I’ve been pretty quiet on Substack lately because frankly it hasn’t felt entirely safe to write all the things I’d like to say, my work as a lefty media whisperer and muse is most effective when I can operate somewhat in the shadows.

If you’d like more info on those shadows, you can find me camping out at independentmediacollective.org.

This behind the scenes business needs to and will change in 2026, probably. But I’ve been enjoyed the last few months not having to meet a publishing schedule, the number of crash outs I’ve avoided since August not trying to say all the things is enormous. But they will be said in due time.

I’ll spare you the onerous annual recap…I saw some good movies, I read some good books, I bopped to some good music. I went places in Europe and Asia and Mexico and America. Some stuff fell apart, some other stuff came together. I was loved and I loved, I was sad and I cried, I was elated and I celebrated.

But it was my friends, my family, and my colleagues who once again carried me through this dumpster fire of a year. I couldn’t possibly begin to list all of you who opened your homes, your offices, your kitchens, your vacations, your assignments, your text messages, and your companies to me while I hurtled through my universe and into many of yours. Thank you all tremendously for always reminding me that I am lucky to know some of the very best people anyone can ever hope to call friends, family, and co-workers.

This gift of being surrounded by excellent friends and family goes back to my childhood, and over the holidays we found an old VHS cassette I digitized a few years ago, quite possibly the first “party recap film” I ever personally shot end to end on New Years Eve, 1999.

The film is crudely shot by a clueless 13 year old and is perhaps a bit hard to follow if you don’t know the characters, I’d take the time to explain it but frankly I’m already running late for the evening and even writing this much feels like more than I intended to do this year.

But there will be more parties from me in 2026. There will be more videos from me in 2026. And yes, there will be more writing from me next year, too. Standby, as always, for more to come on all those fronts.

But a final shout out to the real ones who remember what it felt like ringing in a new millennium, when even the adults in the room weren’t sure we were going to make it through the night. So we gathered in the cold darkness with the people we loved most, and we lost ourselves in music, in jokes, and in each other; truly nothing more to the holidays than that, going back more millennia than we’ve been counting them.

Happy New Year friends, looking forward to making 2026 a special one for everyone. Now go out there and party like it’s 1999.

Until next year!

HELLOOOO CHICAGOOO (or wherever you are). It’s the weekend, this is Down the Pipes, I’m James, and this week I’m filing from the former W Lakeshore, now “reflagged” by the Bonvoy Gods as The Wade. If you like deep dish, having your corporate card declined at Alinea, Ozzie tributes that are blurrier than his last 10 years, midwest romance , the greatest music festival in America, and the annual digging up alcohol in Grant Park the first weekend of August, I’ve got you. If you don’t like those things, reevaluate your priorities.

I love Chicago. I’ve always loved Chicago. Did you know they’re called the Windy City not just because of the lake effect winds, but because they know their politicians have always famously been full of shit? Or that their other nickname, The Second City, was an insult that they turned into a tagline? Like they were just like: “Yeah okay, you got us.” It’s so charmingly Midwest.

Home Alone, Family Matters, and a whole slew of Brat Pack films painted Chicago like a suburban dreamscape, and friends I know who grew up in the area describe it as not far from the truth. Other friends, who grew up in very different parts of Chicago, describe it as “not great” and “totally unsafe.” Both vantages can be considered honest appraisals; like most 20th century American cities, the red lines are clearly drawn and labeled on the maps there.

Gonna keep it light on the pipes this week though, no more talk of red lines. I’ve got some muck on Cuomo I’m working on raking and I’m tracking a whole universe of internet drama to dish on in due time, but this week I’m just self indulging memory lane. It’s August, walk with me.

Lollapalooza was launched as a farewell tour for Jane’s Addiction in the early 90’s. I was quite literally still wearing a diaper in 1991 (not because I wasn’t toilet trained at 4 but because I ate a penny that summer and had to go back to diapers for a few weeks, sorry mah), so I’m going to skip trying to unpack the early touring years of Lolla. I hear they were a blast if you were of a certain alternative ilk in the 90’s, there’s a documentary on Hulu about it. I was still eating pennies so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But I first showed up at Lollapalooza when it was settled in Grant Park in 200…9? 10? 8? This was a blurry time in my life, I had just become Gawker’s sales guy in Chicago, so I was flying out there once or twice a month to pitch all day and then eat insane dinners with media buyers at night.

I ate at Moto like a half dozen times, a kind of Alinea Lite that made molecular gastronomy less silver spoon, more accessible. RIP Chef Cantu. The Publican, my second favorite Chicago restaurant for client debauchery, still allows you to order a six pack for the kitchen off the menu. Once during a client meal at Alinea, the brand new Gawker Amex declined and I had to put it on my personal “for emergencies” credit card because I did not have $3,000 in my checking account at 23 years old.

They have a whole discreet way of pulling you aside when your credit card declines at Alinea, by the way…they made it seem like they had a surprise for me in the kitchen, and then shooed me into manager’s station to show me the decline code. Definitely part of the experience in my book. And they were kind of jerks about it at L20, if I recall. Much more, “Sir, this card is DECLINED.” That card was often convinced it was actively being stolen.

As it goes, Chicago is, was, and continues to be a drinking town, so these memories are getting pieced together with whatever archives I still have. It looks like my first year was 2010, thank you Jay and Nell for not getting sober until after this photo was taken:

This first year, if memory serves, I was staying at The Allerton Hotel on Michigan Ave, a bit of a hike from the festival but walkable if you were 23 and cranked up like I was. Keller (bonus points for you if you know who I’m talking about) slept on my couch that year (his first too, I think) and took me to a great burger joint called Kuma’s Corner, still a legendary pre-Lolla tradition I think he keeps all these years later.

The next few years of Lollapalooza, I have very little physical evidence of. All I have from 2011 is this sorely incomplete Spotify playlist I made:

This year was also the year Radioshack sponsored Gizmodo’s Lollapalooza coverage (before their CMO fled to Australia for sponsoring Lance Armstrong all those years). That marketing team was low key incredible to work with though, they gave us a bunch of camera equipment and let us send a Gizmodo reader to “cover” the festival. I’m sure we did more than this, but it’s also possible that this is all we did. Coldplay played and I remember not being particularly impressed, same deal with Eminem. Foo Fighters, however, had a moment with a downpour that to this day is one of my top 10 all time live music moments:

My favorite find that year was Foster the People, who played a sunshine set on one of the smaller stages. Pumped Up Kicks was just breaking, and they got roped into playing a 1am set at the Hard Rock Hotel (closing for Phantogram), long the gold standard of Lollapalooza afters.

2012…again, not a lot of evidence remains. I remember Miike Snow being big and not really caring…I was there to see Franz Ferdinand and Black Sabbath. Ozzy sounded phenomenal despite looking old, even then. Not that you can tell with 2012 smartphone technology, I think this was taken with a Blackberry:

I think Passion Pit was a headliner this year? Is that possible? Florence & The Machine crushed. 2012 was a weird year in Chicago, this was the year a derecho blew in and I had to shelter in the artist gifting lounge at the Hard Rock. Acts I should have seen but didn’t: Jack White, Justice, Childish Gambino, Frank Ocean. But this was the crowd for Miike Snow:

2013 was the year I fell in love with a girl at the Perry’s stage, it was the sloppy “who are you? Oh, we have friends in common? Let’s make out” interaction that was once terribly common for 26 year olds at these kinds of things. This was also the year I snuck a small A-Team of clients into the Hard Rock afterparty through a stairwell and back of house area. We were apparently very close to the stage:

This was also the year that Zedd’s Clarity broke, a song with particular significance to my universe because Matt wrote it during the Matthew Koma EDM era. That was one of the first time tens of thousands of kids were bopping along and making out with strangers in a field to one of his tunes, it was pretty incredible to witness and participate in first hand. That whole weekend of magic made me seriously consider calling Chicago home for a period of about 8 months.

(Note: Don’t do this. Lollapalooza happens to be during the nicest weekend of the nicest month in Chicago, falling in love here during the summer is too easy and will be brutally tested during numerous delays at O’Hare in February)

2014 was the year I don’t think I spent much time at the festival itself…the SoHo House had just opened in Chicago so they were having sick after parties that it was easier to sneak into if you got there early, couldn’t tell you who was DJing but it was probably a Ronson or two. Cash Cash—managed by my then-roommate and forever homie Jason—were successfully making the jump from Warped Tour to EDM, I vaguely remember it being 4am at this club and the fluorescent lights coming on:

Can any of my Chicagoheads name this club? Is it Berlin? Or Sound Bar?

2015 was my last summer in Chicago for nearly a decade. Dave (of Croatia vacation and Key Club fame) was convinced to celebrate his bachelor party in Chicago the first weekend in August, so I got to share my love of Lolla with him and a handful of buds I had known since college or earlier.

Besides an Uber accident en route to The Publican and Joe drunkenly taking himself to a Morton’s dinner, the rest of the weekend was pretty legendary. Per official bachelor party rules I will not disclose our full itinerary, but we did make it once again to the Hard Rock after party (now being hosted, weirdly, at the Renaissance across the street). Wet was playing, if you don’t know them you should.

My Lolladays ended when I moved to Vegas in late 2015 and started spending every weekday in a festival environment, but that’s a different story for a different newsletter. The idea of traveling to see pop music was no longer appealing…this is about when my Burning Man and Phish arcs started. Again, a different set of stories. But whole lives have been lived and died between the last time I went to Lollapalooza and today, is my point.

Until this year. I was back. Winnetka Bowling League was playing on the Lakeshore stage and doing a House of Blues after party, and I just couldn’t miss my best friend playing on a stage that I melted in front of so many times before.

I’ve been backstage at Lolla before, no clue why or for what but being back there again felt familiar. Seeing the festival from that vantage, 10 years later, now from the view of the folks putting on the festival and not consuming it…it had me emotional.

The number of friendly faces back there reminded me just how many years I’ve spent adjacent to the music industry…there were old colleagues and brothers like Pedram and Keller, different world friends like Oakley and Molly, other sound guys and techs I’ve crossed paths with over the years, former ad assistants who are now ad executives…this past weekend in Chicago was a merging of like six different cinematic universes of mine.

Foster the People, a band I had seen on a small stage 15ish years ago, is now playing just before the headliner on the main stage. Pumped Up Kicks was already a song I associated with this festival, but this year, seeing 30,000 kids (many of whom were literal babies when the song came out) singing along to a song I used to rage to was a real full circle moment. I am grayer, Mark Foster is too, but the kids don’t seem to mind.

Matt will likely be on that main stage at some point in the next 15 years too, probably sooner. Oakley was already up there for Cage the Elephant. So was Jason with Halsey (who played the tiny BMI stage in 2015 before headlining the following year). Keller is seemingly always up there whether or not it’s his artist, they all know him and are happy to have him side stage. It’s a special thing to be anywhere near that kind of musical trajectory, it puts you in rarefied strata to be able to command that size of a crowd.

I’ve been to lots of festivals. None of them are so centrally located, well booked, well fed, well appointed, well organized, and well maintained as Lollapalooza has consistently been over these 15 years. The people who go are the best kinds of music fans, they show up early and they stay out late. They buy food and alcohol, they have a good time but generally know how to handle their shit.

Lolla is still a starter festival with none of the camping tribulations of Bonnaroo, the celebrity pressure of Coachella, or the maze of VIP afters at Ultra or EDC. But the city attracts the most enterprising Americans who don’t feel any affinity to a coast or Texas, and they proudly do wild shit like this every year:

@owl31301got weird looks two weeks before fest #chicagothingstodo #lollapalooza #lolla #rave #

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I spoke with the security guard who was guarding the entrance to the backstage area, and he told me it was his 15th year doing security at the festival, his first year was the same as mine. He worked his way up to working that VIP gate, leading me to believe that all of the staff across the entire festival—from the cart drivers to the caterers—are long time pros too. They keep coming back year after year because there is no better job for a week in August in Chicago, and as long as they keep coming back, I’ll be coming back too.

This year was beyond expectation though, I had braced for disappointment. It can be crushing to return to old stomping grounds to see a bunch of butt muncher 23 year olds awkwardly texting each other from across a field between sets and songs. That was a bit crushing.

More importantly on the crushing front, Matt and the band crushed their numerous sets across town, the crowds were stacked at each show and singing along. During a more mellow “Toyota Music Den” set there were fans requesting songs that I don’t remember and Matt doesn’t know anymore, really made me appreciate for a moment what the algorithms can do for surfacing deep cuts and/or songs that are strong enough to earn an audience over time.

We got to spend the weekend with a world class jump roper and stunt dude named Porter who flip flopped like Benson Boone all over the city, shout out to that dude. He’s got a crazy life, you can pretty much hire him to do anything dangerous, he’s never done car stuff but said he’d love to “figure it out” so if anyone would like to pay us to pay him to drive recklessly let’s chat.

Anyway, it’s late on Saturday and I’ve got company coming tomorrow, so let’s wrap this up with some Lolla 2025 highlights.

Acts this year I’m glad I saw: Mk.Gee (good but not as good as promised), Doechii (I get it now makes total sense), Still Woozy, Sabrina Carpenter (was on her team until Olivia brought out Weezer, still good show), oh and seeing Djo do this was pretty much all of my feels from the weekend politely boiled down to a :23 second TikTok.

Charlotte Lawrence was great and if you were hip you saw her at Bowery this week, and Caroline Kingsbury will blow minds next summer with OUR HOUSE. Del Water Gap (no relation) also gets Down the Pipes approval, he’s a friend of the /Boy Problems universe via DWG’s guitarist Nick. Sammy Virji and 2FRIENDS were the only DJ acts I saw, I will say the DJs rediscovering disco drops is a promising development for dance music in general.

Plus, completely unrelated to all of the above, Kidder and Strle gave me a tour of the soon to be renovated Onion office. I got to paw through a binder called The 9/11 Binder and by god, knowing that binder simply exists is worth your subscription.

Chicago, never change.

Until next time!

Are you excited to hear from me? Elated I’m back? Confused as to who I am? Annoyed that you got this email? If so, please rest assured, I’m with you on all of it and here to help explain it all.

But for the first timers and old timers alike, this here blogletter is Down The Pipes, a resurrected weekly newsletter about nothing and everything, sent to your inbox with hyper regularity when the spirit is striking me (I believe she is striking me).

As always, I’m your local blogger, man of internet business, muse to his nearest & dearest, and your friendly cis white ally in social justice, James Del.

