A car is one of the largest purchases you’ll likely make as a consumer. If you choose to spend that $50,000 on a Tesla, you’re choosing to support child genocide. Not buying a Tesla is one of the easiest things you can do to not be a garbage human being.

Hello from Santorini

Clown show

What a wild lie from Musk as well, given that USAID funding was completely halted virtually everywhere, and this was extremely publicly reported.

YouTube has shown a willingness to bid on live sports rights but often loses out on them because it won’t overpay. Whereas most other streamers need live sports content, YouTube benefits from the fact that every major sports creator and athlete already publishes their content to its platform.

We’re entering a new golden age for hefty print magazines that cost a pretty penny and are only published a few times a year. A lot of them host splashy launch parties to help imbue them with an aura of prestige. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/s...

Instagram is reportedly planning to open up to longform, horizontal content so it can compete with TV streaming services, but of course there’s no hint yet that it actually plans to share meaningful revenue with its creators, which means its leaders still don’t understand why YouTube was so successf

Congrats to all the journalists who convinced their employers that the public really cares about Cannes so they can have a full-expenses-paid trip to Cannes.

One of the things I suspect but don’t have the hard data to prove is that the post-pandemic rise of remote work has made the US economy more nimble and helped reduce the negative effects of Trump’s tariffs and foreign policy blunders with Iran. www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/o...

Me visiting DC's Reflecting Pool

The independent news site The Lever has published some impressive investigative journalism over the last few years. Recently it reduced its output from five reported pieces per week to just one or two longform articles — the idea being that deeper investigations will pack a bigger punch. It’s kind o

Nothing encapsulates how much of a clown show this administration is than them essentially live tweeting the negotiations over the past three months, trying to receive credit for things that just never get formally announced.

The Atlantic is doubling down on video podcasts, expanding its video team from 10 to 20 and launching new shows. My guess is this isn’t just about growing its video revenue, but that the magazine also believes that the parasocial relationships engendered through podcasts helps it with its paid subsc

Over the course of its history, the company now known as People Inc has been incredibly reliant on intent-based Google searches, yet it’s managed to keep revenue steady over the past year despite search traffic plummeting. Now it’s doubling down on highly-produced video content, with a particular em

Anti-AI people have twisted themselves in a pretzel to where they're arguing that non-AI stuff is somehow bad because it looks like something AI could have generated.

Also didn’t help that the Left didn’t invest much in building out its own information infrastructure and instead focused on getting the large platforms to censor right wingers, a project it largely failed at.

Wired interviewed the guy who will be satirizing Alex Jones once The Onion completes its takeover of Infowars. I watched the first video and the resemblance in their voices and speaking cadence is uncanny! www.wired.com/story/the-bi...

The Economist continues to be one of the most aggressive publishers at placing its video and podcast content behind a paywall. Most other outlets — even those with robust subscription models — make their podcasts and videos freely available. pressgazette.co.uk/paywalls/eco...

This doesn’t come as a big surprise: not only had it been previously reported that Penske was considering acquiring the remaining Vox properties, he had also invested $100 million in the company in 2023. As far as media owners go, these outlets could do worse than being owned by Jay Penske. Yes, l

Madonna partnered with Grindr to stream a live performance on the app. 877,000 users tuned in. www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

Kevin Roose is leaving the New York Times to launch a new podcast with independent journalist Casey Newton. The two are taping their last Hard Fork episode in August. Seems clear from this announcement that the show will operate as a separate business from Newton’s Platformer newsletter.

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei detailed how he uses AI to write. He basically uploaded his entire archive of writing + Axios’s “smart brevity” framework to train the AI, and then enters a series of prompts to prevent it from simply flattering him. www.axios.com/2026/06/18/j...

Robinhood plans to eventually shut down the Sherwood website and publish all content in the newsletters and the Robinhood app. This makes sense. By distributing content through the newsletters and app, it’ll be much easier to measure the ROI of that content as it relates to Robinhood’s core busines

YouTube started demonetizing many “faceless” channels because of their propensity to publish AI slop, so some of those channels are either paying cheap actors to appear on screen or even generating fake faces using AI. You sort of have to feel sorry for the faceless creators who are actually p

“[Netflix’s] most recent Engagement Report revealed total hours viewed in the second half of 2025 increased by just 2 percent while MoffettNathanson estimated that the global user base grew by 10 percent, ‘which translates to an 8 percent decline in daily engagement per subscriber.’”

