The Atlantic ran a piece by Adam Serwer that answered that question with some specifics about the process

30 lists and 15,000 words to round out the year from (among others) @tomscocca.bsky.social ! @bcmerchant.bsky.social ! @caseyjohnston.bsky.social ! @taylorlorenz.bsky.social ! @choire.bsky.social ! @rilaws.bsky.social ! @libbycwatson.com ! @hamiltonnolan.bsky.social !

Indignity Vol. 5, No. 209, THE STAIRS, Chapter Six: A serialized novel by Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/the-stairs-chapter-six/

I think it was @jackshafer.bsky.social who long ago awakened me to the fundamental emptiness of how writers use the word "should"

Facebook friends, here is Indignity Vol. 5, No. 208, MR WRONG: Swab the Halls! Deck the Folly! Merry Happy The Holidays! www.indignity.net/its-the-most...

“The absence of a deportation order … is no scrivener’s error. Evan Bernick, an associate professor of law at Northern Illinois University, agreed: ‘You’re not fixing a typo. You’re literally creating a new order, out of nothing, that affects somebody’s rights.’” www.cnn.com/2025/12/17/u...

It just seemed odd for that guy to cite gender ratios at Conde Nast without mentioning that Conde Nast runs a whole lot of women's magazines and only one men's magazine

This from @tomscocca.bsky.social has lived rent free in my brain for years, especially the part of taking stock of how you're enjoying the party after your 2 drinks. If you're not having fun, more drinks won't make it better. Go home. lifehacker.com/have-two-dri...

Indignity Vol. 5, No. 207, THE STAIRS, Chapter Five: A serialized novel by Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/the-stairs-chapter-five/

Cameras are traffic-calming infrastructure

How did the synthetic grandma commercial get a second wind

BREAKING

the unitarian notion of accountability is, in general, very strange as it holds that a single election — the president’s reelect — is more democratically accountable than the rolling process of democratic assent produced by legislative elections and congressional oversight.

Very basic disagreement going on about whether succeeding to power in a constitutional republic means you get to add your new pages on top of what's been written or you get to burn the books

Overturning Humphrey’s Executor represents the Supreme Court applying the same principle to itself it would apply to the president: whoever holds the job at the moment is under no obligation to follow any of the laws or limits set by all their predecessors

Admit it, being the hegemon was kind of a drag

Oh yeah

Good news, today's the earliest sunset of the year, all further loss of daylight is going to come off the mornings instead

Answerable question! Ten out of 14 players in Mattingly's immediate neighborhood on the all-time batting list are not in the Hall of Fame.

Eh, probably fine though

Something a little off about this Dickie Greenleaf fellow, to me

Quitting Irish

A Pot Is Not a Gentleman: Cultivating Humanity in the Age of A.I.

Online shopping surveillance bots need to learn the difference between “you keep clicking on that shirt every few weeks because you must really want it” and “you keep clicking on that shirt every few weeks because you keep forgetting and rediscovering it’s polyester”

It was obvious from the beginning that every expansion from a No. 1 v. No. 2 bowl showdown meant that a.) inferior teams would get in and b.) there'd be less and less defensible difference between the teams just above and just below the cutoff

Girls usually don’t massacre people, therefore massacres are the manly thing to do

This branch of the culture has totally lost the idea of masculine virtue being defined against vices that are also masculine

From the news department: "'When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,' Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/u...

The name of Vice President JD Vance—whose religious identity is essentially congruent with Douthat's and who has staked out aggressive public positions on many of the moral issues discussed here, and on others that somehow go undiscussed—appears nowhere in the text www.nytimes.com/2025/12/06/o...

This is like when they were putting downer cattle in the protein meal for livestock feed

Indignity Vol. 5, No. 205, THE STAIRS, Chapter Four: A serialized novel by Tom Scocca @tomscocca.bsky.social www.indignity.net/the-stairs-chapter-four/

“She showed up as scheduled, and when she arrived, officers were asking everyone what country they were from, and if they said a certain country, they were told to step out of line and that their oath ceremonies were canceled.” www.wgbh.org/news/local/2... @gbhnews.bsky.social

Times reporters have been well focused on the central issue here from the beginning www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/u...

Tom Cotton’s endorsement today of the military shooting unarmed airstrike victims floating at sea may shed some light on the debate over what it meant when he called for troops to pacify disorder in U.S. cities in 2020

Never in a hundred lifetimes would I have guessed that the MetLife blimp does not have a dedicated Wikipedia page

“Tabloid” evolves from meaning a usefully compact print newspaper to meaning an unusably bulky website

Love clicking on a New York Post story link and feeling the phone get scorching hot from the strain

It's so easy to imagine that the past is another country and like it's not even different people

Hope this helos someone www.cnn.com/2025/12/03/h...

i'd go even further and say there is a reason even nixon kept this kind of stuff to himself. you would have to go back quite a bit to find a point at which is acceptable for a president to say anything like this *in public*, to say nothing of in the oval office.

Oof. This hurts. So hard fought to eke this one out over far too many years, only to have it slip out of reach again

👀 www.cnn.com/2025/12/03/u...

Correct!

Taps the sign, wearily, with a lifetime's worth of commingled contempt and futility hmmdaily.com/2019/05/14/g...

They really went and slapped a "born between 1965 and 1980" banner on top of Douglas Coupland, b. 1961, explaining how he wrote his book defining his generation

Really curious about what editorial decisions led to this piece about an interesting application of machine learning having an apologia for the slop industry wedged into it

Seems strange that someone who recently posted about how he goes through life unable to form images in his mind would hold forth confidently about what metaphors will connect with the public

its horrible. do fans today even realize that "litigate whether the last play actually happened or not after every single game event" is not the default state for how sports broadcasts need to work? It didn't used to be like this! bsky.app/profile/edbu...