Some of you have been reading my bullshit online since 2003, to my old friends, family members, and fans who still keep up with this, thanks for enduring my stretches of radio silence. We are back (“we” being myself and the mouse in my pocket).

Many of you have never gotten this email before though, probably because you subscribed to this Substack blindly via recommendation while I was on hiatus (hello! welcome to the party, you’re in now, don’t go anywhere I promise it gets better than this!).

If you are new here (or just looking to relive past glories like the rest of us), it might be worth pawing through the archives a bit, get a feel for the cast of characters you’re dealing with. It’s mostly about me, it’s sometimes about us as a society or a class or a generation or a cult or a body politic, but usually it’s still about me. This is me:

Anyway, housekeeping stuff and then we’ll have a proper catch up…

A number of the posts on this site are paywalled, they were written in an earlier time when nobody really knew I was doing this except the people I knew IRL. I wouldn’t say they’re private but they’re not public, and I intend to keep most of them that way.

Previously, I gave away lifetime paid access to anyone who knew me personally, so if you were an original subscriber to Down the Pipes and this is triggering sweet memories of the summer of 2022 (lol) then welcome back, your subscription is still and forever comped. If you were previously paying, I turned off all subscriptions awhile ago out of mercy, they’ve been turned back on as of today. Email me if you’d like to discontinue being a paid subscriber (or you’re free to navigate the Substack app and do it yourself, good luck and godspeed).

Moving forward, I’ll have a weekly free post for everyone, and once in awhile I will post some deeply insidery, probably not interesting to the internet at large private posts for my OG followers and anyone willing to pay moving forward as a bonus. Just internet economics baby, we’ll get into that topic plenty here.

What else? I think that’s it for Substack stuff, I guess next up would be answering the “where have you been?” of it all for the non-noobs (I’m sorry, I know the ‘blogger back from break’ recap is narcissistic trash, but I feel compelled to share anyway).

For the last 3ish years, I’ve been running a newsletter for and about the “creator economy” called Passionfruit. It was published/paid for by a company called Fragment, and for reasons I’m not authorized to speak on publicly due to separation agreements, I am not doing that anymore, and Fragment has decided to hit the pause button on that publication entirely.

Don’t get excited/upset, nobody did anything bad or wrong, but our visions on where the opportunity sat for internet media and creators at large were not converging. So we’ve diverged. I’m back to solopreneurship, so your paid subscriptions to Down the Pipes are once again encouraged:

Subscribe now

The people who I got to work with at Passionfruit were awesome and they are currently doing a wide variety of their own internet hustles, Substack darlings like Taylor Lorenz and Liz Plank were a joy to publish and you should all go subscribe to them if you don’t already. My dude John Michael Bond is funny as hell and a wildly gifted photographer, writer, and editor you should keep an eye on, Eric Rodriguez continues to make The Reactorverse, and Drew Grant has taken her assets to OnlyFans (no judgment, everyone who makes money on the internet is titillating you somehow, Drew has just always been more honest and direct about that).

I heard Steven Asarch is working on a Youtube commentary show with our part time editor Nightmind, and Charlotte Colombo continues to be one of the best freelance journalists on the block, if you’re in a position to hire her, please do so. Also shout out to Elizabeth Spiers who came in at the end to try and help us save our ship, and Rusama Islam and Grace Stanley who—let’s be honest—were the backbone of that site before I got there and helped grow it substantially while we worked together for 2 years.

There were others…freelancers, interns, superfan readers, colleagues at other titles, a few agencies and consultants, you know…the standard collection of wonderful people who inevitably congeal when you try to do a good thing. I’m thankful to all of them and bummed it didn’t work out the way we wanted it to.

I wish I could say more about the why or the what happened there, because that whole newsletter was built on transparency around the creator economy. Not explaining where it went sideways feels as incomplete to me as it probably does to the 60k-ish creative folks who were subscribed to it. I’m most thankful (and sorry!) for them.

One day maybe I’ll start doing some roman à clef pieces about it, keep it fictionalized, but honest. Maybe, who knows! (You won’t, otherwise it won’t be very good roman à clef). But out of respect for what they’re doing at Fragment and the people still trying to do it there, I won’t say anything more about the subject openly.

Which brings me to now. Projects! I’m back to doing projects. Secret projects, business projects, development projects, production projects, creative projects, consulting projects, romantic projects…I do love getting involved somewhere early, despite my numerous mixed results with ‘em in the past. Whatever, they’re better than having a stable office gig (or suffering a matchmaker).

You’ll see and hear more of what those projects turn into soon, the collaborators and co-conspirators will mostly look familiar to this audience, but I’m sure we’ll have some new faces turning up too. More TK.

But for now, consider this email the first klaxon that I’m back on this fishy, subversive slice of Substack, right on time for cucumber season and summer reading lists (or listening lists, do check out Foster’s Summer Fridays radio show for some real beachside bops).

Future issues will have all the kind of political and sociological lore y’all gobble up, from fascism to federalism, feminism to fatalism…and my dudes, I HAVE THOUGHTS. We’ll talk about my love life (eventually, calm down), we’ll do some tarot pulls and get woo-y (I’ve gotten embarrassingly good at it since this), and I am sure I will talk shit on a number of internet entities and interests that should make the former Passionfruit fans here feel a sense of continuity. I was writing about creativity well before I got to Passionfruit, after all:

This newsletter is not and will never be a news dump. It is not a “round up.” There will be no “features” though I reserve the right to do interviews. It is not concerned with format as much as it’s obsessed with form. Well, the newsletter isn’t concerned with anything, it’s inanimate. But I am obsessed with form.

The internet is gonna keep fucking everything up, and I’ve had a front row seat to this chaos for pretty much all of my life. Whether it was suffering the first troll army through Gamergate or learning about the AI-ification of everything from Ray Kurzweil 10 years before you knew who Sam Altman was, I’ve been here the whole time, baby. I was at the Facebook frat parties in Palo Alto in 2009, I’ve missed like 2 SXSWs since 2010 (and hosted some of the best parties at more than one of them, iyky). I watched the man burn alongside the first era of crypto bros in 2016. Chelsea Handler flirted with me on Myspace while I was in college, motherfuckers.

I haven’t even mentioned Gawker once yet (OG readers will be both pleased and disappointed by this), that’s my real villain arc that I’m still too paralyzed to write about with any real honesty. It’s been 10 years since I left though this month, so at a certain point I need to start sharing it or I just know that a louder, stupider version of that history will prevail. Now that Denton is out of the country maybe it’s time.

That’s kind of where The Great American Wasteland manuscript picks up, so expect more of that too.

The point is, this leftist millennial internet Svengali you’re currently reading only comes out when shit gets interesting, and shit is interesting.

Whether you’re a first time reader or a long time friend, it’s nice to be back in your feed and inboxes talking about it all again.

Respond to this email and we can talk about it together (response times will vary, and ignorance will never be tolerated, but otherwise, say hi…DMs are open, as the journo kids used to say).

Welcome back Down.

Until next week!

It wouldn’t be a Down the Pipes reader appreciation weekend if I didn’t dig out some old Xanga posts for my OGs, right? Loading up some saucy ones for you from exactly 20 years ago, November 2003.

For those of you who are new here, I’ve been blogging for a long ass time. Most of my earliest work from my high school blog has been vigorously scrubbed from the internet, confined to a series of hard drives kept in a safety deposit box deep in the mountains.

Every now and then when I’m feeling nostalgic for being a teenager on Long Island and the friends I pretty much never went back for, I’ll surface some of these old posts and share ‘em here. Miss y’all!

Most of you won’t know the names or references, but some of you might remember the details as vividly as I do. Remember: Reading a 16 year boy’s blog is weird if the kid is currently 16; you should definitely mind your own business. But 20 years later, it’s just another primary document to pore over.

Editorial notes will be provided, where appropriate. You’ll need to be logged into your substack account and a paid or comped subscriber to access this post…paid if I don’t know you that well, comped if I do…sign up for the free tier if you aren’t sure which one you are. Please enjoy.

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Here’s the one post you missed yesterday, my own little Jenny Craig infomercial. Editorial note: The term “Delzempic” is pending trademark, Fostertalk 2023.

I should also mention that I spent 4 hours watching the Squid Games Challenge series last night instead of writing, a show I did not want to like or watch because it seems about as dystopian a concept as Netflix could possibly develop, but their content algorithms are just that good. They know we like watching people have their dreams dashed, it’s the same psychological muscle that makes us gawk at car accidents. “Show me how tough someone else has it so I can feel better about how tough I have it” is a terrible justification for a show, and yet: Number 1 on Netflix. You cannot resist human nature.

Speaking of human nature, this time of year always gets me thinking about my circadian rhythm, the invisible chemical clock that sits inside all of us to some degree. Scientists aren’t still fully clued in to all the subtle mechanics, but the basic gist is that our bodies, like most of nature, behaves in predictable cycles around sleep and alertness. A circadian rhythm.

Think of it this way: If you didn’t have work or school, or a family or any of the other obligations that come with life, what time would you go to bed and what time would you wake up? Imagine there are no alarms in this scenario, this isn’t a question of choice, but rather of impulse. When does your body feel alert, and when is it ready to shut down?

I have always been more functional in the extremities of the 24 hour clock, my best hours are the ones when everyone else is generally asleep. Having spent a full year unemployed and several previous years not waking up to an alarm, I have a pretty good idea of where my rhythm falls now. It’s usually a bedtime around midnight or 1 and a wake time between 7 and 8. This has shifted earlier over the last few years as my social life has simmered upstate, I can fall asleep as early as 9:30 or 10 now, waking me up around 5am.

This comfort with the early AM hours is not particularly conducive to things like being at work on time, seeing friends with kids, or having productive weekends. On the other hand, it’s highly conducive to seeing concerts and DJs, consuming vast amounts of content, texting one other person intensely until 2am, and getting lost on the internet.

I think I’ve mentioned this here before (or if I haven’t, I should’ve), but this New York Times article about night owls pretty much changed my life. For most of my existence, my inability to sleep at night felt like an invisible weight I had to carry around all day, a subtle but persistent anxiety I just needed to accept if I was to co-exist with a world of daywalkers. It’s not like you can really fight against your natural clock in a way that satisfies, in my experience you can force yourself to function in the hours you’re less functional, but all that feels like is living off of credit cards. Your sleep debt never clears, it only generates interest with each day you caffeinate yourself before your body is ready to get cruising.

Coffee, it needs to be said, is a kinda new-ish thing for everyone. I mean not really, it’s been around for the better part of a millennia. But this idea that we all, every day, take a stimulant before we do anything else…that’s just good 20th century marketing, the same sly fucks who got you all buying diamond engagement rings, shampooing once a day, flushing toilet paper, and calling juice a fruit serving. Don’t worry, we’re not going back in on capitalism today. I’m just saying the overcaffeinated world we live in is a relatively modern one brought to you by Folgers, Keurig, and the Starbucks corporations, among others.

The modern coffee craze does line up nicely with the industrial and digital revolutions though, the need for people to work together at the same time (generally 9-5) required giving folks free coffee at work to get people’s alertness aligned, at least artificially. That’s some genius level social hacking from the gentry class, you gotta hand it to them!

But beneath all that sits your own personal rhythm. It may not align with everyone else’s; that’s actually considered an evolutionary advantage. The thinking goes that societies were able to adapt and survive better when there were people awake at all hours, which provided more production, more protection, and more genetic diversity. You can talk about all the spiritual and physical body alignment you want, but if you’re not in touch with what your body’s natural clock wants from you, I promise: Nothing else is going to feel in alignment either.

This of course, does not mean you need to quit your job and work in a nightclub just because you like to stay up late (I mean, it might…it worked for me). But at the very least, you should try and get to know what your rhythm looks like.

I recognize this may be easier said than done. Generally, I’d recommend you find a week or two where you can turn off your alarm entirely, ease off the caffeine (don’t quit cold turkey, you will have withdrawal and it’ll fuck this whole thing up, but maybe drop to a single, leisurely cup sometime once you’ve settled into your day) and just sleep when you’re tired (vacations work well for this, naps are encouraged as you normalize). Let yourself just be…try not to schedule too much either early or late in the day, don’t stick to a bed time, turn the lights off when you’re tired but resist the urge to go to bed simply to avoid “ruining your day” tomorrow.

If you want to stay up until 4, stay up until 4, though try to find something to do. Reading is a good one at those quiet, late hours. Resist the urge to feel anxiety about being up alone so late, it can feel a little maddening at first, it may even trigger some mild depressive thoughts if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t spend a lot of quiet time with themselves. Power through, try to meditate. Track your sleep each day and night, and see if you can spot a pattern shift about 3-4 days in. That’s about as quickly as your body can normalize, though it could easily take weeks or months. Sleep debt, like actual debt, can be cumulative and compounding.

Obviously if you have kids you’re just screwed, simply accept that they have their own circadian rhythms you need to nurture and support. I’m so sorry nobody explained any of this to you in any meaningful detail before you signed up for parenthood, besides the ominous “say goodbye to sleep!” You’ll get a shot when they’re out of the house to mess with this stuff, stay strong.

But if you can peel yourself away from the world of responsibility for a period of about a week, you can tinker with your own clock. Again, if nothing else, just knowing that you’re actually a morning person and not just a person who has been so heavily medicated with stimulants at 6am every day that you just think you’re a morning person is a pretty big deal. Once you know, you can probably abandon your alarm because you’ll know how many hours and and what time your body naturally works. The complex hormonal cocktail that drives you forward and knocks you out is an amazing process to be an active party to, and being able to harness it is kind of like having a super power (see also: 20 minute power naps, something I’m not great at but know folks who have it mastered).

Anyway. Long way of saying I stayed up until 2am watching Netflix because that’s what my circadian rhythm dictates. I’m warning you that most bosses are not hip to this excuse if they expect you to be sharp at 9am, but the dirty secret is there are a lot of us night owls in positions of power. We operate at a high function because the waking world forced us to adapt to their clock, but we also own the night while the rest of you are sleeping. We get more hours to get more done than everyone else, and we’re at our A game when you’re turning down.

If you’re like me, find bosses, partners, and friends like us…we’ll always have each others backs in those late, lonely hours.

Until later.

If you’ve seen me in the last few months, you may have been one of the many people who have said to me “you’ve lost weight.” This is a bit of a backhanded compliment to give someone (because it implies there was weight to be lost), though we’ve all likely given it to someone at one point or another.

I knew I needed to lose weight, I was the one carrying all that extra me around all these years, after all. And now that I’m losing it it I do appreciate when people notice, it’s just generally people tend to focus on the comparative. “You look better now than when I saw you before,” just hits a little differently than “you’re looking great, keep doing what you’re doing.”