For more than a decade, Erin Millar has been trying to answer a question that has plagued the journalism industry: What should replace the local newspaper model after it collapses? Her first attempt came with The Discourse, a Canadian media company that experimented with new approaches to community-

Snapchat is one of those weird platforms where it supposedly has nearly a billion users and yet I don't know anyone, either virtually or IRL, who talks about using it. I also rarely encounter any media coverage about stuff that happens on Snapchat. It's a cultural black hole.

One of the reasons media companies lose readership is because publishers choose ad revenue over user experience. Treat your reader like shit and let alone they won’t click on your ads, they’ll stop coming to your site.

Manga is quickly becoming one of the most popular genres in libraries. “Manga readers are the most reliable readers, because they want the next volume, and the only way to get the next one is to return the last one." www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/...

This is an interesting breakdown of how a historical fiction series became a bestseller without the early boosting from social media book influencers. Hint: church book clubs played a role. romancingthephone.substack.com/p/who-is-emm...

This is a fascinating breakdown of the economics behind prediction markets and why a small number of users take home the lion’s share of the profits (spoiler: it’s not all due to insider trading). youtu.be/E_V7m_lnybY?...

Substacks are pretty overwhelmingly left-leaning.

I brought the receipts.

“I may just look like I’m walking or meeting with people, but it all has an art to it. I might randomly race somebody out of nowhere in the middle of the street. Then I’ll try their national dish. The food is not even settled, then boom, I might race someone again. I’m truly doing activities the wh

A gaming YouTuber with over 5 million subscribers has seen a drastic decrease in his average views per video, but he says he doesn’t care. In his view, YouTube is getting better at surfacing videos to the people who are most likely to enjoy them. It also helps that he diversified his revenue streams

The author Tim Ferris published his book sales data that shows a precipitous decline that correlates with rising AI adoption rates. He posits that the self-help category of nonfiction is being hit hardest.

The speaker company Bose is launching its own music label. “The plan isn't to go toe-to-toe with the ‘Big Three’ label conglomerates, but rather to help break underappreciated or new artists and — crucially — not have to pay for music rights when they feature in Bose commercials.”

Hollywood likes to draw all the wrong lessons from surprise blockbuster successes. If I were a hungry producer looking for the next filmable IP, I wouldn’t be looking at Reddit — I’d be looking to places like Webtoons, Amazon’s self publishing ecosystem, and, yes, YouTube.

Lots of publishers are launching their own FAST channels but I think it’s largely a waste of resources. The streaming market is incredibly saturated and there’s very little organic content discovery there. You’re probably better off licensing your content to established FAST channels and/or putting

Hotter take: consumers' persistent unwillingness to actually pay for journalism is having a deeply destructive impact on our society.

This is a cool trailer

Noah Smith: Iran is Trump's Katrina

When Mike Rogge purchased Mountain Gazette in early 2020, he wasn’t acquiring a thriving media business. For $5,000 and the cost of a couple beers, he bought a dormant outdoor magazine brand whose main assets consisted of a URL, a trademark, decades of archives, and boxes of old issues sitting in st

How many times did we have to listen, ad nauseum, to MAGA Republicans’ claim that Obama’s nuclear deal gave Iran $150 billion?

Back when I was a freelance marketing consultant, I once had a client demand that I drop everything during a Paris vacation to incorporate his edits for an article I’d written for him — which I did end up doing.

Netflix must be seeing some sort of positive subscriber metrics from its video podcast inventory because it continues hammering out new deals. Anecdotally, while I do dip into video podcasts occasionally on YouTube, I’ve yet to click on one hosted by Netflix. In fact, I don’t even know if it’s even

After many months of anticipation, Substack finally rolled out its initial framework for how it’s going to incorporate sponsorships into its creator ecosystem, and I just want to offer a few observations and thoughts. The first is that it’s only offering this service to Substack “bestsellers,” at l

The South Korean film industry is more open than Hollywood to using AI in the filmmaking process. One film that was originally projected to cost $85 million was produced for as little as $165,000. The jury’s still out on whether any of these films will be entertaining.

Ok, I have a few observations on this. The first is that Fox has adopted a pretty differentiated approach to the streaming wars compared to its peers. Rather than bundling its entire IP library under a single subscription streamer — like Peacock, Paramount+, and HBO Max — it instead launched/acquir