Notebook Dump

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash To continue writing this newsletter, I need your support. Please pledge to me if you are able to. Next week I’ll be turning on paid subscriptions, though nothing will be paywalled. One of the most popular Substack posts I’ve ever written is called “The Bernie Sanders Movement Is Finally Dead.” Published in early 2025, it now looks hilariously dated.

Photo by Sam Dan Truong on Unsplash Hi everyone, I started this newsletter six years ago. As you may recall, the world was a very different place in May 2020, and Substack was a much smaller platform. As time went on I played around with a few areas of focus and a few names, but it never became as successful as I hoped. Around 2023 I took a break from the newsletter when I got a full-time journalism job, but still dipped back into Substack on occasion, purely for fun.

Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash Something called Eating With Experts pissed off a bunch of food writers the other week when it posted a carousel of text to Instagram decrying the state of food media. “Most people in the media world have never spent even a day working the line,” Eating With Experts wrote.

Photo by Javier Miranda on Unsplash In a recent essay for the New Yorker, the writer Sarah Miller says that she used to drink as a kind of rebellion against an uncaring planet. “How could anyone not drink in a world where the most flourishing partnerships seemed to be the ones between climate collapse and state-sponsored violence?” she writes. When sobriety got trendy a few years ago and everyone was posting on social media about quitting drinking, Miller dug in her heels.

Google Ron Paul indeed. Photo by Flickr user slobug For months, my hometown of Seattle has been arguing about surveillance cameras. The last mayor and city council installed several dozen of these devices in high-crime areas as part of a pilot program that they quickly voted to expand, the idea being that they would bolster public safety.

Photo by Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash If I go to a sandwich shop, I do not expect to be told that I can’t have an Italian sub because the sandwich artist is feeling “creatively blocked.” If I hire someone to mow my lawn, I don’t anticipate the guy cancelling because he’s not feeling “inspired.” And yet, some writers talk about “writer’s block,” a condition where they are supposedly unable to write. What’s wrong with these people? Of course, it’s never literally true you can’t write.

Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash Last weekend it came out that Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic Senate candidate in Maine, had sexted a number of women who were not his wife a few years ago. In the wake of the scandal, a host of left-leaning pundits have spoken out to say that this is… good?

It's come to this: We need a way to prove that we're human My crappy little web app. I’m going to assume that you already do not use AI to do your writing for you. The debate is pointless. To reiterate what many people have said: AI is currently pretty bad at creating interesting prose and can occasionally make glaring factual errors; it might even open up the author to legal action.

Don't automate yourself out of a career Photo by Jonny Caspari on Unsplash Everyone is using AI, or so I hear. According to a viral Wired story, AI is so compelling that some men are even ignoring their wives and families so they can do things with AI, the same way a previous generation of men might have spent their leisure time obsessively tinkering with their cars. But at least everyone knows what a car is and what it does.

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash Scott Alexander, probably the world’s foremost rationalist blogger, has written a post about art. I find Alexander to be a charming, idiosyncratic writer who approaches most topics with a refreshing lack of guile. Rationalists, if you don’t know, attempt to understand the world in as cold-hearted and quantitative a way as possible.