The last, I don’t know, 5-7 or so years, I was somewhere ~200lbs, peaking in December of 2020 at around 208. For a 6’1” guy, that’s just a smidge over what would be considered a “healthy” BMI into “overweight” territory, though friendly reminder the BMI scale is racist and generally wrong.

I eschewed my previous “skinny fat” designation for full blown “dad bod,” trying to embrace the idea that not caring about my weight was my right as a straight man in a serious relationship. I was Homer Simpson-ing it. The reason to be in shape was to seduce someone else, once that person was seduced there was no reason to keep up appearances anymore.

I do not need to explain the toxicity or lack of regard for oneself required to see your body as purely a means to attract a mate or attention, but needless to say, lots of people see their physical wellbeing in this lens. It kinda makes sense…how we present ourselves is more often perceived by others than sensed by ourselves. Working on our externalities can feel like doing work on ourselves to improve the view others have of us, when in fact it’s the underlying sense you have of yourself that’s steering your behavior. Losing weight for someone else (either specifically or generally) is just how we externally project own self-loathing.

Regardless, I’ve turned a corner and recognized that I just feel better when I’m not carrying around an extra 10% of me. I’m still far from toned, but unlike past experiences with exercise and diet, I’m trying not to look at this like a temporary exercise in achieving a target weight so I can go back to being a slob again. Or rather, I’m not looking at it that way anymore. My goal was to get from 200 to 180, I got there earlier this year. Everything since then, now approaching 170, has been the product of the healthier habits I developed getting to the 180.

In the spirit of answering the “how’d you do it” question, I thought I’d share some advice from someone who never really had physical fitness hardwired in.

This is also, selfishly, an effort to dispel the Ozempic rumors some of you have been bandying about, I understand the timing of my weight loss seems sudden, effortless, and suspiciously timed to the rise of the miracle injection, but those who know me best know I’m far too squeamish to be injecting anything in my body for something as vain as weight loss.

Instead, here are the 5 actual things I’ve done, and am doing, to try and not have a heart attack before I’m 45.

Portion Control

In most Italian American households I know of, clearing your plate is a sign of respect for the chef, and if you’re offered seconds, you accept and clear that off your plate too. Growing up, we weren’t too far removed from a generation of people who remembered a time when there wasn’t enough food to go around the dinner table, so the idea that you ate everything you were given was foundational.

This leads to some pretty bizarre psychological behavior, and I still will find ways to condense a meal’s leftovers into the corner of a plate to give the illusion that more of the plate has been consumed. It’s also easier to eat everything on your plate if you eat it faster than your body can process what you’re doing, so speed eating was pretty common for me.

To achieve portion control, I actually started doing two discrete things differently. First, I consciously served myself smaller portions to begin with. Instead of making a pound of rice and starting by eating half of that, I could make half a pound, and then start by eating half of that. I was still having “two” helpings, but each helping was half the size it would have been previously.

Slowing Down

The second key to portion control was slowing down. I try to imagine my first bite of something like I’m doing a taste test…how can I construct the perfect forkful to get the essence of what’s happening here? If this were a wine tasting, what flavor notes can I pick out? Is that cardamom? Do I sense a touch of rosemary? How’s the texture? Temperature? By forcing myself to really pay attention to what I’m eating, I find I can enjoy each bite more while having fewer bites before I start feeling full.

And that’s worth noting too: Your body has ways of communicating that it doesn’t need more food. Learning to stop and listen for those signals takes a moment, but once you get a feel for it, the reaction can become second nature. Pausing between bites, letting the food settle, and being okay with having leftovers on your plate helped me take fewer, more meaningful bites over a longer period of time.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

The next one is also fairly obvious (I suppose they all are if you’re the kind of person who regularly takes care of themself), but I’ve found that looking at labels on food has made it really easy for me to cut out a whole host of garbage snacks and fast food that I was once pretty reliant on for calories. It’s kind of a “you can’t unsee it once you’ve seen it” approach to what kind of substances you put in your body.

When I look at a label, I look in a few key areas for signals that I probably shouldn’t be eating the thing I’m considering eating. First is the calories, far and away the most important thing to getting your body correct. In any given day your body needs a certain number of calories to function, consume more than that and you’re going to turn it into fat. Less than that plus exercise, and you can actually turn your stored fat into energy, with ketosis being the most extreme version of this, though any amount of caloric deficit plus exercise will help, even if your body isn’t going into full blown ketosis.

This is effectively how Weight Watchers and Noom work…you have your caloric budget, and over time you start to get a sense for roughly what foods fit into what budgets. It doesn’t mean I can’t have deserts or the occasional Crunchwrap, it just means when I eat those things, I’m pretty mindful about not piling more food on top of that.

Besides calories, I check things like saturated fats, cholesterol, added sugars, and sodium. If any of these seem like an abnormally high % of daily recommended value, I shelve it or consume sparingly.

Lastly, I’ve started really diving into the ingredient lists, and if there’s ever an ingredient I haven’t heard of, I google it. This tactic alone has turned me off to more processed food than I can even keep track of, but here’s a smattering of gross ingredients that you didn’t know were in things you loved:

• Titanium Dioxide (E171) - Mostly found in cosmetics because it’s a natural UV blocker, this naturally occurring substance was recently banned from food in the EU for having potentially carcinogenic effects. In the US, it’s what keeps ice cream cakes from melting, what gives certain candies their smoothness and color (think about the glaze on a Ring Pop), and it’s used in certain creamers to prevent spoiling.

• Butylated Hydroxyanisole/Hydroxytoluene (BHA/BHT) - Used as an “antioxidant” (aka something that prevents oxidation, a natural breakdown that most organic material undergoes when exposed to the air), this chemical has also come under fire recently for having potentially harmful effects in larger doses. It’s mostly used to keep processed food fresh, like cereals, beer, and certain kinds of candy. Avoid.

• Palm & Coconut Oil - This one is really hard to avoid, especially if you dabble in processed vegetarian foods like Beyond Meat or anything frozen. It’s also not going to kill you the way a stick of butter might, but it’s still increasingly being used to make “healthy” products sound healthier than they are. Ideally, you want oils that are naturally liquid at room temperature…high oleic sunflower oil is decent, avocado and flaxseed is good, olive oil is the gold standard, and canola oil isn’t going to harm you either. Palm oil is also one of the more ecologically destructive oils to manufacture, use sparingly.

• Potassium Bromate - Including this one because it sounds kind of normal…potassium is a thing we know we need, and bromate sounds like a dude comedy about an American frat guy and British prep guy going on a road trip. Instead, it’s another preservative meant to keep food from oxidizing, most commonly used in processed breads (tortillas, white bread, certain packaged bakery products, etc). It’s banned pretty much everywhere except the US, though California recently passed a ban that should go into effect in a few years.

There are others too, but the point is, start learning what you’re eating and you probably won’t want to eat as much of it anymore.

Any Exercise Is Better Than No Exercise

I was not an athletic kid, I wasn’t shlubby either but I never really saw the appeal in organized running around. I was active though, constantly walking or riding my bike somewhere, definitely getting the steps in. This, of course, is tough to do when you work from home.

So exercise never really stuck for me, it always felt like a distraction from the other things I needed to be doing, and it never really fit neatly into a schedule. To counter that, I started setting some kind of daily exercise target. Today I’ll walk 2 miles. Tomorrow I’ll chop wood for 30 minutes. Friday I’ll do 100 push ups, Saturday I’ll make time for 100 sit ups. Sunday maybe I’ll do a yoga class. It’s not what most trainers would tell you to do to create consistency and routine in your fitness regimen, but if you’re like me and need variety, giving yourself one thing to do per day is better than doing nothing every day.

Keeping Score

The last thing I want to shout out is the array of fitness trackers and apps that can help you see your progress. I use a Withings scale to log my weight, and having a chart I can look at regularly really helps me understand when I’m moving in the right or wrong directions. Because of the nature of weight loss and fitness, results do not present themselves overnight, but they do become apparent over time. And being able to see that is a major motivating factor to keep going.

Stay fit out there, says the guy who has now eaten approximately 15 cookies in the last 48 hours (everyone knows this is a cheat weekend).

Until later!

Actually, that’s exactly what they did.

Miniature spoilers and theories ahead, if you want to go in blind then you can just skip down to the posts from yesterday.

The marketing has been subversive and clearly an extension of the point they’re trying to make, the acting is superb from everyone (but especially Emma Stone, who brings an Oscar-worthy level of attention to every microexpression), and I’m fairly sure the entire show is just about how utterly toxic small dick energy can be to entire relationships, families, and communities.

I guess viewer discretion advised on that front, especially if you have a big screen TV. They hang some tiny wangs in a kind of horror movie, jump scene fashion. One minute a father and law and son are sharing a moment, the next thing you know you’re confronting an old man’s button dick. That Safdie signature shock, turned onto one of society’s most enduring and patriarchal curses. It’s brilliantly uncomfortable television.

I’m already saying and speculating too much. Watch it and we’ll chat more when it wraps.

Well then! We have another fun filled day of blogging ahead of us, but if you’re anything like me, then there’s a special feeling you get opening your eyes on the Saturday morning of a Thanksgiving weekend.

My school tempered, white collar workforce circadian rhythm experiences Friday on a Wednesday and Saturday on a Thursday this particular week, yours probably does too (unless you work in editorial or service or retail, in which case I am so sorry, I’ve been there too, this weekend is awful). But for those of us “fortunate” enough to only ever expect 2 days off in a row, this particular Saturday morning feels as though we’ve been given a stay of execution. Another weekend for our weekend we just had, that’s a little taste of the American Dream right there.

I’m in a great mood today, so expect a nice smattering of random, uplifting stuff, a stark contrast from where we were yesterday. It got a bit heavy, sorry! Capitalism will do that. Speaking of capitalism, a reminder that the Down The Pipes Black Friday offer is running until Monday at midnight.

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And here’s what you missed from yesterday:

More soon, until then!

If you read that last sentence and are thinking “Jesus, is he just going to talk about football?” No. Not exactly. Kinda.

Football is just another sport, albeit one of the world’s most popular (especially if we’re not talking about American Football, though in this case, assume I’m not being European when I say football). Sports have some pretty ancient, pre-antiquity roots…first nations played an early, brutal form of lacrosse in place of fighting wars. Cave paintings in France depict wrestlers dating back to around 15,000 BCE. The Egyptians were famous for their collection of sports that included swimming, long jump, archery, even an early form of hockey. And those games pre-dated the Greek Olympics by around 1500 years.

There was a practical reason for sport back in those early days of civilization, they often served to train men to go out in the world and do typical, patriarchal man stuff. The fastest swimmers would wind up fishing on boats. The fastest runners would find themselves chasing animals. The men who could lift the most would find themselves in the army, and the most capable leaders in team sports would ascend to leading governments and armies.

It was a crude system, but it did allow for ranked measure of athletic ability. Considering the immense need for capable, organized physical labor, it makes sense they’d need a gamified system for sorting out the brutes and motivating them to do something productive with their abilities.

It was and is fun as hell to watch. There’s something impressive about watching another person do something you can’t do, it can trigger a whole swarm of complex emotions ranging from jealousy to empathy. There’s a biological, animalistic pull towards these characters of great athletic ability: The old, “men want to be them, women want to be with them” schtick. There’s a reason folks are saying Taylor finally found someone “on her level” in Travis Kelce, and that subsection of the social contract with our sports stars is just as ancient as the games themselves.

The fine print on that contract has always been fairly brutal, though. The chances of being a legendary, Brady-level champion in any given sport are pretty slim, we maybe get a few dozen stars like that in a generation. Most are destined to get maimed on the field of battle, carted off like the gladiators two millennia before them.

Still, there’s got to be something to the idea of teaching young people about teamwork, sportsmanship, healthy competition, and giving it your best, right? Sure. I suppose. Giving people an outlet for their aggressive tendencies isn’t the worst thing in the world either, for the players or the fans.

If we could force countries to send their best soldiers into a giant, life or death, Squid Games competition to settle their disputes, I feel like we’d probably avoid a lot of civilian casualties. What is war if not a series of strategic moves of force meant to crush an opponent from another geographic area? Is that not exactly what we’re emulating when the Red Sox and Yankees play each other?

It’s probably a pipe dream to imagine a world where war is replaced by war games, though you know shit’s kinda messed up when you’re fantasizing about Ender’s Game being more preferable than our current endgame.

Sports will not be supplanting wars anytime soon though, and the monied interests that control these leagues are just fine with that. America’s desire for bloodlust in their sport has some pretty funky boundaries that the commissioners, owners, players, and broadcasters have all learned to balance; in most instances they’ve found near-perfect stasis between how much blood and gore the audience wants and the kinds of brands that can stomach that kind of entertainment.

It’s why Monster Energy sponsors UFC, and why Rolex sponsors the US Open. The NFL is constantly trying to tweak it’s rules and safety protocols to find this middle path…too loose and people start getting disgusted by a barrage of snapped tendons and violent fractures, too restrictive and people get disgusted by how boring the game feels. The competition isn’t always enough…some of us need something that feels life or death thrown in the mix before we can really get invested. It’s messed up.

The sponsors are ultimate what make professional sports so high stakes, the dollars spent on media adjacent to sports is staggering. Think about Super Bowl commercials, stadium naming rights, endorsements, merchandising, broadcast rights, etc. Sport, like Black Friday itself, sits in that strange intersection between religious fervor, nationalist pride, and capitalist splendor.

Sport steals so much from religion, it’s kind of wild. Hall of Famers are just saints. Sundays are for football. If you’re attending services, expect to be given alcohol. There are hymns and fight songs, mascots meant to personify all the human suffering felt in the pews, and even a weird tradition around dumping water on people. There are miracles! Faith! David and Goliath archetypes! The former president of NYU, John Sexton, used to teach a legendary course to freshmen called “Baseball as a Road to God,” a topic he eventually turned into a book and then toured on extensively. It’s pretty good, conceptually, but save yourself the tuition and watch his spiel for free here.

I don’t need to explain the nationalist part of sports, do I? Teams are associated with cities, usually we root for teams as a localized community against another localized community…it’s pretty clean. If you want to tie something else to the nationalism, remember that the US Department of Defense PAYS most of the major sporting leagues for all those veteran giveaways, flyovers, and color guards. It’s great recruiting; every kid who wants to play pro ball but just isn’t good enough can find a spot on a team at Fort Pendleton. You get it.

