Freddie deBoer

It’s that time again! This is a call for submissions for my bimonthly roundup of subscriber writing, where I publish links to the written work my subscribers want to share. All submissions should be made via the Google Form. Don’t worry about formatting in terms of bolding and linking; just enter the information as requested in the form. Deadline for this month is Sunday, July 5th, at 10 PM EST.

I was interviewed by the How I Make Money Writing Substack. Check it out. The last few years have presented a brief, poignant window where you could watch an army of once-dedicated believers let their ideology slip loosely from their hands, in real time.

I have a piece in the Boston Globe making my case that American schools are, in fact, doing quite well overall. Check it out. You may have read about the dueling lawsuits concerning the bestselling 2025 memoir The Tell. In the book, Amy Griffin describes “recovering” memories in therapy, memories of being sexually assaulted as a child by a middle school teacher, aided by the use of psychedelics.

My family didn’t go to see Toy Story 5 this weekend. My wife and I do sneak off to the movies once in awhile when Junho is being watched by a family members of ours, but he’s still too young to go to the theater himself, even for a kids movie. Maybe in a year or so, we’ll see.

Hello, My name is Freddie deBoer, and I really got the full Google experience today, in the worst way. Please don’t discard this email just because you see so much text. I think this story is worth listening to. If nothing else, you can laugh at my stumbling, worthless attempts to navigate the world made by you, the giant impersonal corporation who dominates our lives in ways both subtle and grand.

Update: comments were initially off by mistake! Fixed now. The Knicks won the championship, and I want to just be happy about it. Part of me definitely is happy for the long-suffering Knicks fans, certainly. (The ones who have long suffered.) I’m a neutral party and I got pretty annoyed by the weird and massive anti-OKC Thunder thing this postseason - I mean, no, they’re not my favorite to watch, but chill out - and was primed to enjoy seeing the young Spurs have to wait a little longer.

starring CHRIS RYAN as RUST COHLE ANDY GREENWALD as MARTY HART PRODUCER KAYA as the real hero BILL SIMMONS as THE YELLOW KING (unseen, omnipotent) A lone dead tree against a sky the color of a healing bruise. At its base, a naked dead corpse of a dead woman kneels in death, nude, dead, in a state of undress, deceased, a crown of deer antlers lashed to her head, a spiral painted between her shoulder blades.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, pay data for May 2024 (national, all workers within each occupation). Every few years, a piece of conventional wisdom about the job market hardens into something that parents, guidance counselors, and pundits repeat without much scrutiny.

As with so many of the worst things in American politics, we have the Nixon administration to thank for the term ratfucking. It entered the American political lexicon through the Nixon-era operatives who perfected its techniques: dirty tricks, sabotage, deception, and (especially) bad-faith manipulation of the pliable political newsmedia. Ratfucking isn’t just trying to hurt your political opponent’s campaign; that’s electoral politics.

“this rocks actually” - Cool Professor Recently a bunch of young people have been using the term “point of view” in a way that’s unhelpful. I say unhelpful rather than wrong because I have zero interest in jumping into the grammar wars, which aren't actually much of a war. Just about zero people out there are actually strict grammarians, and the collective essaying world has taken sides against “grammar Nazis” at a scale of at least 1000 to 1, so it’s a war against almost no human enemy.