Everyone deserves a good editor.

Olivia,

Thank you so much for this. I’m impressed with the scope of your ambition and everything here has real potential.

Bari Weiss, Substack’s Losses, and Mine

When one of Substack’s biggest stars cashes out, the rest of us have to pay the tab.

Oysters, Andor, and one Maine candidate who thinks winning is less important than building power that lasts.

I wrote one of my favorite pieces ever this week, a profile of the upstart senate candidate Graham Platner.

You could read it for the Andor love. Or for the Star Trek references. Or because John Hodgman makes a cameo. Or just because it allowed me to make this connection:

This is going to get weird

The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World

This week's guest on Past Due is Rhett Miller, frontman of the Old 97's with an equally illustrious career as a solo artist who just happens to have a new album out at this very minute.

What I’ve been reporting, what I’ve been feeling, and what I’m doing anyway.

On nostalgia, precarity, and the long arc of journalism’s hustle culture

In June, I wrote a newsletter critiquing Substack and over the weekend it got a Silicon Valley co-sign from the OG tech blog Daring Fireball (where it got a nod of approval), which pushed the piece into Hacker News, where it definitely hit a nerve.¹ Substack is the latest container for a lot of anxiety about the future of media, technology, society, and politics.

I keep coming back to it not because it’s the villain, but because it’s a crossroads.

Neutrality isn't safety. It's shelter.

On Monday, Substack sent out a push notification promoting a Nazi newsletter: NatSocToday. Yes, that’s what it’s called. (H/t to Taylor Lorenz for breaking the story.)

We don’t know exactly why the content was pushed; Lorenz pointed out that publishers generally tailor alerts to material a user is likely to engage with. I doubt someone at Substack chose to promote NatSocToday. In some ways, it would be better for Substack if that were the case. That’s a content moderation issue with a single point of failure.

Uncertainty isn’t doom. It’s possibility in disguise.

Trump has broken the simulation. After years of conspiratorial build-up and righteous demands for transparency about the Epstein files among the MAGA base, Trump’s refusal to release them—his intransigence and denial of their importance—led his supporters into a realm of cognitive dissonance that has yet to be resolved.¹

I have some theories about whether Trump will succeed in fake-newsing himself out of this one. I could place my bet as to whether this is the end of the MAGA coalition and what it might mean for Democrats’ strategy moving forward; seemingly every columnist in America has. But the most important political development to come out of Trump’s Epstein meltdown isn’t specific to the Epstein files, it’s that no one saw this coming and that we don’t really know what it means.

On staying unpublished.

The New York Times’ Ben Mullin has a memo from the new Washington Post op-ed editor, Adam O’Neal, introducing himself.

I used to write for that section. Not often, but enough to know that the people there were sincere and passionate about birthing big ideas into the world. I shared pages with some bad takes but I felt comfortable with the general mission: Engaging people. This memo, however, is a blueprint for adding the authority of the Post to the machinery of control.

This week, I published a column I’m really proud of: It’s about climate disaster, public infrastructure, and the uniquely Texan tendency to valorize mutual aid while dismantling the systems that could actually prevent catastrophe. The part I keep coming back to:

There is such a powerful instinct to help, to give, to protect… Yet that same generosity does not translate into broad support for the kind of public infrastructure that can prevent or mitigate disaster. I have seen people stand on a roadside and cheer a truck from Texas supermarket chain H-E-B rolling through floodwaters; meanwhile, the local siren system goes unfunded. People will risk their lives to pull a child out of a tree but refuse to invest in what might have kept both the child and themselves safe in the first place.

Please give it a read, and share it if it resonates. I haven’t seen anyone else making this particular argument—and I think it matters.

This week’s Space the Nation podcast on 28 Years Later gets into some of these issues, though I spend a lot longer nitpicking the franchise universe. Consider this a companion piece. Spoilers abound.

28 Days Later is a favorite movie that I seldom revisit; I don’t like what it does to me. It asks, relentlessly, What do we become when survival demands violence? In the last act, our hero Jim becomes feral, covered in blood and gore as he visits vengeance upon the soldiers who planned on gang-raping Jim’s companions; we cheer for him. He has become what he was running from but his rage is righteous. In withholding judgment on that contradiction, the film makes us sit with our own answers.

28 Days Later director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland are still clearly interested in that same question with 28 Years Later, but the inquiry is muddled by world-building contrivances. The plot borrows a classic post-apocalypse structure: Survivors living through a new dark age (a boy and his sick mother) set off to find a remnant of the modern era just passed (a doctor with a cure for mom). It’s the details that set me off into comic book guy insolence; here, I will keep to the heaviest lift: the fucking zombies. The zombies who fuck.¹

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Subscribing supports that work. It helps cover the time, focus, and emotional labor it takes to write honestly—without clickbait, branding decks, or platform drama.