Which leaves the worst for last…the capitalism of it all. I know I said sports were always kind of luxurious if you were a super star, but the floor has never been particularly comfortable or stable. Until recently, baseball players were either drunks (in the early days), coked up (in the glory days), or roided out (in the Clinton/Bush Years). Most did not make great money, they played for love of the game (and because they were mostly unemployable doing anything else).

It was an ignoble pursuit at times, but the game was hugely popular with fans. It made lots of money for the owners and the league. The players knew the fans were coming for them, and they fought for better wages and protections. Some owners indigently believed it was their team; they didn’t need the players or even the city they were in (see the Giants and the Dodgers moving to the west coast).

The players eventually unionized, went on a couple of strikes, and eventually started getting decent contracts and healthcare and retirement plans. And helmets! It was around all this upswing that the anti-union movements started in the 80s, the leagues were mostly unscathed but it unleashed a tidal wave of capital optimizations across sports franchises. That’s what we’re living with now.

The leagues have built their corporate fortresses out of other corporate interests. Beverage companies would die without sports, from water to soda to Gatorade to beer. Car companies spend more money on sports ads than any other channel. So do insurance companies. Aramark does catering for 11 different NFL stadiums. Ticketmaster controls ticketing (and often parking, too). Stadiums once named for landmarks or luminaries…Lambeau Field, The Meadowlands, Arrowhead Stadium…gave way to names like CitiField, MetLife Stadium, and GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. Charming. New Balance, Nike, Lids, and Under Armor didn’t mean anything to anyone until after the mid-80s, these brands don’t exist without the economic engine that sports fandom can provide.

But in the end, sports exist because we just like to compete. It’s literal monkey games seeing who can jump the furthest or lift the biggest rock. We feel a sense of deep, self-identifying pride when the people from our area wearing our colors beat the people from that other area in the other colors. We shouldn’t shy away from these aspects of organized sport.

But the profit wringing on $200 jerseys? The $20 stadium beer? Gouging on ticket service fees? That’s the shit that makes sports hard to bear. I’d rather go out back and play two hand touch than watch a bunch of college kids play pro bono ball for a millionaire state employee coach while the NCAA makes billions.

And that’s only partially true. I still (and will always) bleed green and white, blue and orange. I just wish the fans and players weren’t being bled dry at the same time.

Until the next one.

If you’re a friend or subscriber, you should be able to log in to your Substack account to access the entire piece. Here’s what you’ve missed so far.

Chapter 1
Part 1: Broken Chains, Dreams, and Minds
Part 2: Taxis, Trains, Busses & Planes

Chapter 2
Part 1: The Long, Emaciated Arm of American Exceptionalism
Part 2: Do You Know The Way To San José?
Part 3: When The Colonizers Arrive

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Tackling labor, let’s do this. I’ve mostly avoided the issue here, mainly because I read too many excellent writers who understand the stakes so much better than I do (I’m mostly talking about Hamilton Nolan, but I must admit my professional publication, Passionfruit, does some damn good creator labor journalism too).

I am also, for better or worse, someone who has mostly spent the last 15 years working alongside or within the management class, where it is considered taboo to even say the “u” word, lest any nearby workers get inspired to try it.

From a purely MBA-informed perspective, the problem with organized labor is it fundamentally restricts how the management class operates. The fear is that it can limit potential broad avenues of cost management (firing people), it could stifle innovation (using technology to fire people), and it may ultimately make it harder to sell the business one day (because no buyer with that kind of money wants to deal with people they can’t easily fire, either).

I’m sorry, but this is stupid logic by people who claim to be in the business of understanding their customer to extract maximum value from them. It betrays a painfully simplistic way of understanding the strategic relationship between the person who makes the thing, the person who owns the thing being made, and the person who buys the thing.

Now, some caveats. I grew up in a split household, that is, my mother was active in the teacher’s union in my town (though oddly our district is called the “Seaford UFSD - Union Free School District”, a name that actually predates the labor movement and refers to unified groups of elementary schools feeding a common high school managed by an elected board of education). My dad worked on Wall Street for most of his career, and in later years sat on that same board of education the teacher’s union in my town often found themselves at odds with.

So I like to think I grew up understanding both sides, getting a kind of front row, intimate seat at the labor negotiating table from a young age. It seemed complicated, in fact in some ways even more complicated than your standard company’s union.

With a teacher’s union, there’s a direct negotiation with the localized, face-to-names general public. See, the teachers are the workers, the board of education is the management, and the local voters living within the school district are the ones who elect the board. So unlike a private company where the board is whomever you want, or a public company where the board is whomever you want plus a bunch of random rich shareholders, a board of education is just some folks in your town who the other folks in your town are backing.

This argument always boiled down to taxes and who was paying them. In Seaford, there were more older people sitting on family homes than young families moving in, so a large percentage of the voting public didn’t have kids in the schools anymore. Their property taxes—which fed the school’s budget—were already high just by being an hour train to NYC, and every requested increase to the school budget was met with vast amounts of hostility. They simply couldn’t afford to pay more and keep their homes, and that’s a valid, shitty reality for them.

On the other hand, lots of our teachers (including my mother) lived in our town too. Their wages were also paying property taxes, and their children were using the school’s services. Despite being in one of the richest counties in America, Seaford was always more of a working class, cops and firefighters, electricians and commuters type town. Lots of our parents were in some kind of union (cops and firefighters have some of the unquestionably strongest unions in the country, but so do electricians, paramedics, construction workers, rail workers, nurses, and teachers). Lots of our parents had pensions coming their way, got great benefits that covered the whole family, and knew the exact age they could stop working for good (collecting their pension and continuing to receive free healthcare via Medicare). The taxes paid for that.

It was a good system, seemingly! I had friends dads retire when they were 50 because they had spent the previous 25 years in the NYPD, they’d take their guaranteed retirement payments and use them to open small businesses around town. That kind of “you give us the best years of your life, we’ll pay you out for the rest of it” agreement is hard to come by these days, but that’s because unions once fought like hell to get those protections put in place. They said "yes, taxes will be high, but it’s money we give back to you when you need it.” I don’t know why more taxes aren’t framed that way.

Before the unions, if a cop got hurt on the job, he’d have to rely on the kindness of the Police Benevolence Association to support him. Teachers worked until they died, because it was painted more like sainthood than labor…a calling, not a career. Before unions, a dead coal miner meant their kids going into the same mines that just killed their father so they could keep surviving. People and children worked in sweatshop conditions that led to Triangle Shirtwaist-scale disasters just feet from the NYU campus. That was just normal industrial urban living until the unions came along and were like…my dudes, no.

So anyway, there was a very tangible need for unions at one point, things were UNHINGED. Those unions fought for 40 hour work weeks, minimum wages, benefits and unemployment, all the stuff we just naturally take for granted now. The technology that industrialization offered meant you could run machines 24/7, but it wasn’t until people stood up for themselves did the ownership class realize that they couldn’t run their people the same way they ran their machines.

Things got better, so much so that by the middle of the 20th century, you had the makings of a thriving middle class with halfway decent economic mobility. Sure, there was a ton of sexism and racism and warmongering and toxic chemicals and plenty of other terrible shit going on then, but broadly, working conditions improved immensely for the vast number of people in the US (yes, we also started exporting our sweatshops to Central America and Asia around this time but like, let’s stay focused).

When things got better for workers towards the later half of the 20th century, the unions had less to fight for. They got bloated, some were corrupted by criminal organizations and used to enrich any number of illegal rackets. Others would find themselves striking over slight wage increases, a kind of “everything looks like a nail” approach to negotiation.

This swing of the pendulum led to a backlash against unions, and since the 1980’s we’ve been living in the echo of a failed Reaganomics executive policy to uniformly and unflinchingly antagonize your workforce. Wharton was handing out pamphlets as early as 1982 instructing the future leaders of America to treat strikes like opportunities to bust up their pesky unions and replace them with nonunion workers.

The truth is, neither side is perfectly innocent here, though you can’t blame the actions of the workers for the conditions initially dictated by the owners. Unions are both important and pesky. Workers are essential and replaceable.

But my point isn’t actually about whether or not unions should or shouldn’t exist, they obviously should. My point is that unions now are weaker than they’ve ever been, at a time when government services and relative tax rates are at an all time low. This is creating an immense amount of strain on the middle and lower classes, the kind of strain that leads to memes like this:

It’s an untenable situation, and generally when things become untenable, there’s only one institution with enough power and money to fix it. Hello, Washington!

Government is bad at so many things, I can appreciate that. But it’s pretty damn good at galaxy scale public works initiatives when it wants to be, it’s kind of the original function of government and probably why people mostly choose to live under any government than no government at all.

What we need here is what most of Europe has: A renewed social contract with our state and federal governments setting a new quality of life standard for people who work in fields that benefit the public good. See, the unions helped drive a demand for corporate social security, that drove a demand for federal social security, and the acceptance of federalized social security helped propel the unions and every working class citizen forward.

If done with enough fervor and financial backing (lol, dream on I know), you could nationalize and socialize a number of industries all at once…science and healthcare could be freed from the grip of insurance giants, artists and actors and other creative professionals can stop playing gig roulette, journalists can stop taking PR jobs. State universities should be uniformly free to anyone who wants to go, like high schools. The trick would be injecting enormous amounts of grant money into those sectors, and only awarding it to groups that met certain ethical and employment standards for those public-good fields.

Sidebar: Did you know that compulsory high school education in this country only started in the 1920s, and it was used as a way to “Americanize” immigrants? Like literally, the racists WANTED to pay to send aliens to public schools, picture that for a second. I digress.

The problem labor faces is that the government and the corporations are as well conspired as the mob once was with the teamsters in their heyday. There are good prosecutors and candidates who are waiting in the wings to fight the good fight for the workers, but only recently has that become a reasonable position to run on, and most voters aren’t clued in enough to “how it all works” to really understand which bogeyman they’re supposed to be angry at. They pick a color based on what the shouty TV lady says, and the wheels of capitalism continue to level entire communities of people.

When the election gets closer next year, I’ll try to point out some folks on both sides of the aisle who are worth paying attention to on this front. It’s shockingly bipartisan when you get down to the ground level, there are some racist kooks you might need to hold your nose for, but hey, if they got us universal K-12 education and bans on federal funding for Catholic Schools, maybe there’s some space to work with the lunatics. Kidding, sorta.

There’s much more to this of course, I’m glazing over the fact that this all becomes more dire as AI makes more and more jobs automated. Or the fact that our climate cannot continue to shoulder the current level of environmental cost wrought by our economic behavior, so at the very least we should be spending imperial boatloads on funding an actual green new deal (we are starting to do this, but in the same way that I am “starting” to eat less red meat…it’s mostly just been talk so far with some grand gestures sprinkled in).

People, it seems, are not worth what they were once worth to corporations. We’ve seen this before, and we’ve spent the last year being reminded what a strong union is capable of securing when those scales tip; especially when the government and public is supporting them (congrats, Detroit & Hollywood).

So if you’re one of my friends or readers who was raised to believe all unions are always uniformly bad, this is incorrect. There’s a time and a place, and now seems to be the time, and large, scummy corporations driven purely by profit seem to be the place. Given the current state of unions though and our elected representatives’ desire to keep their corporate funding secure, we need to put more people in government who understand the value of a strong, economically sound labor force.

It might sound crazy and improbable, but this country is littered with crazy and improbable acts of public will. The Hoover Dam opened up the deserts of the Pacific Southwest to settlement in the 1930s, women didn’t really start going to college until the 1960s, drunk driving was mostly chill until the 1980s, you used to be able to smoke in restaurants until the early 2000s.

The Brits spend around £6 billion on the BBC annually. Would you like to guess what PBS and NPR operating budgets are? Around $300 million each. About half of that comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcast (which is mostly funded by US taxpayers to the tune of about half a billion). Still not a lot considering how much smaller the Kingdom and Commonwealth is to the US.

And the point is not to create a state media mouthpiece, the point is to create a journalistic outfit that is so good and well respected and well paying, all other outlets need to rise to that standard or lose out talent to an organization funded by the American people.

Imagine if a SUNY school could pay more than NYU and was as valuable as an NYU degree…you’d have fewer kids looking to enroll at NYU, and tuitions would likely drop, once again creating a fair market for educational value. Or a public corporation whose job was to update our energy grid to be smarter and greener coming to compete with the ConEds of the world…you’d have greener energy, more jobs, and a more resilient power grid for increased demand.

Organized labor was always most powerful at the voting box, and the reality is you don’t need to part of a union to vote like you are. Solidarity from the owner’s box, baby…you can’t beat ‘em, you can’t join ‘em, but you can vote with ‘em.

Now I’m gonna go watch the Jets embarrass themselves, because there’s no greater capitalist enterprise than American gladiators. More on that later.

Until then.

Good morning, fellow prisoners and wardens of late stage capitalism! Today’s the big day! Black Friday, if you didn’t know, is the glue…

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How was Thanksgiving? We do the thing? How many of you managed to fully avoid any mention of geopolitical issues?

Honestly, I am lucky to be surrounded by incredibly smart family members each year, and this year not a single one of us brainiacs mentioned anything about what’s happening out there. We didn’t talk COVID, we didn’t talk about Israel and Palestine, and we didn’t talk about Trump or Biden.

The most out there I got was a 10 minute conversation with my brother about the absolute clown show that is the New York Jets. Even Grandma Bev managed to find a certain level of decorum; at one point we thought she was calling someone we all know a pussy, when in fact she had clearly said “pussy cat” (she was still being derisive and judgmental but like, that’s Bev).

I know this family can go deep on the issues when we want to, but god damn do I appreciate when we just don’t sometimes. Instead we got drunk, told family stories to my in-laws that they’ve both definitely heard before, marveled over my sister-in-law’s Taylor Swift cookies, and spent a good chunk of time shopping for a new car for my brother. Simple, unbothered, and for a brief moment, unburdened.

There’s a lot going on out there. I’ve been meaning to write about all of it, but like everyone else my feelings are definitely complicated, probably ignorant, and almost certainly prone to misinterpretation. I’ll try over the coming days to get to some of those more meaty topics, they’re not really the kind of ideas you want to power blog through but I’ll do my best and see what sheikhs out. Woof, sorry about that. It’s going to be rough if that pun is any indication.

But not tonight. Tonight I just want to appreciate the power of taking a break from the things that make us anxious, recognizing that the struggle will be there in the morning. It’s okay to put yourself in rooms with people who share your desire to just not.

This is assuredly a position of privilege, some folks don’t have the luxury of turning away from the atrocities in front of them. I get it, I’m sorry. But anyone who does any kind of front line work will tell you: If you can take a break, you should.

