, have you met journalists?

This is where I ended up, for law stuff not journalism. I’m aware that I’m now Harrison Bergeron-ing myself; we have daily stories of people with better credentials and better titles using AI to do 100 percent of their work. But I’m not there yet. And no one likes to feel forced

i am worried - but expect - that “i don’t even use AI” is becoming “i don’t even own a TV” for a new era and with the same level of dishonesty.

I strongly suspect that in multiple industries where ai use is culturally frowned on a lot of people simply lie about not using it

I have the same issue with Academia. I am tired of tenured or TT professors shaming the rest of us on shortcuts we need to take. Up to 50% of us are contingent. We don't have offfices or school supplied computers and we make less than minimum wage teaching 5 classes across 3 campuses

The problem is there are three types of AI criticism: 1 Specific problematic uses 2 Metaphysical issues like thinking it's a person 3 vibes We rightly criticize 1. Far fewer people should talk about 2, a technical topic requiring expertise. But we hate on people for 3, and should probably stop.

i've a lot of ambivalent feelings AI, but I have to admit that I am growing a bit weary of people who have some of the most remunerative/prestigous jobs in journalism bragging about how they don't need it as they describe their process in terms that that sound like valhalla to 99% of working journos

congrats to the worm man. you did it. and i hope people remember your name.

Totally reasonable way to run an economy. www.cnn.com/2026/03/31/i...

I have very much cited this @lindseyadler.bsky.social essay a bunch since it came out like 15 months ago and its always a little dopamine boost when someone says its so cool I've been a freelance writer the last seven years even though its absolutely gotten me nowhere in life.

If you haven't read @lindseyadler.bsky.social's piece lately on becoming and staying a journalist over the past 15 years, you should

“Our society is poorer (and more stratified) by the cleaving of access to a variety of perspectives and ways to tell a story. Your favorite writers don’t want to be boring. We don’t want to be hacks.”

oof, reminds me of my time in game journalism (same era, related causes, similar implosion)

"journalism, the television and film industry, too. The music business. Anywhere creativity lies is being borne down on by a hydraulic press, like in that disgusting commercial by Apple that reduces access to cultural fulfillment down to a goddamn iPad."

someone should write a piece about what’s happened to one of the senators from massachusetts who used to take pride in promoting policy ideas that were good instead of bad because something has happened and i’d like to understand what that something was.