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Let’s set Substack’s “Nazi problem” aside for a moment. What if the bigger issue is being stranded on a collapsing platform... with a bunch of Nazis? Substack's content woes are bound up with its shaky business model in ways that are bad for all of us.

It's Substacks All the Way Down

Last week, Terry Moran announced that he’d be the latest high-profile journalist to take his brand to Substack, following his dismissal from ABC due to having the correct opinion of Stephen Miller. His Real Patriotism now has over 113k subscribers and about a dozen posts.

Quinn Dombrowski

I’m trying to get out of the habit of guessing what my life looks like from the outside. I’ve just been proven wrong too many times. I’ve always tried to be honest about it but I also know what I try to say and what you believe are not quite the same thing. So I don’t know what you—dear newsletter reader—think my life is like. I don’t know if you think I’m as lazy as I am in the habit of telling myself.

Anyway, here’s a peek at my process as a workaholic in recovery.

This newsletter has been somewhat stop-start, because my life has been stop-start. And for the past year and a half or so, I have leaned into accepting that I cannot work the way I used to work.

The other day, I ran into someone who told me about a friend who used to be a daily, high-functioning ketamine user (now in recovery).

I’ve taken ketamine under a doctor’s supervision for treatment-resistant depression, and from that limited experience, I’m floored by the idea of being remotely functional on ketamine. Yes, the dose in a clinic is high, but even in the tail end I can feel how distorted my thinking is. In the middle of it, I can barely tell my body exists. The few times I’ve tried to write while it’s still in my system, I’ve produced near-gibberish. (It was very effective in treating my depression; a story for another time.)

So, for no reason related to current events, I asked to connect with the former daily ketamine user and ask a few questions.

Last week, I had the honor of speaking at a fundraiser for the DFL Senate primary campaign of Peggy Flanagan, now the lieutenant governor of Minnesota. My friend Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl introduced Peggy and made a somewhat glancing reference to how we are currently struggling with an evil empire, stormtroopers dragging people away, rebellions crushed—and, Dara told the crowd, “You can’t put a rebellion on a Visa,” so pay up to Peggy.

Peggy picked up the thread: “Well, if we are in a rebellion,” she said, “you know what rebellions are built on?”

“Hope!” I shouted—that quote from Rogue One had been planted in Andor just the night before.

When it was my turn to speak, I circled back to Dara’s point: you can’t put the rebellion on a credit card. I admitted I wanted to call Peggy our own Mon Mothma—but added that it shouldn’t have to come to that.

Some things sit on the edge of your desk—or on your conscience—until it’s almost too late. Past Due is a show about those things.

It launches today.

I’m co-hosting it with Open Mike Eagle, and our first episode is a conversation with Paul F. Tompkins about the difference between “success” and “stability,” the shifting ground in Hollywood, and why he continues to do comedy even when it means contemplating a Station-11-style troubadour life. It’s the perfect conversation to kick off the show, because it was born from the same frustrations and contradictions so many of us carry—but don’t always say out loud.

My idea for Past Due came from loving what I do—but being haunted by the sense that it doesn’t love me back.

Hey friends,

I wrote earlier this week about my piece in The New Republic on how the radical right captured mass culture. As I said, the piece took time and support.

What it feels like to be in the middle of a big piece like that (trudging up a mud mountain in a thunderstorm) is one reason I built The Slow Burn, a workshop for writers who want to keep creating while the world is on fire.

We start this Saturday, May 3. If you’ve been thinking about it, there’s still time to join.(You can sign up here.)

What makes something so bad it's good is usually some level of humanity... [T]here's never gonna be a "Waterworld" made by AI. There's never gonna be something that's just a huge swing and a miss. Like, "Waterworld" and "Battlefield Earth" were both made out of one person's ego, which makes them kind of beautiful disasters. Should anyone have the power and influence to make movies that bad? I don't know, but they're human movies.

That's from my interview with Parker Malloy last week about my piece in The New Republic called How the Radical Right Captured the Culture.

You can read that interview here.

The piece is about the influence conservatives have had on mass culture and, more than that, about the collapse of the systems that once made pop culture more resilient and occasionally revolutionary.

It was time.

Just a quick note to say I’m now writing from Buttondown, not Substack.

I’ve been meaning to move for a while. Recent events caused me to rethink my own complicity in supporting a platform that shares profits with Nazis and transphobes… and, as a result, I’ve taken action.

I’ll share more soon, but for now: Thank you for reading. It means a lot to be in a space that feels more aligned with my values and I hope with yours, too.