Fighting the good fight requires two key things: The energy to keep fighting, and a vivid picture of what you’re fighting for. Energy is pretty simple, it requires the occasional rest to recharge fully.

And what are we fighting for? A Thanksgiving where the drama revolves solely around sides timing running behind turkey timing? Not exactly. We’re fighting (or at least, I’m fighting) so that every family can have a place like I’m fortunate enough to have with my family; a safe space filled with visible live laugh and love.

So why would we try and turn those safe spaces into a battleground too? Isn’t that the opposite of pacifism? Of course, you may have family members who can’t help themselves. There’s always one in the bunch who likes placing the bait, and another who always seems to enjoy taking it.

Here’s my advice: You know who both of the hooligans are in your circle (hopefully you only have two, but this still works if your hooligans have already started building factions). The goal is to keep them from hooning out the way they normally do, and the easiest way to do that is to identify the key instigators, pull them aside one by one, preferably before the alcohol starts flowing, and just ask them to, for one night only, hold their fire. Keep it to themselves, let everyone have a night away from the world we inhabit every other minute of our lives.

Some will be understanding, others will be indigent and try to fight with you. If they’re the former, you should be good to go, though if they mention anything even remotely controversial through the rest of the evening, just shoot ‘em a disappointed look. They may say something idiotic like “sorry, don’t want to melt the snowflake” but like. That’s fine. Don’t take that bait, chuckle and say “you can call me whatever you want, just please let’s try to put it aside for an evening.” If they’re not totally off their rocker, this should be enough.

Let’s talk about the ones who are more brazen though, the kind of folks you can’t just pull aside for a chitchat. For them, it’s important not that you win the instigator over, but instead that you go to the person who normally takes the instigator’s bait, and ask them to just ignore it. These folks hate being ignored (same tbh), so they’ll usually become louder and more obnoxious in an attempt to get any kind of rise out of anyone.

This behavior should be ignored by the group too, though at a certain point it may become so unrelenting that the group needs to collectively turn on the instigator. In that scenario, the instruction to everyone else is to just laugh. Don’t respond, don’t engage on the merit of any arguments. Just point and laugh.

It sounds crude, and may not save your next holiday if your instigator is hell bent on raising hell, but you can at least try to have a pre-game chat with all involved parties before the fighting starts. Again, I’m not trying to silence what are very important points that need to be addressed out there, I’m just saying that maybe a holiday dinner is the last place you want to try and reconcile a family member’s global-scale geopolitical takes! Save it for some other time, buster, the war is out there not in here.

Anyway, I’m talking about your family and not mine, we mostly just talked shit on Zach Wilson and complimented mom’s cooking. It’s okay to just do that sometimes, preserving and promoting that bliss for everyone generally requires you to know what that bliss looks and feels like. Not always, get out of your bubble as often as you can and gawk at the inhumanity that exists out there. But also appreciate that you have a bubble, and you should protect it at all costs.

If all we do is fight, then all we’ll do is fight. If you only break it up after it starts, you’ve already lost. Want to make a difference out there? Cool everyone’s jets around you when you can before they start up, yourself included. Don’t take the bait, keep your space safe so you can go out there and advocate for every human to have what you’re lucky enough to get to squander.

On that note: I’m delirious. 4 posts in 12 hours is pretty good, not me at full Roman trireme ramming speed blogging, but today was a chill day. We’ll really open her up tomorrow.

Until then.

I can’t spend too long on this one, just got to my folks’ house upstate and the family is starting to roll in one by one. While being anti-social on my computer is kind of a holiday staple around here, my 97 year old grandmother Beverly is ambling in as I type this, and every moment I am on my computer is a moment she will find reasons to guilt me for over dinner in a few hours.

We don’t call it Jewish Guilt around our family though, or at least not to her face. To Beverly, it’s just nerve. “What a nerve!” could be proclaimed towards anyone or anything, and will likely be proclaimed to me when I tell her the reason I was late to welcome her was because I was writing about her on the internet.

Still, the woman is whip sharp for someone coming up on a century of existence, waking up every day from the Hoover Administration until now has to be an absolutely trip. Her memory is something she saw a number of her friends and family loose at one point or another, but there’s Bev, still able to tell you about the shape and size of a particular handbag she loved from the 1960’s.

I won’t get all deeply biographical because I hear her making the rounds and I really need to get down there, but here’s the short version: Born in the 1920s to a hyper Jewish family (everyone Jewish was kind of hyper Jewish back then, being “reform” wouldn’t really come to mean what it currently mean until the 1970s) in Brooklyn, took care of her small army of older brothers after her mother got gravely ill when she was a teenager, ran away when she was 18 or 19 to marry my grandfather, and raised my mother and uncle in Canarsie.

Once the kids were out of the picture, my grandfather started losing his vision. Could have been from not wearing his service sunglasses on his WWII navy ship, could have just been a fluke thing. Either way, my grandmother went from taking care of her siblings to taking care of her kids to taking care of her husband, an emotionally volatile man who did not like the idea of having his independence slowly fade to black in his 50s.

Still, Bev created touch-sensitive labels for his clothes so he could still dress himself, she marked his bills so he could still be quick with a tip, and she drove him everywhere until the day he died (and then continued driving herself around up until about 5 years ago).

By the time my grandfather died, they had left Brooklyn for Fort Lauderdale, and my grandmother adjusted to life on her own for the first time in her life. You’d think this would be terrifying, but if you ask her about it, there’s a good chance these were the actual best years of her life. No attachments, no need to take care of anyone but herself. Men would call for her, she wasn’t interested. If she wanted to play bridge or go to the casino she would, if she wanted to read a book and sit by the pool all day, she would. She was in her bliss through all her 80s and into her 90s.

When the pandemic started, her age and the shape of things made it pretty apparent she needed to be closer to family. We moved her back to NY to be closer to everyone, though to her credit she’s still mostly unassisted in her assisted living facility (she keeps firing aides for having, you guessed it, nerve).

Beverly is still quick to tell you when she’s uncomfortable, pissed off, or disappointed (she is also quick to communicate this information to service staff who do not operate at her intellectual level). She can also be wise, kind, and hilarious. She’s all of those things, most of the time! She’s been warning us that this could be her last holiday, birthday, or meal since she was about 80 or so, meaning for almost half my life this woman who I love dearly has been reminding us how precious little time she feels she has left.

So with that, I have a million more things I could say about this woman. One day I’ll tell you about the time she wrenched an ill-advised piercing out of my ear, or her bitch of a sister in a law who stole her mother’s wedding ring off her cold dead hand. Bev saw some crazy stuff.

But time is precious with folks who have seen that much of it, so I’m going to go get some of that with her now.

Enjoy dinner, back when the booze and tryptophan hit!

It’s noon on Thanksgiving, I’m currently driving up the New York State Thruway (like, not while I’m writing this, while you’re reading this), and I am undoubtedly tuned to one of the countless stations across the country that still plays Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Masacree at noon on Thanksgiving.

The song is idiotic. Rambling. A mostly true story of a bumbling, ass of a man who learns his town dump is closed on Thanksgiving, litters, and then gets arrested the next day. The titular Alice’s Restaurant has very little to do with the story, only adding to the absurdism of the whole thing. It was folk music reminiscent of the depression era, but written about a fuddy couple of days beating around in the Berkshires and not the starvation and despair of the dust bowl.

All media hinges on invented tradition and respecting that tradition. It’s why anchors sign off their broadcasts the same way every time, why newspapers still run the funny pages on Sunday, it’s why NBC lights up a tree in their courtyard. Really, all capitalist enterprise wants is to convince you that shopping is an annual ritual worth honoring, hence your Macy’s parade, your Black Friday/Small Business Saturday/Cyber Monday/Giving Tuesday, your Toyotathon and December to Remember.

Media too, as a business that lives off the attention you give us, needs to create moments of traditions. What started at a gag from a cool alternative station in New York has blossomed across the country as a goofy way to guarantee 15 minutes of listenership on a weekday when people aren’t commuting the way they normally might.

And that itself has turned into a legacy so time honored and unquestioned that it’s one of just 500 or so American songs designated for the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, alongside legendary recordings like Muddy Waters’ Hoochie Coochie Man, Elvis Presley’s Sun Studio Sessions, Etta James’ At Last, and even Herbert Morrison’s haunting radio description of the Hindenburg disaster.

Hats off if you already know where I’m going with this.

My family wasn’t huge on Arlo’s plodding song, I wasn’t even aware of the song until my AP Stat teacher in high school gave us a pop quiz after the long weekend to see how many of us listened (he was really, weirdly into it). You were either an Alice’s house or you weren’t, and we weren’t really.

Instead…my family turns back to another broadcast icon tradition, the big WKRP Turkey Giveaway.

The humanity, indeed.

Whatever traditions you keep today, whether they be breaking wishbones or betting on the Lions, getting stoned with your siblings before dinner or that weird dish your great aunt always brings around, appreciate what that tradition exists for.

It could be a goof, it could be a corporation trying to make money off of you, or it could just be how we remind each other that we all remember the last time we were all here doing this thing we always do, and we’re simply happy to be back in that place, doing that thing again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

More on that in a bit too, but if you’re new or new-ish then welcome, this is a semi-private place for just classic blog fodder content that once had a home in places like LiveJournal or Xanga. Most of the posts are paywalled for people I know or people willing to pay for them, subscribe for the free tier if you wanna try your luck with me recognizing your name and or email address and adding you to the comp list.

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Well, it’s been a minute…sorry about that. As my oldest standing friend and long time Pipes supporter Matthew Koma’s newly produced single Are You Awake by Lauren Mayberry (it slaps, check it out) suggests, “hometown hero is a poisoned chalice choice. If they all love you then you’re just destined to disappoint.”

It’s a familiar feeling for creatives of all stripes. When you start making good shit that people start recognizing you for, a pressure starts building. Don’t mess it up, make the next one better than the last one, people are counting on you for another banger post, song, look, take, TikTok, whatever. You can physically feel the weight of your audience at every step of your creative journey, whether that’s dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions. Every time you add more audience, it can feel like you’ve added more invisible expectation to succeed.

Couple that with the sense that once you start getting a certain amount of critical acclaim (or even just acknowledgement) from the people who weren’t always rooting for you (like the people in your life you look up to, complete strangers who have happened on your work, or even the icons you dreamed of becoming), a sense of imposter syndrome is likely to sneak in. That stinging voice in your head that drives you to make your work the best it can be is also capable of convincing you that your best is never going to be good enough, and anyone who says otherwise is either tasteless or lying to you.

How you handle this as a creative person is entirely up to you, and ultimately the difference between people who are creative and people who create. Everyone is at least a little bit creative—we all have the capacity to imagine—though most folks don’t have the gall to push through the self doubt and external hurdles to make something imagined into something real with that creative energy.

It’s hard! A million things will get in your way if you let them, but finding ways to push through those distractions and get back to your work, that’s where creation flourishes. And it’s those creatives who keep going who wind up being successful creators. Seth Rogen explains this well.

A number of creatives I know do a thing called morning pages. It’s a practice popularized in the book The Artist's Way, but it’s effectively just daily journaling. Not for any particular reason or any particular rhyme, just a free dump of whatever is at the front or back of your mind, a kind of daily stretch for someone who needs to spend their days making creative output.

It seems kind of obvious…if you want to write every day, it’s best to start your day with writing. Trey Anastasio has a version of this as well, though for him it’s if you want to make music every day, wake up and start making music. You can see the childlike joy in his morning routine:

But that’s actually not the brilliance of morning pages. It’s the commitment to a routine; that’s the secret ingredient most creatives miss out on.

The perpetual motion of a daily ritual that fits in a pattern of other daily rituals that give you the meditative space and time for creation. Wake up, coffee, meditate, write, eat, work, exercise, eat, work, play, eat, watch, sleep, repeat. Something like that. It’s seldom that simple, there’s meetings and trips and family stuff and friend stuff and the endless distraction machine that is the very phone you’re glued to instead of engaging with your family on Thanksgiving (unless you’re my family, in which case hi, I’m sorry I haven’t called, I’ll be home soon).

It’s how you prioritize the routine, the commitment to the bit that you are a person who creates things; that’s what sets apart the people who manage to keep it going and those of us who just manage to eke out erratic bursts of creativity followed by long spells of seemingly nothing (I feel you, Andre 3000).

But it’s never really nothing, is it? Or is it always nothing? I guess it’s both and neither. When creatives aren’t creating, we don’t cease being creative, we’ve just stopped giving ourselves an outlet for the creativity. Sometimes we stop creating because we’re just burnt out, nothing left to say. Other times it’s because we’re afraid of what we have to say and the response it may generate from the faceless and faced people who we suspect expected something different from our work.

Most often though we’re simply distracted by our latest infatuations, be that a person, a crew of people, a job, an artist, a project, or even more sinisterly, a vice. Lots of times these wind up being interconnected and competing distractions! My job is managing a crew of artists that I adore and we’re working on a project, sometimes we drink together. See how quickly all that stacks?

Creatives are prone to states of limerence, a sort of involuntary daydream (okay, they’re invasive thoughts) about a particular subject, human or otherwise. When we become limerent, it kind of becomes hard for us to focus on anything or anyone else. It is as annoying as it is blissful, and can either propel great work and relationships forward or leave you spiraling in circles and ignoring some of the people closest to you (in a sense that was me the last few months, my apologies to those of you who felt my lack of presence in your life recently).

But I’m not actually here to apologize. I’m here to say thanks. Thanks to those of you who stuck around while I flitted off to do what I do, and thanks to those of you who flitted off with me. Thank you to my family I’ve been absent from for letting me go be absent for a bit. There’s an old saying writers remind each other of when we’re procrastinating: A piece that takes you 6 months to create really takes 2 weeks to write and 5 and a half months to live. I’ve been out there doing some living, and I’m thankful to be able to come back home and tell you about some of it.

So! Here’s the kicker, if you’ve made it this far you’re clearly invested here, and I too often take that for granted. Because I’ve been consumed by work and play the last few months, I haven’t had much time for my own writing. That’s not so much the case this weekend, so we’re going to try something a little different down these here pipes.

For the next few days, I’m just gonna blog. Perpetual morning pages, all day and night long, baby! Sometimes it’ll be long heady shit like this, other times just screenshots from my phone. Free posts, subscriber only posts, a note or two, maybe even an impromptu podcast or late night chat if we’re feeling daring. It will be fun, because blogging is fun, and if you like fun blogging then keep checking downthepipes.co throughout the weekend for the latest fun.

I’ll be taking requests, go follow me on the gram if you aren’t already and/or text my ass if we know each other like that and tell me what you want more of here, I’m feeling immense gratitude for your support all of a sudden and I honestly don’t know how long that’s going to last, so don’t squander it. Also don’t be offended when I don’t respond immediately either, please appreciate that this entire post was an attempt to tell you that my focus is finite and fungible.

Lastly, don’t worry, I won’t be flooding your inboxes with my bullshit (your inbox belongs to the retail gods this weekend anyway), instead you’ll get a daily round up in your inbox for the next 4 days of the previous day’s posts, so if you want the real time feed you gotta pretend it’s 2008 and smash that refresh button (or keep an eye on my Instagram, I’ll be posting links there too).

If it goes well maybe we’ll bring it back for 12 Days of Pipesmas, who knows. Happy Thanksgiving, buckle up. lol, unintentional dad-level Pilgrim joke.

Until the next one!

Current editions of DTP are sparse as I focus my brainpower on promoting We’ve Got A Band, a fun podcast where Gabrielle Bluestone and I talk to some really amazingly creative people about their careers and favorite band (it’s Phish). The latest episode features a lovely chat with the HQ Quizdaddy himself, Scott Rogowsky. You wanna clip? Here’s a clip. Also here’s a fun news item you may have missed: Scott is launching a new gameshow app. Nature is healing.

Listen wherever podcasts are sold (search for “Undermine”), and maybe go buy something from Section 119 using code Phan10 for 10% off your order. Obviously I’ve been paid to say that so consider this your paid promotional disclosure, but if you’re not going to buy a subscription here you can at least consider buying a Grateful Dead polo.

Lastly in the housekeeping division, I published something about creator labor I’m fairly proud of over at Passionfruit this past week based on my first trip to VidCon. I don’t generally write anywhere but here so this is kind of a big deal for me, but the response was positive enough that I’ll probably be doing it more, here and there.

And now, on with the show.

Twitter continues to stumble over itself, the Bluechecks are commandeering their new territory from the native Tweeters and an exodus has begun to new corners of the internet, such as the competitor started by a bunch of ex-Twitter employees, BlueSky. We’ve seen these digital migrations before, though it’s been a while and perhaps some of you weren’t as chronically online as I’ve been the last 30 years, so you may have missed them.

They all go in the same rough series of waves, I’ve mentioned this before but Nick Denton once told me that he thought the internet was a 100 year revolution that would come in tidal waves; every decade or so another tsunami would overrun us and wash away our digital homes, communities, news sources, public forums, tools, and terrors. Still, like our scared nomad ancestors navigating unfamiliar wilderness, we move en masse from one platform to the next, rebuilding what was lost and asking ourselves what we could have done differently to avoid such a fate in the future.

The first migration I can recall living through was from AOL to just what we called “cable" internet. Once the cable companies realized their coaxal wires carried more data capacity than copper phone lines (reminder: A modem was just a way to turn your home telephone line into a data pipe hooked into other computers, servers, and data centers…that’s all the internet is), it was pretty much over for dial up services, which was AOL’s primary selling point for most of it’s useful existence. Our local cable companies were cheaper, faster, and they were doing early experiments with bundling their television and internet offerings making it easy to switch.

The best and most useful AOL feature jettisoned itself into a standalone app called AIM, the proto-Slack for a generation that now conducts most of its business through DMs, though at the time our business primarily consisted of posting emotional lyrics directed at our crushes. Back when I was blogging in HS, my way of informing my readership of a new post was by simply updating my away message with a link to Xanga. It was as good as tweeting to my followers (actually better).

This was the era of Livejournal and Deadjournal, Blogger and BBS. A few years after the freewheeling days of Angelfire and Geocities, but just before the dawn of Myspace. Social Media is not a term, yet. Marketing agencies had just recently started hiring digital designers and developers to build overwrought brand websites (my favorite was Candystand, a portal from Lifesavers that offered Macromedia Flash games like minigolf). Individual, homegrown websites and blogs are cropping up, like Maddox’s Best Page in the Universe and Ebaum’s World, Homestar Runner, and Neopets. Most newspapers were still just publishing yesterday’s paper on their website a day later, and Drudge was crushing them on scoops. Recall that the guy who started Twitter, Ev Williams, also started Blogger about a decade earlier. Those folks were working on digital publishing platforms for a long, long time.

Call me digitally old fashioned, but if I’m nostalgic for any era of internet it’s this era…platforms like Napster and KaZaa and Limewire and iMesh were cropping up, giving the internet a kind of naughty, illegal but what are they gonna do about it vibe. 9/11 had us feeling feverishly patriotic, the idea that the internet was a kind of wild west of copyright infringement, pornography, and stranger danger felt comfortingly American in those years. Like a newfound digital frontier where anyone could make a blog, sell a t-shirt, flirt with a girl (who was probably a guy pretending to be a girl), or build an empire. The American Dream was to be digitized.

That is, until we got to social media.

First with Friendster but more noticeably with Myspace, the move towards social media was one that felt refreshingly cool in a way that the internet had never known before. Once purely the providence of computer nerds, the internet was becoming accessible to everyone, and with that came all the societal pressures of style, charm, wit, and beauty. Myspace was an opportunity to express one’s tastes and life digitally in a way that felt more performative than what most people had access to previously, and we started creating online avatars for ourselves that pretty closely mirrored who we wanted to be in the world. The proliferation of digital cameras, webcams, and even early flip phone cams were critical to Myspace adoption. Prior to these profile networks, you needed to have some basic coding background to build a website. Now just about anyone could have a page with content to fill it.

The rise and fall of Myspace was fascinating to witness, it started primarily with scene kids and indie bands (they made it incredibly easy to upload music files and photos; the perfect digital press kit for an upstart band looking to get signed). When I was an A&R intern at Columbia Records in 2007, all I did was cruise Myspace for trending bands. I surfaced the band 3OH!3 to Matt Galle this way, who ultimately signed them to his Photo Finish Records imprint. We also passed on Drake because his Myspace numbers kinda sucked back then.

If the “scene kids” started Myspace, it was the early wave of extremely online, attractive “influencers” who really blew it up. Jeffree Star was an early star on Myspace as was Dane Cook, but an oft-forgotten fact: So was TSwift. You ever see her old profile? She was a prolific commenter. Or her bio from 2008? Check this absolutely endearing shit out.

Show me the lie! It’s literally a paean to oversharing, a document that should be taught in high school social media literacy classes worldwide. This early internet—like the millennials who mostly populated it—was horny and sincere, slightly traumatized by war and terrorism, and still felt wild. Myspace was a safe haven for our sincere expression of who our friends were, who we liked, what we looked like, what music we listened to, and what movies we quoted.

Myspace messages made celebrities broadly accessible for the first time, I recall fondly DMing with Chelsea Handler and Weezer’s digital archivist Karl Koch. Jack Antonoff was there building an audience for Steel Train. Bo Burnham had just posted a few videos from his bedroom on Youtube and was grappling with immense online fame despite relative local obscurity. But I’m starting to get ahead of myself.

Myspace was a good business and a good platform, but it wasn’t a great one. Their primary revenue consisted of a cheap looking “Punch the Monkey” advertisement (what?), and they were not prepared for the amount of spam, scams, and bots that would flood their servers once the platform reached critical mass. The site started feeling sticky and slow, gunked up from 3 straight years of checking your comment wall multiple times a day.

Enter: TheFacebook.com

Whereas Myspace was open to everyone and populated with extremely online teenagers, Facebook offered an aura of exclusivity. The Ivy League passport was digitized. Going to a top ranked college granted us access to a social network of all the other brilliant young people in our school and grade, and suddenly Myspace felt a little trashy, a less serious version of the internet for those of us who were starting to think about building a LinkedIn profile. It was elitist, sure, but in a way that was more accessible than ever.

For those of us who didn’t grow up already ensconced in the upper echelons of the monied elite, Facebook felt like getting accepted into the Skull & Bones. The connections and photos were more intimate, the “poking” was more suggestive, and the DMs were more tawdry. Entire relationships were playing out in semi-public on our walls. It was exclusive and it was safe from our parents or teachers accessing our profiles, and for the first time we had an internet that truly felt like ours, built by someone who grew up like we did.

The utopia was not to last, however, as investors piled in and advertisers lined up around the block. Millennials until this point were considered a marketing enigma…we had strong brand preferences and decent spending power, but traditional forms of advertising seemed ineffective at modifying our taste. The olds understood that the internet was shaping our culture, and Facebook was where we were spending many hours a day getting our internet. It was only natural they’d show up to try and sell us something while we were there.

Gradually Facebook opened up, from ivies to sub-ivies, then to state schools and NCAA schools, then to all schools, then to all businesses, then to anyone with a pulse and an email address. By the time our parents were joining Facebook, the thing that made it feel like a special club house for our friends and colleagues to gather was capitalized and commoditized into oblivion. Spam ticked up, fascist and international bad actors weaponized the distribution stream, and like Myspace on a lesser scale, Facebook was ultimately overrun by the hordes.

Meta did manage to keep their head above water longer and more actively than Myspace, largely because they built up the war chest big enough to buy their way into new competitors like Instagram and WhatsApp. Anything they couldn’t buy (like Twitter, Snapchat, or TikTok) they copied (with Newsfeed, Stories, or Reels, respectively). The waves are still eroding the Meta empire but I wouldn’t count them out just yet, they are weathering a storm that is seldom weathered for decades, but they’re hanging on.

Twitter, on the other hand, seems to be struggling through it’s own freefall. While the birds continue to tweep through their death spiral, the collective internet’s focus is starting the anthropological shift I’ve seen it make so many times before.

The digital diaspora begins anew, with broadband explorers setting off towards the outer edges of fringe product and community. We exchange beta codes and tips on new platforms that show promise, we hit up our founder and investor friends and ask them what they’re excited about. If it is anything like previous cycles, the first settlers will experience the next digital gold rush.

But there’s another technological thread here that I’ve neglected to pull on yet. Throughout this outward facing explosion of internet culture through the maturation of the American millennial (that’s a free thesis title for anyone who wants it), there has been a distinct counterculture movement that has been fiercely and actively anti-capitalist.

It started its funding through the same method most anti-capitalist movements get funded…piracy through the lens of a no-victim Robin Hood effect. Napster and all the illegal file sharing protocols that came after it were interested in making media and entertainment a freely available commodity to anyone who wanted it. At worst it was a massive economic upset driver if you owned Tower Records or Blockbuster, but at best it was an enormous Library of Alexandria with every piece of recorded film and music ever commit to tape available for free, to anyone.

‘Would the internet be driven by capital or ideas?’ was the fundamental question of that era, and the capitalists had great lobbyists and lawyers with a well prepared answer. The money was going to talk and the communal ideas would walk.

Which came first, BitCoin or BitTorrent? The answer is BitTor, by a fairly large margin (2001 vs 2008). Torrenting, for those who aren’t as tech savvy, was a means of doing P2P filesharing where a file was effectively decentralized across many different host computers, each one holding a kind of piece to the file’s complete puzzle. It was impossible to shut down, and even well-known seed tracker sites like the aptly named Pirate Bay managed to continue operating for years without much government intervention. Sound familiar?

This “free, decentralized internet” movement eventually ballooned into all matters of illicit, decentralized marketplaces, and one of the hardest challenges to running an illegal business on a computer is that money tends to leave a digital paper trail. Transfer requests, card authorizations…the internet was built on the same pipes that the banking system had been using for decades prior, they knew how to trace a dollar that moved out of one bank account and into another.

Which is how we get to BitCoin, crypto currencies, NFTs, Wallstreetbets, the whole lot. The BitTor to BitCoin anarchy pipeline is better poised here than we’re giving it credit for, the only thing slowing that cohort down is they haven’t figured out decentralized governance yet (they’re actively working on it though, imagine this is what early conversations around functional democracy were like).

While their ascendancy still seems a way off, that wave is going to continue crashing hard against the moors of digital and economic reality. Eventually, the desire for a better path for human governance and equity made possible by a global computer network will satisfy and replace our distrust of more traditional institutions if those institutions are unable to offer a tenable, competitive alternative, an outcome they seem to be struggling with.

For those of us who are simply looking for a town square to share ideas and check the pulse of society, our options are vast and none seem obviously dominant yet. Discord feels good, so does Bluesky. Post and Mastadon seem lagged behind an early jump. Hive seems like a slow start. Truth is attracting a certain kind of moth, Twitch is capturing another. TikTok is unstoppable and making social media stardom easier to achieve than ever. Substack and Patreon are allowing creators to swipe credit cards. Young people still love the ethereal Snap, and I’ve failed to mention the Youtube elephant in the room.

Our attentions will continue to splinter, or dare I say, decentralize. There are forces at work on both sides to recapture a singular, controllable news feed, and there are opposing forces out fighting against a system that has spent centuries protecting it’s underbelly, mainly by hyping culture wars and stoking false outrage. Capitalism only weakens against organization, and periods of mass disorganization generally tend to be the best time to consider an organization strategy. This movement is bubbling up out there and has been gaining momentum for decades, it’s coming and will likely be a helluva break when it finally organizes itself in a way that sticks.

Meanwhile, the end users will continue to build new profiles, follow new channels, appease new algorithms, and the world wide web will spin madly on while the builders and early adopters balance a desire for riches with a desire for a post-capitalist principles.

The battle for the soul of the internet is happening around us, and who wins and loses will have an enormous impact on what kind of information system we wind up living with. None of us, individually, will have much of an impact on this arc, but collectively how we spend our attention online is deeply important over the next few years. New companies rise, old ones will fall, and the abandoned battlefields will be consecrated while new beachheads are fortified.

The world wild web is just as wild as its ever been, so pick a side, find your new community, and let freedom ring.

Until next time!

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Words matter. How we express ourselves with words are how we make our internal ideas real and understandable to the people around us, and the words we use to label things is how we share an understanding with each other.

For example: We can all agree a school bus is “yellow,” an undeniable statement of fact to anyone capable of seeing a full spectrum of colors. We’ve all agreed that yellow is yellow the same way that we’ve all agreed that a dozen is twelve of something. There’s no confusion or ambiguity when we talk about hues or integers.

Less precisely, a road may be “long and winding,” a statement of relativity and opinion based on the fact that it curves some and goes on for a bit. If you wanted to be dense you could perhaps argue that “long” is an imprecise measurement of something and “winding” is an amorphous shape that merely means “not straight,” but generally we’re capable of having a shared understanding of that ambiguity.

There are some words, however, that have lost all meaning because of how all-encompassing they’ve become. “Literally,” for example, can mean both “truly” or “not truly.” “I am literally starving” is a common utterance that does not typically mean “I’m in danger of death by emaciation,” it merely means “I could eat.” Meanwhile, “I’m literally in meetings until 5pm” can be a statement of truth: My calendar is jam packed and I don’t have time for anything else.

There are literally tons of words that fall into this last bucket to some degree. When I was a “Digital” Director at TAO Group, I thought I was signing up for a job that would involve digital media buying, social media, email newsletters, content production; basically anything involving internet marketing. But I learned quickly that my bosses defined digital as “anything that plugs in or has a screen,” including digital billboards on the Las Vegas strip, in-venue TV screens, and even print advertising if the publication also ran a website. I had to solve IT issues around geo-fencing and public WiFi networks, introduce internal comms platforms like Slack, and wrangle social media celebrities who wanted a night out in the club. “Digital” has so many meanings, its meaning is easily lost.

Which brings me to the many-meaning-ed word I’m here to talk about today: Gay. In the 13th century, the English word “gay” was derived from the French “gai” and generally meant joyful, carefree, and merry. Happy.

In the 17th century the meaning shifted to focus on the “carefree” sense of the term: Any kind of loose, immoral action was gay. A man with lots of girlfriends and no desire to get married was considered gay. A married woman who drank too much and enjoyed nights out on the town was gayly going about her life.

Any commitment to carnal pleasure that fell outside of the “norms” of post-Tudor, pre-Victorian England was considered immoral and gay, though homosexuality wouldn’t specifically and directly join those ranks until the mid-20th century. Prior to that, a gay person was merely in contrast to someone who was “straight-laced,” a person who followed the norms of society.

By the 1950s and 60s, gay started to diverge its meanings. Within hip circles, “gay” was an accepted codeword used for men who found homosexual to be too clinical (in fact, it was erroneously considered a mental disorder in the DSM until 1973) while “queer” was still considered derogatory. Like the n word within black lexicon and community, gay men took a word that was used by power structures to indicate a negative and started using it as a positive among themselves.

This doesn’t stop the word from being used derogatorily though, in fact use of these words as pejoratives has only increased over the last 60 years. Like a kind of dark yin and yang…the more a community attempts to feel pride in a word that was once used to oppress them, the more the oppressor feels confident using those same words with brazen malice and disdain. It becomes a word with more than one meaning, and therefore runs the risk of having no meaning at all if your audience doesn’t share your understanding of the word or concept.

As a child of the late 80’s and early 90’s in lily-white, Roman Catholic, suburban Long Island, gay was a word that was introduced early and often, like elementary school bus stuff. Kidspeak. It was not a “bad” word in the sense that it would get you in trouble for cursing the way a fuck or a shit or even a hell or crap would, it sat with words like moron, butthead, friggen, heck, and darn.

To be clear, this was not the case in my house…we actually swore with real curse words and then grandma would threaten to wash our mouths out with soap, usually while swearing herself. It wasn’t as fucked up as it sounds…we all had fun with it, they say people who swear are more intelligent anyway. She never actually washed our mouths out, for the record. I digress.

Gay wasn’t a word that got tossed around in the house though, being of a liberal, pseudo-metropolitan, artistic family meant we probably had more exposure to the gay community than most kids on the south shore of Long Island, and my folks were quick to reprimand us for letting it slip.

It slipped sometimes, of course, the way we had to speak on the bus to avoid being called gay required that we call other things gay. I wasn’t the best at this game, so I spent a fair amount of time being called all kinds of homophobic names, namely because I didn’t play sports and liked hanging out with girls more than guys (which I still argue made me the least gay, I may have been going to all the field hockey games but I wasn’t taking showers with my all male teammates after a hard afternoon of physically touching them).

But my ostracism only turned me into an early ally. My longest roommate in college was gay, I had gay friends from drama and music classes, and, like most young people who grew up around homosexuality, it really, truly wasn’t a big deal. Kind of an afterthought, really, though I will admit the stories that young gay men share in New York will spin your head in every direction.

Sure, there are the gay bars and Fire Island share houses, the orgies and the oglers. But there’s also a gross amount of bigotry, hatred, and stereotyping that the gay community is forced to endure in their everyday life. Things have improved considerably since the semi-recent days of “fag” being a slur for someone being lame, but not everywhere, and not all at once. Some places feel like they’ve moved backwards, another battlefront on a culture war that only hurts people with the best of intentions.

And while we’re on the subject of queer bigotry as a whole, the trans issue is another one that seems to be sucking a lot of air out of a lot of rooms this year. Transgenderism is not a new concept by a few millennia or more, in fact there’s mountains of evidence that Native American tribes almost uniformly accepted the idea of a third, androgynous gender (the west has adopted the term two-spirit to describe these individuals as they often exhibited male and female expressions of gender, though even the “two spirit” term is sometimes challenged as conforming to the European, Christian form of gender binaries, as opposed to the more fluid, spectral understanding that indigenous people have).

Fun trans fact: Iran has some of the most supportive trans laws in the world (the government will even pay for gender reassignment surgery), mainly because being gay is punishable by death, but the workaround has been gender transition which allows gay men to date other men without society shunning them. Somehow both backwards and forwards, but an interesting statistic nonetheless.

Still, the idea of changing genders deeply disturbs a large chunk of the population here in the US, and I regret to inform you that I’ve heard from just as many liberals as I’ve heard from conservatives that the trans thing “doesn’t make sense” to them. Everyone seems caught up on the sports thing…the insanely sensible solution to that issue by the way is to start and promote more professional co-ed leagues. Problem solved.

Regardless, here’s the thing: None of this should matter to you. How someone else chooses to express themself is of no consequence to you or your family, nobody is trying to groom anyone (well, not counting the enormous amounts of grooming that religious zealots offer kids to be and act “straight”).

Having known many wonderful non-binary queer folks (some of whom read this newsletter, what up my dudes, ladies, xudes, and xadie’s!), they’re uniformly better versions of themselves once they’ve fully been granted the space and grace to transition into the person they always knew themselves to be. Convincing a straight kid to be gay is a fundamental misunderstanding about how these kinds of things develop in people, and honestly if a kid thinks they might be transgendered or gay, accepting that and surrounding that child with supportive people who know what that child is going through is actually the most appropriate way to raise a happy, healthy adult.

We tell kids that this is the land of the free, home of the brave. We tell them they can be whatever they want when they grow up. Supporting them on that path, encouraging them to express themselves and their love however feels right to them…that’s as American as apple pie. It’s brave and it’s awesome and it’s what being free is all about.

The only folks who argue otherwise are clinging to a false, often faith-based idea of binary gender and sexual identity, an idea stemming from the middle 18th century European concept of prude, monogamous, cisgendered, heterosexual relations being the only universally recognized way of expressing one’s proclivities and identity. These are largely the same folks who think chastity rings are totally chill accessories to force their daughters to wear.

There was seemingly more pride than ever this year, but there were also more bullies trying to silence a movement of people who just want some privacy (in the legal sense) to love. It’s an easy issue to politicize (far more confusing to liberals than abortion, I’d say), but I promise: It’s not an issue.

Pat Robertson died recently, and he thought to the depths of his heart that homosexuality could bring down empires. That the Greeks and Romans and Etruscans and Persians and Chinese and just about every other major world empire had tolerance for an expanded slate of sexual and gender identity, and that’s the sin did them in.

But that’s not what felled them, that’s part of what made them. They were inclusive, they accepted their citizens and subjects for who they were, and they went about focusing their attention the shit that actually mattered, like do we have enough food and what are the fricken Huns up to (not to be confused with Hun Culture in the UK, a delightfully camp subset of gay lifestyle).

If anything, historians will mostly tell you it was the Christians who divided and weakened Rome. The Muslims sacked wrecked Persia. Western (read: Christian) influence ended homosexuality in China.

It is intolerance that destroys an empire, not love.

Happy Pride, everyone, I’m sorry it’s been a rough few years but I’m certain love will win. If you have a relative or friend who is intolerant, then let’s use some of that cis firepower we’ve got stored up to try and listen to their concerns, and then calmly school them on why they’re wrong. Like most things people fear, it’s usually because they don’t understand them, and once they do, it’s not so confusing or scary. People are just people.

Until next time.

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Firstly, a programming note!

Things have been a little quiet down here as I’ve been wrapping up my first podcast series with Gabby Bluestone and the good folks at Osiris Media and Section 119, it’s called We’ve Got A Band and, unsurprisingly, it’s all about Phish and some of their most notable fans. We had a blast making it, and I’ll be talking more about it here as the episodes come out (this is not-so-secretly a Phish blog, if you didn’t realize).

The first episodes will be out this week, check it out and let me know what you think!

Now, before we get into my Succession breakdown, we’re unfortunately going to start with a dose of what we’d call “too insidery” back at Gawker, just a mess of personal beef and rage blogging that I admit, is not a great look. I should just let it go and let the past be what it will be for the cursed few who seem determined to keep rehashing it.

But I can’t. When someone drags the past into the present in a way that conflicts with my own remembered version of events, I feel compelled to try and correct the record.

And so: I need to address something that was written on Max Read’s Read Max Substack last week about the Gawker Media sales team, circa 2015. For context:

Read Max

Share a Coke with Hitler

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Some housekeeping notes before this week’s column: (1) I’m still collecting stories about awful A.I.-related meetings and other horrific A.I.-related work interactions for judicious use in a future newsletter. I’ve already got some good (terrible) stories about strange meetings and conversations in tech and media companies, on…

Read more

3 years ago · 65 likes · 14 comments · Max Read

In case you don’t feel like reliving that much of a forgotten past, here are the relevant sections:

Either way the real problem for me was professional, because the post had pissed off the people who sold ads for our website. My sense, in retrospect, was that every post we did pissed off Gawker’s ad-sales department,³ but this post in particular was seen as beyond the pale, I suppose because it indicated in a relatively explicit fashion the contempt with which we on the editorial side held advertising as a concept, despite the fact that, or maybe because, it was “the whole business model of our publication.”

³As far as I can tell the ideal version of Gawker as far as ad sales was concerned was a blog that only posted brand-friendly stories, and if that could not be accomplished, then simply a version that never posted at all.

I wasn’t going to respond at all (we had a saying at Gawker, “don’t feed the trolls”), but for years this particular Gawker.com editor in chief has been grinding an axe against my sales colleagues and I, primarily focused on what were feeling and why were feeling it. As “business side” publishing employees, we generally keep our mouths shut on the internet, but that leaves a lot of space for someone else to write our narrative for us.

Max, if you’re reading this, I’d like to set some things straight.

Yes, we were pissed off at the Mein Coke stunt, not because it wasn’t a fair point to make about a heartless company that only sells heart disease in a can, but rather because the way in which you made the point (using Mein Kampf as your cudgel) made it impossible for us to defend on the merits of your argument. We were quite comfortable working around the Gawker Tax, we always defended your work to irate clients who demanded we take things down, and in my 8 years we never obliged them once.

My favorite, personally, was telling Samsung that yes, this dick joke would be costing us millions. And this was just 18 months after another site lead—who will remain unnamed—tried unsuccessfully to hook up with Samsung’s paid media director at a sponsored event, much to the chagrin of the Samsung lead client, who the site lead then attempted to fight in the lobby of a Residence Inn. I was exceptionally good at cleaning up those kinds of messes, which were plentiful with you lot, and again: We never removed a post on behalf of an advertiser request.

We did take down a number of advertisements that your team found distasteful, however.

Defending a Hitler joke is, as you can imagine, a difficult situation to needlessly put your colleagues in. Still, we took the calls from the (don’t cancel me it’s true) disproportionately large number of horrified Jewish advertising clients, and I did my best “we’re all Jewish too, that’s why we can joke about it” routine.

That's what we were doing that week. Yes we were upset, it felt like an enormous self own on an otherwise fair point. There's really no good way to work Mein Kampf into a humorous blog post about a serious point, but you tried and we got screamed at for it.

Let the record show that your enemy wasn’t a sales team that wanted a version of Gawker that loved brands, that sounds like ass and is not a site I would have signed up for in 2008. I wouldn’t have dumped my life savings into equity for that version of Gawker, and I wouldn’t have spent most of my 20s proudly defending what that site meant to the world. It’s never what we were, it’s never what we wanted, it’s merely a narrative construct of your own design meant to place blame on the nameless sales team you evoke (whose names you knew because we all drank together semi-frequently). Our only sin was wanting Gawker to keep existing, a thing you seemed uninterested in preserving while doing your editorial calculus.

You won’t say it in your post so I’ll do it in mine: Dying on Geithner’s hill was clearly a performative attempt to come off like a martyr. You were seemingly looking for a story that was so repulsive that Nick and Company would be forced to reject it, and you’d get to take your high horse victory lap as The Last Blogger to be felled by The Man. Your “I killed Gawker” press tour is clearly still ongoing, but I beg you: Get over it. Let it go.

You’re a great writer and I have often enjoyed your work. You're funny and smart and usually right while being self-effacing, and I really do appreciate your way with blogs.

But please: Reconsider the narrative that your colleagues on the sales side were out to get you. Every one of the 60+ people on the sales team was a fan of Gawker before they joined (I know because I interviewed most of them), and many of us reinvested our bonuses right back into the company that you thought was ghoulishly exploiting your creative output. We loved what Gawker was, nobody was trying to shut it down or defang it from our side.

Everyone knows that was all Nick, heyoooo.

There was a way for us to co-exist, but you were the one who seemingly thought it was sales that had no place at our company.

It’s true by the way, we should destroy capitalism. Give the means of production to the workers, destroy the rich, ACAB. I believe this to my core and have the receipts, not that you ever bothered to ask. Some of us found it easier to dismantle from the inside than the outside; you were lobbing the grenades and we were supplying the ammo.

That you could interpret our symbiosis as anything less than that is just proof of how skewed and myopic your editorial lens truly is and was, even after all these years.

Fuck off.

OK! Sorry about that! Little Logan Roy segue there at the end. Succession spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t seen the show or the season finale and want to, now would be the time to stop reading.

The finale of Succession got a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking this past week, ranging from the glowing “cannot be topped” to the deeply misogynistic (and simplistic) “Shiv is a bitch to betray her brothers.” Per usual, the internet is awash with takes both bad and good, and I’d like to toss my own analysis onto the pile, though I recognize, like Roman, this is nothing. I am nothing. We are nothing, obsessing over a thing on the TV is silly nothing, and we'd be better off drinking a martini by ourselves or sitting on a park bench.

Alas. The show was a sharp view of how a patriarchy (dis)functions in the 21st century, and it’s worth spilling endless ink to make that context clear.

Many of the reviews I’ve seen are broadly drawing parallels to the great tragedies of Shakespeare, though they generally seem to stop at King Lear, the story of a fictional English royal family that was too power hungry and egomaniacal to sincerely love one another enough to maintain their kingdom. Siblings fighting and screwing siblings in a make believe, earlier time when English kings worshipped Roman gods (they never did this). TIL: It was kinda like risqué sponsored content, at the time.

But Lear is not the only Shakespearean reference to make the cut in this series. We see glimpses of Lady MacBeth in Shiv’s decision to vote with Tom/Matsson, in order to put her child in the blood line to one day be king. The princess of the family became the deciding vote, making her a self-appointed queen and kingmaker. It will undoubtedly drive her to madness, but she ultimately recognized that she was always going to lose against the men in that room, at least with her husband and possible future lover at the helm she’d be able to exert some amount of soft power.

This, of course, is the bargain women are expected to accept in patriarchy…stand by your powerful men and maybe you can catch some afterglow. It’s dark and hard to watch, but like Game of Thrones, if you thought this show would have a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.

Elsewhere in the Shakespeare Succession Multiverse, we got nods to Hamlet in the cuckoldry of the King. When Matsson suggests that he could easily fuck Shiv to Tom’s face and he just…goes with it? It’s a foul bit of “locker room talk” (the “boys will be boys” fallacy elevated to the boardroom) between two of the most powerful men on earth, but it also serves to drive home the Machiavellian mammoth that is Tom Wambsgans, a man who truly knows no depravity he can’t learn to live with. He is effortlessly flexible when it comes to changing his position to suit his advantage, perhaps one of Logan’s best skills.

It is also the rawest exposure of what drives the all decisions in a patriarchy: who has the biggest dick in the room, and who is “man enough” to take it? From Shakespeare's Twelfth Night:

Maria: …my Lady will hang thee for thy absence.
Clowne: Let her hang me: he that is well hang’d in this
World, needs to fear no colours.

Shakespearean fingerprints are everywhere. There’s a Romeo and Juliet arc from an earlier season when Kendall falls in love with the daughter of the rival media family, the Pierces. Greg could be any number of valets, attendants, maids, servants, fools, gossips, and normal folk who litter most of Shakespeare’s stories…the average townsperson who finds themself not just present for history in the making, but inadvertently making history through their own misguided or misunderstood actions.

The supporting character of Willa Ferreya, a sex worker turned wife (really wanted to use the Latin cum here but y'all have ruined a dead language) to real eldest boy Connor, openly and sincerely chases the money in perhaps one of the most honest relationships in the entire show. Bianca from Othello is a courtesan who generally stands for the cruelty and manipulation women have to endure in order to be close to power, a naked representation of the crude sexual bargain proffered in a world run by and for men.

Towards the end of the finale, there’s a scene where the Roy children are fighting it out in the conference room, and a number of odd, power-drenched acts take place, each a representation for the trauma that Logan imparted on them. The father who only knew how to show his love through acts of emotional and physical violence, as fine a representation of generational trauma I've ever seen depicted on television.

First, there’s that weird hug. What was the deal with Kendall’s stitch-gouging Roman? At first I thought he was just trying to hurt him, but when I thought more about it, I realized he was trying to say “I love you” in one of the ways their father loved them: Through painful physical abuse and humiliation. Boar on the floor, anyone? Vulture did a good job of breaking this set down.

Later on, Roman returns fire by invoking Logan’s mastery of verbal and emotional abuse, reminding Ken that it’s actually Shiv who carries the bloodline, because Ken’s children probably aren’t really his. I barely caught this line when I first watched it, but it was definitely something Logan had brought up before as a potential liability to Kendall’s reign. Also about as low as you can go between brothers. Mashable explains it better than I can.

And lastly, it’s Shiv who lives up to her name and delivers one of daddy’s greatest hits, the betrayal of a promise made to her childish bros while quite literally preserving the dying wish of her father’s patriarchy: Sell the thing. It just so happens that doing so also solidifies her husband’s newfound power, and yet another powerful woman is degraded to propping up a coked up, abusive man.

And she’s not the only one who had their fate tied to their name, as the name-obsessives at Nameberry pointed out:

@nameberry.comDo the names on Succession reveal the show’s ending? #succession #hbomax #tomwambsgans #billwambsganss #shivroy #successionhbo #successiontok #successionfinale #babynames #nameberry

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Nothing more satisfyingly Shakespearean than names that have hidden meanings. Roy meaning King is the obvious one, but Kendall is a Ken Doll, Roman is a once great but collapsed empire (also sounds like “No man"), Shiv is a backstabbing knife, heck, even Willa Ferreyra breaks down to “Will To Live By The Firepit/Ironworks.” And a Wambsgans who gets a triple play in the World Series? Modern Shakespeare at it’s finest.

In a family where love is transmuted into physical pain, emotional torture, and betrayal, the Roy siblings never had a chance at bonding together and saving the company. They inherited their father’s worst impulses for love and we can see where it got each of them: Shiv’s loveless marriage, Kendall’s neglected (maybe not even his) children, and Roman’s humiliation kink.

A good tragedy is cathartic because the characters always wind up exactly where you’d expect them to, reckoning with their actions and getting what was always coming for them. It may not be a fairytale ending that satisfies our natural desire for family, unity, and triumph over evil, but life for the powerful is seldom a happy ending. Amassing that kind of money and control almost always requires making too many enemies, screwing over too many friends, and eventually finding yourself on the shit end of karma’s boomerang.

The Aristocrats Patriarchy!

It does make me wonder if the Murdoch kids saw it and if they were horrified or inspired by the collapse of Waystar. I could imagine them taking notes (“Buy stickers for estate sale”), but I could also imagine them simply not watching or caring. After all, this is all a lot of hawing about not serious people who fancy themselves masters of the universe, confined to our TVs and a week’s worth of pointless public discourse on the internet.

It just doesn’t matter to anyone who matters. It’s simply more noise as public tragedy and vast amounts of generational trauma continue to spiral outward. Those vipers interested in keeping their illusion of control intact will do whatever they have to in order to maintain their sense of domination, regardless of who they need to attack, blame, destroy, or distract in the process.

The power of patriarchy is a narrative power, one that preordains roles based not on merit, but on a willingness to respect the made up, false narrative of the biggest dick.

But you know what they say: “You can’t make a Tomlette without breaking a few Gregs.”

Or you know, maybe, “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”?

Look at that, it actually kind of works for this one. Go figure.

Until next week!

This is a project I started on a career sabbatical in 2015 that ultimately changed the course of my entire life, though in exactly none of the ways I expected it to.

If you’re a free subscriber or first time reader, you can check out Part 1 for free, and if you’re a longtime subscriber or friend on the comp list then you should have full access to the paywalled version via your inbox or your Substack login. Everyone else: Consider a free trial, otherwise we’ll see ya next week.

Previously…

Chapter 1
Part 1: Broken Chains, Dreams, and Minds
Part 2: Taxis, Trains, Busses & Planes

Chapter 2
Part 1: The Long, Emaciated Arm of American Exceptionalism
Part 2: Do You Know The Way To San José?

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My friend Whitney texted me the other day “are you left handed?”

I am.

Her kid is taking his sweet time picking a hand to write with, playing sports lefty but clumsily switching between left and right for the finer motor skills, like writing.

Whitney was picking my brain on my own developmental experience as a lefty, a foggy series of memories like pencil grips that didn’t fit my hand, scissors that I couldn’t get to work, teachers that would subtly (or rudely) imply I was doing things all wrong, and smudged pen ink staining the side of my hand like a messy tattoo.

In a class of 25 kids, statistically 2-3 will be lefties. In the Catholic elementary school I went to, they had (only semi-recently) stopped slapping wrists with rulers, but lefties were still not particularly popular with the sisters, brothers, mothers, and fathers who ran the joint.

The box of scissors in the art room maybe had one or two lefty scissors in it (maybe), and there wasn’t any kind of orientation offered to those of us who felt more natural using our left hand. Lefties spend our first few years socializing with other kids who largely behave differently from us, and children (at least back then, on Long Island) were not enormously supportive of kids who were different. Heck, even the lefty compliments from kids sounded like insults, like skateboarding “goofy.”

My family, on the other hand (pun!), was incredibly supportive of a lefty in their ranks, though nobody else in my immediate family shares the distinction. My uncle and father beamed at my “southpaw” throwing arm and had lefty baseball mitts ready for me from a young age. My mother encouraged me further with plenty of coloring and painting, and before long I began to see left-handedness as a super power that made me special.

A tale as old as time: The thing that made me different was actually the thing that made me awesome. See also: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, like a quarter of Aesop’s fables, most Disney movies, and just about every Animorphs and Goosebumps YA novel. An obvious narrative to find over and over in folk art and pop culture, if you’re looking for it. We’ll get to that more in a bit.

Lefties have been researched to hell, though there isn’t much conclusive evidence as to the why or the how. Genetics play a role, but not in a dominant/recessive, Punnett square kind of way, more like a confused series of probabilities. At the same time it’s not perfectly random either, as a perfect random distribution would see just as many lefties as there are righties, but we’ve already established it’s more like 10%.

If it were an evolutionary disadvantage to be left handed, our kind would have fully washed out of the population by now, but there’s some universal benefit to humanity for a small set of the population to be left handed, though scientists have struggled to fully pin down what that benefit is.

There are some instances where left-handedness is still frowned upon. An orchestra needs everyone’s arms moving in the same direction or you’ll have elbows bumping into each other (I did attempt to play trombone lefty in public school but was forced to learn with my non-dominant hand). Armies generally prefer their grunts be right-handed, because again you don’t want one guy in your ranks doing everything the opposite way as everyone else. Any kind of job that requires a lot of people to act in unison is ill-suited for lefties, and as lefties we generally avoid these environments almost instinctually.

Lefties do get a reputation for being more creative, more sensitive, more artistic, and more mentally ill. Studies do seem to support that to a point, but the reasoning is often obscured by some left brain/right brain hand waving. I think the reason lefties are more creative is simpler than that though. I actually think the whole “benefit to humanity” thing is simpler than that, too.

Enter: Catharsis.

Aristotle was the first to suggest that listening to a song can create a sense of purification or even purging, a feeling of being emotionally moved through tones and stories. Listen to a sad-sounding song or watch a tragedy and get weepy, listen to a pump up song or a fiery speech and you’ll get wound up. He called this sensation “catharsis.”

Prior to Aristotle, catharsis was a medical term for, quite literally, draining menstrual fluid. A “purification” of the body, in the old confused terms of 2,500 year old Hippocratic medicine (a post for another day, but there’s a helluva story behind the caduceus, that winged snake bird on ambulances that actually stands for hucksterism and commerce, whereas the less flighty Rod of Asclepius is actually the symbol for medicine and healing…sorry, another time). Did I mention the medical term for being a lefty is sinistrality? Establishments, man.

Anyway, back to the emotional catharsis.

If the theory goes that humans (and a number of animals) experience emotional feelings, having a way to knowingly drain those emotions is wholly good for us. It doesn’t even mean that a sad movie needs to make you sad, it might make you happy to see people going through the same grief you’re going through (good grief, if you will). Likewise, a romantic, horned up love song can make you feel sad if you’re recently split or heartbroken.

The point is, catharsis is the relief you feel when your emotional charge is validated and given space to be shared. Catharsis is like a warm blanket for your feelings, like the first chuckle you have after a hard, ugly cry. The moment you unclench your fist after telling your boss to shove it for the last time. When a person you love gives you the hug that you need in the exact moment you needed it.

There’s a latent emotional energy in every person, and artists, musicians, writers, comedians, and performers of all stripes are evoking your emotions through their own expressive catharsis. They felt a thing, turned that feeling into art, and by sharing it with you, the hope is that you too will feel a thing. Catharsis for all!

So why do lefties understand this better than most? Because we learn it so damn young, that’s why. Imagine knowing that you’re observably different than everyone else at the youngest age, and having to fumble your way through a world that isn’t designed for you? The list of objects that righties take for granted is near infinite, but it still gets me on a near daily basis.

Grab a measuring cup with your left hand and put it on the counter as if you’re going to measure something. Notice anything strange? If you place the handle on the left (where it would naturally wind up if you’re holding it in your left hand), you’ll be facing the metric measuring side. I know this, and have forever known this. But I still always wind up putting the measuring cup down, going to measure, realizing I’m looking at the wrong side, spin it around, measure, spin it around again, pick it up with my left hand, and pour.

The whole world is a series of micro challenges for lefties…door knobs are often on the “wrong” side of the door, can openers need to be operated backwards, you’ve got to pick your seat at a restaurant carefully so you aren’t knocking elbows with the righty to your left. Nobody chooses the life of a lefty, and I understand why.

But I also think the first time someone hands us a lefty scissor or puts a lefty baseball glove in our hands, we feel seen and relieved, the emotional frustration of not being able to cut things or throw like everyone else is validated and assuaged. It is the earliest, most basic feeling of catharsis, and lefties understand inherently how good that feels, and how necessary it is. While other kids are told to do as everyone else, lefties know that they cannot, and despite that initial feeling of fear and confusion for being different, we learn to cherish our designation once we find a way to communicate our needs.

And that’s all any creation really is: An attempt at catharsis, either for oneself or for one’s audience. An expression of a need, a frustration, a desire, an idea, in the hopes that others see it and say “Yes, I get that and feel it too.”

Lefties learn that lesson almost immediately upon socializing; we recognize pretty quickly we don’t fit in with everyone else and that’s ok, because catharsis exists if we share our struggle with the world.

We hold some of the greatest and craziest minds among our ranks. 6 of the last 14 presidents were lefty, including Obama, Clinton, HW Bush, and Reagan. Oprah and RBG, Prince William and Neil Armstrong, Lady Gaga and David Bowie. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Osama Bin Laden and Charles Manson.

Oh yeah, Aristotle too.

Lefties are legion, and we’re here to teach you that your weakness is your strength, empathy comes in all shapes and forms, and the world would be deeply boring if everything and everyone was the same. It’s not just ok to think different, it’s critical to our understanding of our world and ourselves. Most importantly, learn to release whatever you think is holding you back, physically, mentally, spiritually, romantically…whatever. You’ll probably find lots of people share your experience, and connecting with them, well…that’s just catharsis.

Until next week!